College costs so much because people are paying for unstated social goals. Each college and university is a collection of many different activities, some of which pay for others. Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions. More broadly, the United States created the world’s first mass system of higher education. Hundreds, not dozens, of colleges aspire to be research universities—because there lies status, prestige, and intellectual excitement—and so they have faculty members with low teaching loads. That costs money. The system is built to take in just about all high-school graduates, and that costs money, too.
I said that in the comment section of this post and in this article.
Apt. 11d 
“Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money…”
I suspect that the author doesn’t really know what does and doesn’t make money. I’ve heard, for instance, that schools of education are a real cash cow. It makes a difference that some subjects are really expensive to teach, and some are really cheap.
Here’s some info from the horse’s (i.e. community college dean’s) mouth:
“We stay afloat through a series of internal cross-subsidies. By turning a profit on Psychology, we can absorb heavy losses in Nursing. We milk the cows precisely so we don’t have to shoot the dogs.
“(For the record, and contrary to what most of the academic blogosphere seems to believe, English isn’t a cash cow. It pretty much breaks even. The smaller class sizes offset the lack of equipment costs. The social sciences are where we really clean up, since those are chalk-and-talk classes with much larger sizes. Naturally, with different course caps in different places, your mileage may vary.)”
http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2009/09/cash-cows.html
“…they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs…”
I know of a university that recently built a huge science complex in the hope that science faculty would start bringing in the sweet grant money and the science complex would pay for itself. Unfortunately, the last I heard, that sweet grant money has yet to materialize, although maybe it will someday. There’s just so much competition for grant money, and this college is in the position of a runt piglet nosing for a teat on a sow that’s one teat short.
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“College costs so much because people are paying for unstated social goals.”
One of them being access to a better dating and marriage pool.
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I’m not following. Bio-medical research subsidize philosophy departments and too many colleges are trying to be research universities.
Is that why non-research liberal arts colleges like Bryn Mawr cost $38K, while research universities with big bio-medical research facilities like Emory cost only $38K?
Or is it that “real” research universities like Penn and Boston University cost only $38K, while second tier wannabes like Pepperdine and Lehigh cost $38K?
All the top (private) Colleges and Universities cost $37-41K.
The chart you showed recently shows pretty clearly that public colleges cost up to $14K, “good” private colleges cost over $35K, and the gap from $14K-35K is filled with crappy little private colleges that I’ve never heard of.
It looks pretty clear that you can pretty easily put together a private college and charge $20K instead of $40K, but no one is doing it except for the little schools that would lose enrollment to comparable peers if they raised their prices.
If it’s supply and demand, then you either have to build a lot more colleges, or else do something like stop offering subsidized loans — that’ll drive down demand pretty quick. Right now, we’re offering everyone the equivalent of free money that can only be applied to bananas, and then wondering why the bananas are all so expensive. And yes, this is exactly the opposite of the argument that Lemann is making.
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“It looks pretty clear that you can pretty easily put together a private college and charge $20K instead of $40K, but no one is doing it except for the little schools that would lose enrollment to comparable peers if they raised their prices.”
Yeah, you made that point last week and I meant to tell you that i liked it.
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But I also meant to add that state colleges like SUNY Albany can charge less than Skidmore, because SUNY Albany gets money from the state that subsidizes their programs.
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I think he’s right that the second tier is trying to compete with the first tier, but I also worried about this:
“That could be a three-decade accident, or it may be a sign of something lasting—the educational version of the inequality surge, elevating “one per cent” institutions far above the rest.” [talking about the fact that from 1989-2017, the president will have a yale or harvard degree]
Then I realized the flaw of the presidential statistic, since it only includes 4 individuals, raising the accident possiblity, but then also noting that the two democrats have graduate, not undergraduate degrees from the schools, while the three potential republicans are the old-fashioned prep school crowd. So, I don’t think I trust Lemann’s thesis. But, I am also worried that reforms urging fewer colleges to aim for the R1 status might increase inequality, reducing accessibility to the 1% education, and creating a big gulf between them and everyone else.
