I’ve been writing for quite some time about the destructive rise in college tuition and how to stop it. One aspect that is underdiscussed is how the US News and World Report rankings, and the culture they help create, contribute to the rise in tuition and student loan debt.
As I’ve long argued, two of the primary drivers of college costs are the rise in administrative costs and rampant physical expansion. These might seem like unconnected phenomena, but in fact I think the speak to one dynamic: the rise of thinking about college as a kind of resort where you also happen to take classes. Administrative creep is present in any human bureaucracy, of course, but a big part of the reason that colleges hire so many administrators is because they are running so many programs. At a large school, the number of purely extracurricular activities, organizations, groups, charities, campaigns, and sundry others is frankly incredible. All of this stuff costs money to run, and nowhere more prominently than in hiring more administrators. Meanwhile, while the recession appears to have somewhat leveled off the building boom, too many colleges are still building too many new buildings or renovating buildings that don’t absolutely need it.
Now. As someone who lives on less than $18K a year, but manages to enjoy it thanks in part to the number of partially subsidized activities that are available on campus, I’m not blind to the appeal of these programs or these facilities. But we can’t afford them. We just can’t afford them. And yet colleges feel it necessary to constantly expand their mission and include more and more, and also to have the nicest, newest gyms, food courts, gyms, and facilities. Why? Because those things play a disproportionate role in getting highly sought after students to come to your college. In doing so, they contribute to the end-of-career senior exit surveys that play a large role in the US News rankings.
I have some shocking news for you: 18 year olds aren’t the worlds most rational people. I’m close with people involved at various levels of the college admissions process (small liberal arts college administrators, a big public U dean, several people in the test prep world), and a lament common to all of them is that entering freshman spend years working incredibly hard to get into top schools, agonize over which schools to apply to, and then seem to choose what college they attend based on very arbitrary or silly criteria. Colleges keep pumping money into fancier dining halls and racquetball courts because those things work in attracting students. Unfortunately, the actual educational experience seems not to matter much. (The metrics on education they do care about, such as student-faculty ratio or number of Nobel laureates, are often meaningless constructs in practice.) But then those are the wages of the neoliberal insistence that only market mechanisms are worthy: when you insist that education should just be another product to be marketed and bought, you get what teenagers think is cool rather than what is best for their education or for society.
There are many in the academy who would love to change these dynamics. The rankings themselves and the mentality they are a part of them are loathed by most professors. Indeed, the professoriate is also the group most likely to question the value and importance of the facilities and programs that help inflate the costs of college in the first place. But professors are living with the consequences of an American university system that has become captured by the administrators. It’s no surprise that administrators get what they want, particularly considering that the cost of administrator salaries have exploded while faculty salaries have stagnated. And as administrators care about rankings and artificial notions of prestige, the university continues to chase after them. It’s a recipe for rising costs.
I support the Obama administration’s effort to address this situation, although the devil will be in the details. I also believe that, despite media’s tendency towards the apocalyptic, concerted effort can achieve positive change. But state funding of public universities simply has to return if we’re going to make college affordable again. State funding declined precipitously following the financial crisis, but that was merely an acceleration of a decades-long abandonment of public education by state legislatures. (At the extremes are states like Iowa, where public funding for state universities has decline 40% just in the last decade.) And the media has to do a better job. Unfortunately, the popular media is now so universally hostile to the university and those of us who work within it (and political bloggers even more so) that they can’t understand the actual dynamics within. In David Levy’s reality-free editorial in the WaPo, he asserted that faculty salaries were driving the cost of college tuition, when in fact tenure track faculty salaries have been stagnant and more and more TT faculty are being replaced by cheap adjunct labor. Forget about fairness: that kind of distortion makes it harder to solve these problems.
And they desperately need solving. We need a broad program to address existing student loan debt (up to and including debt forgiveness), and we need to reduce the cost of tuition up front. That means that colleges have to truly dedicate to keeping costs down; it means that efforts like the Obama administration’s have to keep the heat on; and it means that public money has to be reinvested in our higher education. But it also means that our media has to call out lies like those of David Levy, and stop participating in daily professor and university-bashing.
For more, consider Sherry Linkon.
MikeBoyScout
Bingo!
c u n d gulag
I went to Marist College a few years after Bill Orally.
It was mostly for blue-collar families, and most of us were the first ones in our families to go to college.
Very few of the kids on campus had cars, and we commuters were popular for that reason.
I went back to be an Adjunct Professor there in 1994, 13 years after I graduated, and Marist was no longer blue-collar, but light-blue to white.
The parking lot had expensive cars which the resident students got from their parents.
There were at least 2 layers of Administration that wasn’t there when I went there. And, since the economy was improving, nay, booming, Marist expanded wildly.
The college kept expanding after I left in 1999.
When I go on campus now, the cars are all expensive ones, and you can tell the student’s cars from the Professor’s, because the sh*tty old ones are all driven by the teachers.
