CCAP in the News
Richard Vedder has an op-ed in the Kearney (Nebraska) Hub on college costs and the role of
administrative spending as a cost driver, particularly in the State of Nebraska:
The share of college spending on administration has been growing for decades. Jay Greene, Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, in their recent report, “Administrative Bloat at American Universities,” noted that from 1993 to 2007, administrative staff, after adjusting for enrollment growth, grew by 39 percent, compared to only 18 percent for faculty.
Similarly, over that period inflation-adjusted per-student spending on administration rose by 61 percent while such spending on instruction rose by only 39 percent.
It is little wonder that Benjamin Ginsberg observed in his book, “The Fall of the Faculty,” that “as colleges and universities had more to spend they chose not to spend it on expanding their instructional resources … (but) chose, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources.”
Research we did for the Platte Institute indicates the problem of administrative bloat is particularly acute at the University of Nebraska, where there are 12.98 administrative and professional staff for every 100 students. That rate is about 24 percent greater than the national average.
You can read the whole piece here.
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Times Higher Education in the UK ran their story on the recent kerfuffle at the University of Virginia over the firing and subsequent reinstatement of the University’s President. The story extensively quotes Richard Vedder:
“To me, this is a beautiful example of the ambiguity over governance,” says Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an independent, not-for-profit research centre in Washington DC. “Who runs universities? Who are the bosses?”
This issue is exercising the US academy not only because of the University of Virginia controversy. There have been disputes in Texas, Iowa, Oregon, Louisiana, North Carolina and elsewhere as governing boards have clashed with both university leaders and academics.
The entire story is available here.
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In the aftermath of the NCAA’s announcement of penalties assessed on Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, CBS Sports reported on CCAP Facult Fellow Dave Ridpath’s initial reaction to the penalties:
As far as the penalties—I am not a fan of the process or how the NCAA did, but simply put: Penn State deserves everything they get and it is far from over. I cannot fault the penalties and I know the collateral damage is immense and innocents will suffer. But we all played a part in this culture being omnipotent and everyone must suffer a bit. If I were Emmert I would not have done it this way but I might have done an investigation to see if NCAA rules were violated etc. like Baylor.
Still it is hard to argue with the end result as PSU needs to be knocked down a few notches. We heard the crap of victory with honor for so long now knowing this nothing is too harsh. While I wish it were done another way or just left to the courts, Department of Education and lawsuits, it is hard to argue with the result.
Penn State football will never be the same and it shouldn’t be. I just hope others listen too.
The rest is here.
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Richard Vedder appeared on Chicago Public Media, WBEZ 91.5, to discuss with Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro the value of a liberal arts college degree. You can listen to the full segment here.
Fill Those Seats!
Tom Van Riper reported on a rather interesting higher ed story in the latest edition of Forbes. The story focuses on Bernie Mullin, who runs the Aspire Group. As Van Riper reports:
Mullin has found a handy niche helping 20 unive
rsities repopulate stadiums and arenas for baseball, football, basketball, and softball, among others. Taking 10% of ticket sales, plus costs (more for small-conference schools) or a management fee tied to increased box office, Aspire should gross $500,000 or so on more than $5 million in revenue this year.
What actually struck me about this story was that Mullin’s business extends even to the perennial sports powerhouses (he’s done ticket price consulting work for even Ohio State, for example). In fact, the Forbes story opens with Mullin’s relationship with Arizona State University, who required his professional assistance to make up for the nearly 40% decline in ticket sales for the ASU athletic department from 2007-08 to 2010-11. Other competitors of Mullin’s group have landed deals to sell tickets for Penn State, Duke and Tennessee. The reason for this new business for ticket sellers and consultants is, as ASU associate athletic director, Steve Hank, said, “A lot of these places have seats available at kickoff… That used to be unheard of.” Indeed, FBS football schools in total actually saw a minor decline in attendance from 2010 to 2011 (surely partly a result of the sluggish economy). If the big guys are hurting a bit and have to put in extra effort to sell their tickets, I wonder what that really means for the little guys.