In the 1% education crowd I run around with (where in a random group of people, mostly everyone has degrees from an Ivyish school), people spend a lot of time worrying about how their kids are going to get the same thing. One comment I’ve heard (between two families, one multi-generational ivy-ish while the other is an upstart) is that it won’t matter, because even if the kids don’t make it into the top tier, they’ll have peers in the 2nd tier (because the competition is getting so tough in the 1st tier). That view was taken by the multi-generational wealth, while the upstart wealth was wary of the idea. Interesting, actually, ’cause the multi-generational privelged person basically argued that wherever she was was going to be elite, while the other was worried that her presence alone wouldn’t define the elite.
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Yeah, you made that point last week and I meant to tell you that i liked it.
How am I supposed to know when to stop repeating my points if people don’t tell me that they like them?!
But the point regarding SUNY vs. Skidmore was the issue of debt. SUNY cost a lot less, but its students had a slightly higher debt burden.
SUNY Albany gets money from the state to subsidize their programs, and then can lower tuition, so then people lower down the economic totem pole can consider the possibility of affording college, but only if they take out loans, which puts their total debt burden at the same level as the rich Skidmore kids who didn’t need to take out as many loans.
What is most striking about the NYT cost/debt chart is how little correlation there is. Penn State and Rutgers cost the same, but debt at Penn State is twice as high. Skidmore costs 4 times as much as SUNY Albany, but students have similar debt levels.
What I am seeing is that people seem to be perfectly willing to take out $20-30K in student loans, so schools can raise their tuition accordingly. If you killed the student loan program, colleges would have to either shut down or get by on $20K less per student. I bet they’d keep going.
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I think it’s undoubtedly the case that the market for education is being skewed by the loans. But, I don’t really know what their elimination would do. Presumably differences between Penn State & Rutger’s level of debt are explained by differences in 1) school support — which might not be state support, but might be in the form of scholarships and the like. 2) the wealth of the students — with poor students needing to take on more debt. What happens if you halve the student loan money (and change nothing else)? Does Penn State end up costing less? Do students not come?
And, what about the role that loans play at the more prestigious colleges (like Stanford, where 80% apparently receive some kind of support)? Right better off families (say, two college professors making 100K each) aren’t eligible for aid. Presumably most of them haven’t saved 500K to send their two kids to college, either. So, they take out loans. What will they do in the world with less loan availability? Will Stanford cost less? Will it cost more with more aid? Will people have to mortgage their houses?
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Bj, people Are mortgaging their home to pay for college. They’ve been doing it for a long time. My parents did it.
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“Will people have to mortgage their houses?”
Laura’s correct that people have been tapping their houses for a long time. But at least up until the housing bust, they’ve tapping the houses for EVERYTHING–RVs, cars, home renovations, kids’ education, debt consolidation, paying the mortgage itself (!!!), you name it. That’s how you buy a $200k house and wind up $400k in debt on it (as a lot of people did in places like the interior of California).
Borrowing on a house for kids’ college is probably not so possible now, though, as about a quarter of homeowners with mortgages are underwater, and many of the remainder have relatively little equity.
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“The Federal Reserve issued a report yesterday on the nation’s housing market yesterday with a few sobering numbers. The nation has lost $7 trillion in market value since 2006, or more than half total home equity. Prices are now down 33 percent.”
“Middle-income households, as a group, have been particularly hard hit because home equity is a larger share of their wealth in the aggregate than it is for low-income households (who are less likely to be homeowners) or upper-income households (who own other forms of wealth such as financial assets and businesses). According to data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the decline in average home equity for middle-income homeowners from 2007 through 2009 was about 66 percent of the average income in 2007 for these homeowners. In contrast, the decline in average home equity for the highest-income homeowners was only about 36 percent of average income for these homeowners.”
http://www.oregonlive.com/finance/index.ssf/2012/01/money_reads_half_of_us_home_eq.html
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People have always taken out mortgages to pay for their kids’ education, but the mortgage was based on the parent’s property value and ability to pay. It did not saddle the kid with debt based on nothing except a vague thought that college grads earn more. The mortgage debt is non-recourse and dischargable in bankruptcy, and interest rates are very low. College loans adhere to the student, interest rates can fluctuate, and they cannot be discharged. And since the maximum Stafford loan amount is $31K, it is not at all surprising that college debt seems to hover around that number, and colleges can charge more because anyone on her brother can easily get $31K.