And the Administration members also have expensive, if not luxury, cars.
As for levels of Adminstration, there’s probably at least another layer or two.
Marist is NOT the same college I went to in the mid-late-70’s until 1981.
It’s an expensive school, with a fairly we-off student base.
samara morgan
But Freddie, you are isomorphic with Virginia Foxx, right?
heres your conscience again, the same one that won’t let you vote for Obama.
Wasn’t that you scolding the owwies for caring about a 600% increase in college tuition since the 80s?
samara morgan
WTF does that mean anyways, firebagger freddie…..“to give up on asking for what is best for you.”
does that mean lay down for the retardicans and the blue-hairs?
WTF is “left wing practice”? Fighting back?
Standing up for ourselves?
Telling the truth?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
When I graduated in 2005, the president of the college gave a speech about state spending on college students. When he graduated from UT Austin in the late 70s, the state contributed somewhere around $10 per dollar contributed by the student or family. When I graduated he said that the state contributes < $.50 per dollar spent by the student. And the state, in order to not actually try to raise money to give to education, freed colleges to set their own rates.
You can argue about building costs and administration, but society does not believe in putting that much money in education any more. Which leaves the poor out in the cold.
Kim Jacobs-Beck
Yup. I’m a department chair at a small two year college that’s part of a large public university. We are separately funded from the big university and our administration is very tight-fisted. As a result, we’re financially healthy and our tuition is very reasonable ($5000 a year for full-time students). But we have no housing, very few sports teams, and few of the amenities the universities tend to have. We actually do need some more professional staff people because we’ve grown a lot in the past few years and people are actually overwhelmed by the amount of work they have. And we are totally out of space; we don’t have room for offices for new faculty and staff nor do we have classroom space available during peak times of the day.
I would add that as state legislatures, DOE and “the public” demand more accountability, I also see a growing industry of professional staff who didn’t exist years ago–faculty development people, assessment directors, instructional designers, institutional researchers, not to mention the cottage industry of software and other pre-packaged solutions to data management, etc. that cost a ton of money. So in some ways, we’re being told to prove we’re doing good work and that said work justifies tuition, which costs money to prove, while at the same time we’re being told to keep costs down.
PeakVT
the rise of thinking about college as a kind of resort where you also happen to take classes.
I two small-ish college towns I’m familiar with, new on-campus facilities have pulled money away from downtown businesses. There are always town/gown tensions in college towns, but further dividing the two can’t help.
Ben Railton
Lots in here to think about, but I have to say that I think it’s pretty nonsensical to suggest that student-faculty ratio doesn’t mean much in practice. I’m fortunate enough to teach at a university with a consistently small-ish ratio (no classes bigger than 33, at least), and it’s really great, and has made a big difference in my classroom experiences and work with students and grading and much else.
Not a big deal in the scope of the piece, but the kind of thing that does actually argue for increased higher ed funding, to help keep that ratio down. (Even more true of secondary and earlier ed, of course.)
Thanks,
Ben
samara morgan
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): well freddie got his already.
he doesn’t care about 18 year olds.
samara morgan
@PeakVT:
that sounds like something Virginia Foxx might say.
;)
Schlemizel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I mentioned this in the earlier thread about college costs. The lack of government support for all education is one of the biggest efforts destroying this country.
That there is no current popular method to get the work done for 20% in India is a lesser but still important factor in why college costs are outstripping inflation so badly.
Raven
I have worked in a state university system that has had record enrollment and record budget cuts for more than a decade. It’s not because of gyms.
Ol'Froth
WHen I went to my small college in the early 80’s, there was but one dining option on campus. The cafeteria. You might have a choice of three entrees, a couple of vegetables, and whatever the starch of the day was. If you didn’t care for the food, they had a place where you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If you had money, there were places in town to eat.
Now, the cafateria looks more like the food court at the mall. In adittion, there’s a campus cafe. Frankly, I wish we had those things when I went to school, and I understand students are attracted to places with more options, but those options have to increase the cost of tuition, room, and board.
samara morgan
@Schlemizel: no dude….its the free market in action.
We are entering a period of resource starvation because of Peak Oil and global competition. The free market has begun to cannibalize the middle class.
The american “freed” market is an ecophagy, and its WAI (working as intended) …as intended by the 1% at least.
BGinCHI
Thanks for this post, Freddie, but you really should have put declining state funding at the top. That has singlehandedly driven this rise for the longest amount of time. Other things have complemented it and added to student debt burden, but that’s the real scandal here: states are privatizing higher ed by telling (some) people what they want to hear. They are “lowering the cost of government” with a bait and switch, since what they are doing is spending less on higher ed (and ed generally, often) and then sticking it to people who can afford it least. It also leads to a state’s inability to hold on to young, smart people.
