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Higher Tuition For an Engineering Degree
i_like_spam writes "The NYTimes is running a story about a new trend in tuition charges at public universities throughout the country. Differential pricing schemes are being implemented, whereby majors in engineering and business pay higher tuition rates than majors in arts and humanities. Last year, for instance, engineering majors at the University of Nebraska starting paying an extra $40 per credit hour. One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields. Officials at schools that are implementing differential pricing are aware of some of the downsides. A dean at Iowa State said he 'thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power.' And a University of Kansas provost said, 'Where we have gone astray culturally is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of... the value of the particular major.'"
Fewer engineers and more people with degrees in Art History!
The first thing that I thought of when read this story earlier, was why should engineering and science students pay more if their departments are the ones bringing in the most money from research grants from the government and industry. It seems ass-backwards to me, unless this is being done by schools without any research program to speak of. If that is the case I think they threaten to drive themselves to obsoletion. Most of these sorts of schools already provide a lower quality of education in those fields, and now they want to raise their prices as well. Good luck with that.
Well, like it or not, a humanities degree is cheap compared to engineering or science. All that lab equipment (and space) costs money, not to mention the people who set it up and keep it running. I'm not saying I agree with differential pricing, I'm just pointing out the costs.
This is already implemented at my university, SFU. You can see that the per-credit cost for Engineering is about $15 more than for other courses, although not as much as the $50 differential for business students. I personally don't really mind this as I noticed the quality of our laboratory increased once the increased fees were put in to place. We managed to replace a lot of outdated scopes and other equipment, and I'm sure the fees were at least partially to thank for that. I can see how an Engineering degree could cost more compared to, for example, a liberal arts degree. Liberal arts majors don't require access to tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronics to get their education.
I'm still at a loss to explain the difference in the cost of business credit hours, I guess they're just milking those people because they can...
By charging less for less useful subjects such as history we will end up with a surfeit of people with the wrong degrees - people not suited to the jobs that we, as a country, need.
This is where government intervention/financial_support is needed for the long term good of society -- I can't see it happening since the payoff is way beyond the next election.
That's already the case for graduate education at most universities, engineering credit hours cost more. Substantially more in many cases.
However, that is a reflection of economic realities. School's have to be more competitive in hiring engineering faculty. Whereas for most humanities, most PhDs would like nothing more than an academic position at a university, that is simply not the case for Engineering faculty. School's not only have to compete with other education institutions, but industry as well, which can afford to pay PhDs a lot more. To a lesser extent, this also translates in the stipends a department pays engineering grad students, they get more.
Also, an engineering education costs more in terms of support. Engineering labs, equipment, etc. all add on to the cost of the education.
While I can appreciate the notion of "knowledge for knowledge's sake", which is infact how most universities started, that is not reality today. Not all disciplines are equal in economic terms. The barriers to entry into the arts and humanities are lower than the hard sciences/engineering. For proof of that, look in universities or the working world. How many people switch their majors from sciences/engineering to arts/humanities, and how many do vice-a-versa? Also, most of those who switch away from sci/eng do so because they are struggling in those fields.
Even beyond college, you often hear of a former individual with a background in sci/eng transitioning into more "soft" areas, such as policy research, K-12 teaching, art, etc. But you almost never hear of a political science graduate becoming the lead tech on an engineering project. The only place where that transition does take place is in Comp Sci, and that's because the barrier to entry there is lower than other Engr fields. And I'm not even going to count the transition to IT, because IT is different from Comp Sci, and is not a Sci/Engr domain.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Yes, yes, but apart from electricity, running water, internet connections, telephones, automobiles, computers and stable buildings, what have the engineers ever done for us?!
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
I, for one, am not going to trust the same invisible hand that gave us pets.com to provide them.
Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is way too fond of giving people the finger...
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Heck, this would even have a major bonus: when I was in school I know that one english "teacher" that I had deliberately lower the grades of engineering students )including myself) as opposed to BA majors (others may well have done this too, but I only am sure of it happening from one "teacher"). By entering as a BA canidate and then switching a student would be free of this type of grade discrimination, which I expect happens much more on the "arts" side of the university.
I should also mention that I paid more than the art history majors, and that was many years ago. But it was sone in the form of "Lab Fees" for engineering courses, not based on what my major was.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Right, and guess what? People are no more satisfied now than they were during the rule of Rome.