However, as Van Riper is careful to note, this does not mean that “[c]ollege sports attendance is hardly in crisis.” Given the massive amounts of cash top schools spend for athletic success (according to USA Today, “Division I public schools spent nearly $6.7 billion on athletics in 2011″), it would make sense that the schools would be particularly keen on maximizing their revenues from these enterprises. Nevertheless, it still strikes me as at least a tad excessive that college and universities would take these extra steps to pad ventures which have, in many regards, only an indirect relationship to their academic missions.
NCAA Penalties Give Penn State the Opportunity to Start Over
This morning NCAA President Mark Emmert handed down massive penalties against Penn State in the wake of
the Jerry Sandusky scandal. The punishment includes a $60 million fine against the university, loss of a substantial number of scholarships, post-season ineligibility for four years, a five year probation period and the vacating of all wins from the 1998 – 2011 seasons. While much has been made about their avoidance of the “death penalty” or suspension of the entire football program from competing for one or more seasons, the sentence given Penn State is certainly large, and I, for one, praise the NCAA for the punishment handed down. It was not too harsh, but it also was well thought out and fit the crime. It also punished those who were most culpable at the University of allowing Sandusky to commit his horrible crimes as a way of protecting their hallowed football program.
Perhaps the most startling of the sanctions is the nullification of 112 wins over the last decade of Penn State football. This, along with the removal of the statue outside of Beaver Stadium in State College, demonstrates the tatters in which the reputation of late, legendary football coach Joe Paterno now lies. Once the winningest coach in FBS (Division I) college football history with 409, the NCAA’s action drops Paterno’s total to 298, or fifth all-time, according to ESPN. Analysts often scoff at the idea of vacating wins, since the game cannot be replayed, but in this case it really means something. Records in sports are revered and taking someone’s record away is a big deal. The NCAA is sending a very clear message here: Penn State, you had your priorities WAY out of line. It would have been better for them to have gone winless all those years than to be complicit in the atrocities that were being perpetrated on their campus.
Also particularly significant is the $60 million fine, which is roughly equivalent to the income brought in by the Penn State football program in one year. The money is going to go into a fund for “external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at the university,” as Emmert put it in his announcement of the sanctions. In doing this, Penn State is required to attempt to make some sort of amends for their negligence as an institution in policing its employees. By putting such a significant amount of money towards combating sexual abuse, hopefully Penn State will be able to help prevent future tragedies and assist victims in coming to terms with their experience and to move on with their lives.
The penalties that look to the future of the Penn State football program: the post-season ban, the loss of scholarships and the probation, will hopefully help the University move on from this tragedy and to re-examine its mission and hope it goes about that mission. Penn State has already made some moves in that direction with a hiring of a new football coach and a new president, as well as the removal of the Joe Paterno statue on Sunday morning. While there are certainly those who feel like the school has escaped fair punishment, the actions set down by the NCAA today mark the opportunity for Penn State to re-evaluate its priorities and to move forward. There are many alumni, faculty, and even sportspeople at Penn State who are completely innocent of any complicity in the Jerry Sandusky case. What must happen in the case of Penn State is a complete break from the culture of the past, where football reigned supreme and all other considerations, including the health and safety of young people, took a backseat. With a change of personnel, a four-year post-season ban (i.e., a “stop-and-think” period) and probation, Penn State has been given the opportunity to rebuild its program and its image in a more appropriate way. Let the NCAA sanctions be a reminder to us all that football is just a sport. Major universities across the country must evaluate their priorities and remember that their athletics programs are meant to be part of the college experience, not its entirety.
Louis Freeh and University Governance
Can some good come out of the Penn State tragedy? Former FBI director Louis Freeh has authored a remarkable, lengthy and brutally frank reportbuy viagra online pharmacy
a> that finds fault with lots of people at Penn State. But a group that has heretofore received only modest criticism gets a lot from Freeh—the Board of Trustees. And, reading news reports of the findings, it appears Freeh’s view of the role of boards is very similar to mine, and highly consistent with an idea I have been promoting with increasing frequency for several years.
Freeh said “the Board allowed itself to be marginalized by not demanding thorough and forthright reports on the affairs of the University.” Freeh’s indictment of the Penn State board would apply, I submit, to probably a majority of the governing boards of American universities. While boards can become too activist and disruptive (some would say this is the case at the University of Virginia, but I am not so certain), the far larger problem is that boards are co-opted by the administration which supposedly is subservient to them. The boards accept the information that the president provides as the sum total (or a very, very large proportion of the total) of what they should know about university affairs.
