Posted on 11/26/2008 6:49:28 AM PST by reaganaut1
On August 6, 2008, the Washington Post reported that tuition and fees at public colleges in Virginia will increase by an average of 7.3 percent this year. The article was four sentences long and ran in the Metro section, below the fold, in space reserved for unremarkable news. The drumbeat of higher education price increases has become so steady in recent years that it barely merits attention. But the cumulative effect is enormous: the average price of attending a public university more than doubled over the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation. The steepest increases came in the last five years.
And there’s nothing routine about the way college costs are weighing down lower- and middle-income families. Students are still going to college—in this day and age, what choice do they have? But some are getting priced out of the four-year sector into two-year colleges, while others are trying unsuccessfully to simultaneously hold down a full-time job and earn a degree. More students are going deeply into debt, narrowing their career options and risking catastrophic default. The lightly regulated private student loan market, which barely existed ten years ago, now controls about 20 percent of loan volume, burdening financially vulnerable undergraduates with high interest rates and few legal protections. State and federal governments have poured tens of billions of new taxpayer dollars into student aid programs, only to see them swallowed up by institutions with a seemingly unlimited appetite for funds.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonmonthly.com ...
Maybe if students didn’t get worthless degrees in the first place, they wouldn’t have problems finding substantial jobs.
I think the plan I related in a previous thread would work quite well in reducing student loan debt:
Basically... you make students pay a fraction of the actual payment while they are in school. This fraction could be small, say, 10% or 20% of the post-school loan payment. These payments would go directly towards principal and the dollar amount would increase as the student borrows more.Such a regime would serve to remind students that loans are not free money and that a student loan payment, if not low enough, can seriously impede someone's progress in life. It might even entice some students to reevaluate the worth of their degrees and possibly go directly to the workforce instead, or it might entice them to work during school to cover some of the expenses.
Why is college expensive? Professors selected for their political views, engaged in producing “research” nobody cares about, published in journals nobody reads. Professors who, when they bother to teach a class, teach classes students do not need or want to take. Colleges, in turn, which require those students to take those classes, as a “liberal arts” or “distribution” requirement. Often, the majority of a student’s time in school is taken up by these useless, yet required classes.
It is not like the students are learning the classics of Western civilization, or even the history of their own country. The majority of what is taught in colleges today is completely and utterly worthless, and indeed destructive. Every department of women’s studies, African-American studies, art, philosophy, speech communication, and English in every college in the U.S. could be shut down tomorrow, and it would be a net gain for the country.
We need to close down all the colleges and start over. We need to eliminate tenure and make professors work for a living. We need to fire all the administrators and replace them with business managers (and a lot fewer of them) who know how to get work done. And we need to kill and bury, once and for all, the whole idea of “liberal education” and the poisonous political indoctrination that is has led to.
How in the world did you work two jobs while in grad school? When I was in grad school (1997-2000), we generally had to read two or three books, a couple of academic articles, and write two or three substantial papers per week. There was no time even for sleep...!
That’s what happens when the purpose of higher education becomes the subsidization of useless termites like Ward Churchill, teaching racial grievance mongering in a couple of tiny seminars each year, and writing impenetrable gibberish for journals nobody reads. University professors with tenure, outside the hard sciences, return less to the taxpayer for the money spent on them than any other government employee. I would fire half of them, double the laughable work load of those remaining, and close many departments entirely.
Colleges have no incentive to contain costs because any increases in tuition will be absorbed by higher subsidies, financial aide, etc. Its really a vicious cycle.
The loan programs have increased the cost of education by making it easier for schools to demand more money.
In the modern world U’s have very poor utilization of assets. Too many buildings and facilities empty most of the time. They should be eliminating some of the worthless courses and either reducing physical plant or filling it with adult learning of usefull courses to further utilize empty space.
I've thought that what we need are more bare bones, teaching only colleges. These will be full four year colleges, but without sports, restaurants, research, nice afternoons lazing around the quad, etc. They will have all the romance of an office park. If you want somewhere to life weights then join the local YMCA. If you want to eat then go to the Pizza Hut down the road (or they could even rent space at the college). If you want to discuss how wonderful Obama is and how he will change the world you can find the local DNC or Starbucks in the phone book. If you want a good, solid education matching an average to above average (not really trying to compete with the Ivy League or MIT) then this will be the place.
The professors will be hired to teach and that will be their primary or even sole job, not an afterthought to be squeezed into their research time. These could even be set up as a chain with a common curriculum. Each professor doesn't need to review text books and decide the lecture topics.
However, I have a feeling that the universities running the accreditation boards would never allow such a college to get the accreditation it needs.
Exactly. No parent should pay tuition at these 4 year schools for an undergraduate degree in anything other than a hard science or engineering degree, and the general requirements need to be KLEPPED out or done at a 2 year school. That would effectively defund the faculty left. If junior can’t cut it in those disciplines, College Plus and other options (some online) can get him that largely worthless piece of paper known as a BA relatively inexpensively. Becoming an electrician or a plumber would probably be a better option, though.
