Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yep. This is Capitalism, where workers are forced to accept the same wages for over a decade while costs for everything continue to rise.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Well, the answer to "Why shouldn't they be?" is because they are supported by the state they reside in under the premise they will support the local populace first. Essentially they are getting the benefits of being a state school while shirking the inherent responsibilities that come with that.
Education is a future benefit. Food is a current benefit. Some people are having to make that kind of choice now.
It's amazing, you make it easy for people to get money to pay for some specific thing and the price of that thing skyrockets for no apparent reason.
It's not like this has happened with other things, say handing out home loans like candy causing house prices to shoot up.
And the additional money goes to the administators, after all they are the ones who are clearly doing all the work to increase the institution's revenue. And of course to those stadiums you mentioned, since that helps the administrators perform better at the dick measuring conferences.
My state university has all these beautiful new buildings that are half empty because they can't afford the faculty to put into them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
If you don't have enough money for food, you aren't going to pay taxes. You qualify for full tax exemption (my full time working mother-in-law is in this exact situation). So no, no one has to make that choice right now.
That's because it's easy to raise private funds for buildings, but it's much harder to raise private funds for faculty salary.
You are dead on right. In Texas, the legislature has been eating away at state support for higher education after eliminating caps on state university tuition. The legislature said with a straight face that this would not increase tuition, but it doubled over the last decade. The Texas GOP views higher education as "liberal brainwashing", so I expect the GOP controlled government to continue down this path.
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.
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. I make a very decent salary for a 30-something with only partial-college education. what I have that makes me worthwhile to employers is half a decade of professional experience, and nearly two decades of non-professional experience, in my field of choice, as well as experience dealing with the type of people (Both clients and colleagues) that I am likely to interact with. It is only something that I found out in retrospect though. I don't know that I could blindly walk in to "Screw it, I'm not going to college, I'll be fine" without so much experience seeing that it actually is fine.
You can still get ahead in the world on the strength of experience, you just have to start lower and prove yourself more often. I'm probably about 5 years behind where I could have been if I'd graduated with a degree in IT (which, to be fair, they didn't even offer when I was in college), but I'm also running without the debt as well. I'm not sure which is a greater hindrance on you long term. I'd be interested to see a study on how today's student debt affects people long term. The last one I read on the subject said that once accounting for debt levels, delayed entry into the workforce, etc, a college education was only worth something like an extra $100,000 to $400,000 over the course of a lifetime, depending on the profession (obviously something like doctor is right out). I don't remember how old those figures were though. If tuition keeps going up much faster than inflation and salaries, it's going to cross over the other way at some point.
So, if you want to get into the business world without a college degree, it can be done.. but what it really requires is a plan. you have to know where you're starting out, and where you plan to go from there... which almost no 18 year old has. I didn't. Hell that's half the reason a lot of people go to college in the first place, to learn who the hell they are and what they want to do with their life. College is a much easier choice, and if I did it all again I probably would still choose to go, and maybe even to graduate this time, but not because you outright -need- to... just because it's easier.
You are dead on right. In Texas, the legislature has been eating away at state support for higher education after eliminating caps on state university tuition. The legislature said with a straight face that this would not increase tuition, but it doubled over the last decade. The Texas GOP views higher education as "liberal brainwashing", so I expect the GOP controlled government to continue down this path.
In Texas, all the education you need you get on Sunday morning in the pew.
Erm, while it seems like 'research-only professors wasting money' would be a good thing to pin the issue on, in actual fact, those sort of positions have been massively reduced over the past few decades.
You can argue they're a waste of money, but they're clearly not the cause of the current problem.
And it's worth pointing out that they usually aren't a waste on money, as they tend to operate off grants (Which the college does not pay) and the only expense they have is their own paycheck and lab space, and in return they tend to get all sorts of expensive equipment like centrifuges and refrigerators and lasers and whatnot...that the university gets to keep.
He's a guy making the equivalent of ten student's tuition. If he can bring in ten students via his name, and get them another five students-cost worth of equipment, he's earned his keep. The college doesn't actually pay for the research he's doing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I saw plenty of professors who wore their politics on their sleeves.
The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint. They are willing to DEBATE you on it and give you equal time. They are willing to concede that you have good points and acknowledge them, they are willing to moderate their own positions and take your points on board when you bring up something they hadn't previously considered or that is argued well. I turned in several papers that argued completely contrary to the views I knew the professor held, and STILL got high grades because I argued my points well.
The "conservative" professors, meanwhile, were generally hidebound dogmatic fools who were only interested in "showing up" their colleagues, indoctrinating minds into seig-heil follower mentality, and if you didn't just spew back the hate and bile they passed out in classroom, you wouldn't get a passing grade. I watched three of these assholes tear into some of my classmates after they "found out" that the classmates were officers in the university Gay-Straight Student Alliance.
So... in all due respect, FUCK them. I've seen the true colors of the "Republicans." No thank you.
If the topics were taught objectively you might have a point. But they arent. America, capitalism and democracy are often painted as the roots of all evil, while praise is sung of socialism, communism, and violent revolutionaries like Mao, or Che, or Stalin.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
It's not that education draws more liberals so much that education turns off conservatives—not in principle, but in practice. As far as I can tell, the conservative movement in the U.S. (in the bastardized incarnation that is the Republican party) largely consists of two groups of people: people who are fiscally conservative, and people who are socially conservative.
Socially conservative people have two choices: attend a socially conservative school (mostly religious schools) or attend a public school.
If they attend a public school, they tend to become less socially conservative. The very nature of a melting pot institution of higher learning inherently increases tolerance because it exposes you to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. Being in an environment where you encounter people who are different from you makes it harder to dehumanize people who disagree with you. This has nothing to do with the teachers or the institution, and everything to do with the fact that it is a microcosm of the world rather than a homogeneous group.
If they attend a homogeneous private school, their conservative ideologies may be reinforced (depending on the university), in which case they will continue to see public education as a hotbed of liberalism, and if they decide to become teachers, they will generally choose to teach at similarly homogeneous schools.
Thus, socially conservative people tend to either learn tolerance or segregate themselves, which is why you rarely see social conservatives teaching in public higher education.
The other big group in the Republican party are the fiscally conservative. These people presumably have at least a passing understanding of economics (at least enough to know that you don't spend every penny you have coming in), which means that they won't put up with a job that pays them peanuts, working long hours to teach a bunch of kids who don't really want to be there. And the "new conservatives"—the folks who are fiscally conservative because they became rich and now want to keep that money rather than supporting the social programs that helped them get there—have an attitude that doesn't exactly match up with a desire to help others by teaching. You won't see any of those sorts of people in higher education, private or otherwise.
So it's really no surprise that there are few conservatives (of either type) in public education. Want more conservatives in public education? Tell your conservative bureaucrats to triple higher ed salaries so that they can compete with private enterprise and private homogeneous schools. Until you do that, conservative views cannot possibly balance out the liberal voices in higher ed, precisely because the liberals—those who care more about others than their own well being— are the only ones who will take the job... that and people who aren't smart enough to get a job doing something else... and some people who are both....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to deal with in a class on differential equations. Teach me math and shut up about the other professors' socialist tendencies and the evil red scare. Also stop babbling about evil capitalism and how we need socialized healthcare.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Well, buildings can be named after benefactors whereas the faculty members inconveniently have already been named by their parents.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
In "Liberal" CA, state funding has dropped from 90%ish to less than 50% in less than 20 years (at least here at cal poly). So it's not just texas.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction