Posted on 09/05/2010 9:34:09 PM PDT by Kaslin
“What the heck are the schools doing with the money?”
Many colleges are vehicles for redistributing income. Tuition rates are set artificially high, well above the cost of delivering the service. Financial aid is doled out not only by the federal government through loans and grants, it is also provided by the college or university. The college provides financial assistance to some students based on “need” or minority status, using the overpayment by the undeserving to fund grants, scholarships, and loans for the deserving.
Colleges and universities have exploded administrative budgets over the years. Many have also gone on spending sprees acquiring land around their campuses and constructing new buildings. Dorm rooms of today are nothing like the small rooms with a bed, a desk and a closet. Today students live in spacious suites (often coed) wired with the latest technology including computerized notices of when laundry in the washing machine down the hall is finished.
Finally, the worst of high education spending is the legions of well compensated, underemployed tenured professors who teach one or two courses per semester and do “research” as their primary activity. In the mean time part time adjuncts are paid a pittance to teach the undergraduates. The tenured professors are the elite royalty who do little teaching yet reap the rewards of long service. Put these professors in the classroom with a full teaching load, slash the bureaucracy, stop the building programs, end the wealth transfer financial aid structure and you will see the cost of higher education fall dramatically.
Thanks for posting this! Lots of excellent info on this thread.
It seems to me that a college education has become the equivalent of a high school diploma in the 1950s, in that it is now merely a stepping stone to get into the next level of job qualification: graduate school.
My children will go to a decent state school, with the goal of working hard, getting excellent grades, and going to a good grad school.
Bump
Internet MBAs haven’t diminished the value of MBAs overall; they’re worthlessness is due to the utter and overwhelming glut of MBA recipients in the job market.
Think of the supply/demand function. When the supply turns into an avalanche, the value (and the demand) drop to almost nothing.
Nationalizing the loans was genius. Effectively coupling loans to rising costs in education-over 10% annually-is an effective “tax increase” every year on a cohort that has’nt even established a career!!
The GI Bill after WWII is often pointed to as the reason for today’s college configuration, but the fact of the matter was that those students went to school to get a degree to earn a living. Private colleges in particular really grew during the Vietnam War, when they would accept anyone who could pay and thus get them a draft deferral. This was probably the point at which you had a good number of students who were NOT interested in learning a skill to earn a living, but initially were avoiding military service; this has since morphed into going to college to delay growing up. I was shocked 20 years ago when I was in a state school in northern NJ, and saw how many people in their 30s were taking freshman and sophomore level classes after being already enrolled full-time for several years. The cost was low enough, and the parents had enough money, to let them be “professional students”. Many didn’t work (even part-time), and there was absolutely no sense of urgency to graduate or any conversations about plans after graduation. Some of them are probably still there.
And we are indirectly financing a huge leftist indoctrination system.
— One third of students belongs in college and are motivated to learn.
— A second third are fundamentally smart enough to attend college but lack motivation. These are the kids who want the easy A or B without doing much (if any) work.
— The bottom third simply should not be in college period. They lack the intellectual skills and are wasting someones money.
For professors, the bottom 2/3 of the student body turns us into high-priced baby sitters who have to spoon feed kids who have almost no interest in learning or working. Many professors, however, continue to both dumb down courses and give out high grades to students who don't deserve it. They do this for two reasons. The first is to keep asses in seats, thus ensuring job security. Little Jill or Johnny's parents will continue to fork over tuition dollars if they maintain a good GPA. The second is professional advancement. If the grades of your students are inflated, you will likely get good student reviews. This comes in handy when it comes time for tenure or promotion.
And then there are the administrators. Many deans have (multiple) assistant deans, and other administrators with loud titles (like Director of Diversity) who really just serve to slow things down.
Yes, higher ed does need reform. Ironically, I think the catalyst for that reform will be Obamacare. That is because its cost is causing huge shortfalls in university budgets. This will either translate into higher tuition costs or drastic cuts in staff. I predict the former, which will cause more parents to re-evaluate the college decision for their marginal offspring.
“College community can be virtual today, but yesteryear it made social sense to have physical campuses.”
It could be....but unfortunately, in my experience as a hiring manager, online degrees impart little education.
I think it is that for many students the “degree” is the goal, rather than an education. If you are looking for a degree, then it makes sense to minimize the effort and cost to obtain it.
Somewhere in the education process there must be an objective assessment of the work performed - and the best assessment is face-to-face. Every student can probably remember an assignment that they thought their time and effort deserved high marks, only to have it flayed and dismantled as substandard by a professor.
I’m not saying that it is impossible to do this online - only that given a choice between “hard” and “easy” students will flock to “easy”, so a rigorous (hard) education online would not be as financially viable as a not-so-rigorous online education that would attract students in droves seeking a “degree” rather than an education.
“Brother Dave” Gardner, who was red hot on the comedy circuit fifty years ago, said in one routine,”There is one thing I have learned about higher learning and that is to git high and learn.” It appears that today there is a lot of “Gittin’ high” going on but precious little higher learning.
A bachelor’s degree is no longer proof of even a high school education but it costs a fortune. Young people of 22 enter the job market with a huge debt load but less real education than their grandparents had at 18 with no debt load after graduation from the public high schools of the time. To add insult to injury they are four years in the hole and that is the ones who can complete the degree in four years, something that is becoming nearly impossible at some schools due to courses being unavailable when needed.
Plus they have to pay to replace the turf field and the jumbotron in the football stadium every few years or so. :-)
I have been an advocate of selling off the University of California System, except for the community colleges, and building professional schools, such as Health Care Universities, and Engineering Schools to replace the Cal State system, which produces graduates with pieces of paper and no content in their minds.
In the 1950s a young man who applied himself could finish high school and immediately get a job that would support him, if he worked hard he could be married and have a home of his own, mortgaged of course, and a child or two by his early twenties. If he kept on working hard he could move into the ranks of lower management or even middle management, all with his high school diploma.
A bachelor of arts degree now comes nowhere close to being equal to a high school diploma in the 1950s. It is possibly equivalent to being an eighth grade dropout back then.
I can add a #4 to your list: ROTC students who are going to be in the military for a while anyway.
That’s what I did. I tried balancing a difficult engineering curriculum with my fairly intense ROTC schedule and it just wasn’t working. So I changed over to a far lesser degree and was able to get commissioned and pull down a good living as an officer while my wife (a software engineer) did her thing. Now she’s stay-at-home, I have some excellent technical training and on-the-job experience working in a very technical field.
Looking back I SHOULD have gutted it out in an engineering discipline of some sort (or should I? Perishable skills and outsourcing spring to mind), but I had a different priority. It wasn’t until I wanted to get out of the military when I thought, “Hey, my degree is nigh useless!”
Great summary. “rent-seeking” it is, exactly.
My information on the textbook situation is a few (c. 4)
years old but people abroad tell me the price for the
same content as in American texts is quite a bit less.
well, the catch with learning a real skill used to be
getting into the apprentice program.
The biggest change has been—from my personal experience, 40 years ago, is the cost of used textbooks. then pretty cheap, now, not so.
I believe you and I debated this a couple of months ago.
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