I’m not exactly sure why advocates for students see these things as positives.
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“The mortgage debt is non-recourse and dischargable in bankruptcy, and interest rates are very low.”
Recourse or non-recourse depends on the state. Here’s a list (probably incomplete).
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2010/02/your-mortgage-nonrecourse-states/
Also, while there’s often forgiveness in situations with 1st mortgages, cash-out situations may be treated differently. This probably varies a lot from state to state.
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So let’s back up and try something different here.
Let’s say the goal is a great undergraduate education, not a research institution. At a fair price.
Ok! So what’s a great undergraduate education? Is it:
1. An education that prepares a student for a specific, defined job that actually exists in the current job market?
2. An education that gives a student a wide base of preparation, skills, a “cultivated self”, habits of mind and discipline, etc. that can be applied to many careers (and life)?
#1 is a pretty easy institution to build and even to set prices for–the prices can be set to whatever the prevailing salaries in that specific career are (and to how competitive the field is). It’s probably not that hard to recruit faculty for either–the tricky thing being that you have to pay at least the prevailing wage for a mid-career person in that field and not assume that anyone with experience in that field is able to teach it well. You might discover that in some fields, that cost doesn’t add up to that revenue base (e.g., you can’t charge what you need to charge to pay your labor costs–so you either have to charge more and hope people are desperate enough that they don’t do the math, or you stint on labor and hope no one notices that the product is pretty poor.)
On #2? You tell me: how do you recruit your faculty, how do you retain talented people? Are they going to be Ph.Ds? If so, what do you think will motivate them to want to be teachers? Being a teacher means everyone in the world feels entitled to second-guess your professionalism. It means you have nothing to your name except the students you’ve taught.
And how are you going to keep your mind and ideas and knowledge alive except through something rather like scholarship? The temptation if you define an institution as teaching-centered is to jettison everything that looks like “research” as a money-saving gesture–and whoops, there goes faculty development and intellectual engagement. Congrats, you just created a faculty that you’ll either have to fire at 40 or accept people teaching about fields they last studied thirty years ago. If you agree continuous engagement is important, you agree that looks something like ‘scholarship’, then ‘research’ might just be the most familiar proxy name you can give that activity.
I say this as someone who primarily identifies as a teacher and whose intellectual engagements come primarily through something other than long-form scholarship–I am not against either vision but even I’d concede that not that many people are motivated by it, it is not well rewarded, and it is hard to measure, account for, or recruit for. What evidence do I have that I’m a committed teacher or that I produce lots of smaller or shorter scholarly artifacts and that I’m intellectually alive? Primarily my blog, I guess. If I didn’t have that and I popped up here to make these points, how would you know whether I was full of crap or not in my view of myself? There are maybe a handful of college professors famous and respected for their teaching. There are hundreds or thousands famous and respected for their scholarship.
How to account for and know about teaching is important. How can a prospective student or parent of a student know whether or not there are talented teachers who execute this mission well when they’re choosing a college? What’s the informational signal that helps you evaluate a teacher besides sitting in their classes? I’m working hard on this problem–I think there are things that help communicate high-value teaching (online syllabi, public or transparent examples of teaching work) but it’ll stay difficult to assess no matter what.
You tell me: what do you think most parents today would choose? 50K university with famous names (who might be bad teachers or atrocious mentors) or 20k college with a faculty that you’re assured via brochures are fabulous teachers–but that you’ve never heard of?
