We've been pickering for six days about college education, which is about three days longer than the rest of the blogosphere. Not that I'm keeping track or anything.
After all that bickering, no one has convinced me why I would send my kid to a private college for $30-55K, instead of a state college of equal educational quality for $10-15K. Especially when that difference in price means a life time of college debt.
The trouble is that state colleges may not be able to maintain their quality or their low price tag.
Peter Orzag writes that under pressure from failing state governments, state colleges are not keeping up private colleges on a number of measures. With the effects of globalization and a poor labor market, we need quality college graduates more than ever.
His suggestions are interesting:
One place to start would be to focus on raising productivity in public higher education, so that we could do a better job of delivering quality with constrained budgets. Would we be better off if research dollars were even more concentrated in fewer institutions, and a larger share of faculty specialized in teaching (which is often given short shrift at research universities)? Can more businesses partner with public colleges to create curriculums to teach specific job skills? Can remote learning and online coursework, especially for remedial subjects, finally realize their potential?
Apt. 11d 
Maybe this is more “bickering,” but I find it funny that you think all the student debt is being racked up at spendy private colleges–there are plenty of students graduating from public colleges and universities with student debt. There are lots of kids going to community college and paying for it with student loans, in fact.
As far as state college funding goes, it’s no secret that in most states, they are struggling to maintain current levels, much less compete with private colleges as far as class sizes and technology goes (much less climbing walls and fancy cafeterias).
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“Can remote learning and online coursework, especially for remedial subjects, finally realize their potential?”
I suspect that the more remedial a student is, the more hand-holding they need, and the less they can get out of remote learning. But if you are a self-starter, and you have scheduling or geographical issues, what a fantastic option distance learning is.
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Your Kardashian link is automatically playing commercials when it loads. Not sure whether that’s a feature or a bug.
I ignore people when they say they hate numbers and also when they suggest that “raising productivity” and efficiency as a solution to a complex problem.
1) concentrating research dollars? well, I’m not sure what that means in Orzag’s context. Does he mean awarding federal grants to fewer universities? I think there’s some argument for doing so — for concentrating science research dollars and scientist specialist institutes. Of course, if that happens, I’d question the training of any scientist outside of those institutions. Scientists generally need to be trained in how to do science, not given access to science facts.
2) business partners training specific skills? Well, if businesses wanted to offer training programs for jobs at their business and partner with state schools to teach those programs, I wouldn’t be against it. But, then, I’d expect them to pay for the training, and provide the jobs for the students after the training was completed. I don’t see many businesses eager to take on this model.
3) Remote learning/online work? The magical tech solution. Potentially, with video, some folks who had a hard time learning material the first time around in the regular classroom might benefit from the ability to review/pace/test their own material. But, I think Wendy has commented before on many of the reasons why the poor student is often the one most poorly served by online courses — because, to start, poor students often have problems with the reading, writing, organization, and motivation that is even more critical in the online environment.
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And, yes, state universities are being crunched in ways that will affect the education our children would get at them. Different state universities are being crunched in different ways. First, expect tuition to go way up for middle class families. Second, expect access to popular majors to be further limited within the university. Third, expect access to popular classes to be even more limited (and especially to required classes). Fourth, expect star professors to either leave or to teach less as they are allowed to buy out more time for other endeavors (with grants or fellowships).
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If tuition goes up, won’t it go up for everyone? I find it hard to believe any school would be able to single out the “middle class” alone for tuition hikes.
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No, bickering is good, Jackie. I’m proud of the fact that we jumped on this topic before everyone else.
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Star professors hardly teach at all, bj, because they are doing research.
I’m going to get heaps of hate thrown at me, but here goes…
Lots of people have told me that their research helps them be better teachers. They bring their research into class discussions, and the kids just love it. “More regression analysis, please”, the students say. “Just tell me one more time how you operationalized your terms. It’s so genius.”
Not really certain if that is true or not. Would love to see if there is a correlation between teaching prowess and research output.
I think the world would be just fine with a little less research faculty and more teaching faculty.
The most horrific story about the pressure to publish comes from an old buddy from grad school. She is teaching five classes per semester at a community college. 50 kids per class. And she is expected to publish in order to get tenure.
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Why is somebody at a community college expected to publish?
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I love discipline-specific research (she says vaguely), but not really for me. I don’t want the *pressure* of research. Sometimes I have interesting ideas I want to explore and take to conferences and such, and I appreciate that I have opportunities to do it, but not the pressure to do it (in my job).
My real passion these days, however, is the scholarship of teaching and learning. Maryellen Weimer is kind of my guru in this area. I want to talk about what we do in the classroom and how we communicate the info we know. I want to be exposed to new ideas and reconsider old ideas.
