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Your State University Doesn't Want You
theodp writes "According to a new survey of college admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed, the admissions strategy judged most important is the recruitment of more out-of-state and international students, who can pay significantly more at public institutions. Ten percent of those surveyed also reported admitting full-pay students with lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants, and a majority of schools either use or plan to use controversial commission-paid agents to recruit foreign students (commission-based recruitment is barred in the U.S.). 'This isn't about globalization or increased educational diversity,' asserts USC's Jerome A. Lucido. 'They need the money.' So, should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"
Considering how much tuition has increased at my local state schools over the last decade or so, I'm not sure they want *anyone*. I really feel sorry for kids today. It wasn't that long ago that I went to college. And tuition has almost tripled at my old school since then (while incomes have barely budged). If I had to do it over again today, there is no way I would have been able to afford it without crippling student loan debt. Sadly this rise has happened in a time when it has become almost essential to get a college degree if you want any kind of decent job.
There was an excellent article on this a couple of years ago in the NY Times.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yay first post
Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!
Pennsylvania has got to be a forerunner in all of this. The state run/subsidized colleges seem to have a heavy preference to those with a fatter check. Then again, why shouldn't they be? Those same kids are also eligible for more grants and by adding minorities and foreign students to their undergraduate portfolio the college can get additional state and federal funding. At the same time the "higher" tuition those kids pay for a heavily paid for by some group other than the actual student.
What, do you think you have the right to education wherever you choose?
This is capitalism and the land of free enterprise - just start your own university if you think you can do any better.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
It's a purposeful distortion to ask if rank-and-file *employees* should get a pension after a lifetime of service, simply because one single administrator (uni pres) has a huge paycheck. That's like asking if the front desk secretary should be allowed to have a cigarette break because the Goldman Sachs CEO is already out playing golf.
Our funding in Wisconsin was slashed by our governor. Our pay has been slashed for the last 4 years. Enrollment is down, which means money for supplies is trickling down to zero. So when we go to China (a new program instituted this year) to import foreign students, we're doing it to stay solvent.
Who should be mad? I would say the taxpayers of the state, but they get what they pay for. Even though they have paid into the system their whole lives, they would rather save a few bucks in taxes each year than have access to cheap, amazing education in their state.
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So, should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"
- no, and no pension system should be public in the first place.
This was happening at the university I went to back when I was in it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.
Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/585302/201109191844/By-The-Way-We-Teach-A-Little-Too.htm
Created price inflation and increased the administration staff that isn't on the front line actually teaching students.
Rather than downsize administration and actually meet the needs of students, they look to those with more cash flow.
Gravity is a bitch.
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The cost of education really has sky-rocketed. Perhaps a study or two needs to be done on the real cost of education, because to hear tell, the educators aren't getting big raises, and this even occurs at schools with no need for capital expansion. So where is all this additional money going?
Perhaps state funded schools should need to justify every increase in their tuition, and certainly business projects, such as stadiums and sports teams, should be excised out of the report (ie, they need to be self-funding)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You'd have thought the lower tuition fees for in-state kids was due to a public purse of some sort, so that the institution doesn't get less for their own kids. It's crazy to set up an incentive to get out-of-state kids for a state school.
That's academia at it's finest. They will take the state and federal funds but put preference on the out-of-state or international students. And then they look down their nose at anyone that's not "enlightened" by their institutions. They push policies that ensure their power and authority and deride the unwashed masses who havent yet lost their common sense.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
If only I could have read this article before I had to share a dorm room with some rich moron from New Jersey whose dad owned a car dealership. Oh, and he dealt drugs out of our room, too. While I was there. Studying.
Take your douchebags back, California and New England!
The cause of this is exactly that schools receive a hell of a lot less tax money from state governments than they used to.
"Capitalists will take anyone that can pay the bills..." and only those who can pay the bills. And they deliver an inferior product -- for-profit colleges and universities are notoriously poor. If you want a quality education for everyone; we need public funding; if you want a so-so education for the children of the rich and little or no education for the poor, then let the capitalists run the schools.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
The 16,000+ figure for out-of-state students is wrong. According to the linked statistics, it's only 11,442. Submitter erroneously added the total "Non-Ohians" figure and the "foreign students figure together.
One way to double check the correct math is to subtract the 52,635 Ohians from 64,077 total students, yielding 11,442 Non-Ohians. Subtracting 4,940 foreign students means there are 6,502 out of state students.
The state government provides something like 15% of UNH's budget, and that was cut in HALF last year. GJ, teabaggers.
This has been a problem for long time. 10 years ago VA schools at the time said that they have to take the same number (or percentage probably) of kids from each county in the state. Well I happened to live in a densely populated county and all the kids applied to the state schools. Guess what happens? It's super competitive to get in. But, if you are from out of state you can have a much lower GPA and SAT scores have a better chance of getting in than the kids that live there. They (myself included) pay more to go out of state. What school wouldn't want the money?
Also a lot of people I went to high school with applied and got denied or wait-listed ended up going to a local community college for a year then transferring in as sophomores and juniors as a way of bypassing the state school admissions process.
Aren't the most reputable institutions in America generally NOT state institutions?
Also, whether or not to fund a university is something the politicians do. People have voted to have less education. Isn't that fair enough?
