January blahs? Good golly, yes. Grey skies are staring at me from the windows that surround my desk. I need to pull myself together and get to work. A quick scan of the morning's headlines.
A new study indicates that small, wealthy colleges aren't educating kids better than larger, public schools.
I'm fascinated by the rising price of art.
Apt. 11d 
I read the rich private vs. public article and they seem to be saying that the study demonstrates that big class sizes, heavy teaching loads and lots of adjuncts do not substantially harm teaching quality.
In related news, the local private college has a horse riding club. The club had chalk sidewalk advertisements this weekend. Also, my husband tells that the college sponsors rather fancy white water and Grand Canyon hiking trips (for an extra fee, but no doubt discounted).
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The study suggests to me that it is currently possible to exploit liberal arts faculty to the point where one can get excellent teaching without paying for it. (“Slides by Blaich suggested that spending on faculty members is where the differences exist between the colleges at the low and high ends of the spending spectrum among those 10 institutions.”)
Now the difference is that those liberal arts faculty do, hopefully, have more choices in the US, and need to be rethinking their willingness to provide the services for the pay thy are receiving. When that happens, and market theory would suggest it would, differences may appear. Alternatively, the “4 value scale” might not capture “education” (which is notoriously difficult to measure). On the other hand, it’s possible that liberal arts teaching is low-skill labor, accessible to a large number of people, and will become a commodity.
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Fascinating article on the art markets (i.e., “chandelier bidding”, which means fake bidding, and 3rd party guarantors who get discounts on their bidding up of the price, and the lack of enforcement of laws requiring published prices.) I’m guessing nothing gets done about the practices because the city has a significant interest in high value sales (and collects some form of taxes on them).
The story I’ve heard about the ever-higher art prices are that they’ve been seen as a means of savings in countries where markets are restricted (for example, China, where the ability to invest in foreign stock markets is apparently limited).
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I forget whether I’ve posted this before, but when I was at USC years ago, there was a popular t-shirt describing USC as a 4-year party with a $100,000 cover charge. That wasn’t exactly true at the time, but I suspect it’s gotten truer of colleges generally. The local private college is expensive, but the kids have a really good time.
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re: effective college education, in several of my workplaces (dating back to the late 90s) we have declined to recruit graduates from small liberal arts colleges, or Ivies. We found that these graduates did not fare well in the workplace. I only have anecdata as to why, but the ones I saw who washed out lacked persistence in the face of challenge, had debilitatingly persistent entitlement issues, and were often not willing to put in the hours.
Could it be the variable is the *students*, not the faculty or their incomes?
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Hmm, we just hired a Dartmouth grad (a BA, not a lawyer), and she’s great. Hard-working, painstaking, intelligent, takes direction (that is polite language for “obedient”), and enthusiastic.
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Here’s a possibility to reconcile Jen’s and y81’s observations. Jen has spent a lot of time in technical fields (yes?) and small liberal arts colleges aren’t where you would expect to find really exceptional techies. (Harvard has produced a number of big names, though, right?) On the other hand, the Ivies are exactly where I would expect to find kids who’ve been dreaming of law school since they were in high school debate club.
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I was just over at Kitchen Table Math. There’s an abstract posted for an article entitled “College as Country Club.”
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2013/01/college-as-country-club.html
Catherine Johnson comments on the college visiting experience, “I got soooooo tired of looking at amenities.
“I don’t think we saw a single professor on any of the campuses we visited.
“We did see some books.”
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But as the study says, as you’d expect, since labor is always the biggest cost of any service industry, that the different between good schools and bad schools is teacher pay. The amenities cost something, but those costs are insignificant compared to the costs of the labor force. Cutting the health club and the field trips doesn’t cut costs very much.
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Everyone has anecdotes about the Ivy grad who wasn’t all that, but I’d guess a specific workplace making the decision not to hire from there probably has to do with the quality of Ivy applicants they’re attracting, rather than the overall quality of students from Ivy’s.
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Oops, that should read cheap schools and expensive schools, not good and bad.
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Y81- Off topic question… How did your house in Fire Island make out after the storm?
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“I’d guess a specific workplace making the decision not to hire from there probably has to do with the quality of Ivy applicants they’re attracting, rather than the overall quality of students from Ivy’s.”
Right.
I remember once adjuncting at a small, 3rd or 4th tier women’s college and noting the fact that one of the faculty had a Princeton doctorate. Their least successful graduates have to go somewhere.
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