Research does benefit a scholar in some ways because it helps you relate to your students and the challenges they face in learning something new. I’m also kind of afraid we’ll miss something important if we don’t keep researching. The evolution of our literary canon has really benefited from historical research. Would we have Zora Neale Hurston in our canon today if it wasn’t for support for faculty research? Alice Walker couldn’t do it all on her own.
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Would we have Zora Neale Hurston in our canon today if it wasn’t for support for faculty research?
It isn’t really “research” research if there is no math.
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“It isn’t really “research” research if there is no math.”
Ha! There is math involved in research on Hurston! She lied about her age a lot in the 1920s/30s. You have to do math to find the right age. 🙂
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Raising productivity? As part of his work on trying to find opportunities for increased productivity, Vance Fried created hypothetical colleges. Basically, he started from scratch.
My guiding design principle for CELS was never spend money unless the resulting additional student benefit is clearly greater than the additional cost….
The Most Obvious Cuts: Research and Public Service
Since CELS‟s primary focus is on undergraduate education, the most obvious spending cuts built into the hypothetical budget are to eliminate spending on research and public service. While these may be worthwhile activities in their own right, they add little, if any, to undergraduate education.
Of course, some people would disagree, and I guess most would say, “it depends”.
Leading reasons for high college costs are research and public service
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Looking at the reported linked in Grace’s link, it a good point about how students might be paying for things from which they don’t benefit. The report didn’t have all the details I’d like (for example, how are the “indirects” on the grants counted).
Then again, at times got a little bizarre. For example:
If you combine the cost of externally funded research not in the E&G budget with internally funded research disguised as instruction, some research universities actually spend more on research than instruction.
Well, yes. That’s why they are called “research universities.”
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Looking up stuff on this, I learned that the ‘R1 University’ has been replaced with ‘RU/VH University.’
Anyway, there’s only 100 of them out. Without those (and really without the top 20 to 50 of them), you’d find it very difficult to train those teaching the undergrads. Also, very difficult to get the research done.
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“I find it hard to believe any school would be able to single out the “middle class” alone for tuition hikes.”
It’s the high tuition high aid model. Of course, they aren’t singling out the middle class — they’re singling out the middle class and above, by offering scholarships to those deemed poor. It’s Harvard’s model, except that presumably the poor will have to be poorer at State U than at Harvard.
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State colleges aren’t cheaper – much – because they are state funded. They are cheaper because they get state funds. The cost of putting a highly educated and tenured instructor into a heated lecture hall for four and a half hours a week is pretty much the same.
To the extent that state taxes are paid by burger flippers and state colleges are attended by the children of the upper middle class, it’s pretty wildly regressive. And as bj notes, they do a certain amount of redistribution by charging tuition to their more fortunate students and rebating to their poorer.
There’s been a nice social consensus for state colleges. I expect it will be in trouble – partly because the colleges themselves are recruiting out of state students, who pay more, and squeezing out the instate students. Result: the middle class people who have been expecting cheap college for their kids get grumpy.
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Heh. Check this out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/gwu-professor-resigns-accused-of-not-teaching/2011/11/08/gIQASJQt0M_blog.html
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You’ve caused a huge amount of trouble here at home. 🙂
I had an intellectual discussion with my kids about Burlington College, which sadly became my whipping post. It costs $22k to attend, only has 192 students and looks to me like a glorified CC. I have nothing against a CC, but I’m not paying 22k/year for it. That’s the whole point.
My kids were arguing that they just might get as good an education there as they would at, say, Penn State. We never settled the argument, really. But I just said that neither of them would go there with my money, so there. Really, they’re just so egalitarian that they didn’t want to suggest that poor Burlington College might not be a good place. They treated it like they would a person–everyone gets a chance. Kind of heartwarming, really.
I would absolutely send my kids to the $12-13k/year publics over a place like Burlington. Where it gets sticky for me is choosing a public over a top 100 private that gives me an aid package that brings it down to $12-13k. All things being equal, we’d probably go private, or at least small. But that’s just my kids. They thrive in small environments–which is why Burlington appealed to them in the first place. Sigh.
Clearly, I will have to blog Geeky Boy’s college decision process–or maybe make him do it. 🙂
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I’m not sure why you seem to think that a team has the option only to be great or to stink. I’ve already said the team didn’t stink in the first five games, but I never said they were great, either: just as stinky teams don’t score three Offensive TDs in 10 minutes, great teams don’t give the ball away five times in a single game. They were a team that was fitting the pieces together, and it was pretty painful at times. I had hoped we’d get through the first four games with a 2-2 record because I *knew* there would be growing pains here. 1-3 was disappointing and 1-4 was downright painful.
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“They treated it like they would a person–everyone gets a chance. Kind of heartwarming, really.”