———–
One other thought: if at either the vocational OR liberal arts institution, there’s a student who wants to go on to get a Ph.D, especially in the sciences, they’re increasingly expected to have a research experience with a resulting product. Which means, unless you want to send them somewhere else for their senior experience, you have to have (in the sciences at least) ongoing research work happening at your own institution. Even if you’re a Tier III liberal arts college. Unless you really want those institutions to say, “Don’t come here if you think you want a Ph.D ever.” Which edges us closer to the norms of higher education outside the United States, in which however you test at age 18, that’s your lifelong fate. A norm that many countries outside the United States are trying to move away from. But maybe that’s where we’re going with social mobility, towards class rigidity and structured income inequality, and we just need higher education to further sanctify that move.
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You tell me: what do you think most parents today would choose? 50K university with famous names (who might be bad teachers or atrocious mentors) or 20k college with a faculty that you’re assured via brochures are fabulous teachers–but that you’ve never heard of?
They are clearly picking Vanderbilt, Villanova, and Wake Forest at close to $50K over Sienna, Marist, and Elon at half price. But the question is why Villanova can charge that much.
Put another way, why is Villanova charging close to $37,267 instead of $75K or $100K? If it charged $100K per year, people wouldn’t go because it was too expensive, and would pick a cheaper school. But if $75K and $100K are too expensive, why isn’t $37,267 also too expensive? It’s because you can take out these subsidized loans for $10K per year, and then you only have to scrounge $27K from other sources — savings, mortgage, private loans, whatever.
If that $10K worth of loans were not there, and suddenly tons of Villanova hopefuls couldn’t afford to go anymore, then either Villanova would slash its enrollment, or it would slash its price (either directly, or more likely through increased “financial aid”).
Arguing that we need college loans to let the poor afford college is like arguing that we need the mortgage interest deduction to let poor people afford to buy houses — the interest deduction only increases the price of houses to the point that you need to mortgage interest deduction so you can afford to pay your mortgage.
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Let’s just say that it turns out that social mobility in 21st Century America primarily turns on access to selective higher education. Leave aside the why of that for a moment (e.g., whether that’s because of the actual content of that education, the social capital of the institutions, the networks of peers formed at university, the value of a distinction in a competitive market where most candidates appear identical) and just say it’s true.
In that case, college is not at all like a house–access determines whether we’re a society that has mobility or not.
Leaving that big point aside, let me also suggest Ragtime’s financial math is curiously precise. Why do you think 10k in loans is the break point? Just your intuition? I’m always interested in people on the left and right who think that some very precise calculation of incentive can turn people off and on like a faucet in crucial life calculations.
At some point, yes, less selective but expensive schools are going to overshoot the mark and have no more prospective students. When they do, they won’t be able to save themselves in either direction–if they cut radically to reduce the cost, they become even less appealing, and it’s too late at that point to raise the price still further in hopes of becoming more selective. My sense is that this point has already arrived for some private institutions, and you can expect some institutions to go out of business in the next ten years.
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“You tell me: what do you think most parents today would choose? 50K university with famous names (who might be bad teachers or atrocious mentors) or 20k college with a faculty that you’re assured via brochures are fabulous teachers–but that you’ve never heard of?”
OK, Tim, this is going to be a harsh, but kindly comment. Please take it in good humor and in the name of lively debate. There are implied smily emoticons all over this comment….
99.99% of people have never heard of any academics. I could name the names of the most famous, most prestigious names in political science to even my well heeled neighbors and they would have no idea who that person was. They choose their universities based largely on the rankings of US News and World Report. They never check out the faculty pages at the university website, which brag about research. They just don’t care. A middle class family wants a selective college at an affordable cost and they really don’t care at all about the names of the faculty members.
When Tony Grafton mentioned that 40% of the students at Princeton came from families that could afford the $60,000 per year without batting an eye, he responded that it wasn’t a big deal to him, because they were all eager to learn. I was thinking that interacting with students who comprised such a small, elite group of the population must really fuck with one’s idea of reality. I think it would be harmful to me as a political science scholar to have so much interactions with the super elite.