Grand Valley State University really pumped the whole "local first" good for the local economy/our students make West Michigan better by staying in the area, but I know several people who attended GVSU recently who couldn't get funding for their master's degrees (other than loans) and, even worse, could even get practicums at GVSU when they were pursuing a master's degree in Higher Education. Heck, GVSU's library spends most of its time hiring people who earned their MLS degrees from other states, instead of people who earned their degrees from one of the two MLS programs in Michigan (something like 6-8 'entry level' hires in a two year period). In short, screw you GVSU.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to be cool with this.
The linked page shows a total university enrollment of 64,077, of which 52,635 are Ohioans. That leaves 11,442 non-Ohioans, 4,940 of which are foreign, leaving 6,502 students that I would consider "out-of-state". So how did they make up that number? Did they put an extra "1" in front of 6,502 or did they count the foreigners twice and add 11,442 to 4,940?
dom
The strategies of recruiting out-of-state and foreign students reflects decades of disinvestment in public education by the state government. Where I teach the state legislature retains 100% of the control over our budget despite contributing only 1/8th of that same budget. This pattern exists in state throughout the U.S.. If you want a quality public university system get on the phone, write letters and organize to pressure your state government to fund it.
...where the US higher educational system is going to have to realize that the current model isn't fiscally sustainable. As long as your tuition rates are growing faster than people's income, SOMETHING'S gotta eventually give. They'll have to see that all the extra bells and whistles that are currently considered "essential" to the university aren't so much so, and they'll just have to pear it down to just boring-old-teaching.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
...or read a table is complaining about higher education. Ohio State University doesn't have 16,000+ out of state students, it has 11,442 (according to the document the post links to). Foreign students are included in that number. There are 52,635 Ohioans, 11,442 non-Ohioans for a total enrollment of 64,077.
My other sig is extremely clever...
"So, should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"
NO NO NO NO NO!!!!
We cannot afford old school (no pun intended) pension programs, especially public union pension when the tax payers have to foot the bill while most, themselves, have to self fund their retirements.
Government unions are absolutely a horrible, horrible idea. They have to go!!!!!!!!!
First, they shouldn't be put in a position where they have to raise more money in this method. If state funding of education were prioritized over, say, road beautification projects or officials' salaries, maybe they wouldn't resort to these methods
Second, and more important, the schools need to remember they are STATE schools, funded by the state. If they want to recruit outside the state, they should have their funding from the state deducted for every out-of-state student over a certain percentage of the school body they enroll. Hey, they are making as much as 5-10 times the money off these out-of-state kids, so they should have funds withheld appropiately. These places tend to forget the money they get from local taxpayers dwarfs any amount they get for recruiting out-of-state.
Across the country, state legislatures have been treating public higher education as a "splurge"; something that's nice to have but not really necessary. Welfare is a necessity, but public higher ed is not. Gotta love that logic.
Public funding has been a declining percentage of the universities' budgets for a long time. In a few years, they won't be "public" at all.
Most IT workers should go to tech / trade schools and apprenticeships.
And not forcing them to go 4 year (that trun out to be longer then 4 due to the high number of needed credits in the past you needed less)
Also how does high level theory vs doing more hands on work help you be a better help desk or desktop guy? What is use is all that high level math? Some math is ok but some it of it is better for high level design that is way past what most IT workers do.
Now for coding I can see lot's of math and theory (to a point) but going to far on theory is bad for coders.
Networking, support, and admin needs to be on it's own track from the coding side of work. And even on the Networking, support, and admin side that can also be broken out a few of there own tracks aka big scale network setups vs admin + a smaller network setup.
The filler classes are nice to a point but it has gone a little to far as the number of credits needed has gone up over the years. Now a better system is to cut them down and or make some IT classes just out side your main focus count as filler for the needed credits part.
Ideal way is to have a 2 year mixed class room / apprenticeship system and no internship B.S. It should be a real payed (at least mini wage) apprenticeship like how electricians and plumbers systems are setup.
Now keep the 4 year for the high level stuff (with a way to join midway if you did the 2 year mixed class room / apprenticeship in the past)
"i.e. they receive a good share of tax money from your local gov."
While here in Illinois our state government is DELINQUENT in paying its share to the University of Illinois system.
New Economic Perspectives
Don't you know that public institutions are simply there to provide life support for football programs? The lions must be fed, unfortunately there is no bread at these circuses.
The bigger mess comes when out-of-state students apply for in-state status, which they are generally able to do after the first 1.5-2 years of school. At the same time, states set limits for the percentage of out-of-state students who can be granted in-state tuition.
So, states end up with subjective, nonrepeatable selection processes for judging who is granted in-state status. You could buy a house or run for office and still not be considered in-state for tuition purposes.
Gotta train that cheap labour from other countries so we can continue to out source jobs to them !
Interesting atricle from The Economist, from 2004, about social/financial mobility in America. http://www.economist.com/node/3518560
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I see it simple. The student invests his personal time into his future and the state should help him doing so. Other form of investing something in the future of the inhabitants of a state are also helped, like tax exemptions etc. Lets say 10000 Students from you state studying will in you universities for 3 years each roughly corresponds to a 1.5 billion dollar investment of their personal lifetime ($50000/year). If they will earn twice as much money the next 30 years, they will get in total a return on the order of 15billion from this investment, and the state which they live may get a even higher amount back from it. So why not to help them to invest this?
