Slashdot Mirror

Most places are not religious institutions.

A number of the ones on the list are, though not all.
From the shorter version ( http://www.popecenter.org/comm... ) the ten most oppressive colleges were:
1. Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland ("recently thrown into turmoil by president Simon Newman’s firing of two faculty members who criticized his idea that the school should reduce its freshman class by “drowning some of the bunnies” (i.e., culling out academically weak students).")
2. Northwestern University,
3. Louisiana State
4. University of California—San Diego
5. Saint Mary’s University in Minnesota
6. University of Oklahoma
7. Marquette University
8. Colorado College
9. University of Tulsa,
10. Wesleyan University

So, the religious universities on that list are Mount St. Mary’s University, Saint Mary’s University, Marquette University, and Wesleyan University. Four out of ten. Doesn't seem too bad, but only 20% of the US Universities are religiously affiliated, so it's about twice what you would expect.

The John William Pope Center is a mouthpiece for a right-wing think tank, and is no friend of higher education.

That having been said, some of the incidents described are pretty egregious. But then university administrators have been cowardly autocrats since universities began.

No they haven't. Universities have historically been strongholds of free speech. In many countries during the middle age universities had special laws that allowed them freedom of speech eventhough no one outside the university had it.

Now, they are more business and less higher learning, and as most businesses are, they are more worried about their public image and earnings than their principles.

The John William Pope Center is a mouthpiece for a right-wing think tank, and is no friend of higher education.

That having been said, some of the incidents described are pretty egregious. But then university administrators have been cowardly autocrats since universities began.

A US Supreme Court case found that if an employer was using skills testing that resulted in racial discrimination, then they were guilty of racial discrimination if they intended to be discriminating or not:

The court case is "Griggs vs. Duke Power"
For an explanation, see-
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=1749

The only kind of testing that US companies can use now without fear of discrimination lawsuits, is educational requirements. Ridiculous but true.

Non-Academic Administrators include people like me. I'm a librarian.

Yes, I know what the phrase means, and I didn't mean to imply anything bad about all administrative (or "non-academic") positions -- AT ALL. I'm all for libraries and librarians. Apparently, if this blog is to be believed, the issue at this particular school is that there's also a significant amount of jobs going to friends of existing administrators going on in administrative hiring. I have no idea whether these claims are true, but the implication of the blog is that unnecessary jobs are being "created" and sometimes unqualified people are getting them.

This is NOT an indictment of all administrative staff at all institutions, let alone those who provide important services to students.

On the other hand, the reality of budgets at many schools is that administrative costs are rising at alarming rates (along with costs for new buildings and facilities, etc.), while academic budgets are static or going down, with more and more adjunct faculty hired at levels below minimum wage just to cover basic teaching needs.

These are general trends, and this blog seems to claim that one university has some particularly problematic stuff going on. Again, I have no idea how true it is, but that's the subject of this thread.

That "Non-Academic" phrase gets thrown around a lot and frequently includes people like guidance counselors who DO have an impact on student success.

Yep. That's great. SOME "non-academic" growth is certainly necessary at many universities to provide various kinds of student services, whether that's a career counselor or just an extra person at the registrar's office to facilitate student access to records.

The issue is the rate of growth relative to academic areas, making these administrative costs a significant driver of increasing tuition rates, as discussed in many news stories in the past few years. In many cases, these "administrative" staff have increased anywhere from 5 to 10 TIMES the rate at which faculty and academic staff have increased.

I'm all for providing student services, but if all of these guidance counselors and librarians, etc. are necessary for student success, what had colleges been doing before these giant increases in administrative hiring in the past decade? How could they possibly have functioned before with so few administrators?

I'm not at all saying that administration is somehow "bad" -- it's just that the growth seems disproportionate to other areas, and I'm certainly not the only person to have commented on that trend in the past few years.

Stories like these sicken me when it comes to how they are effectively ignored and swept under the rug. This case was criminally prosecuted only because there was a lot of money involved and it was students and not the staff.

If people are going to spend ridiculously high costs for schooling, they need to know that it's not going to support criminals like those at Winston-Salem.

Ah, but the ADA (Americas with Disabilities Act) gives you, Mister Student zmitch32, some useful leverage. http://www.popecenter.org/acrobat/vickers-mar2010.pdf may provide a useful suggestion.

I think I did misrepresent the situation. There really are 44 people working in that office, but they are not all dedicated strictly to diversity. Looking more carefully at the job descriptions, that number is more like 8. The majority are apparently involved in "community engagement."