University presidents typically try to maximize revenues and minimize bad publicity. The two are actually highly interrelated. Hence, if something embarrassing happens on campus, the trustees are typically notified only if they likely would find out anyway, or if the legal ramifications of failure to notify are so huge that there is no real alternative. Thus scandals sometimes erupt, despite efforts at containment, and the trustees are caught off guard.
I remember, a few years ago, receiving a phone call from the chair of my university’s board of trustees, a longtime personal friend. The football coach had been arrested for drunk driving, always embarrassing, but doubly so since the coach was featured on posters deploring the dangers of excessive drinking, and the football team had had several members arrested for drinking-related offenses. The board chair had not been informed and was called by a reporter to comment. He was, correctly, furious that he had not been forewarned by the university. I told my friend, approximately, “I got news for you—you don’t hear about half the things you should know about.” What is true at Ohio University is true all over.
Louis Freeh thought the Penn State trustees needed to be told when the early reports of Jerry Sandusky’s actions were received by Penn State. Yes. But I think procedures need to be put in place which would make it very, very difficult to conceal information from the governing board. Whether the governing board will act on the information is another matter, but they can’t act if they don’t know.
Specifically, I think every public university, and probably most private ones, should have an employee whose “boss” is not the university administration but the chair of the board of trustees, and whose function it is to independently inform the board of anything that could potentially harm the university. That person should have the equivalent of subpoena power—the right to virtually any file or information source on campus. That person should have some, if not all, the functions of an inspector general in a federal government agency, and his/her reports should circulate regularly to the entire governing board.
My guess is that had that happened at Penn State, the board would have known about Jerry Sandusky’s behavior earlier. There would have been a quicker resolution of the problem. And, most importantly, a few young people might not have had their lives badly scarred, not to mention saving Penn State some scars itself.
This post originally appeared on the “Innovations” blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 16, 2012.
The College-Graduate Glut: Evidence From Labor Markets
The price system works marvelously to allocate resources in our society, but in higher education, prices often do not reflect the true value society places on resource usage, as they are often distorted by a variety of policies. The price of
elite colleges, for example, is actually well below what demand-and-supply conditions would warrant, while the price of college in general has been distorted upward by extravagant federal student financial-assistance programs (although some would argue with that contention).
But labor markets are largely free of these distortions, and very recent evidence from them on the whole supports the hypothesis that the huge gains from obtaining a bachelor’s degree may be diminishing for a simple reason: Supply has been rising faster than demand for college graduates.
The large differential between the earnings of high-school and college graduates is often cited as proof that college has a high payoff. Elsewhere I have argued that this is not an entirely useful comparison, since the behavioral traits of high-school graduates are markedly different than those who complete college. Moreover, those differentials have actually narrowed some in recent years. Compare 2008 and 2010, looking at the average earnings of those working full-time, year-round. For males with a high-school education, earnings rose 1.87 percent, while for those with bachelor’s degrees, they fell 4.17 percent (for those with master’s degrees, earnings were essentially unchanged). Those with a less than 9th-grade education fared better in terms of earnings change than those with degrees, whether associate, bachelor’s, or master’s. In inflation-adjusted terms, the earnings of those with bachelor’s degrees on average fell well over five percent (and over $3,500 in absolute dollars) at a time when college costs were rising at least as much.
The results hold if one uses median instead of mean income, or looks at all workers, not just full-time year-round ones (although the earning differences are less stark). The data are more mixed regarding female workers. Longer term, though, from 1991 to 2010, earnings for all female workers rose more on average than for just those with bachelor’s degrees.
As more and more college graduates take jobs as janitors, bartenders, truck drivers, etc., I suspect we will see the earnings differentials narrow more, at the same time that college costs continue to rise at rates greater than inflation. However, people respond to market conditions. If the gains from a college degree fall relative to its costs, people will start seeking substitutes, be it in the form of cheaper degrees or in the form of non-degree credentialing.
Caveats are in order. We are looking merely at a two-year period, a period of economic under-performance as a nation. The data are based on a good sample (the Current Population Survey), but one subject to some sampling error. The numbers for females do not show the same deterioration in relative advantage for college graduates. Later this summer, the 2011 data should be released, giving us a little longer time horizon to see if a new trend is really developing.