Social mobility doesn’t come from schools like yours, Tim. The Swarthmores and the Princetons protect the wealthy. Social mobility comes from schools like my alma mater, SUNY-Binghamton, which provided an excellent education with an affordable price tag. My friends were all first generation to attend college. They were smart enough to get admitted to Cornell and Harvard, but too poor to attend those schools. My friends are now doctors and Wall Street executives and school teachers.
I’m also surprised that you don’t think that you could recruit smart, talented people to teach at an affordable college that didn’t stress research. I know tons and tons of smart, talented people with PhDs who are dying for a college job. Any where. About half my friends on Facebook are in that boat. Also, there are many smart, talented people who regularly visit this blog who don’t do much research, but are very happy with their jobs and are very good at them, too.
Colleges should not be set up to provide help to the .01% of student who go to grad school. If a student decides that they want to go that route, then they should transfer to a research based school. My sister started off at SUNY-Binghamton, too, but she needed a more advanced language program, so she transferred to Georgetown with a full scholarship after 2 years.
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I could name the names of the most famous, most prestigious names in political science to even my well heeled neighbors and they would have no idea who that person was.
Is that why nobody cares that I saw Keohane going into a restuarant near my office? I thought I was telling it wrong.
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Laura:
There are plenty of openings in the History Dept. of the University of Ghana if your friends with PhDs are historians and serious about the _Any where_ part. My experience is that most Americans especially those with PhDs have an irrational prejudice against working in Africa. Which would explain why so few Obrunis from the US apply for our positions.
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1. Bowen and Bok among others have demonstrated that mobility does happen in selective institutions–e.g., that the 1st generation or economically disadvantaged students they admit do achieve lasting socioeconomic gains. The point that the former president of Amherst made fairly is that this is a very, very small number of people we’re talking about and that even these very small institutions could do better in a variety of ways. And of course the pricing is hitting the “middle-middle” class really hard now. But keep in mind that measuring virtually *any* effect between a very small thing and a very large thing is to be done carefully. You wouldn’t want to say, “But this town of 5,000 only employs 200 people in its government–nothing like this city of 50,000!” Wherever the majority of people educated in the US are educated will have the most impact by definition–a college of 1450 could admit nothing but 1st generation college students and have no more than the most miniscule and unimportant impact on social mobility as a whole. *Every* liberal arts college in the country could do that and the same. But proportionately, the graduates of elite institutions do end up having a lot of influence for good and ill, which isn’t chopped liver if you’re thinking about social mobility–or anything else.
2. Social mobility does come from higher education as a whole. As I noted above, the explanation of precisely *why* is very much debated (is it the content of education? the social capital? etc.) And it is of course right that public universities are the absolute central engine of that effect and have been for fifty, maybe one hundred years in the U.S. But ok, if that’s so, the problem has a simple answer and I don’t quite get why you’re worrying so much about expensive private institutions. The simple answer is to put all the support back into public higher education that’s been cut from it. That’s substantially why tuition has gone up, before we ever get into cost management issues.
3. I think there’s plenty of evidence that middle-class families want excellent higher education first, and expect the cost to be substantial, if not as high as it is now. You probably remember the NY Times series a while back on tuition costs, admission and selectivity–one of the amazing things in it was the discussion of the moderately small, less selective private college whose student body is very much middle to upper middle-class that raised tuition and did nothing else in order to become more selective–and they had *more* applicants with higher SATs who were exactly the same SES profile the next year. Higher education is a Veblen good even for the middle-class. I think that folks ought to be thinking about other things in selecting a college–and be more cost-conscious–but the evidence is that they’re not, however much you believe they are or ought to be. Maybe that’s about to change.
4. No doubt selective colleges and universities oversell the value of Big Shot Scholars to anyone but a small fraction of the applicant pool. But I think you’d be surprised some of the things that even parents very unfamiliar with academia are looking for and will respond to that are reputational rather than financial, including some skewed or particular perceptions about what makes the faculty good. I don’t think people ask probing questions about teaching.