That is due to higher expectations. Yesterday's luxuries are today's necessities.
sanitation and clean water supplies have arguably done more to extend the average lifespan than the entire field of medicine.
1. If differential pricing becomes a common practice, I think it will be a blow to America in the long run. If anything, I think this country graduates too few engineers and scientists. We need more people who spend years in college learning real world skills, how to produce value. I am not dissing humanities and social sciences here. However, I do think that we have too many people in US colleges studying social sciences, such as political science, and humanities. Most of them end up taking vanilla, dead end administrative jobs that pay half of what an engineering or science graduate can make. (Of course. What did you expect? that's about what those studies are worth in real world). The biggest reason for this is America's mediocre system of secondary education that graduates hordes of students who barely know math and are afraid of pursuing majors involving any "hard" subjects from the beginning. Raising tuition for such majors will discourage people from getting into engineering even more.
2. The problem with the runaway salaries of the business school professors was created by the business schools themselves. We know that business PhDs can get very good jobs outside of the academia but that's only a part of problem. The real problem is that the supply of business school professors is very tight. What would you expect when business schools at large research universities produce so few business PhDs? Big universities like Purdue, Michigan State, or University of Colorado at Boulder have business-related departments (such as finance or accounting) that employ dozens of professors, yet they admit about 2 doctoral student per year, and even less of those graduate 4-6 year down the road. In the end, they pay 130-140K to a fresh assistant professor. Compare this to the field of economics. Large universities admit 15-25 doctoral students of economics per year and usually at least a half of them finish the degree. The starting salary of an economics professor is about $85K.
The youngest generation is fucked, that's why.
Seriously, there's a major entitlement problem with younger Americans these days. They seem to think they're entitled to being multimillionaires, but they're not willing to do the work necessary to achieve that.
However, I do wonder how representative your sample set is. I'm a little older (graduated college in '97), but I was at a state university (Virginia Tech) and I don't remember meeting anyone with that kind of attitude. It might be something limited to the overpriced private schools.
My own background in graduate school for physics had a program of many 80 grad students at a time, 10 to 20 of them born and raised in China. One of our professors, the one most cited in his field, had a similar background and a tendency to recruit other kids from China.
None of the graduate students has any intention of returning to China. Ever. Most were marked at youth for their academic ability, and raised away from their parents in boarding schools. They don't have loyalty to China, nor a big family that roots them to China. The Married ones bring their wives/husbands with them (often having financial issues while in grad school).
I've known some from western provinces that would be a 'Stan and loathe the government. I know others from the big cities that just want the money they can get here. So now the brain drain is very favorable for the US. So doom isn't going to happen in 10 years. But maybe in 20 or 30 when we stop being the target of the Brains looking for money.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
At the very time that US companies began offshoring IT work, the US was filled with people with IT degrees and experience. The "lack of qualified workers" seems to mostly been "a lack of masters-degree people who would work for associates-degree salaries".
{....-Now that I think of it, the US university lobby should have been one heavily opposing the B1-B program. US kids are hardly encouraged to go into debt to get a degree knowing that they can always be easily replaced with a less-expensive offshore worker. What was their official position on the matter? Did they even have one?-....}
With some professions it's fairly possible to get into them with a bit of luck and without any college--but for a few like medicine, law and engineering it's pretty-much not easily possible for an average person to do. But one of these jobs is not like the others: doctors and lawyers often need to appear in person to do their jobs; but engineering can be offshored as well.
So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well. Is it a good idea for US kids to go into debt for school, to try to land a job that may not practically exist within a few years? The only ones losing money on this deal are the colleges.
~
... that at least you have a free-market system that works. I'm sure that, given time, this problem will resolve itself, one way or another. The market corrects itself. I just wish we had something like this here.
Think, for a moment, of what we have to face. The top engineering examination is the IIT Joint Entrance Examination, which is the only way to gain entry into the Indian Institutes of Technology. Every year, around 1,50,000 people appear for the IIT entrance examination, straight out of high school. That was the number last time. This time, I think it's much higher. Around 4500 get selected. Everyone else to told to go screw themselves. That means that only three percent of people who appear get in.
The next big examination is the AIEEE - the All India Engineering Entrance Examination. In this system, there are a number of colleges which choose to give admission based on performance in this exam. Here, around 8,50,000 people appeared last year. Out of that, only the top 50,000 are called for "counseling" - they are the only ones who have a chance at getting a place in a college. Out of those, only the ones getting into the top five thousand get the first tier colleges and universities. That works out to about 0.588% of all people who appear. But it usually works out for people with ranks up to 25,000 - they get into a good enough place. That's 2.94% of the total who appear.