Partly by design, colleges develop cultures that are relatively isolated from the real world. Highly subsidized, the university community is loath to change, contemptuous of the discipline of markets (a point explicitly made by some faculty critics in the brouhaha at the University of Virginia over the status of President Theresa Sullivan). College professors hold views on a wide variety of issues fairly widely at variance with those of the American population, for example. Concern about labor-market outcomes of students is decried by some as “mindless vocationalism” or “corporatist thinking.”
This sort of political myopia may have serious adverse consequences on the academy in the long run. You cannot thumb your noses at economic realities or popular opinion forever without have people ask “Why are we subsiding this activity?” If the 2011 data continue the trends with respect to earnings of the previous couple of years, I suspect more and more Americans will simply say “no” to higher education. What happens at some schools if, say, the Class of 2017 simply does not show up in expected numbers for school a year from now?
This post originally appeared on the “Innovations” blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 11, 2012.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Issues Wake-up Call to Higher Ed
By: Andrew Smyser
On June 19, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce (ICW), a branch of the United States Chamber of Commerce, released a report entitled “A State-by-State Report Card
on Public Postsecondary Education.
The study grades six categories of state performance and policy:
- Student Access & Success: retention and graduation rates, access for low-income students.
- Efficiency & Cost Effectiveness: how much it costs the state to produce degrees.
- Meeting Labor Market Demand: how graduates do financially in relation to less-educated individuals.
- Transparency & Accountability: how states measure learning and availability to the public.
- Policy Environment: state policies that encourage and facilitate degree completion.
- Innovation: state policies that encourage innovation in college education, how education reaches students that may be underrepresented.
In each of the first four fields, two grades were given: one for four-year colleges and one for two-year institutions. Innovation is divided into two subfields, both of which received a grade: openness to innovation and online learning. Taking the grades given by the ICW and converting them into a standard GPA 4-point scale, the state-by-state averages are illustrated in the table below. The national average for public postsecondary education comes to a GPA of 1.74, or a C-.
| State | GPA | State | GPA | State | GPA | State | GPA |
| Florida | 2.82 | Georgia | 2.00 | Mississippi | 1.73 | Vermont | 1.45 |
| Minnesota | 2.45 | Washington | 1.91 | Kansas | 1.73 | New Hampshire | 1.36 |
| South Dakota | 2.36 | Ohio | 1.91 | Connecticut | 1.73 | Arkansas | 1.36 |
| Indiana | 2.36 | North Dakota | 1.91 | Wisconsin | 1.64 | Alabama | 1.36 |
| Texas | 2.27 | Michigan | 1.91 | Pennsylvania | 1.64 | Rhode Island | 1.27 |
| Tennessee | 2.18 | Louisiana | 1.91 | Maine | 1.64 | Oregon | 1.18 |
| Arizona | 2.18 | Kentucky | 1.91 | Hawaii | 1.64 | Idaho | 1.18 |
| Virginia | 2.09 | Illinois | 1.91 | West Virginia | 1.55 | Delaware | 1.18 |
| New Jersey | 2.09 | Iowa | 1.82 | South Carolina | 1.55 | Nevada | 1.00 |
| California | 2.09 | Colorado | 1.82 | Nebraska | 1.55 | New Mexico | 0.91 |
| Oklahoma | 2.00 | Utah | 1.73 | Montana | 1.55 | Alaska | 0.91 |
| New York | 2.00 | North Carolina | 1.73 | Massachusetts | 1.55 | ||
| Maryland | 2.00 | Missouri | 1.73 | Wyoming | 1.45 | ||
Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce
As might be expected, some states scored well in certain areas while doing poorly in others. For example, South Dakota, which placed relatively high on the overall list, was in the lower third of the country on four-year college grades, while being in the top four in both the two-year grades and policy-related categories. Virginia, on the other hand, did poorly in the policy categories, average in the two-year ones and very well in the four-years. Florida and Indiana were among the most consistently good scorers doing in the top fourth of all three broad categories. Alaska, New Mexico and Nevada were among the lower quarter in the broad categories.