5. There are some wonderful, interesting colleges that have been started more recently that put teaching first and research way down the priority list–and a few more established places that do the same, like St. John’s College. The established ones have their niche, they’re in good shape on the whole–but St. John’s (as the most dramatic example) needs to recruit very carefully to find people who can adapt to its very strong curricular vision and expectations. The less established ones struggle more than you’d think to recruit and retain people who really care about teaching and are content to not have a research program. Not the least because the more you adapt to that vision the less marketable you are in academia as a whole–and if it came packaged with the idea that this is also a cheaper, leaner operation that will keep labor costs low, then you’d have every reason to worry–are you taking a job that will keep you from looking for other jobs without compensating you? Being focused on teaching isn’t a magic recipe: you still have to work on quality. A small place focused on teaching that was 20k wouldn’t be worth much, *especially* if it was liberal arts, if it wasn’t also trying hard to be the best it could be. A liberal arts degree is already hard enough to sell in this market–when it comes from a relatively unknown place where the main driver is cost control, is it worth even half the price of the elites? Moreover, we’re back at point #2 again here: why are you even interested in a small, less costly, all undergraduate college if the only engine of social mobility that matters is a big public university?
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Then there’s this:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq_ed_board/Colleges-can-do-more-to-cut-their-costs.html
I keep coming back to the car analogy. Some people want basic transportation which will get them to work safely, while others like things that are shiny and flashy that impress their neighbors, even though you’re essentially paying more for the same product.
The article shows how High Point University has taken ‘new and shiny’ to the extreme. (My neighbors’ daughter crossed an awful lot of schools off her list because they “smelled old” when she went into the buildings. Apparently she really likes that new car smell.)
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Leaving that big point aside, let me also suggest Ragtime’s financial math is curiously precise. Why do you think 10k in loans is the break point? Just your intuition? I’m always interested in people on the left and right who think that some very precise calculation of incentive can turn people off and on like a faucet in crucial life calculations.
Actually, general and imprecise.
I was thinking of the Stafford loan program, where dependent undergrads can take out about $7,500 per year and independent undergrads can take out $12,500 per year — so about $10K/ year on average. The number was not to imply that this is a magic break point — just that this is what undergrads can easily get. If we replaced Stafford Loans with a government program called the “Everyone Get $20K To Go To College Act,” I’m guessing tuition would magically increase about $5K per year, because everyone could afford it.
(Note that the linked Lemann article in the blog post is specifically about how both Obama and Romney are supported lower interest rates on Stafford loans. So I was specifically commenting on the value of the Stafford loan program.)
My question was, who does this help? It doesn’t help the student if the Stafford loan is being matched by a comparable increase in tuition. It only helps the college, which can take the money as an student contribution in any financial aid calculation, and then raise tuition accordingly.
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Louisa said:
“My neighbors’ daughter crossed an awful lot of schools off her list because they “smelled old” when she went into the buildings.”
Now I’ve heard everything.
Ragtime said:
“The number was not to imply that this is a magic break point — just that this is what undergrads can easily get.”
And we know what they actually do and actually borrow. If we look at student borrowing, maybe we can figure out where price resistance starts. It’s certainly interesting how consistently priced private tuition is.
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I was going through some old things (long story) and came across a tuition bill from my penultimate semester at Cornell. Tuition was $5750 that semester.
Btw, I have to give a presentation tomorrow at my daughter’s middle school Career Day about being a college professor. I have no idea what to say. Ideas? What does a middle school student want to know about what college professors do?
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They are clearly picking Vanderbilt, Villanova, and Wake Forest at close to $50K over Sienna, Marist, and Elon at half price. But the question is why Villanova can charge that much.
Villanova doesn’t seem to charge twice as much. You have to look at net price, not the official price. According to College Navigator, the net price for Villanova’s $28,657. (for “Full-time beginning undergraduate students who were awarded grant or scholarship aid from federal, state or local governments, or the institution.”)