That's right, this issue clearly boils down to a decision between "public funding" or "capitalist run". Furthermore, the options are mutually exclusive, one option is obviously better and the other one sucks, and the only reason we don't go for the better option is because idiots control the system...
Or maybe it's more complicated than that? Maybe your broad generalization is off base and reflects a bias on your part, instead of reality?
Like any other state/national entity, states should apply max quotas of immigrants to who they admit from outside, who are all subsidized by the taxpayers in the state. There's both financial and educational (diversity, quality) benefits to admitting as many outsiders as the state can get, before the net effects exclude actual residents too from the net benefits.
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I am working at a "state school" right now, which receives a whopping 5% of its budget from the state. Do not be so quick to assume that "state school" means "paid for by the state government."
Palm trees and 8
Whenever there is a discussion of cost increase for education (or medical) the first thought is finding yet more money to pay for the increase. Why is there little to no discussion on why there is an increase. We do that with personal budgets. As an ex-Project Manager I say, FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Parent is insightfully addressing the misleading question in the summary:
"should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"
This appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine the idea of providing a pension system to state employees without providing any evidence that those employees haven't earned that pension.
This rhetorical attempt to represent the compensation of a university *president* as justification for reduce compensation for the majority of university employees is logically fallacious, and seems like an attack on those employees simply because they work for a state or a state education system..
I expect better. Yes, even from Slashdot.
I agree completely, I've wasted most of the money I have spent on education. I was working at ISPs administering servers, and doing hi level tech support before I ever went to college through self education. IT work can be self taught in most of the non development fields and sometimes even then through a desire to buy books and learn on your own.
I pretty much have handed now 2 schools a boat load of cash to learn nothing, waste my time, and listen to teacher who half the time have never worked in the field doing the classes they teach(sometime saying things that are flat out wrong) just to have a piece of paper that says I already know what I know.
Through the years I have had multiple interns tell me they have learned more from me in a year or two interning than they learned in the entirety of college, sure there is a place for it for some, but many jobs could just as easily be taught on the job without the crippling student loan debt.
Here in our university, in many departments, when they hire IT staff, they don't hire full time staff, instead they hire international grad students which is much cheaper ( about $1,600 a month , plus a tuition waiver, for 20 hours a week, and you get to call yourself a research assistant). These position especially attracts engineering, CS and business students from either India or China who otherwise cannot get a research/teaching assistantship from their home department because they sucks.
These people get in with fraudulent resumes that list MCSE, A+ certification etc. and good programming skills, and when they fix PCs of faculty members, all they know how to use is doublemyspeed.com and mycleanPC.com and call it a day. Then they get back to their workstation to play WoW or voice-chatting with their friends either in Hindi or Mandarin.
The office where I worked (in the university medical center) have unfortunately picked up one of these TFK's (Trust Fund Kid) from China, his work slows everyone down. Finally we have a golden opportunity to fire this asshole due to a budget cut caused by someone else's far more superior (originally an undergrad student worker) converting to full time.
Seriously, domestic undergrads works far more efficient and show more enthusiasm compare to these international grad who just want to get a degree and pick up a white chick + green card along the way,
New Economic Perspectives
Why do I get the feeling that this is a leading question?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/education/15fifth.html?_r=2
http://consumerist.com/2011/09/private-colleges-starting-to-offer-four-year-degree-guarantees.html
Some place have this now and it's due to stuff like.
adviser hadn't erroneously told some one that a particular class would fulfill the math requirement. Unfortunately, for some reason the same class winter quarter was a different class that didn't fulfill the requirement, even though the fall and spring classes with the same course number did.
Classes that are too full to accept all the students that want/need to get in for their majors
Classes would either be full, or would be offered so infrequently that they'd have to wait, sometimes for two years, to take the class.
Every state should offer completely free public education through a post-highschool degree. If you graduated a public school in the state/county, the state/county should offer you a degree path at a state/county college. That is an investment in all the people in the state/county, since its during college that people typically travel to where they'll start careers, which mostly serve the other people in the local area. The more and better the local college grads, the better life gets in the area, offering more productive workers and associates, and more complete people, with which the rest of the locals can make money and live their lives.
If we can't fund education by taxing the businesses making money from educated people, and by taxing the people who opt to pay for private education instead, and by collecting taxes and fees from the many proceeds of public (and publicly subsidized private) education production like patents and research products, then we have to admit that our kind of capitalism is totally unsustainable, a fraud, and just a scam. Before it's too late to do anything about it.
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I work for Cal Poly SLO as a systems administrator, and we just had our sort of back to school pow wow where they were talking about increasing out of state enrollment. This has been happening for awhile now at cal poly, because the state isn't giving the schools the money they need. It has come out this year that the state now provides less than 50% of our funding (around 45ish IIRC), 10 to 15ish years ago that number was more like 90%.
Look at this graph of CSU funding (has enrollment too), the CSU is now funded with less money than it was in 1999! (and I'm pretty sure those numbers ARE NOT adjusted for in inflation.