Fucking criminal.
samara morgan
@Schlemizel:
in a free market, jobs flow to the cheapest global labor source.
samara morgan
@BGinCHI: right. how do you explain private universities 600% increase?
i know!
praps we should ax freddies “conscience”….you know, the one that scolds the owwies for whining about college mortgages and can’t bring itself to vote for Obama?
Keith G
Freddie the idea the such expenses are a large problem makes intuitive sense, but the article that you link to does not provide evidence that this is indeed the case. Your claim needs support.
tcinaz
Sounds like the real problem here is the free market. As schools dependency on state and federal support declined, administrators applied free market solutions, driving costs through the roof. Now only the already advantaged can afford the free market product. This, too, is a good example of how well the free market works. Just not so much for anyone who isn’t already affluent.
Warren Terra
I’m sorry, this is massively ignorant. Anyone who reads even casually about building programs at universities quickly finds out that they are frequently countercyclical – mostly because of the extremely long lead times involved in approving and funding the projects. As such, they arguably function as stimulus in their communities in difficult times. Also, notice part of that was the lead time in funding the projects: university buildings (even monumentally stupid ones like the stadiums and platinum-plated exercise centers) are typically prefunded, so while the money could be more usefully redirected to help in hard times it’s not actually a part of the current operating budget.
samara morgan
@Keith G: freddie relies on what we call Barry Manilow statistics….feeeeeelings, whoa whoa whoa, feeeeeeelings.
samara morgan
@Warren Terra: Barry Manilow statistics inform all freddies viewpoints….well that and his conscience.
;)
samara morgan
@MikeBoyScout:
was that Freddie or Virginia Foxx? i swear i can’t tell them apart.
gaz
Freddie @Top
While I don’t disagree with your assessment, I hardly see the worth in pushing this line of argument when we have much bigger problems, that actually happen to be easier to solve, I’d think.
At one point, roughly 75% of tuition costs were subsidized by a combination of state and federal monies.
Now it’s 25%…
considering that tuition costs are at least 4 times as much now, I’d think the figures above would point to the largest (and most fixable problem with accessibility of higher education). See too, the problem with privatizing college loans, AND giving them FDIC style guarantees to boot. IOW – giving these companies a blank check – so not only are we just freely dumping our tax revenue down these ratholes, but we give them freedom to do accept this tax money, and yet charge up to 18% interest. Used to be 9.5%, iirc. Why Freddie? Why? And then when a student dies before they can pay it off, the rest of the taxpaying citizens get stuck with the bill. You don’t see a problem here? maybe the largest problem?
So why push the meme you pushed above? I understand that it’s a problem, but is it really the most important one? Is it the one we can most readily do anything about?
I don’t get it.
samara morgan
@tcinaz:
zactly.
and its the global free market that once lifted America’s boat. Now its time for all the other boats to get lifted.
But because the 1% can’t profit (as much) from the rest of the world anymore (hint hint Peak Oil), they have to get PROFIT somewhere.
goodbye middle class, public education, safety nets, unions, healthcare, etc.
anything that makes the american worker less cost viable than the indian or chinese worker.
gaz
Freddie – here ya go:
http://education-portal.com/articles/The_Dirty_Secrets_of_the_Privatized_Student_Loan_Industry.html
Dave
Awesome way to smother a thread, Samara Morgan. 10 of 23 posts in the thread are yours. Can’t you buy a book of crossword puzzles, teach yourself magic tricks, or find some other way to fill your time without inflicting your tiresome theater upon the rest of us?
samara morgan
@gaz:
because freddie is just trolling here. or maybe he’s Virgina Foxx in a mansuit.
samara morgan
@Dave: I’m just doing for BJ what i did for TAS.
I’m just replying to each comment to clarify fire bagger freddies position.
go to another thread….or mail Cole. idc which.
;)
gaz
@samara morgan: You shouldn’t bother replying. I could have written your response for you.
I’m more interested in hearing Freddie’s views on what I posted than yours. For starters as Dave pointed out – you’ve taken up half the thread. We know how you feel about Freddie, and the free market already. Repeating yourself isn’t going to make anyone give a shit what you think.
I think I can safely speak for everyone here except you when I say the above.
Get a hobby. Please.
samara morgan
@Dave: and Dave….i will gladly leave and never return if Cole will kick Firebagger Freddie off the masthead and revoke his privs.
why should BJ be a platform for a fire bagging emo-prog troll?
samara morgan
@gaz: make me.
and i don’t care. i was just echoing what another commenter said about the free market. everything freddie is saying is verbal fluff that obscures the proximate cause. the reason college costs have increased 600% since 1980 is the free market. its the same reason housing prices increased gobs before the Econopalypse.
people don’t want to admit that.
;)
samara morgan
do you people even READ what this assclown is writing?
Libertarian speak.
I got mine.
techno
Still cannot beat Matt Damon’s crack in Good Will Hunting. “…you are going to discover that you blew $150,000 for an education you have gotten at the the public library for $1.50 in late fees.”