Elon’s net price is $25,030. Elon charges about $3,000 more at the below $30 K income bracket, but $8,000 less at the over $110,001 income bracket. For the $48,000 – $75,000 income level, Villanova and Elon charge about the same net price–about $23,000.
Villanova has a 45% acceptance rate . Elon reports a 48.5% acceptance rate. Wake Forest reports a 40% acceptance rate.
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“Villanova doesn’t seem to charge twice as much. You have to look at net price, not the official price…”
Very interesting.
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What does a middle school student want to know about what college professors do?
They probably want to know what Stanley Fish was really like and then to see (and extensively review) dozens of examples of syllabi.
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So, you hate middle school students, huh? And you don’t even live with one yet…. 😉
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As the mother of a junior in high school, I’m filing and recycling college marketing pieces. We visit campuses together. Email solicitations come to her inbox. My impressions of the colleges’ marketing efforts are only impressions, gathered over the last few months.
1) When marketing to parents, research institutions emphasize:
research (pictures of students holding test tubes)
Your kid can become an engineer! How practical! (Note that research is
not connected to Sociology, anthropology, etc. Biological sciences,
engineering–that’s the ticket. Pictures of students holding up test tubes,
or building solar cars)
big, fancy buildings on campus–preferably lit up at night
At least one building which looks like Hogwarts–it could be an obscure
building from the 19th century. Doesn’t matter.
cushy dorms, full of friendly, smiling, diverse students
Great food, available around the clock (mothers seem particularly concerned their teenaged sons might starve)
lots and lots of extracurricular activities, “I don’t know when our students
sleep!”
international travel
internships with businesses
2) What I have not heard from the research institutions:
The value of the liberal arts or humanities. Really, if you didn’t know they
actually do have English, History, Philosophy and Foreign Language
departments (with the exception of Chinese, of course), you’d never
guess it.
The value of learning about the world, and how we got here. Great patterns
which do play out through human interactions. I happen to think
many high school students don’t know much about current events or
history these days. Blame NCLB, Call of Duty, or Hulu.
The value of coherent written work. They are not promising to improve a
student’s writing.
The value of class discussion.
3) The liberal arts colleges do talk about the value of a liberal arts education. That resonates with my kid and me. The most elite schools–Ivies, Vanderbilt, etc., do talk about the importance of the items I’ve listed under (2).
4) The research universities seem to be marketing on pragmatic points. Your child will be comfortable, learn marketable skills, and cheer on our sports teams (Go _____s!) They’ll have a lot of fun at our fine institution. No mention of ideas, of having one’s preconceptions challenged, indeed of the power of education to change people.
We’re (obviously) not the target audience. (Thank heavens, my daughter and I are in the same camp!) We don’t laugh at the laugh lines, and we roll our eyes at the Big Pictures of Students Doing Fun Stuff.
I would happily pay for my children to follow a challenging, “impractical” major at a college which respects the humanities. I would not be happy sending my humanities kid to a college which thinks the engineering sciences are the pinnacle of civilization and the smartest people on campus. So, to this consumer, “worth it” is a subjective decision. Different people have different opinions.
Sadly, I already know she won’t choose Swarthmore. She found the tour guide pretentious.
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As the mother of a junior in high school, I’m filing and recycling college marketing pieces.
I still remember the flood of college marketing materials I received at junior year of high school (22 years ago!) With high SAT scores in a low-income neighborhood, the deluge of thick, fancy folders was pretty intense.
To this day, I’m not sure which was more immature — my process of choosing colleges (“There’s a St. Olaf College!?! That’s where Rose was from in The Golden Girls!” “I can NOT spent four years in a place where the bricks are that shade of orange.”), or the college’s process of wooing me. (“Named one of America’s Top Ten Party Schools by Rolling Stone!” “Top Seven Ways People Mis-Pronounce Ursinus.”)
In the end, I was admitted to Yale but chose not to go. I’m not saying that it was definitely the right or wrong choice for me, but it seems pretty shocking that it was a choice my dad allowed me to make at 17.