The ICW offers several broad stroke recommendations about how to improve the schools performance though it emphasizes the risk that “one-size-fits-all reform will impede creative solutions to postsecondary institutions’ problems—and even make them worse.” Despite this risk, it has three pieces of broad advice: (1) find solutions that work with a state’s individual priorities, (2) embrace transparency, and (3) focus on performance and outputs. While this call certainly leaves the exact implementation and policies up to the states, it clearly calls for a change and an updating of education policy across the country.
Improved transparency is one way in which postsecondary schools could vastly improve the quality of their product. Requiring institutions to be accountable to the public, would force those colleges to make the necessary changes to better serve their clients (particularly their students). Transparency would encourage innovation in education as a selling point for the college. It would also give the schools incentives to improve graduation rates and the quality of the degrees conferred. The price of these degrees in the current system would be prohibitive for many schools to make the necessary changes to survive, so they would be forced to innovate and to become creative and more efficient in the allocation of their limited resources.
This study should be a wake-up call for state school systems across the country as well as to American policy makers. The United States’ public postsecondary education system is not doing its job when it comes to preparing the next generation for life in the 21st century. This study’s emphasis on meeting the demand of the job market illustrates the pervasiveness of this problem. The problems in the education system are being felt in the American economic market as well which seriously hampers the United States’ ability to compete on a global market.
Andrew Smyser has an M.A. from the University of Missouri, Columbia and a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Research Consultant for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
This post originally appeared in CCAP’s “Higher Education and the Economy” blogspace for Forbes.com.
No Boredom in Board-dom
College governing boards are becoming pretty uppity, actually thinking they have a real, not ceremonial role to play in governing universities. Next thing you know, Britain’s constitutional monarch, Queen Elizabeth will decide to suspend Par
liament and fire the Prime Minister. To be sure, there are limits to the attempts by boards to assert leadership—the University of Virginia board capitulated to the university community by returning power to them that the board rightfully possess by Virginia law.
Nonetheless, boards have become more aggressive in using their most important power—easing out or firing the university president. Illinois has done it not once but twice in the last few years, sending both Joe White and Michael Hogan packing. From the East (Penn State) to the South (Louisiana State) to the West (Oregon), presidents have been ousted. At other schools (e.g. University of Texas), strains between the university administration and the governing board have been very visible and have led to all sorts of campus conflict.
To be sure, these are challenging times. Public concerns about rising college costs have passed the threshold needed to become a major national issue. Big-time intercollegiate athletic corruption reeks and is beginning to stink up the enter higher-education enterprise, as folks in State College will tell you. Public universities are undergoing an involuntary and painful privatization, and the gap between them and the well-endowed private schools is growing rapidly. The job market for graduates has been bad for years, leading to more people questioning the need for a college degree. In short, the life of a university president is not easy these days.
There has long been a disconnect between what the academy itself thinks its mission and priorities should be and what the general public thinks. Boards, very often, have mindsets closer to that of the general public than that of the university community. Occasionally, that leads to clashes, although the university community is usually pretty good at co-opting and neutralizing trustees, making them comparatively docile. They do this by withholding vital information of an embarrassing nature, minimizing the actual number of board meetings, trying to co-opt who is selected for boards, etc.
In my judgment, boards on average do too little, not too much, although there are activist boards that do more harm than good. All schools, including so-called private ones (excepting for profit colleges), depend a lot on government largess. These institutions need to be accountable to someone other than themselves. As it is, colleges have made radical changes in how they operate, with little board involvement or even formal approval. Over the last half century, teaching loads have sharply fallen—did trustees approve this by vote? In most cases, no. Administrative staffs have become bloated, creating what Benjamin Ginsberg calls the “administrative university.” Did trustees sanction this? Sometimes technically they did by their budget votes, but in most cases I doubt they knew that they were voting to weaken the purely academic part of the enterprise.
In a growing number of cases, there is criticism of the boards by loyal alumni. Dartmouth College’s fights over seats on its governing board, and the brouhaha at the College of William & Mary over the Wren cross are good examples.
