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What's Wrong With the American University System
ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
No, they don't. The ONLY thing they do is raise enrollment. The year after a team wins a championship or does well, they've seen enrollment rise.
UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more — Syracuse, which lost $835,000, Wake Forest ($3.07 million) and Duke ($6.72 million). Rutgers, which spent $19.07 million on its football program, was the only other school to fail to make a profit, although the Big East school broke even.
Basketball doesn't make money either.
"Let's just take a look at two schools, my own Holy Cross and big-time power North Carolina to highlight the flaws. According to the article, the Holy Cross basketball team racked up $1,549,329 in expenses while generating an identical amount in revenue and therefore exactly broke even.".
And as a whole, only 19 D1 Football schools were in the black.
I'm a member of a college athletics committee, and I can tell you with all confidence that while is the common perception of college and university football programs, it simply isn't true. Even in Division I institutions football teams are, as a rule, largely funded by state dollars, student fees, and creative tax exemptions rather than by ticket sales, television contracts, etc. And this has been shown in study after study -- it's even a line that the NCAA toes.
You can check NCAA financial disclosures to verify this at http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/ thanks to a study completed by Mark Alesia in 2006, but a quick Google should point you to a bunch of other studies that give this position the lie. If you'd rather not click through and see the reports yourself, this is a nice summary statement:
"First off, he [Alesia] found that athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, and that without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. In fact, most would have lost more than $5 million."
While this is a statement about athletics programs in general rather than football programs specifically, the NCAA financial reports make it clear that even among popular sports like basketball and football, the overwhelming majority of programs are perennial money losers.
You never know who will get one.
"In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University."
Not for the university, no. Football funds generally go to the athletic department, which still runs at an overall loss to the university. This is according to the NCAA.
Those funds are typically used to support the rest of a university's athletic department budget. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most departments operate at a yearly multimillion-dollar deficit. [PBS Nightly Business Report: The Business of College Football, Part 1]
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/onair/transcripts/071112c/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Coming from a European high school, and having spend a decade in the US, it seems to me that the courses that everyone that graduated my high school had to take would be equivalent to what many Americans get if they take a whole lot of AP classes. My biggest gripe with the American University was that the entry level general courses had no material I had not covered in High school: Physics I and II, Chemistry I and II, Calculus I, II and III and College Algebra were all covered in HS. Everything higher level than that had better quality content than what I'd have seen in the local University back home.
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-universities/2010/02/25/worlds-best-universities-top-400
You'll notice that the United States is disproportionately represented. (Effective troll though...)
For the reason I actually stated. it has the most well known schools therefore the most well peer reviewed schools therefore the highest score. It's like how Megan Fox/Christina Hendricks are not actually the most attractive women in the world but will always win the polls because the majority of the contestants aren't well known enough to compete. And either way it's the system as a whole that's under scrutiny, not the individual Schools. I'm not denying you have some very nice schools. It's the concept that your system as a whole is superior.
Unfortunately, "better schools" are rated as such because their students score higher. That convolutes the data - the teachers may be equal at both schools, but one may be in a wealthier community and the students brought up by parents who emphasized education, while the other may be inner-city whose parents are less hands on and possibly not college graduates. Having gone to the former school, I can tell you that approximately half the school - the ones who were in district - scored very well on the SATs, ACTs and AP exams (no IB available), whereas the other half were bused in from nearby 'inner city' schools and did just as poorly at my school as they did at their district school.
Of course, there were exceptions. I can name them, because there were only 7 out of the 1200 students who were bused in that took it upon themselves to take honors or AP-level classes. The rest were content to stay in the lowest level offered. Additionally, there was a 25% dropout rate for bused in students, compared to a 2% dropout rate for in-district students.
A police history on crimes committed at school showed a disproportionate number of serious incidents (stabbing, drug dealing, gang fights, etc.) from the bussed in students, whereas the in-district population contributed less than 5% of these crimes.
Clearly, your experience and mine differ significantly. I support allowing students who have proven interest in a better education being brought in at taxpayer cost to a better school so they can be surrounded by equally driven peers, but bringing in large numbers of underprivileged students does not improve their education. They are still surrounded by the same group of people, and nothing changes. There is sufficient data beyond my personal anecdote (and of course, now that I'm looking for it it's nowhere to be found) to back up my claims.
Don't forget that schools are rated by student performance, and there is a LOT that goes into student performance beyond teacher quality. It mostly comes from the students. You can take a 'poor person' out of an inner city school, but if they're not inclined to an education, you can put them in any school you want and they still won't get one.