In the past year, I've been told to drop several classics and substitute "more timely" material -- including television/movie-based fan fiction and blogs (!). I've been told that grammar and spelling errors are irrelevant in the face of the "innate, ingrained language knowledge" of the student. I've been told that my attendance policy is outdated and enforcing it is "too fascist and combative."
I need my job. I like teaching -- for every three dozen slack-jawed, directionless, bovine, "I'm only here because I want to party" idiots, there are two or three people there who really want to learn. (Interestingly enough, they are usually recently separated from the military, or took a few years off to work in the "real" world before they came to college.)
I'd quit in a heartbeat if I could find a job I liked as much, or that paid a decent salary.
Here’s another set of considerations:
Student pays $8K for classes per semester and takes 5 classes. That’s about $1,600 per class. In undergraduate classes you can have up to 100 kids in a class for 100/200 level classes. 100 kids x $1,600 = $160,000 for calculus, english or american history 101 class? Prof teaches maybe 2 of these for a cost of salary and benefits of $40K per semester. Teaching Assts. do the grading and handle the break out classes. Looks like BS to me.
The housing is another boondoggle. They charge kids $2K per semester to live in a 15 x 15 dorm room with a roommate. That’s $8K per year for 225 feet of space and not including anything that they do in the summer sessions. A 3 bedroom apartment with 1,000 sq. feet off campus is $1,200 when you factor in utilities.
What they do is find ways to charge different consumers different prices. Airlines do this by charging less for flights with a saturday stayover. Business travellers are willing to pay more for tickets and do not want to stay over the weekend. Movie theaters do this by charging less money to seniors, or by offering "early-bird specials." Colleges do this by raising tuition and then offering more financial aid to qualified students who make less.
In fact, colleges have the best system of price discrimination. It basically amounts to "send us all your financial information, and we'll charge you as much tuition as you can afford." Another way of looking at it: regular middle class students are not paying more, but students from affluent backgrounds are.
Teachers Unions are doing the same to Publik Edjamikasion as what Auto worker Unions did to the Auto plants.
I am "junior faculty." My 100-level classes are capped at twenty students. I get no benefits -- unless you count a faculty parking sticker. I even pay for my own photocopying. I make the princely sum of $2,100/course/semester. Basically, for a fall/spring combo, I make $12,600.00 -- perhaps more, if I pick up a couple of the summer sessions that the tenured profs will not deign to teach, or pick up a night course for the adult continuing ed department. No TA for me -- Hell, no OFFICE for me. More often than not, I am treated as the TA for the upper levels.
By comparison, my tenured department "betters" teach one or two upper-level courses a semester, make $65K a year (with full bennies), and have their travel to various bullsh*t conferences subsidized, so that they can deliver obscure papers on the minutia of their specialty.
Professors are not the reason why college is so expensive. Professors work for a living, in case you didn’t know. Colleges spend a lot of money on insurance because their liability is enormous. Kids come who insist on the freedom to do what they want (parents often insist on the same thing) yet sue at the first sign that Johnny might get hurt because he exercised his freedom. Johnny might get drunk and injured or worse in an accident off campus, but the college gets sued anyway. The colleges usually lose those cases.
Dorms when I went to college supplied simple, but ample rooms. Now, they require expensive technological safety systems and people to monitor who comes in and out. The rooms themselves are a lot fancier. If they are not, kids go to schools where they can find them. It’s called competition.
The accreditation organizations are now requiring significant outcomes in all courses. Parents don’t realize that after secondary school parents fought off that evil, the trend merely moved to the colleges so that it could work under the radar of most students and parents. Part of the requirement means forced hiring of staff to oversee that this is happening. They will lose their accreditation if they refuse. There’s all kinds of middle management that is now required for numerous reasons. Technology itself is expensive to maintain. And this just skims the surface of reason why colleges are expensive.
Your housing comment struck home with me. My daughter is in grad school in Austin. The tuition is not the problem, it’s the cost of housing. Even with a roommate her housing expenses are almost $1,000 month when you factor in utilities, internet and groceries. I live in fear of her final year when she will do six week clinical rotations all over Texas and need temporary housing. Typically these students pay weekly rates at a Comfort Inn type place.
I am also a non-tenured adjunct at an East Coast two-year college. I teach Speech Communications. I am more fortunate than you are, though. I have a few requirements, but other than that, have a lot of freedom. I am also a pro-life, Republican, but I don’t advertise that. My students are liberal. I listened to a group of speeches last night that broke my heart, but I try hard to be fair. I listen to the reasoning and not the topic and try to teach them to think and reason out arguments. I teach at a community college and fortunately, am paid decently, if not spectacularly. You make what the adjuncts make at my husband’s college. My husband is tenured, gets “bennies” and works widely hard.
I was a lousy student. It took me 4 years to finish a 2 year graduate program. I took one full time semester in the beginning and almost flunked out. Following that, I took simply one to two courses a semester and worked 2 part time jobs around those classes.
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