My feeling is that there is absolutely NOTHING you can actually teach a 19-year-old that is worth going into debt to learn.
And then there is Thorstein Veblen who ridiculed “The Higher Learning” by suggesting that colleges are places to learn the mannerisms of the Leisure Classes. He suggested a tell—did the school gave credit for learning how to duel. When I was in school, you could get credit for Theatrical Sword Fighting. You cannot make this shit up.
Bottom line, if the school is not teaching you something that will enhance your material well-being in life, spare the cost—read a book.
doofus
Freddie hasn’t made his case. His argument would be more persuasive if he could show that overall school budgets are increasing more than state higher education budgets are being cut.
eemom
I’m casting my lot with toko-loko this time.
Normally I don’t give a shit who Cole lets post here, nor do I think anyone has the right to tell him what to do.
But I draw the line at people who don’t vote and an underscore at people who don’t vote and purport to care about public policy. This self-important little twerp deserves every ounce of shit she flings at him.
Carry on, child.
samara morgan
@eemom: Cole has every right to let freddie post here.
and i have every right to shred his crappy writing and the dolts that reply to him.
but if Cole wants to get rid of me….he has to get rid of freddie.
Fair deal.
Alison
@samara morgan: Why should it be a platform for your obsessive, childish, boring ass blathering? Your repetitiveness makes anything you might have to say with any substance totally worthless because no one gives a shit, they just want you to STFU.
God damn, I’d take an army of Freddies over one of you any day.
Amanda in the South Bay
I don’t see what is driving the Freddie-hate: pointing out that there’s a shitload of adminstrative overhead in colleges is…he’s now a libertard 1%er?
Martin
Ok, there’s a few problems here.
First, a portion of the construction is due to universities expanding student housing as real estate prices skyrocketed after 2000. Off campus housing became prohibitively expensive. That construction is winding down now.
Another portion is the rapid change in technology since 2000. Wiring entire campuses for wireless Internet and power for all of those laptops to charge, changes in how all manner of disciplines work – from arts to engineering to medicine have all changed more in the last 15 years than they did in the previous 50 or more.
Also keep in mind that almost a quarter of the nations public 4 yr universities popped up in CA after WWII – over 30 universities. These schools are half a century old and are now reaching acreage capacity. The easy expansion is done and these schools are having to replace buildings and go after more expensive construction options now to keep up with growth – while the costs of Chinese steel and concrete have soared. Systems like CalState built out as a teaching system with small classrooms and virtually no lecture halls on the expectation that teaching faculty would keep pace with enrollment. It hasn’t, and there’s no reasonable solution to the problem other than build larger classrooms. Further, there’s been a surge in demand for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and you can’t train electrical engineers exclusively in classrooms designed for humanities majors.
And with all of this change, and resources stretched to the absolute limit, administrative costs soar. When you have 30% more classroom seats than you have students, scheduling a class isn’t too hard and might take 10 minutes. When you have 0% more classroom seats, scheduling a classroom is incredibly hard and might take hours. There’s vastly more planning needed. With no open time in rooms maintenance and setup costs much more because it all happens late at night and weekends.
It’s naive to think that college costs won’t outpace inflation when you’re going from serving 40% of the population to 55%, against a population that itself is growing. Capital costs get amortized over decades yet needs to be paid for up front. If we need to build a lecture hall to accommodate another 2,000 students, That $2m cost is $1000 per new student up front. They’ll be able to use it for years, but public institutions often can’t borrow to build – they need to pay as they go. It’s stupid, but that’s what fiscal hawks have driven us to.
You’re seeing the pushback now in CA. The UC system cut way back on new students and CalState put all of their freshman on wait lists until the state comes up with funding with no guarantee any of them will be admitted. That’s an offset of nearly 100,000 students, but it’s cheaper to not take them than to pay the costs to accommodate them.
Pen
Until “reading a book” can get you a degree you can put on a resume that advice is naive at best. College is ‘t about learning, not directly, it’s about increasig your marketability to employers. People who want to learn will, and people who need to know a skill can do so at any time. But college? It’s all about the credentials. Anyone who says otherwise is either already financially secure or suffers from a massive case of idealism.
BGinCHI
@samara morgan: Cashing in on misery is the only way to explain it. Plus their endowments got fucked in the 2008 market crash.
My heart is doing no bleeding for them, though.
Ron
I work at a small liberal arts school. I do wonder sometimes about all the money spent on administration and consultants. I understand all the reasons why student retention is important, especially at tuition-dependent schools, but I sometimes wonder if we end up spending more than we get back for it. I have to disagree that most students could simply get the same thing from going to a library that they do from their classes. I know I spend a lot of time outside the classroom helping my students with material. Maybe some people could simply check out a textbook on some advanced topic in mathematics and teach it to themselves, but there are a lot of people that can not do that.