I am impressed with some alums at Colgate, who want a Better Colgate, and are angling for alumni election of a good hunk of the governing board. Their concerns arise from the fact that Colgate is slipping by many measures—from 2008 to 2011, the school dropped four spots in the U.S. News & World Report ranking and seven in that done by Forbes (full disclosure: I direct the compilation of the Forbes rankings). The Better Colgate folks are extremely frustrated at the near complete secrecy surrounding board actions, the lack of public attendance at meetings, the hiding of board committee reports, etc.
Question: Why are institutions benefiting from federal and/or state funds, or that benefit from tax-exempt status for university gifts, not required to operate out in the open? Why are not board minutes, committee reports, etc., routinely available to the public? I am rooting for the Better Colgate folks who, against heavy odds, are close to getting one of their renegade members on the Colgate board. Transparency should be required of anyone using, directly or indirectly, federal or state government funds.
This post originally appeared on the “Innovations” blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 5, 2012.
We’re In Business: The Value of a Good Liberal Arts Education
A recent Wall Street Journal article raised questions about the value of an undergraduate business major to potential future employers.
The article argued that while some companies continue to hire primarily business majors, increasingly more of them look to expand their recruiting classes by drawing from humanities majors, such as history and English. Students with concentrations outside of business disciplines attract such employers because their coursework has taught them to think critically, be flexible, and confront problem-solving creatively. Business schools at universities such as Santa Clara University, Georgetown University, and George Washington University have taken note of this trend and in response are now integrating more liberal arts classes into their curricula. The philosophical drive for doing so seems to be that a renewed emphasis on humanities courses would foster increased critical thinking in their students and make their graduates more appealing to future employers. Both the studies and the responses to it share recognition of the value of a liberal arts education.
While the WSJ article reaffirms the value of the humanities to an audience which might tend to be skeptical of it, a report from NPR highlights the tensions that increased economic pressure has brought to bear on traditional liberal arts institutions. A May 2012 report examines the financial and philosophical difficulties that a poor economy presents to small, elite, and expensive liberal arts colleges whose missions are facing scrutiny from skittish parents who are nervous about committing so many resources to an education for their child that may not have tangible monetary benefits immediately upon graduation. Liberal arts schools, which traditionally boast small class sizes and low student-to-faculty ratios, struggle to balance the cost of such a structure with the reality that, particularly in times of economic uncertainty, many students and parents worry about the practicality of choosing a course of study that does not readily lend itself to a lucrative career path. As administrators attempt to soothe fears about the value of the education they offer, many have chosen to repackage their model and focus on the job-applicable skills that their students learn while attending a liberal arts institution. Wellesley College Provost Andy Shennan asserts that college administrators “have to continue to make the case [that a liberal arts education is relevant] as persuasively as [they] can.”
Both articles speak to the same sets of worries. On the one hand, colleges and universities have to be aware that many students choose to attend an institution based on the likelihood of future job prospects. At the same time, however, the liberal arts tradition of higher education continues to reveal its inherent value. And while liberal arts schools work to remain relevant in a difficult hiring environment, more business schools seek to tap into the wisdom of the humanities in order to prevent their graduates from casting themselves into too narrow a mold.
The lesson is clear: the study of the humanities still holds value, even if the economic model of traditional liberal arts schools has come under fire. It is equally clear, however, that in a climate where all schools are facing pressure to show their economic worth, administration, students, and even faculty, must diversify. Many curricula require business and engineering students to take one or two humanities classes, but do they explain the value of such a requirement? Too often, students from outside of the humanities disciplines choose not to take their coursework in these requirements seriously, as they believe that a detailed study of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire or an in-depth analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights will not apply to their future career, the “real” reason they are in college. But the value of history and literature to a non-humanities student goes far beyond acquiring knowledge about a specific topic. Instead, the humanities teach students to think abstractly. It cultivates reasoning, incites curiosity, and demands intellectual rigor. Students of the liberal arts learn how to decipher patterns and use these comparisons to construct clear, well-reasoned arguments. Every discipline needs sharp, articulate thinkers, and the humanities provide a venue for students to hone these skills.