It's gotten to the point that office trash now only gets emptied once a month (so basically you have to do it). Of course the buildings where administration is are cleaned every night. It's pretty sad really and I hope that they continue to increase out of state enrollment to try and offset this.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
Nobody's forcing you to go to college, or to study IT while you're there.
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No, the cost of education is increasing.
If it were just the withdrawal of state funding (which is true) then state schools tuition would be rising faster then private schools. Which is not true.
Fun with numbers! Education inflation numbers, broken down by public, private, teacher pay, buildings, etc.
http://www.commonfund.org/CommonfundInstitute/HEPI/Pages/default.aspx
I think there are 3 reasons:
Productivity: Productive of professors have been rising slower than the average employee. The same professor teaches about the same number of students as they did 20 or even 100 years ago.
Research: Professors & Universities are judged by the original research that they do – teaching at most are secondary. Undergraduates tend to subsides this research – at least indirectly. They get grad students instead of professors for teachers. I think research is very important – I just dislike the ungrads subsides it.
Worth: The value of a college degree has gone up. One used to have a lot of good paying carrers open to you if one did not have a college degree. Today, less so. Why subsides something that people are willing to go deeply into debt when budgets are tight? (I know the answer, alas the public and politicians do not. California, which once had the best state university system, now spends more on prisons. Sigh.)
No, unless you're talking about the Ivy League old boys clubs, which is a completely different problem, it's not true. The main thing you pay for with an Ivy League education is connections to people that are connected, the education they provide isn't necessarily any better than high quality state schools.
The other aspect is that state schools are more prevalent out west than they are back east and there's a tendency to over value things that are respected on the East Coast regardless of what you're actually gettin.
For example, the University of Texas at Austin's state funding comes from the Available University Fund, a contribution from the Permanent University Fund, largely derived through land usage income (oil, minerals, etc.). This is about $158 million out of the University’s total budget of $2.26 billion — about 7 percent. So, you could say its president's income (around $750K salary, plus benefits) is only 7% indebted to the state.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Most IT workers should go to tech / trade schools and apprenticeships.
And not forcing them to go 4 year (that trun out to be longer then 4 due to the high number of needed credits in the past you needed less)
It's worse than that. They graduate after 4 or 5 years without the right skill set and can't get a job, so they then apply for a Masters program and get even more education that's not useful to their career plan.
In Sweden all university and college education is free of charge for the students, payed by taxes. No tuition, no fees. You also get a combination of benefits and cheap loans so you can study full-time instead of having to work to cover living expenses. If you want to get in at a popular school you still need good grades or test results, of course.
It seems to work pretty well.
I had to drop out of my State University because all of my required classes were full. They focused more on enrolling more students than meeting the needs of their current ones, they have a parking and housing shortage in addition to having to compete for basic freshmen level classes.
A couple of things to say about this...
Those schools are still reputable, whether or not you like how they obtained that status. And they do seem to produce a lot of research, though that isn't necessarily indicative of a being a good place to be educated.
Also, I suppose we're talking about undergrad education. Having gone to a well-known place in Britain, I've concluded that education is more or less the same, regardless of where you go. Any Engineering course for example will still have more or less the same content. It's really only the kids that are different.
I thought in-state students paid less because the state paid the difference? Why should the school not make the same total amount from each student?
I fear the rich will have to rediscover the situation they were in with a massive uneducated population before they stop this downward spiral.
The rich are by and large begging for higher taxes and higher government expenditures. It's the poor simpletons that are railing against the $40k/yr of services they receive. Outside professional pundits and the politicians you will find practically no one making over $379k/yr after deductions complaining about a marginal tax rate on income above that mark increasing from 35% to 39%, it's poor people making $140k/yr that in practical terms pay no income tax that have their panties in a bunch.
your state university doesnt want undergraduates, because it doesnt fulfill their mandate of top 25 institutions in america.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Most IT workers should go to tech / trade schools and apprenticeships.
I agree with this, but for completely different reasons. The problem with the current system is not that IT workers are learning too much, it is that they are receiving bachelor's degrees without learning enough. If people just want job training, they should do what you just said: go to a trade school or establish apprenticeships. The point of higher education is education, not to train people for particular careers.
Some people have used the term "credentialism" to refer to the current view of higher education. For decades, we have been treating 4 year degrees as some sort of certification that a person has received training for a job, and high school students are being told that they must go to college or else they will never be able to get a "good job." The result is that large numbers of college students seek the path of least resistance, and they select courses that require the least work, avoid professors who demand excellence from their students, and cheat when they are confronted with tough problems.
It is not at all wrong to expect that someone who completed a CS curriculum should be able to state the P vs. NP problem -- yet the majority cannot. The standards have fallen to the point where most CS majors are only expected to understand a single programming paradigm, and they are not even expected to understand the theory behind that paradigm (how many CS grads can state Liskov's principle, or are even familiar with the term?). If someone wants to work in IT, and does not really care about the theory of computation or algorithms or programming languages, then what are they doing in a CS program?
Not that we are likely to see any change. When I was an undergrad, I confronted the program chair in my school's CS department about what I felt were lax standards, and I was told that (1) I was underestimating the difficulty of computer science because of my own talent and (2) if the department raised its standards, they would only have half a dozen students in their graduating class. That is the view that schools take: students who want a challenging curriculum and who are actually passionate about their major are outliers, and demanding too much out of the mainstream of the student body will cause them to flee, and thus the school will lose those tuition dollars.