MonkeyBoy
Actually in terms of local economics, colleges are partly a form of tourism – people from outside the region who come to the region and spend their outside money. Don’t disregard local economic motives in the promotion of colleges.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Is that (citation wanted) really what a lot of costs are going towards? Installing wifi and wired networks and building HVAC systems for computer labs? STEM is a rather broad term-the same requirements you need for the computer science department are totally different than biochem or civil engineering.
Ecks
Also keep in mind that those swanky cafeterias end up as profit centers at well-run universities. The food often goes at a slight price premium based on the super-convenient location and lack of ability to cook among 19 year olds.
Chris
@Pen:
Exactly. EXACTLY this.
Martin
@Ol’Froth: These other options are necessary due to other constraints. We’re so constrained on classrooms that I have students in class straight from 2 pm to 10 pm. There’s no room in there for a trip to the caf across campus, but they can run down to the place a building over and get a takeout burger between classes. Time was we could avoid that. We can’t now. There are long periods each week where there is not a single idle regular classroom.
And we’re one of the places that has the great fitness club and dorms, but nobody considers how they work. The fitness club was a student initiative, voted by the students and paid for by a separate student fee. The university merely provided the land, but even charged the students for staff time. The really nice dorms are on campus property but were paid for and are operated by a private company. 75% of the cost of construction out here is the cost of land. So we lease the land very inexpensively, regulate the housing rates, and get dorms paid for and run for free. The builder keeps the rent, returns some to us through the least and in 20 years or so turns everything back over to the university. It actually generates revenue for land that was part of our original grant, incurs no administrative overhead, and provides student housing well below market rates. Yet we get criticized for the construction because nobody will take 5 minutes to understand the arrangement. Nearly all of our food services work the same way, btw, except that we lease the space at market rates. We have one of the nations busiest Starbucks and earn a ton of money off of the space because there’s no other way for them to get that kind of proximity to a pedestrian population this size. Are we bad for having them there, subsidizing the cost of running the university?
slim's tuna provider
@Martin: you’re not “bad”, but aren’t the student fees for the gym and the money for the lattes coming mostly from loans, as is the money for the nice dorms? isn’t that the point of freedie’s post?
gaz
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It’s samara morgan. nearly every one. Is this your first encounter?
samara morgan
@Amanda in the South Bay: you can’t read.
freddie just wrote a post bashing the owwies for whining about their college mortgages…he sounded just like Virginia Foxx in betty’s post down below.
you see, that is the problem.
firebagger freddie is on the frontpage, so you assume he has something worth reading.
he doesn’t.
classic libertarianism.
freddie says, i got mine.
Another Halocene Human
@PeakVT:
Come to think of it, I know of a perfect example of that too, except that the town owns the facility and went into debt over it, more fools they.
Another Halocene Human
@Ol’Froth:
Sounds more like Aramark to me.
Another Halocene Human
@Another Halocene Human: Allow me to clarify. When Aramark was first getting started in the 1970’s, the college paid them a fixed amount to provide food service (much as they had assigned a budget to their internal staff before they outsourced). Aramark wisely noted that the less students actually ate at the caff, the more money they made, so the food was just as nasty as you can imagine.
Since then, colleges have wised up and caff budgets are determined by meals purchased. Also, there’s plenty of competition in that space. So Aramark will go to great efforts to jazz things up and make a splash that will impress admin and stupid student leadership.
I happen to think that the new, improved Aramark also sucks donkey balls. A lot of their “fancy” “concepts” result in you spending half of your lunch period in line for so-so food. (Note, this was a decade ago but I’m still bitter… also I’ve sampled some Aramark since then post college and they’ve improved remarkably little… they also run food service for some large buildings, notice that all the employees race out the door at lunchtime and frantically try to get some takeout instead of eating their sludge.)
Aramark is also the typical privatization scam by which the front line employees are paid min. wage and the managers get paid more and more. When my school switched over Aramark decided to try to fire all the long-term caff employees, some of whom were people with disabilities who didn’t have clear means for re-employment.
The worst thing about Aramark is that they will demand an exclusive contract. At the Baltimore Convention Center (where they serve food not fit for a dog), this extended to cracking down on vendors at an Anime Convention selling Pocky. Yes, boxes of Pocky (sawdust flavored pretzel sticks from Japan) violated their exclusive food vending rights and had to go!!! At one time I was briefly a student at UMass Amherst and they still had a traditional university-run cafeteria. Not only was the food way better and served faster (and priced nicer), but they also had student-run cafes all over campus, including the vegan-friendly cafe (hey, it was fun for a lark) and a nice little bagel shop I was quite fond of. At an Aramark’d institution, students may be serving your coffee and bagels but they sure as heck don’t run the place. And that’s a damn shame.
Another Halocene Human
@samara morgan:
And pay dips below the means of support
Another Halocene Human
@Warren Terra:
Well, not if they’re constructed by a crook who hires illegals and cheats on his payroll tax. Oh, where was I?
