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?"

Comments

I don't think my state university wants ANYONE

[elrous0]

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.

Re:I don't think my state university wants ANYONE

[claus.wilke]

It is important to mention that throughout the US, tuition has gone up at least partially in a response to declining state funding. If states are not willing to fund their state schools, then the state schools have little option other than operating just like the private schools.

Alright!

[AngryDeuce]

Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!

Re:Alright!

[houstonbofh]

Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!

This comment for the most customer unfocused industry in the country? The whole point was that the gaming the government funding, which is not capitalism. More pure capitalism would actually fix a lot of the problems state schools are having. Of course it would create a lot more... (University of Phoenix anyone?)

Conflating facts

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As a university professor:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:As a university professor:

[houstonbofh]

Education is a future benefit. Food is a current benefit. Some people are having to make that kind of choice now.

Re:Capitalism - make your own

[Antisyzygy]

Yep. This is Capitalism, where workers are forced to accept the same wages for over a decade while costs for everything continue to rise.

Someone has to pay for all those managers...

[G-Man]

"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

Costs of education?

[Gr8Apes]

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)

Re:Costs of education?

[afidel]

Largely for state schools it's coming from reduced income from the states general budget. Somewhere along the line we bought into both "everyone needs a college degree" and "government shouldn't do anything" and so we have an entire generation that is going to be saddled by mountains of debt just to be able to get a job. It's kind of the company store all over but at a macro level instead of just in small towns.

Re:Costs of education?

[nedlohs]

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.

Re:Costs of education?

[sandytaru]

My state university has all these beautiful new buildings that are half empty because they can't afford the faculty to put into them.

Re:Costs of education?

[claus.wilke]

That's because it's easy to raise private funds for buildings, but it's much harder to raise private funds for faculty salary.

Re:Costs of education?

[Sponge Bath]

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.

Re:Costs of education?

[DavidTC]

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.

Re:Costs of education?

[Moryath]

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.

Re:Costs of education?

[dgatwood]

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....

Re:Costs of education?

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:Costs of education?

[kidcharles]

Well, buildings can be named after benefactors whereas the faculty members inconveniently have already been named by their parents.

Re:Capitalism - make your own

[Antisyzygy]

You can't just start a business without capital. Right-wingers always assume people have the ability to gather savings when they are under-paid and/or under-employed, then start businesses in fields with such large capital requirements that it would be impossible. Just try to start a cellular provider, or internet provider, or restaurant, etc. You pretty much have to find a rich person to finance you, and that is also not as easy as Right-wingers always assume it is. Simply put, the middle class has been eroded and pressured so badly there are not many capable of doing this. If you look at the number of "entrepreneurs" attempting to start businesses over the last 30 years it has been a steady decline mostly due to people not being able to survive let alone save anything on the wages they make. We live in a capitalist society with less-and-less markets capable of being exploited due to massive corporations, off-shoring, and the money supply being concentrated into only a few hands. Then, if you want a good job, you need a good education and thus are slapped with crippling debt for the rest of your life. How can you start a business when all your savings go to paying off interest?

Re:Quit Blaming Capitalism

[betterunixthanunix]

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."

MOD Parent up, please Re:Conflating facts

[jdgeorge]

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.