Palm trees and 8
As another poster notes, what the problem is not is salaries for teaching staff. Most teaching staff is overloaded and paid peanuts. The big money goes to the upper-level administrators. Typical...
But the real problem is simple the staff ratio. The typical university now has around a 5-to-1 ratio: for every member of teaching staff, there are five other people running around increasing overhead. Lots of this is due - directly or indirectly - to federal mandates:
In a nutshell: close the federal department of education, get rid of federal involvement in student loans, and let the free market work. After a brief period of bloodletting, as the fat is slashed away, tuition costs will plummet.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
What bugged me about my college was the double standard when it came to grades. Professors did everything they could to keep the international students around because they brought in money. Their favorite tactic was basing most of the grade on group projects. They'd choose the groups so that you had at least one local student in each group and then ignore the complaints about how most of the international students didn't do much of anything. My senior year I got stuck in a group with a couple of international grad students and they had the gall to tell me, in front of the professor, that they didn't have time to work on the group project because they had another class to work on, and the professor still passed them.
From TFA "Recruiting more "full-pay" students -- those who don't need financial aid -- is seen as a key goal in public higher education"
This, coupled with increasing tuition rates (Almost every year in California they have increased the tuition here, the recent plan was going to be a 16% increase every year for the next few years) and with so many people still out of work due to the economy means that we have a feedback loop where increasingly only the rich will get education for their families.
Class *pun intended* warfare much?
A good thing too, as the offerings have no applicability to the real world job requirements or skill sets needed which makes them just a money pit.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Capitalism doesn't have much to do with this, because capitalism is tainted where government goes beyond simply enforcing contract law and protecting against coercion. Capitalism, after all, is defined by the lack of government interference in the market, not the presence of it. Any government-funded school, therefore, cannot possibly be an honest example of "capitalism in action". The level of capitalism is inversely proportional to the level of government interference, and in the case of state universities, the level of government interference is quite high.
Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is besides the point; the bottom line is that capitalism cannot logically take the blame where government holds a large presence.
How about the indefensible act of most private universities to suspend "need-blind admissions?" Suddenly, it's not about your academic record or intellectual ability, it's about how much cash your parents have. And for what? 4 years at day-care? Education is rotten to the core these days.
It's always confirmation bias!
These are state sponsored institutions, i.e. they receive a good share of tax money from your local gov.
You are so full of shit I don't even know where to begin. They are state controlled by meddling legislatures (and so the politicians can get up and say that "we have a University" and also to use them as foil for re-election) that refuse to fund them.
Are you ignorant or just stupid?
What makes you say that? As someone who dropped out of college (where I took only a couple of IT classes; one for easy grades and the other to learn 3D graphics from a pioneer) and created my own very successful IT career, I've found most IT grads with just a little simultaneous IT experience to be much better hires than people with no schooling but plenty of (some quality of) experience. FWIW most people have no skill sets or other job requirements, often after years of working. In any field.
In other words there are notable exceptions, but generally people who study IT in college and pursue a career benefit well from the time and money spent, including compared to the alternative of on the job training.
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since they decided to grant in-state tuition to illegal aliens.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/06/news/sc-dc-0607-court-tuition-20110607
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Now being used to educate foreign students.
while actively dropping us.
Now my education is being given to others.
I just now this second joined the tea party.
You don't need a college degree to get a job, although we as a society have done a very good job of convincing young people otherwise.
The odds say otherwise if you want one with decent pay. It is and always will be possible to do well without a college degree but the simple fact is that there is copious data to support that, on average, having a college degree will result in significantly higher pay. Many/most professional jobs these days won't even give you an interview unless you have a degree. We can debate whether that is a good thing or not (probably not) but those are the facts.
You are proposing a road to hell.
Sure, a lot of the IT workers can get by with minimal amount of education. The problem is that without a good education you are guaranteed to stay at the bottom with no future. Sure, it works for electricians and plumbers. Go ahead and outsource a plumber or electrician. Oh, you can't. You need them locally. Oh, they also have a "nuclear option" through unions. Oh, they are licensed professions with barriers to entry,limits and quotas.
This will not work for IT as it is and companies will fight to the end to prevent IT going licensed profession like electricians, plumbers, carpenters, doctors, lawyers etc. If you are at the bottom, you are expendable, easily replaceable with somebody from the third world slum who will work for food.
I am not saying that what colleges are doing is right. Far from it, they are doing a very poor job of educating students while asking tons of money.
The problem is that most of the companies are controlled by idiot CEOs who think that creating quality products is not important. People are happily buying the cheap crap. You don't need the top notch people to create crap.
I think this is slightly off topic, but anyhow.
Most evaluation systems (admissions, peer review, employee reviews, etc.) are actually quite good at weeding out the truly bad and identifying and highly rating the truly good. (Putting aside corruption, of course.) This is simple natural selection. Schools, publications, and employers want the best, because that gets them better results, better reputation, and better revenue.
