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| I Can Has Edukashon? |
's proposal to create a 4 year degree for $10,000. This sort of talk about producing education like a cheap laptop makes me angry and sad. The reality is that even at a state school, even a CC, the cost of tuition barely covers the cost of faculty salary.If you want innovation, then you to compensate the faculty. And you need to provide the faculty with classrooms with update working technology. At my CC, the clocks don't even work. I bring my own. I have yet to be in a room where the technology works as it should. And my CC is award-winning.
Our salaries are on par with the people who collect coins from parking meters- no joke. I spend out of pocket all the time for books, films, and one term, when I was told i was over my copy limit, copies and paper.
The real cost is the number of students who arrive unable to pass the entrance exams into Math and English. They spend 1- 2 years taking remedial courses. If they were prepared or if they were given alternatives, the costs would drop.
I hope you can post this or edit so it can be posted. I fear for the future whether Perry is elected or not.
From the article:
So I’m intrigued by Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s proposal to come up with an affordable college degree program. Perry, who’s running for president, has created quite a buzz for a bold — some say unrealistic — higher-education plan.
“I’m challenging our institutions of higher education to develop bachelor’s degrees that cost no more than $10,000, including textbooks,” Perry said during his State of the State remarks this year.
And just how does he propose that schools offer degrees at a such a discount?
“Let’s leverage Web-based instruction, innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures to reach that goal,” Perry said.
FULL ARTICLE
- Desmond from Des Moines
Perry and his ilk are full of crap whenever they claim to care about public education. The evangelical/tea party/small government/home school contingent is actively working to limit access to secular education in America as much as they can possibly get away with.
ReplyDeleteSlashing state education budgets, threatening to dismantle the Dept. of Education, crushing teacher/professor unions, demonizing public school teachers: this is all a deliberate plan to do away with a system that threatens their political and financial interests.
An educated and actively engaged populace is not in the interest of wealthy Christian conservative pols. They would create an ignorant, unskilled underclass that their rhetoric will denigrate as responsible for its own misery and the cause of all social ills. Why the F should white, well-off evangelical Christians care after all, when they're shining their shoes for the Rapture?
WTF would Jesus do, indeed.
It's like CM has invaded the Washington Post.
ReplyDelete"...too much college spending is devoted to extras — state-of-the-art recreation facilities, larger university bureaucracies, intercollegiate athletic programs and higher salaries for university personnel — that do little to promote education or economic growth."
OK, we only bitch and moan about the first three items on the list here all the time. This sentiment would be familiar to people who read this site: “An excellent case can be made that we are over-invested in universities, that too many students attend school, that much of our investment is wasted."
Universities and community colleges are expensive. We waste a lot of money trying to educate people who are not prepared for college. With an alternative that Perry describes, our classes would contain fewer of those students, making it easier to do our jobs of teaching the good students. Could those underprepared students attend an online university that charges a lot less and still be successful? Maybe not, but their failure would result in $2500 in student loans, not $25,000. That's not a bad outcome for all concerned.
I saw that, too, and thought of posting it, since I hadn't heard about Perry's proposal elsewhere. Much as I respect Singletary (and think that a lot of entitled snowflakes would benefit from reading her very no-nonsense financial advice on a regular basis), in this case I don't think she's done her homework. There's also the disturbing (to me) mention of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which seems to have gotten a real "in," somehow, with the Post's education writers (I really do want to believe that the fact that, at least until the student loan bubble began bursting, Kaplan, also owned by the Post, was helping to subsidize the newspaper's operation has nothing to do with their editorial decisions, but I'm getting more and more skeptical. Maybe it's an unconscious bias from people grateful to still have jobs in an industry that is experiencing seismic changes, but I'm just not seeing the kind of in-depth investigation of what seem to me like extremely naive proposals for the "reform" of higher education that I'd expect from a publication famous for exposing and explaining complex problems).
ReplyDeleteAs Desmond points out, tuition has never come anywhere near covering the real cost of providing a college education. Higher education has always been subsidized: by churches when most colleges were seminaries, by philanthropists and the endowments they helped create as more schools became secular, by federal and local governments through land grants and tax dollars. I strongly suspect that there was a time when an education at a solid state school *did* cost the equivalent of $10,000 (there was also a time when a student could work all summer, and earn his -- it was usually his -- tuition and very modest board for the school year). A lack of frills, low pay for professors, and a minimal administrative staff undoubtedly played a part, but I'm pretty sure that the largest factor in delivering a college education at that price level was heavy government subsidies.