Yes, this claim bothered me too because in my experience a lot of the building going on is not frills (heck, they won’t even build dorms any more… go live off campus with some shady corporate landlord) but buildings intended to make money for the university. Cancer research, photonics labs, etc.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: Regarding construction costs, retrofitting and repurposing facilities is a serious cost even outside growth – particularly at publics where they sometime lack the authority to admit based on ability to service students in favor of broader equality of access independent of major. A decade ago there was 10x the demand for computer oriented majors as now. Today, biomedical, chemical and energy fields are off the chart. They have completely different instructional needs from facilities to faculty.
The largest up front driver of costs now is construction and retrofitting. The largest recurring cost driver is healthcare – same as for everyone else. Universities are among the most labor dependent industries out there. We have virtually no material expenditures. It’s all capital costs and labor. So when healthcare is inflating at 15% per year, tuition is going to have to at least match that. Then toss capital costs to expand and modernize on top of that. That’s most of the formula right there.
Another Halocene Human
@gaz:
My deceased paranoid Republican right-wing judgmental Baptist aunt would have completely agreed with what you just wrote. She was against the subsidized Stafford loans, too, understand, as they are (to her) like steroids for private school tuition growth, but the madness of these private loans and the special exemptions they have carved out… oh, and I believe private loans are more common with secondary education such as law school and medical school. No wonder doctor’s fees are blowing up out of control: look at med school tuition these days. No wonder GPs are in short supply. No wonder health care is suffering. Doctor’s fees are the rhinoceros in the living room that nobody wants to acknowledge but is rapidly tearing up the place. Well, who unleashed the rhinoceros? Greedy medical schools (who think they are entitled to a cut of future earnings, yes, they say this shit out loud) and greedy private loan providers.
gorram
@techno: Bottom line, if the school is not teaching you something that will enhance your material well-being in life, spare the cost—read a book.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, if you’re school could be replaced with just reading a book, then seriously, try to get into a different and better school. Education shouldn’t just be professors telling you to read certain books, you reading them, and then you spitting out random trivia on them in essays or multiple choice tests.
You’re not talking about education. You’re talking about a memorization factory.
Another Halocene Human
@Pen:
Oh, fuck that noise. I was, and am, a voracious reader and that never, ever substituted for classroom time. Why?
Accountability. Books don’t make you do homework. (VERY important in science and math classes.)
Professor Expertise. You can’t ask a book questions. Okay, you can, but it won’t answer them.
Classroom dynamic. Depending on the kind of class you are taking and the individuals taking it (works better with small class size), you may end up learning a lot from your fellow students. Books, typically, are the work of one person.
Deep knowledge. Unless you become obsessive on a particular topic (btw, go back to accountability) you are not going to be hunting through academic ILL and Lexis-Nexis for obscure information. However, professors are experts who will expose you to stuff that you didn’t even know to look for.
Labs. Labs, labs, labs. This does get back to what employers are looking for–no book is going to give you that hands-on knowledge of a lab. The only exception is in computer sciences, where you can do all your own experimenting at home. This may be why academic degrees in computer science are not particularly prized by employers. (In fact, they can be a barrier to hiring, because they indicate an inappropriate temperament for industry work.)
Nothing I’ve written here–except for labs–can’t apply to online learning–assuming it’s being led by a professor who also demands accountability, rather than being a money-sucking degree mill. But books? No.
Classroom learning is thousands of years old. It hasn’t been replaced by books, which are also thousands of years old, in all that time because classroom learning fucking works.
Another Halocene Human
@Ron:
Don’t forget recruiting. Schools spend insane amounts of money on mailings, on sending recruiters around and having seminars, college fairs, etc. Public schools as far as I know used to stay away from this private school’s game (despite the increase in potential students, some private schools have closed, so recruiting is not unimportant by any means) but when the states started cutting funding, public schools started looking for lucrative out-of-state students and the race was on, I suppose.
If there were a way to force schools to spend less on recruiting that would be sweet. They’re in an arms race now and it’s just ugly.
Another Halocene Human
@MonkeyBoy:
Like voting Republican, it’s a pyrrhic victory. Tourism is a low-profit endeavor, and at the same time, the tax-exempt college is sitting on your town like a cancer, gobbling up more and more resources while your tax base shrinks. They will drive any and all industry away that might increase prevail wage and hence their labor costs. Beware, little community, beware.
Jess
@Another Halocene Human: THIS! Thank you for spelling it out so nicely. Also, an absolutely crucial component of a good education is being called out on your blind spots and biases. Books will only do that to a limited degree, and only if you seek out the authors you vehemently disagree with (in fact, True Will Hunting makes the same point in the end; for all his brilliance, Will cannot become fully adult without the emotional and intellectual support of others). I’ve known a lot of smart, creative people who didn’t go to college, and they’ve all been intellectually stunted to some degree b/c they didn’t get the experience of rubbing their ideas up against those of others just as smart or smarter than they were. There’s no way to reach your true potential without that, IMHO. At the very least, intellectual isolation can lead to Libertarianism. ;-)
Chris
So, I’m curious about one thing here – does anyone else here think it’d be nice if colleges just deep-sixed Gen Ed requirements (or to phrase it another way, can someone explain to me why they shouldn’t)?