It's only the marginal people who find themselves "unfairly" rated. And indeed, in a perfect system, with a rating oracle, people would be ordered properly, and schools would let in the best N students that they have room for. But this is impossible, so when it comes to marginal people (and a quota for admissions or articles, etc.), we have to GUESS about how relatively mediocre these people are. Mind you the bar can be very high. If you only accept the top 10%, then you're going to reject a hell of a lot of really good students. But in any case, your instutition (or journal or whatever) is going to get really good students. Without some serious cheating and hacking or a case of mistaken identity, it's impossible for a terrible student to get mistakenly identified as a spectacular one. The randomness occurs around the cutoff line. Even when things like affirmative action get involved, mostly all it does is reshuffle people around the mediocre line. A terrible white student is never going to be accepted over a fantastic black student, unless your school is flagrantly racist or has some stupid legacy program that can override other concerns.
So what about those mediocre people? No one should argue that college acceptance should be based on some criteria other than merit. Merit has to be demonstrated based on things like past academic achievement, important extra curriculars, etc. If you have not demonstrated those things well enough, then that is your problem. If a low-income student had to work a job in highschool, and that affected his grades, then that IS unfair. Shit happens, but there should be means to account for this. But in the general case, students do marginally because they didn't work very hard. It's the rare individual who can do well WITHOUT working hard. In any case, those who did do very very well, are the ones we want to accept into jobs and universities. Those who were unable or unwiling to demonstrate their abilities provide evaluators with no means to evaluate them. And as there is no magical source of other information, there's nothing we can do about it.
And yet, if you ever want to advance to a D or C level position, you need a master's degree.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
A "good share" being about 5 to 10% of their total required funding, sometimes as high as a giddy 15%.
The reason they are having to look for students that can pay more is because the state funding has been drastically reduced over the past decade or more.
You want those students to come, do well, be entrepreneurs, and lift your state out of the dirt.
American isolationism will destroy it. ARRRRRR YOU ARENT ONE OF US DONT COME HERE
Now people from the next state or town over are "illegal immigants"
Arrrr dey took r jebs.
Education has been under attack in the United States for a long time now, and that includes higher education. People simply do not place much value on an education, and the general sentiment is that college exists to train people for a job. Thus we have seen college programs with less practical value slowly die off, curricula have become less rigorous and more "practicality" oriented, and students are not complaining about receiving a sub-par education. Nobody wants their tax dollars to pay for some other person's job training.
If Americans thought that there was value in having a well-educated population, free education for all might be possible.
Palm trees and 8
I hope we've convinced young people that education opens your eyes to new possibilities. College is more about widening your experiences and depth of knowledge. It's not going to benefit every single person. But it will improve a significant portion of those who graduate.
In other words, think of it from the community's point of view, rather than the single student. One lone student may or may not see the benefits of college, but the entire community is pretty much guaranteed to see benefits if a significant amount of it's population is educated.
The ratio of administrators to teachers has skyrocketed, so you pay for a lot of people who don't teach. And don't get me started on all the money thrown at PC issues at colleges.
Seeking higher paying students is exactly what capitalists would do.
This is about state employee pensions, which can be exceptionally generous, especially within the education systems.
But federal employee unions have little bargaining power, while state ones are often very powerful. What Walker wanted to reduce the benefits to for his state employees is still much better than what federal employees get.
Try again. I am a second generation Chinese-American.
New Economic Perspectives
... but in the one I support (I'm a DOD contractor) degrees from places like Strayer, UOP, etc; are regarded as pretty much worthless.
Germany, for example. University is free, but only the good students get in, the ones who are more likely to make a degree worth it. Everybody else goes vocational school, which can actually be quite good and technical and set you up with a good-paying trade.
Free here would mean every idiot going, wasting our resources. As it is a LOT of students aren't prepared for college when they get there, so they simply shouldn't be there. A guy I knew was studying number lines! Yes, number lines, in college math. I learned that in, what, fourth grade?
His college had MATH 100 (the number lines course), 101 and 107, and none of the content of any of them was beyond my high school's non-AP math courses.
And their language as part of the "Indo-European" language family.
Seriously stop with this bull shit already. All these Asian Niggers do is come in with a bloated fake resume, kissing a$$ with their boss, scratch their feet on the job a majority of the time, and show up to work just to get the check. At night they will think about which white girl to pick up and fuck. They are a waste of resources that could go to domestic students who want to go to grad school. EXPEL THEM ALREADY!
Twitter: @dainsanefh
I know at least in my state, the University of MN was founded as a land grant university - a publicly-funded institution dedicated to the dissemination and advancement of scientific knowledge (primarily agriculture at the time) to its citizens.
This usually meant the granting of land and occasionally buildings to the school, as well as public funding and tax exemptions.
If the STATE schools want to educate foreign and out-of-state students preferentially, that's fine. Let's pull their land-grant status, stop all public funding, hell, let's let them pay property taxes too.
-Styopa
The higher education bubble has almost run out of steam. And, oh yes, it is a bubble.
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/college-tuition-cpi-vs-us-home-prices-vs-cpi-1978-2010
I'm not sure where all the money is going, but my guess would be student amenities, building programs, and excessive administration.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I'm saying we can't just do free in the US carte blanch. We have to be selective in order to maximize resources.
Ill-prepared idiots going to college is fine with me as long as they're paying their own money and they're not slowing down my class.
