18 thoughts on “State Colleges”

  1. I mentioned this before. See also. Now the president has been fired. It seems to me that filing very misleading reports to the state is a perfectly obvious reason for getting fired. That the former president is so adamant about having suffered an injustice makes me wonder if the system isn’t rotten from within.

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  2. My gripe is that the state schools in our state with the best reputation–Temple, Penn State, and University of Pittsburgh–aren’t really state schools. They’re state affilitated. They’re expensive–$12k-$14k in state. The smaller, less reputable schools are $6-$8k for in state tuition. So, if my kid wouldn’t do well and/or doesn’t want a giant school, he’s looking at the smaller schools and might get a “lesser” education. I also wish there were a neighboring state agreement. We’re closer to many state schools in NJ or Delaware than we are to even Penn State, but we’re “out of state”. I realize that’s a can of worms, but imagine if tuition at a neighboring state went like this: $12k in state, $15k within some radius, $22k out of state. Seems like that might be good for some of those schools.

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  3. That’s the we trend, “state affiliated” and not state.. The justification is that State support has been , so the state schools with reputations raise their tuition and act like semi privates. They think they can attract enough full pay students (and out of state and international) to subsidiize the students they want to attract (diversity, talent, academics).
    The radius idea seems like it could give students more choices. But the money have to work out (and it’s hard to see how it would without cross state subsidies)

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  4. I am currently visiting a state university (in the south). The dorms smell funny. (mind you probably not any funnier than the dorm I lived in at college). The ivy-leaguers I’m traveling with tell me that the food was way better at their schools (not at my college, which was more elite than this state u).
    Is it really surprising that with college as an American right of passage, where a child finds her tribe (remember Alex Doonesbury’s search?), these things matter to people.

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  5. I’d be interested in learning about the history of the different kinds of institutions – land grant colleges, normal schools, etc. – and how their missions evolved.
    Now that I’m about to be tenured at my middle-tier state university, I’m beginning to feel quite attached to it, and defensive about criticisms of it. On the one hand, (mostly) Republican bureaucrats want it to be even cheaper, want us to spend more time documenting exactly what it is that students are learning so that they can justify giving us any money at all. “Performance-based funding” is a new thing; “assessment” is huge. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, though, no one agrees on exactly what the methods of evaluation should be or what kind of “performance” to expect. Sometimes this becomes a sort of “if you fail too many students you’re obviously doing something wrong” – when the students, many of them first-generation college students from rural or working class families – drop out for personal/family reasons or financial reasons. They work half time or sometimes full time during the school year and then can’t keep up. Or they’ve been badly served by the public school system and we have to do remediation, something we are really struggling with now; if 40 percent of your incoming freshmen can’t start out in a “college” math course, should they have been admitted in the first place? But if we don’t let them in, our enrollment numbers drop and we get dinged for that too. So, do we have to change what “college” math is?
    On the other hand, sometimes people assume the lesser state colleges are for the hoi polloi and wonder why our students should be taking the liberal arts at all – why not just efficiently turn them all into accountants or marketing people or farmers? Weirdly, I just teared up at that thought; these kids are just as deserving of access to deep knowledge about history and philosophy and literature and religion, and just as capable of benefitting from it, as the kids I TA’d at my Ivy alma mater.

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  6. Geekymom — Differential pricing like that is definitely frustrating, but I’m not sure that it’s not better than the alternatives. I find it interesting to sometimes see how “outsiders” look at American higher education. This article from the Economist from last year, on the theme of increasing costs of British Universities struck me for how differently the Economist viewed American colleges than how we do — not to say either view is wrong, just different.
    http://www.economist.com/node/18586968
    In England, the Conservatives are implementing budget cuts to colleges, and allowing the tuition to raise to 9000 pounds ($14,500), which was more than double what it had been. That’s for essentially EVERY college, with no differentiation based on quality.
    The Economist yearns for the free market system on America, where “Harvard University, which consistently tops the league tables on cost, charges $38,000 a year for tuition (albeit with generous scholarships) whereas the University of Houston charges local students $8,500, for example.”
    I’m not sure that Pennsylvania’s $8K/ $16K/ $32K tiers aren’t preferable.

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  7. We give in-state tuition to students in the nearest three neighboring states (all within about 100 miles of the school).

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  8. “That’s the we trend, “state affiliated” and not state…”
    bj,
    I believe that in Pennsylvania, the ambiguity is long-standing, rather than a recent development. Didn’t Pitt start private? MH?

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  9. Given its recent struggles with the state legislature, Pitt’s Board of Trustees is considering abandoning its official state-related status and becoming private once again. (It became state-related in 1966.)
    Since Pitt’s admissions have become more selective over the past decade and since it has produced a significant number of Rhodes and Marshall Scholars, its tuition will skyrocket if it goes private, I wager.
    On another note: I spent $12,980 on daycare for one child last year. Should college be cheaper than daycare? Should it be the same? Should it be significantly more?

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  10. I think sometimes neighboring states have agreements where you can get in-state tuition if the major you are choosing is not offered in your state–I grew up in MD, and I think a friend went to VA Tech to major in ergonomic design/engineering and got in-state tuition because that major isn’t offered at a MD state school. So there’s some precedent for what Geekymom is talking about, at least.
    I’m a huge fan of state colleges, having gotten both my degrees at them, and with no student debt due to scholarships and assistantships.

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  13. Taught at William and Mary for awhile — I was amazed at how many students seemed to be unable to get all their necessary courses within four years. That’s a statistic I find myself asking when we think about schools for our kids — What is the probability that my child will be able to get all his courses and graduate in four years– if he comes in knowing his major? if he changes his major? I’d like to know why there’s no central location that compiles this information.
    I’d also like to know how Alabama manages to afford such great merit aid for out of staters — and I’d like to know why University of South Carolina is so cheap. (I’ve been trying to sell my kids on that school for quite some time now — so far, no luck).

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  14. I believe that in Pennsylvania, the ambiguity is long-standing, rather than a recent development. Didn’t Pitt start private? MH?
    As noted above, Pitt did start private. Penn State, which has the same status in relation to the state, was started by the state and has its board packed with state officials there on an ex officio capacity.

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  16. Rutgers is another college that started private and then went public. Wikipedia says:
    “It was originally chartered as Queen’s College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American Revolution. Rutgers was originally a private university affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church and admitted only male students, but evolved into a coeducational public research university. Rutgers is one of only two colonial colleges that later became public universities, the other being The College of William and Mary.[4]”

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  17. Pitt might be the only one founded during the Articles of Confederation period that later because a public university.

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  18. Well, I deliberately avoided state schools when looking for a PhD program. After a master’s in a state school–flagship, no less–where my field was undervalued and I received what I feel was a subpar (in a general sense) graduate degree; I had no interest in that kind of environment again. My field is small, a kind of subfield, and in the state uni it basically existed as a service dept. Now, in a private university, I feel like my dept is valued and my work is supported beyond just being a service to the greater field.
    Not sure if that makes any sense.

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