I’m asking because I went to college, spent the first one to two years scrambling to get all those done… and I don’t feel that it did a goddamn thing for my education. Virtually all of it was stuff I’d already covered in high school. It didn’t precisely do good things for my GPA (the kid who didn’t have a head for math and science in middle school or high school still didn’t have a head for math and science in college – who knew?)
On the other hand, write the Gen Ed requirements out and kids can complete college in three years – or two/two-and-a-half years if they’re real studying machines like some people are. Or they can still do four years, but with time to take a lot more classes of something they actually want to study. All of which seem like good things.
Also, I’ve never been to law school or med school and I’m not planning to, but as a related question – why aren’t kids allowed to go straight into these? Make it one or two years longer if need be, but why do they need to spend a full four years in undergrad before pursuing what they really want? I believe there are other countries where that’s how it works.
In other circumstances, I’d write these things off as harmless quirks, but given the obscene cost of college in the United States, Gen Ed and pre-med/law requirements seem like luxury items. I for one would’ve have zero problems shaving a year off my college experience by ditching them. Is it just me?
Mike G
@Pen:
This.
Most (not all) of the value of a college degree is show-and-tell for HR departments that won’t even spit on you without paper credentials since they can’t be bothered developing systems that accurately evaluate knowledge and capabilities. It doesn’t matter what you’ve learned yourself, if it’s not on a transcript then you are assumed to know nothing.
One of the saddest myths about American society is the idea that it’s still a freewheeling open-minded culture where the talented outsider can rise to the top through sheer ability. If it was ever true, it has long been subsumed in a sea of idiotic, corporate by-the-numbers ass-covering and sclerotic obsession with credentials.
foursix
What is your take on Dean Dad‘s theory that the problem is neither gyms nor administrative bloat, but is instead about falling state funding and the outdated credit hour model?
I’ll admit my biases up front. I work at a state university in an administrative staff role. I’m bloat! So obviously I tend to favor explanations that don’t peg me as apart of the problem. But Dean Dad knows his topic well, even if I don’t always agree with him.
In my office, we are doing more with less all the time. Salaries have been frozen in my state for five years, and when positions vacate they often go unfilled for a while so we can use the money to fund other expenses. We are still building, but not because we’re greedy – we don’t have enough classrooms or dorms for the students we already have, and more people are applying every year. And we keep getting inane emails from our Republican governor reminding us of the importance of fiscal responsibility.
I do agree, though, about the inherent problem of relying on 18 year olds to make the most rational decisions. When kids are denied admission our school, we tell all of them to go to community college and come back in a couple of years. And the reaction to this advice is almost always utter and complete devastation. Tears are shed, garments are torn asunder, we have “ruined” their lives. This is entirely illogical. We have a fabulous CC in my area, and these kids will save thousands of dollars by doing the CC thing for two years, and still end up with the same bachelor’s degree that they would have gotten by starting with us at year one.
But the kids hate it because they’ve been sold on the “college experience.” Sold by us, yes, but not just by us. You can’t sell in a vacuum. The whole culture tells them they should have this and want this – all of it, for all four years – the dorms, the greek life, the sports. This is how Americans do college, and if you have to miss two years of it to go to a community college, you’ve failed. So they do whatever they can to avoid that failure, including crazy loans for which they really don’t understand the ramifications (you can’t, until you graduate and live with that debt over you).
In my dream world, everyone goes to a community college those first two years. Take some time to figure out what you really want to do, who you really are, your priorities. Save some money and save the bigger name school for when you’ve matured in your studies a little and are starting to specialize. But it’s still a mark of shame to go the community college path if you have any other option. We’ve got to change that.
BethanyAnne
@samara morgan: Fuck you. Happy now? Yes, yes, you can shit in a pool. Congrats!
BethanyAnne
@Amanda in the South Bay: it’s determined to warp everything to its agenda, until it gets its way. seems to invalidate any argument about how some people suck, but ymmv
Martin
@slim’s tuna provider: Without those options, students would’ve paying the same or vastly more living off campus. If Freddie or anyone else wants to point to a study that shows that off campus housing is generally cheaper than on campus, I’d be happy to see it.
If you’re arguing that universities should be cheaper yet, well, okay. My first dorm in 1987 was a repurposed WWII barrack that other than a coat of paint was no better than a WWII barrack – except we were 3 to a room instead of two. I suppose there’s an argument ht housing for American 18 year olds should actually be worse than housing for Foxconn 18 year olds in China, but I dont think it’s an argument that will get us very far.
Martin
@Chris: General ed mostly serves to prop up unpopular programs. Most universities wouldn’t have language programs at all without Gen Ed.