The next level are the state examinations. Through them, you can get admitted into the colleges affiliated with the local state governments. In states with good colleges, this works out for the top five to ten percent of people in the state.
If you don't get in through any of these channels, then your only option is to pay huge amounts of money to a college of your choice so that you may be included in the "discretionary" admissions that they allow.
It's not difficult to understand, economically - the government controls who and what constitutes a university and a college. It also fixes the fees of all of them. Further, it also controls admission criterion - who will get in, what the admission policies will be, and every other little detail. Now, by forcing colleges to charge students less than what it costs them to run the place, and making the deficit out of its own pocket, along with imposing the hassle of bureaucracy, it provides a very effective dis-incentive to people to start new places, new centres of higher learning, all the while making sure that the few colleges and universities who have a name are the ones who are most profitable (because they can charge arbitrary amounts for the "discretionary" admissions, and the ones with the best reputation charge the most).
What this, in effect, leads to is that there is a ridiculous amount of competition for a very small number of seats, and that the vast, vast majority (above 70%) of the nation's students are getting an education which leaves them unemployable in any meaningful way.
It also has further, unintended, and catastrophic consequences, in terms of the allocation of resources, many of which are very scarce in a country like India (forgive me if I sound like Sowell here, I'm reading his book right now).
Because of this unnatural competition (in a market system, such an artificial shortage and scarcity would not have happened, and therefore I call in unnatural), people try to find ways to game the system.
These tests follow a pattern - the AIEEE, for instance, will consist of three sections, one devoted each to Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics. The questions in each section will be multiple-choice. Now, given the general pattern, it is possible for a coaching institute, which trains students to take a specific test, to do a statistical analysis of every paper since the test's inception, and guess what will be asked next. The rich can, naturally, afford the best coaching, and thus overwhelmingly dominate the pan-Indian tests.
I remember that during my days in suc
... graduated from Yale in 1968 with a B.A. in HistoryReagan earned a BA degree in 1932 from Eureka (Ill.) College, where a photographic memory aided in his studies and in debating and college theatricals.
OTH, the last president to keep us out of war was Jimmy Carter:
received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946...graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, In fact, you will find that most presidents that kept us out of war had really served in the military (not fake like W), and typically had a science/engineering degree.
As to lack of books, well, a simple Google once in a while would work just as well for you. You may find out more than you think.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There's another major problem with this as well. When a good education is affordable, people with a lot of potential but not much money can use universities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Education acts as an equalizer, a place where people who haven't had many advantages can still be successful and get ahead in society, and I think that's important in a society where (supposedly) we are supposed to be able to succeed or fail based on merit alone, rather than the size of dad's portfolio, or who our parents know. In short, it makes for a fairer society.
When you start charging people more to go into higher paying fields, what's going to happen? The people who most need a leg up- kids from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder- are less likely to choose those career paths. The kids from rich families are more likely to take those courses. The poor stay poor and the rich get richer. Society as a whole becomes less fair. It's already happening at the Ivy League colleges. These days the overwhelming majority of the kids at the Ivies come from well-off families- maybe not all of them are fabulously rich, but many of them come from the upper ranks of the middle class, and very few of them come from blue collar or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Then many of these kids go off to join Wall Street, or become congressmen and presidents. Basically, the Ivies help the rich get even richer, and the powerful to become even more powerful. They help make society less fair, rather than more fair, to start creating permanent upper and lower classes; they've gone from being part of the solution, to part of the problem. They give opportunity to the people who have already had every opportunity in life.
It's up to you whether you believe that part of the University's mission is to produce a more fair, just society. I happen to believe that should be a university's goal to produce equality of opportunity, but it's a question of your values. A libertarian would argue that, just like individuals, universities should be free to do whatever the hell they want. Fine. I don't agree with that on principle, but I can see how you would justify that argument. However, I think that this situation is not just unfair, it's potentially dangerous. You don't need to look further than the President of the United States to see what happens when you start giving people opportunity based on connections and money, rather than on ability and merit: you get spoiled, rich, idiotic brats running the show. You have the system being run by people who have never had to learn from their failures, pay for their mistakes, or succeed on their own merit. And we're going to be paying for that mistake for years to come.