Their pay ranges from $77K for a humanities assistant prof to $366K for a med school full professor. A science/engineering fill prof earns $180K on average. Some double their salaries consulting up to 20% of their time. elite schools pay more. Institutions in S.F./Silicon Valley pay more.
...so how is this relevant?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
As noted, the university president's salary has no relation to pensions of the rank and file. Secondly, the "state pension" that university employees receive isn't funded by taxpayers, it's funded by the university, which gets only 5-15% of it's budget from the state.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No. Also. The employees making $20,000/y should be taxed, "even if it is only $1", and the president should get an additional tax cut, "because he creates jobs".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It does matter - and you touch on it in your first point. But it is not just underpaying part time faculty. It’s about finding good teachers. The cost of teachers have increased.
For an example, take an accountant who is trying to decide if they should go into teaching.
For top line accountants, productive has risen massively in the past 30 years. Thank you computers! Where once one needed 4 accountants – you only need 1. As a result, salaries for those in public practice have doubled or tripled. This can be temping.
Universities can offer other perks then pay – tenure, light teaching load, not having to work 100 hours during tax season, etc. But they offered those same perks 30 years ago – so they have to bump up the salary.
And we can generalize. Other industries have been able to leverage the brain power of their employers, become more productive, and offer higher pay. I know it does not feel it, but wage levels have increased over the past 20 years.
The solution can’t be solely to double the number of teachers. It’s a supply / demand problem. Qualified teachers tend to be bright intelligent people – who can and will be pouched by the private sector. There are 2 solutions. First, increase productive (More students per teacher? Khan’s Academy? I don’t know). Or, increase pay to get a sufficient number of teachers.
Productivity matters. It is what drives real wages in the long run. And because wages are a high proportion of a college degree (or at least higher than most industries), and the underlying real wage of the workers have increased, the cost of college education has increased faster than inflation.
After that, you're a state resident so you pay the in-state rate. All this hooplah for 1 years' tuition. Meh.
It does matter - and you touch on it in your first point. But it is not just underpaying part time faculty. It’s about finding good teachers. The cost of teachers have increased.
For an example, take an accountant who is trying to decide if they should go into teaching.
For top line accountants, productive has risen massively in the past 30 years. Thank you computers! Where once one needed 4 accountants – you only need 1. As a result, salaries for those in public practice have doubled or tripled. This can be temping.
Universities can offer other perks then pay – tenure, light teaching load, not having to work 100 hours during tax season, etc. But they offered those same perks 30 years ago – so they have to bump up the salary.
And we can generalize. Other industries have been able to leverage the brain power of their employers, become more productive, and offer higher pay. I know it does not feel it, but wage levels have increased over the past 20 years.
The solution can’t be solely to double the number of teachers. It’s a supply / demand problem. Qualified teachers tend to be bright intelligent people – who can and will be pouched by the private sector. There are 2 solutions. First, increase productive (More students per teacher? Khan’s Academy? I don’t know). Accounting wages have increased by a factor of 3, prodcutive has increased by a factor of 4, so oeverall cost goes down. Not happening in education. Or, increase pay to get a sufficient number of teachers.
Productivity matters. It is what drives real wages in the long run. And because wages are a high proportion of a college degree (or at least higher than most industries), and the underlying real wage of the workers have increased, the cost of college education has increased faster than inflation.
They make scotch tape on a continues machine. It just keep coming and coming – then it’s rolled onto the tub, sliced (but only because they want it to be manageable – they could keep on going) and cut (one industrial roll equals scores of scores of retail rolls.)
Why would one assume that is everyone's goal? I have no desire to move to those levels I prefer technical work make more than enough money where I am at most of those d/c are nothing but yes men to some equally incompetent person the next level up so proof to me that a degree means absolutely nothing as even idiots can have 10 degrees.
I actually work for a company where one of our C level execs was found to be lying about her degree, she was promoted.
This has been an issue at American universities for some time.
Foreign nationals have been generally given favor because of that status alone but also because they generally fall into a given "minority" status (the only "non-minority" is a white male or Euro-American, and there are funds setup by their governments or through agreements with Uncle Spam or through various groups that support them here so they can afford more access to the best universities.
The different colleges and universities take advantage of all of that financial aid and raise credit fees driving out those who do not have access to the dole.
You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support. Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.
Thirty-three states exclude food from sales tax, and only nine tax it at the same rate as things people don't need to survive.
Now if you live in one of those eight states, like Oklahoma or Mississippi, I agree you've got a legitimate grievance with the way your state is being run.
State gives university a chunk of money and says "go forth and educate". They don't pay by the student, at least not at my university.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If you're a non-resident attending a state university, you can't get resident tuition after a year. Take a year off and stay in state and you could be eligible, although there have been instances of universities attempting to deny the discount because the person deliberately moved there for reduced tuition.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You state legislature forces your state university to charge low tuition but isn't willing to make up the difference out of tax revenue.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Electorates in almost every state have put people in office who have been hacking away at state university budgets. They are saying loudly and clearly, "We do not want to support the public university system. It is a bad use of our dollars." So, what do the universities do? They see that the support from the state is dropping precipitously, so they look for ways to stay solvent.
If you are complaining about this, maybe you are the problem. Americans have asked for their state governments to be slashed. That isn't free. Now state services will be slashed too. The 20 kilobuck annual in-state tuition will be a reality by the end of the decade. No one seems to care about that. So grow up and live with your choices.
