Higher Ed Politics

~ Laura

I’ve been meaning to catch up on the politics in Wisconsin over higher ed, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. So, I’m just going to point you to two blog posts and refrain from comments. Check out Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber and Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.

Published by Laura

4 thoughts on “Higher Ed Politics”

  1. Thanks for the link Laura. I’m planning a long response to Megan (the main message of which is, basically, ‘yes, I agree with all that’ but I hope a bit more interesting than that.

    Like

  3. Hugely interesting mea culpa from a law school dean in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/law-schools-reform-or-go-bust-308339?piano_d=1

    “Through the first half of the last century law schools relied on small faculties to teach large classes in facilities consisting of a few lecture halls, offices and a library. Today large faculties teach small classes in elaborate facilities housing high tech classrooms, court rooms, cafes, lounges, suites of faculty, administrative and student organization offices, computer labs, libraries and even workout rooms in a few schools. Faculty teach not only smaller, but fewer, classes, with frequent sabbaticals and research leaves. Little wonder tuition has risen in excess of inflation for four decades.

    As someone who promoted all of the above as a law school dean and benefited from it all as a law professor, it pains me to acknowledge that during my nearly four-decade career legal education, I abandoned frugality for profligacy. Some of the rise in cost resulted from program expansions in response to a plethora of new legal specialties and from steady pressure from the American Bar Association for more training in lawyering skills that requires a much lower student-faculty ratio.

    But the core factor in the escalating cost of legal education is that the guild of law school professors long ago captured the combined regulatory apparatus of the American Bar Association (ABA) and the AALS. We law professors have constructed a legal education model that, first and foremost, serves faculty interests—higher salaries, more faculty protected by tenure, smaller and fewer classes, shorter semesters, generous sabbatical and leave policies and supplemental grants for research and writing. We could not have done better for ourselves, except that the system is now collapsing.”

    The applicability to higher ed in general is work thinking about. In some ways there’s been a bait and switch for higher ed in general – parents get the idea that 1. Roscoe will get a decent job and 2. accepted in polite society with a degree, won’t without. Employers have been sold on the notion that if they hire folks without degrees, they are going to get worse employees. And then there are thousands of administrators and professors who get to be gatekeepers and make a living providing “college” (think Blutarsky in his sweatshirt: http://www.amazon.com/Animal-House-College-Crew-Sweatshirt/dp/B00MFD79UE) to Randy Newman’s model students “college men from L.S.U. Went in dumb. Come out dumb too.”

    We are overproviding the service of teaching people to do 30-page research papers compared to the number of students who are capable of doing it or to the number of jobs which require it. Now, Walker got in trouble because whatever staffer who was working this issue dropped the nice and somewhat anodyne “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” from the statement. I guess I am claiming that there has been a sort of ‘college’-suze orman-reader’s digest complex militating for sending every kid to something modeled on a top tier university so they can get a good job.

    I liked McMegan’s lines “…not sure that this means they think of educating undergraduates as core to their mission. Graduating undergraduates, yes. Keeping undergraduates from dying, or suing — yes. Getting undergraduates jobs, yes. Giving undergraduates a happy college experience that will later turn into fat checks from nostalgic alumni, yes. But educating them? Is that really their core mission? Again, from outside, it seems that administrators are more focused on student life outside the classroom than they are on what happens inside it. That’s certainly where a lot of expenses seem to be growing in recent years..”

    As Brighouse noted in his post, the UW system is a lot of campuses, most very far from the flagship UW flagpole. “meeting the state’s workforce needs” is a lot of what has been used to sell higher ed to parents and employers for years and years. My guess is that the staffer who was working this issue for Walker was fumbling towards pressing UW more towards this goal and away from the 30-page research paper for all goal.

    Like

Comments are closed.