Hmh. I’m glad my kids are still too young for this discussion. I’m pretty much dreading it once the time comes, because I don’t like any of the alternatives. The whole “finding the perfect fit” exercise seems inane to me. But that’s definitely the world in which I live. And I can totally see my kids wanting to be play the game of everything has value, we can’t rank anyone, multiple intelligences, all applied to college.
I do that our kids steeped in progressive education need to also learn that in the real world we have to make choices with scarce resources and sometimes that means ranking (both colleges and people) is necessary.
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“I do that our kids steeped in progressive education need to also learn that in the real world we have to make choices with scarce resources…”
Wait a minute–that doesn’t come up in their hands-on learning exercises? And you haven’t had to explain how your kids happen to be going to the school they’re going to? That’s a conversation every bit as fraught as the traditional birds-and-bees talk. “Sometimes, when a mommy and daddy love their kids very much, they decide to send their kids to private school.”
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“Why is somebody at a community college expected to publish?”
Because the powers-that-be can get away with requiring it for promotions, I should think.
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bj–yep, I had to pull the old “in the real world . . .” line. Bubbles burst.
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I don’t feel sorry for colleges that prey on The delusion that a college must look like Hogwarts, and then give students a bad education for a high price tag. I loathe them.
A real world with scarce resources means saying no to our kids sometimes.
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Because the powers-that-be can get away with requiring it for promotions, I should think.
I’m sure, but why would the powers-that-be want to require it? It seems to me like driving a 1985 Civic and insisting on new chrome rims. Also, you can rent-to-own tires and rims, which suggests that maybe suboptimal decisions aboout borrowing money might be related to both car and college purchases.
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“I’m sure, but why would the powers-that-be want to require it?”
I think the community colleges sometimes have terrible inferiority complexes vis a vis four year schools.
From what I hear from my relative who has adjuncted at a community college for a long, long time, tenure track and adjuncting are very different at the CC level. No one is demanding that adjuncts at her college publish, although having published does raise her stock with the college and makes for a more reliable supply of courses to teach. Also, my relative says that a lot of the “publications” in English by the tenure track are books of unreadable and unread “poetry”.
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It’s pretty much a given that all poetry is unreadable suckage.
I understand why administrators at lower prestige four-year schools try to push faculty to publish. The school might become higher ranked or, as is more likely given the way things are going, slip in prestige if they don’t keep up with what the others are doing. I understand why individual faculty at community colleges would want to publish. It just might be possible to get a job at a four-year university. But, I don’t see how the administrators at a community college are helping themselves or the students or their school by insisting faculty publish.
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I’m sure, but why would the powers-that-be want to require it?
Adjuncts not to wonder why, adjuncts not to make reply, adjuncts just to scry and scribe.
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MH,
There’s also the related phenomenon of community college starting to do four-year programs and award BAs.
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Would not want to be one of the students involved in the particular experiment. I’m still upset that all the normal schools became “universities.”
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I don’t know if I have the endurance to slog through Friel’s piece.
According to the Cost of College blog, among other cost-cutting initiatives, he recommends colleges optimize class size, and eliminate or consolidate low-enrollment programs. If you glance at the “programs and majors” section at the College Navigator, it’s striking that the business majors and psychology majors far outnumber more demanding majors, such as computer engineering or any of the languages.
Yes, you could cut costs by eliminating small departments, such as mathematics, foreign languages, and the physical sciences. Is that the proper thing to do, though? Shouldn’t we want to have a few people around who can speak Russian, Japanese, Chinese and German?
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“Yes, you could cut costs by eliminating small departments, such as mathematics, foreign languages, and the physical sciences.”
That’s what Texas is doing, right? I think in their defense, they’re doing it at schools where those majors were anemically under enrolled with no real change expected in the future.
But, I think that I disagree fundamentally with the calculation being done in these efficiency arguments (even the fundamental one that all the activity of the university directly benefit the students — even if we got better at defining what that benefit was — from a job to having their hearts fly when they hear a certain stanza of poetry). Universities, like governments and societies are communities. Sometimes any particular activity isn’t going to benefit me, might never benefit me, and might not even benefit my group or anyone I love or care about. But we’re supposed to be in it together.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that we should know where money is coming from and going to and who is benefiting. I’m sympathetic to the idea that we should be careful to not let the poor subsidize the rich. But I do not think that should change into the calculus of comparing the tuition hours taught by psychology and the german department and rigidly enacting “eat what you kill” compensation/reward schemes. I think that fractures communities and undermines the professionalism of having common goals.
I think the efficiencies that come from such calculations are short sighted and undermine the societies and social structures that human beings need.
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bj,
One issue that hasn’t been discussed here is that certain academic fields are much more inexpensive than others, and yet tuition tends to be the same (with some exceptions). Interestingly, I believe it’s majors like English and education that subsidize more expensive-to-teach majors like some in the sciences. Here’s an old joke:
“The chair of the physics department goes to the provost for the annual budget review.