That said, I’d be more inclined to support Gen Ed if it only included courses that were high enough level to be used for the major – no rocks for jocks, just a proper geology course for majors. And if the courses had some relevance to the discipline. Rather than a generic Econ course for psych majors, how about an Econ of the US mental health system?
That all wrecks the massive economy of scales that Gen Ed is designed to achieve, however.
Smiling Mortician
@Chris:
Because gen ed is where students learn to function as humans and citizens. Without gen ed, we’ll have more knee-jerk authoritarians voting for teabaggers.
This is NOT true of my gen ed students. Perhaps you went to a much better high school than my students did, but even when I think I’m reviewing the most basic stuff (historical, artistic, social) in my gen ed classes, my students have never heard of it before.
Smiling Mortician
@techno: You may have missed the part in that movie where Will Hunting is a fucking genius. Most people need something beyond a book and some quiet time to develop sophisticated skills and meaningful knowledge.
TheMightyTrowel
@Martin: @Smiling Mortician: I went to a university that had a modified Gen Ed requirement – all uni classes were classed as belonging to 4 groups and all students had to do 3 courses in each of the four to graduate. The groups were language/lit; history; social science; science. I thought that worked really well – they’ve since split science into 2 separate groups based on the amount of math you need for each.
Also, I have since been a student and prof in three other countries (France, Britain, Australia) and it amazes me the things that students don’t know before or after university. For all its flaws, the liberal arts system (gen ed and all) makes for much more interesting and interested human beings than the 2 and 3 year focussed degrees.
I’m an archaeologist and I want to smack my head into a wall everytime i meet a student who thinks they can just do archaeology having been streamed science from age 15 and not having ever studied history or having been streamed humanities from the same age and never having had a proper chemistry class.
RSA
@Chris:
I think there are good arguments for and against Gen Ed requirements; I’ll offer a few points in favor. (I work in a computer science department in the engineering college of my university, which colors my views.) Gen Ed requirements for our students are seven courses in total: two humanities; one economics and another social science; two interdisciplinary perspectives courses; and one more humanities, social science, or performing arts class.
First, there’s the argument that Gen Ed courses make for well-rounded students. It doesn’t always happen in practice, but exposing students to topics outside their major is all for the good, I think. Otherwise universities might as well be technical or vocational schools.
Second, our department’s industrial advisory council is always telling us that they want more than graduates with purely technical skills–they want people who can write well, speak in public well, and work on teams well. We can handle the last piece ourselves, but we don’t have the skills or the expertise to do the others as well as faculty in other disciplines.
Third, it turns out that more than half of all students change their major at least once during their time in college. If we narrowed the possible paths they could take through the system, it would be much harder to do this. It seems that most eighteen-year-olds don’t yet know what they’d like to do with their lives, at that age, and exposing them to different possible futures can change their minds.
As I say, though, there are good arguments against Gen Ed requirements. Some students already know what the Gen Ed courses can teach them; some students coast through them without actually benefiting very much (this was me in college, when I had to take courses in other engineering departments); some students have a better idea than a university about the direction they want to take. Some stellar people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Matt Damon, etc.) simply skip or drop out of college; in the legal field, some states allow people to take the bar exam, I think, without any formal education at all.
THE
@samara morgan:
Look at the pattern of growth in the (mostly student loan) sector of credit. See how it explodes after the recession? It’s like people are using student loans in lieu of unemployment benefits — using education to avoid facing the adverse labor market — and presumably trying to improve their skills at the same time.
This is the YoY dollar rate of change. It has started slowing down.
gaz
@Another Halocene Human: to be clear, I’m all for not-for-profit loans, and direct funding through state and federal grants for higher education.
What I’m against is giving this over to private, for profit agency.
If your die-hard conservative aunt agreed with me on this, then for all of our other political differences, I’m with her on that. Was she a Teddy Roosevelt republican? ;) heh
Julia
@BGinCHI: @techno: “When I was in school, you could get credit for Theatrical Sword Fighting. You cannot make this shit up”.
I have seen this same meme on Gawker…sword fighting classes as one of the stupidest things you can receive college credit for.
This drives me nuts. Does anyone stop to think that this class makes all kinds of sense to a THEATER major, who the class is intended for? Do you know there are coaches in NYC that consult with productions on stage fight and weapons choreography? How many stage productions have scenes of battle or swordplay or fighting that need to look realistic vs. ridiculous but without injuring the actors?
The main reason for college costs rising is not stupid and unnecessary classes or buildings or facilities or administration, but states slashing education budgets and citizens going right along with it. My son is graduating from University of Colorado in a few weeks, and it is funded 5% from the state. That is why almost 50% of their students are from out-of-state, and those students pay private-school equivalent tuition levels. My youngest, who will start at CalPoly in the fall, was told there has never been a better time to be admitted as an out-of-state student, because the school is so desperate for the higher tuitions those kids pay.