Key Education Issues Dividing Public, College Presidents, Study Finds
By KEVIN HELLIKER
The general public and university presidents disagree about the purpose of college, who ought to pay for it and whether today's students are getting their money's worth.
But university presidents and the average American agree that the cost of higher education now exceeds the reach of most people.
Those are broad findings from a pair of surveys released late Sunday from the nonprofit Pew Research Center. The surveys took place this March and April, one posing college-related questions to 2,142 American adults, the other to 1,055 presidents of colleges large, small, public, private and for-profit. The two surveys contained some identical questions and some peculiar to each group.
The surveys show the two groups dividing along predictable fault lines. The idea that students and families should bear the largest share of college costs won approval from almost two-thirds of college presidents—but from only 48% of the general public. As for the value of a college degree, a majority of Americans say it isn't worth the cost—or anyway that "it fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend," said the 159-page Pew report on the two surveys.
....and this is why there are blogs like "100 Reasons Not to Go to Grad School" (they're up to 59 reasons as of this post), college review sites like StudentsReview, and a cottage industry of "scamblogs"* denouncing the vast horde of law schools which badly train students for an oversaturated job market at $150,000 a pop.
ReplyDeleteI have written here before that the system might be a bubble and that it might blow up, mostly from the watering down of instruction; my focus was on the wrong end....student debt has reached 900 BILLION DOLLARS, far outstripping credit-card debt. Such a system cannot survive becoming a trillion dollar drag on the US and world economies; sooner or later the nincompoops who manage the shambling wreck that is American capitalism will ask "Sallie May or Us?" and let that festering shitpile slide down the chute to Enronsville. And places like Humpshack U., Northeastern Ghetto Tech, and all of our basketweaking colleges will be chained to that fat Moby Dick turd as it slides to corporate non-existance.
On Nakhba Day the Zahal (Israeli Army) shot 16 or 20 (I'm going with 20) Palestineans who came from Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon to gaze on what had once been theirs and protest their exile....If I had the ability and the USSR still existed legally, in response I would fly a MiG-25 as low as I could at full military power, which is Mach 2.5+, over Tel-Aviv, shattering every Goddamn window in town while I dropped leaflet cannisters with little slips of paper stating "WE SAW WHAT YOU DID."
There was also a good discussion entitled "Is College Right for Everyone?" on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-05-16/college-right-everyone . Lots of discussion of cost and the consequences of debt there, from a panel that ranged from someone questioning the whole idea of college for many students to a fairly traditional -- and articulate -- defender of the liberal arts (who also agreed that current college costs are a major problem).
ReplyDeleteThere have also been a couple of good posts in the blogosphere pointing out that the spectacular increase in public-university tuitions over the past decade or two has more to do with decreasing state contributions than any other factor, but I can't recall exactly where I saw them at the moment.
I was hoping for outrage at my "bust the Israeli windows with a supersonic Soviet jet" idea, but here is the footnote:
ReplyDelete* The scambloggers include "JDpainterguy", a former law student whose student loan debts broke up his marriage and forced him to work dead-end jobs like housepainting; "Exposing the Law School Scam" and "The Law School Tuition Bubble" (self-explanatory); and the best for last, "Third Tier Toilet" by "Nando" which reviews the sub "top 14" law schools and beats them down mercilessly. There is also a one page blog called "Thomas Cooley School of Law is a Scam" and occasional comments by an angry ex-JD student called "Skadden Farts" (he was one of the first scambloggers), but the people I listed are the better anti-law school blogs. Google them or go to Nando's site at www.thirdtierreality.blogspot.com but BE WARNED; TTT uses full toilets as a post leitmotif.