“”I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is we have a lot of exciting things going on in the department – some potential Noble-prize winning stuff. The bad news is we need a new particle accelerator which will cost $10M.”
“The Provost is shocked. “That is a lot of money. It is incredible to me how different departments need different things. Why can’t you be more like the math department? They only want Paper, Pencils and wastebaskets. And the philosophy department doesn’t even want the wastebaskets…””
http://wilk4.com/humor/humore30.htm
That is so true, by the way. When my husband was finishing up his short math career, our apartment was strewn with hundreds of pages of proofs that didn’t work.
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…our apartment was strewn with hundreds of pages of proofs that didn’t work.
Why didn’t he go to econ?
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To the extent that state taxes are paid by burger flippers and state colleges are attended by the children of the upper middle class, it’s pretty wildly regressive.
I think “to the extent that” here means “to almost no extent at all.” As we have learned from our Conservative friends, 53% of Americans pay no income tax, which probably includes most burger flippers.
After all that bickering, no one has convinced me why I would send my kid to a private college for $30-55K, instead of a state college of equal educational quality for $10-15K. Especially when that difference in price means a life time of college debt.
On an individual level, this is true. On a society-wide (let’s say, statewide) level, can you imagine what would happen if everyone suddenly said, “Screw this. I’m dropping out of Private Low Ranked College and going to Trenton State!” And New Jersey said, “Great! We’ll build some new dorms and install some portable classrooms and triple enrollment at all our public universities!” And then Governor Christie agrees to triple state aid, and increase pay and job protection for adjuncts! Or, um, divide the same level of state aid among three times as many student. Or, um, maybe cut aid 10% and let everyone fight over the rest. . .
Social problems need social solutions. Approximately the same amount of state funding plus private tuition payments are needed to educate all of our 18-22 year old. You can’t just decrease private tuition unilaterally without either finding a big chunk of money somewhere else, or dramatically cutting costs.
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53% of Americans pay no income tax, which probably includes most burger flippers.
State taxes are different, at least for most states. We pay a flat tax to the state government, plus taxes that are regressive (sales, tobacco, alcohol).
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“We pay a flat tax to the state government, plus taxes that are regressive (sales, tobacco, alcohol).”
Don’t forget the lottery!
“On an individual level, this is true. On a society-wide (let’s say, statewide) level, can you imagine what would happen if everyone suddenly said, “Screw this. I’m dropping out of Private Low Ranked College and going to Trenton State!” And New Jersey said, “Great! We’ll build some new dorms and install some portable classrooms and triple enrollment at all our public universities!””
Indeed.
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no one has convinced me why I would send my kid to a private college for $30-55K, instead of a state college of equal educational quality for $10-15K.
Well, if you can’t get into UW Madison, what’s the advantage of choosing University of MN at Morris or UW Oshkosh over (private) Luther College or Wartburg College? [Yes, I live in the Midwest.] Especially since the privates have a lot more flexibility to provide $$ in the form of merit aid, while the publics are pretty much bound by strict financial aid formulas based mostly on need (as they define it).
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I haven’t read all the comments on both of your posts about colleges and costs but one factor I haven’t seen is that most families want to fund a quality education at the least cost. Often this is a state university such as you attended, Laura. Binghamton has a well deserved reputation as a top notch college yet costs are at the public college level. What happens is that the best and brightest kids all apply to schools like that and it becomes extremely hard to get in, even if you were a good student in high school. So where do all the other smart kids go for their college education? They have to look at private colleges which do not have public subsidies to keep tuition down. It becomes a lose/lose proposition for some families. Can’t get into a public college because the competition is too strong, can’t earn a decent living without the higher education, can’t pay for the student loans at colleges you can get into. I believe that is the real issue today.
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Can’t get into a public college because the competition is too strong…
We are a very long way from that situation in most states.
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Can’t get into a public FLAGSHIP college because the competition is too strong…
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Looking up University of Wisconsin, I see that 25% of admitted students have ACT score of 26 or below. That doesn’t look like a school that excludes all that many good students. I’m sure some don’t get in if the have both bad grade and bad tests.
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In New Jersey, the 25%/75% Reading SAT scores at Trenton State (mid-tier public school) are 560/660.
The 25%/75% Reading SAT scores at Fairleigh Dickinson (low-tier private school) are 460/550.
It doesn’t look like the two school are pulling from the same pool of students at all.
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So here’s my prediction of what’s going to happen in the next few months: the US will succeed in getting the IAEA to vote to report Iran to the UNSC again. This is simply because the IAEA acts by consensus not votes, and it will provide the necessary pressure to do this. There may be time delay imposed – for example the IAEA board will give Iran a certain time to “abide” by its “obligations” (which are made-up and don’t actually exist) before deciding to send the matter to the UNSC – but in the end the effect is the same.
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