You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support. Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.
I was too lazy to do the exact math, but you got me interested. Since yearly revenue and operating budgets are publicly available for my school (as well as tuition), I was able to figure out the exact change:
First, the 2011 operating budget for my university is 8.1% higher than in 2001, adjusted for inflation, so there hasn't been this huge "administrative bloat," at least in the last 10 years. Next, as a percentage, state funding decreased from 33.6% in the 2001 budget to 14.3% for 2011. Conversely, tuition composed 24.8% of the budget in 2001 but in 2011, this increased to 38.1%. Lastly, undergraduate tuition, including room and board, increased by 55% from 2001 to 2011, also adjusted for inflation.
It appears for my school at least that the roles of tuition and state funding have more or less flip-flopped, with tuition being relied upon more than ever today. Indeed, the increase in tuition basically accounts for the decrease in state funding.
The whole point of state universities is to put your HR bimbo's favourite football team at the top of your resume so that she doesn't have to read any qualifications or make a critical decision. If they stop taking all the local lugs, how will anyone ever get hired?
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In state is booming.
Because, if people like your wife could get assistance, you'd have had to pay even more taxes for education.
First off, the submitter claimed 16000 nonresidents were enrolled, when the actual number (as linked) is actually around 12000. Second, most grad school students probably do not go to local schools, and this is by design. Graduate students coming from diverse experiences to study with professors whose interests align with their own are what drive a lot of progress. When you realize that 11000 of OSU's students are graduate students, 12000 out-of-state students suddenly stops seeming like a huge number, and starts to look like a healthy attempt at removing homogenization
To think that the state somehow operates outside of capitalism is ludicrous. Capitalism has been the pervailing socioeconomic model in the world for the last several centuries, and governments are just as much a part of it as businesses. Even the Soviet Union acknowledged that it was capitalist; Lenin himself was advocating a move towards "state capitalism" as early as 1901, saying it would be a huge step forward for Russia.
Perry is a card-carrying creation scientist. Your argument is invalid.
As a small business man, who has a lot of responsibility and passes many many hours in building and servicing customers, I know what overpaid means.
It means no risk, good benefit packages, and a lot of social contacts. The IQ of this school administrator is not signifacantly higher or better than the average, but the skills to get consensus are trivially better.
I don't see that the administrators salary should be more than 20x the average of the staff. He has no shares, there are no dividends, and his investment is time, not capital.
So Americans, wake up, you need to curtail high expense public or semipublic management. Time to begin looking at cost benefits and begin asking for more benefits and certainly reduced cost.
Convert all state universities into Training-cum-Placement agencies.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Wondering US Visa/Outsourcing are not linked to Caste system in India and Human Rights in China?
I am a teacher drone at a "state-funded" university. The idea that state tax money does dog sh*t for us is ludicrous. The fed's provide a small piece of grant money for US students, a few hundred a year at most. The state's usually match that. What else is on the chart: well most state universities get about 2-4% of their operating budgets covered by the state. That is the money you are talking about when you talk about pensions and benefits. The rest of the money (and I mean for the balance of the operating budget AND the cost of instruction and research and capital investments, upgrades, improvements that keep us current, all that, comes from the money that the university EARNS with tuitions and research contracts.
So explain to me why a state school should be jumping with joy about being required to provide tuition, room and board to in-state students at cost or loss just to get a tiny fraction of the operating budget. Makes more sense to tell the states to suck off and charge everyone the same, which might lower cost for the out of state and international students that are paying extra to subsidize the instate students.
If you want to see where this stupidity leads just look at England. They are franchising out their universities around the world to get the income needed to provide services for English students who get heavily subsidized education.
the state and the feds do so little for universities it would be easier of they just went away and left us alone
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
This could be a good thing. Less money going out on federal aid also means less money from the taxpayers.
One problem I have not seen mentioned here is that the number and percentage of male high school graduates even applying much less graudating from college is dropping like a rock. But it takes an average of 14 years to break even on a college degree and you have to pay off your student loans much earlier and before you start making any money from your degree. I live across the street from a state university and this is serious both for the universities and for the future of families. Does anybody wonder why so many of our doctors are coming from third-world countries like Pakistan. 23% of juniors at the state university here recently failed the easy Junior Level Essay Exam, among much other evidence that the public schools are still turning out bright students who are functionally illiterate and can't balance a checkbook. When the U. S. is 23rd in English proficiency at that point in education, what do you expect? Students whose parents could pay full price and make nice donations to the college have always had an easier time getting in than those of us who had to win scholarships. But this seems to be getting worse, especially as the non-dischargable debt burden to get through college and professional school has spiraled into numbers that even many lawyers, etc., will never be able to pay off much less pay on schedule. Most college grads' salaries, in real, constant-dollar terms, have been stagnant or falling since about 1973. Public junior colleges start from vacant fields, 30-40 miles from public universities. with a plant investment that exceeds what my highly rated private alma mater founded in 1787 lists as its total endowment and assets. The rate of more and more luxurious building replacement here, and new building at another similar state university where I used to live in Pennsylvania, are staggering. Administrative costs are way higher than in my day. Salaries are up but not that high except for the political positions, including CEO, fund-raisers, and athletics.