Basically, we used to treat colleges as infrastructure, and the education of promising students as a collective investment in a collective future. Now, we're way behind on maintaining our bridges, roads, and dams, *and* we expect students and their families to make an individual investment in their educations. But, faced with all sorts of pressures and doubts about the return on that investment, families go bargain shopping instead. And, sadly, in many cases they'll get what they pay for: a credential that's barely worth the paper it's printed on.
I work at three institutions currently. Two of them are online, and one is an R1 school.
ReplyDeleteUni 1 is online and focuses on military. There are lowered standards, advisers who try to get extensions on behalf of their middle-school-level students, and a ridiculously low level of comprehension. These people show me repeatedly that I would fear having them make me diner food. Let alone be in charge of something. This is not real education. After 4 years, they might have the equivalent of a HS degree.
Uni 2 is an online, accredited, really good school that blends technology with rigorous activity. I'm in the middle of my first course there, but the requirements are much more stringent and in some ways I'm seeing the benefits of solid technology teaching approaches at work. It's beautiful.
Uni 3 is an R1 school with terrible technology. The chalkboards are so old that the erasers cannot do anything do get rid of decades of chalk residue. The projectors are always broken. The lecturers in general abhor technology and refuse to do anything but lecture at the kids, who sit there on their pristine laptops googling themselves.
Uni 1 is a waste of time and resources. Uni 3 is a waste of time and resources. Uni 2? Has a LOT of potential.
Dear Rick: 10,000 would make the education system even worse than Uni 1. Shut up and crawl into a hole.
So we "leverage" online ed and go for "aggressive efficiency"?
ReplyDeleteThat is not a vision of a future dystopia. That is the world I teach in. "Aggressive efficiency" in my world is called hyper-standardization and centralization of form and content, "facilitation" instead of content expertise, low pay and hire-and-fire month by month according to immediate demand. We're already Perryland.
"Education For All" seems to be the buzzword (or really, buzzphrase) for the 2000's. The issue with that, as we've all seen, is that academia is not for everyone. A large percentage of students that are currently funneled into higher education, either CC or 4-year, would benefit more from a trade school.
ReplyDeleteI noticed the shift after I graduated from high school in the early '90's. By the time my brother graduated from HS 4 years later, vocational classes such as auto shop, wood shop, metal shop, and the like, had virtually disappeared from campus. Yet these served a large number of students that, for whatever reason, were not or could not be served by an academic curriculum. This is not to say that these students weren't given the opportunity to progress in the academic curriculum. They either did not want to do so, or they could not do so.
(Before anyone gets after me for this statement, everyone at my high school was given equal opportunity to take any course, academic or vocational. But, as I believe that we've all seen, not all outcomes can be identical. So long as there is equality of opportunity, inequality of outcomes should be accepted, which it doesn't seem to be.)
This divide has only been exacerbated by NCLB, with its emphasis on academic over vocational. Many districts have decreased vocation education spending as a result of NCLB, doing a disservice to a fraction of the population, more so in some districts than in others.
While I think that Gov. Perry's plan is severely flawed for an academic degree, there is nothing that says this couldn't happen at a trade school.
I second Pat from Peoria. One of my best friends from high school, who went through all the same college prep courses I did, went to Vo-Tech and is gainfully (quite!) employed in the electronics industry.
ReplyDeleteA two-year Vo-Tech education could be usefully done for $10,000 tuition. As long as the state subsidizes facilities and staffing.
Pat, Introvert, what do you suppose is worthwhile about knowing woodshop in a country that is reducing its industrial workforce?
ReplyDeleteFactory jobs, production jobs, union jobs, these are all disappearing. Having a trade school degree in that is close to worthless. Some construction/electricity/foundation stuff might be helpful, but the housing market has put a lot of those people out of work as well.
I get your point, but I think that Steve Jobs was right when he said 60% of today's kindergartners will have careers in jobs that have yet to be invented.
We are in a time of transition, when the old school format is trying to accommodate new school world. It won't last. Not that I'm optimistic, but I don't know what is coming.
Perry suffers from "good old days syndrome."
ReplyDeleteWhen he graduated from a land-grant school tuition was was less than $3 an hour.
You read that correctly: less than $3 per credit hour. All the state universities in Texas had the same tuition rate back then, too. He paid out-of-pocket. What he conveniently forgets is that the university budgets were highly subsidized by the state at the time.
Nothing Rick Perry says about higher ed should be trusted because he was an extremely mediocre student, but then all of the candidates (including Mr. Hope-n-Change) are flailing around when it comes to the American University....I'm with Academic Monkey; I don't know what the future of ed will be, but it can't be what we have now - that system is shot.
ReplyDelete