Anyway, it's still true that administrative overhead is rising more quickly than costs that are more obviously and directly related to educating students. See, for example these two articles that I quickly found, which both say that while the hiring of instructors and professors has kept basically apace with the growing number of students, the number of administrators and support staff has grown considerably faster.

I read another article a while back that I wish I'd saved. i think it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was about this topic, and it referred to a study that some economists had done in which they formulated a quantitative law of bureaucracy growth. IIRC, the gist was that in most organizations, bureaucrats have very little incentive to organize and coordinate things in their purview to run more cheaply and efficiently because that would imply that they could get by on a smaller budget and with a smaller staff, which reduces their prestige. So, staffs and budgets tend to increase over time, apparently in a fairly predictable way.

1. "Not everybody has a computer" - while still somewhat true, it's becoming pretty much a non-issue, when countries like India are putting linux-based tablets into every students hands by subsidizing them so that they only cost $30. (No, not XO-based devices - the XO is overpriced in comparison).

1.a - if you don't have access to a computer outside of school hours, you won't be able to do the rapid code/test/modify loop that is most conductive to learning anyway. The days of painstakingly figuring out what you want to do with flow-charts, writing it all down on 3x5 index cards, going through your card deck to make sure you had no bugs, then committing it to punch tape so you can run it and take the ensuing green-bar print-out to the cafeteria and pore over it to find your errors are long gone.

2. People learn by example, so cut-n-paste solutions definitely have their place. You can take a page to describe the difference between a function declaration and a function definition, and still leave someone scratching their head, or just SHOW them by example.

int foo(int a); // declaration - does nothing except declare that somewhere, we will sit down and define a function called foo();

int foo(int a) { // definition - it defines what foo actually does.
return a*42;
}

3. As for future "real-world" practicality, whatever you teach them today is probably going to be obsolete in 20 years anyway, unless you're teaching them c/c++ (which you don't want to do as a first language if they're kids).

Let them get the basics of reading, writing, math, biology, chemistry, and physics first. The schools are already failing at this, as evidenced by how half of all universities having to give remedial english and math courses. Lest you thing the US is better, 2/3 of students entering college are not ready for it, and only 1/3 actually take remedial classes to help fix the problem and only 3.4% of those tested were suited for taking college-level courses without a remedial course first, of which a large percentage rejected help (which helps explain the drop-out rate)..

Computer courses don't fix these basic problems in reading, writing, and arithmetic. No wonder that in one study 26% of all accountants who graduated failed the simple task of writing a 2-page memo ... and why it's become an increasingly ingrained problem over the years.

Parent is correct that requiring higher and higher degrees for the same jobs is merely a screening method. The thing is--for many occupations, it wasn't always this way.

It relates to the Supreme Court decision Griggs vs. Duke Power Company, and to over-reaching anti-discrimination laws present in the US that effectively prevent private employers from doing their own skills testing of applicants.

You can read one article explaining it here-
http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749

I find however that the issue is employers seeming to THINK that Highschool isn't enough when it really is. Browsing the job market I see 75% of jobs requesting bachelors (of anything) or greater can be accomplished by two weeks of in-house training and a grade 10 education. The problem isn't that we have too many degrees saturating the market, its that every employer feels their entitled to request only those qualifications for their position when not required.

There is a term for this. Do you know what it is? ---> "credentials inflation":

http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749

-----

I do not know that this situation (of "too many college graduates") is really a problem as such or more of a symptom of a condition of "the system" not working the way we think it should.

There is a misguided notion of equality in the US that everyone should be able to achieve the same results, regardless of their (lack of) abilities. It has ultimately become destructive to achievement in academics and the business world as well.

You can't have a rainbow-assortment of people always tie for first place, unless the race was rigged from the start.
~

...past US supreme court decisions have found that if there is any effective discrimination of testing procedures it is illegal, even if the test is demonstrated to be directly relevant to the position and the test is not intended to be discriminatory (Griggs vs Duke Power Company, 1971).

This is the reason for credentials inflation--private companies are afraid of getting sued for generating their own skills testing, so they just ask for higher and higher degrees every few years for the same jobs, even though the actual duties of the jobs don't change.

Jobs that used to ask for high-school diplomas twenty years ago are requiring bachelor's degrees today.

And colleges (being morally above the barbs of such intellectual accusations) engage in race-normimg, to make certain that more and more people who should have failed are passed anyway.

http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749

Good luck!
~