This value should not lure liberal arts students into a false sense of security, however. Competitive markets require adaptable applicants, and so students of the humanities must learn to demonstrate that their skills cover a broad spectrum. Here, too, diversity is key. An English major who has taken public speaking courses and actively hones her presentation skills appears to be much more of an asset than an inarticulate applicant of any major. Classics students improve their command of English grammar by their study of Greek and Latin; supplementing this skill with editing experience in journalism makes them stronger applicants for a job that requires strong writing skills. To market these courses of study as excellent job preparation does not “cheapen” them or reduce their intrinsic value. Rather, it reaffirms yet again that the humanities are adaptable and as relevant now as ever.
Katie Smyser is a PhD student at the University at Buffalo. She is a Research Consultant for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
Weekly reCCAP: 07/13/12
At a roundtable convened by the Science Coalition, an organization of universities dedicated to preserving
federal funding for basic research, and the Association of American Universities, the officers discussed the future of pure and applied research — and where the money will come from to pursue both.
Public higher education in California may be nearing the breaking point. And the endgame for the worst off among the state’s budget-battered colleges might look like the accreditation crisis that is engulfing the City College of San Francisco.
The two-year college has failed to adequately cope with its money woes, according to a report released this week by the college’s regional accreditor, which gave City College less than nine months to correct a series of financial and administrative problems, some of which were identified as far back as 2006.
The world of higher education is abuzz with the news that a for-profit university, Ashford University, whose Iowa campus holds accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, has been denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for its online headquarters. Denial of accreditation for schools that already have it is pretty unusual and gives us a rare glimpse into accreditation and a detailed example of what’s wrong with the existing system.
The Glorious End of Higher Education’s Monopoly on Credibility
Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-earned paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class, or via a zillion other ways on the Internet.
And yet, while learning has always been available around us, inexpensively, free (or even paid on the job), until recently, sources of credibility have been highly centralized, and highly expensive. There was basically only one source: higher education. The more elite, the better.
Weekly reCCAP: 06/29/12
The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Gates in an exclusive interview Monday to talk about his vision for how colleges can be transformed throug
h technology. His approach is not simply to drop in tablet computers or other gadgets and hope change happens—a model he said has a “really horrible track record.” Instead, the foundation awards grants to reformers working to fix “inefficiencies” in the current model of higher education that keep many students from graduating on time, or at all.
Sara Hebel, Jack Stripling, and Robin Wilson
Teresa A. Sullivan was reinstated as the president of the University of Virginia on Tuesday, completing the arc of an improbable comeback tale that began a little more than two weeks ago with her forced resignation.
With less than a week remaining until the interest rate on federally subsidized student loans is set to double, Senate leaders said Tuesday afternoon that they had agreed on a compromise to keep the rate at 3.4 percent for another year.
As Republican governor of Indiana,Mitch Daniels has been an efficiency maven, and his scalpel has gone after higher education along with everything else. He has also introduced price competition by welcoming Western Governors University Indiana, a low-cost online college that, among other heresies, gives credit for experience.
The announcement that Daniels will become president ofPurdue University, leaving one political battlefield for another, led to speculation that he is eager to make a mark in the roiling universe of higher education.
The news for would-be attorneys keeps getting worse. According to analysis from the Wall Street Journal released yesterday, only 55% of class of 2011 law school grads were employed full-time as lawyers nine months after graduation. The other 45% may be unemployed, working at Starbucks or starting their own law school hateblogs. Couple this with declining starting salaries (they fell $9000 between 2009 and 2010) and the fact that 85% of law school grads are facing an average debt load of $98 500 and you can see why law school as a career path has taken a public lambasting in recent years.
Education may have positive externalities. That is, your increased knowledge may prove beneficial to others in society. So, who should pay for it?…
…Let’s start by drawing a distinction between training and education. People spend time and money to develop competencies in producing goods and services, in return for which they expect to be paid. People learn how to do surgery, how to install drywall, how to fix computers, how to sell insurance, how to write novels, how to teach English, and countless other kinds of work. Some of their training may be done in formal education settings, but much of it occurs on the job.
Because they intend to use their skills to make a living, individuals have a very strong incentive to find the optimal degree of training. The government does not need to intervene to tell a lawyer, for example, that she ought to become better trained. She will figure out the point at which the cost of additional study and training exceeds the benefit from it.
The same is true for all other professions and occupations. People will invest in the “human capital” needed to succeed in a field, weighing costs and benefits to find the optimal point. There is no need to subsidize their investments.