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I’m not the one going to college. Her reasons for not liking a school may not be my reasons, but the hard part of the process is deciding which schools to drop from the list. I’m glad when she decides she doesn’t like a college with an admissions rate of 16%.
I think the “party college” line isn’t playing well with parents. You would think the students spent their off hours attending seminars and intellectually demanding plays, from the marketing materials. There may well be a back-channel to get to teenagers with marketing about the party scenes.
My kid’s not attracted to Lax bros. A “lax bro” culture turns her off. For other kids, that’s what they’re looking for. Every campus must have different groups of kids, of course, but when you’re deciding which campus to visit, a school which emphasizes the wrong things (for her) gets recycled.
Fun list of reasons kids did not like colleges: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/705291-stupidest-reason-child-wont-look-college.html?highlight=reasons
Not many colleges market philosophy/psychology/theater majors to their applicants these days.
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I feel like the goalposts keep moving. At one point we’re talking about Harvard and how expensive it is, but then suddenly it’s about state schools, but then when state schools are brought up, suddenly the cost of Harvard comes in again. I think one reason these conversations get confusing is we’re talking about very different institutions with different goals.
I think one problem going on here is there was a trend towards turning technical and vocational schools into universities. I agree that it’s better to have first rate technical/ vocational schools than 3rd or 4th rate universities. On the other hand, there’s a large trend away from public funding for schools. If states used to give schools X amount of money, and now they give X – n amount, schools have to get n amount from somewhere. That can be from cutting back tenured faculty, skimping on maintenance, raising tuition, or whatever, often all of them. (For some reason though, administration and sports never seem to get the axe. Hmmm….) But anyways, schools have to do something. Blaming the lack of money on professors doing research just seems like it’s looking in the wrong place, since faculty 1) aren’t the most powerful contingent at a university (that’s the administration) and 2) aren’t really all that costly, all things considered, and research even less so. Social science and science research pays for itself and then some, and the cost of humanities research is next to nothing. I don’t know about other institutions, but here, in my soft social science discipline which is routinely ridiculed by Republican politicians, to even do research without teaching you have to fully fund it with outside grant money. As a grad student, I have to do my research with outside funding, which I am expected to apply for in the form of grants throughout my time in grad school. Maybe some schools are doing this, but I’m at a world-famous R1 university a gazillion nobel prize winners, and no one in the university is throwing money at faculty asking them to do expensive research.
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I think the argument on the expense of research isn’t the infrastructural costs but the costs in terms of teaching loads/sabbaticals. E.g., every course that a professor could teach but doesn’t has a real price tag on it in relationship to the credits that students need to graduate. If your students need on average 4 courses a semester to graduate in four years, and the faculty are teaching a 1/1 or 1/2 load because of the way research is valued, you need a *lot* of faculty (hence the reliance on adjuncts in many research universities). But yeah, if you’re at 2/2, 3/2 or above, I don’t think research per se costs all that much save for very expensive laboratories.
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“since faculty 1) aren’t the most powerful contingent at a university (that’s the administration)…”
Isn’t the faculty senate also a big deal? Plus, a lot of faculty have administrative duties. These days a college president is definitely a different kind of critter than a faculty member, but I think there’s a large grey area of overlap between faculty and administration.
On the subject of colleges and money, my husband’s college takes a cut of more or less every outside dollar for “overhead,” be it grant money for research or running a conference.
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Yup. We’re getting the deluge of college mail too. My Type A neurotic child found it hysterical when he got a brochure for some small university in Florida whose main selling point seemed to be that it was a short drive to the beach. (Part of that is because we live a short drive to the beach, so it’s not that big a deal for us — but also, it just struck him as really weird that anyone would choose a college for a reason like how close it was to the beach. Guess that comes from being too young to have watched the 90210’ers attending California University, you know).
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BI,
All of those endless committees also have some power. I’m not sure how much compared to upper administration, but there are real decisions being made at the committee level.
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