Not only is the high price considered a positive as per your link, but Veblen specifically used university culture to explain his concept of conspicuous consumption. So much of university professor culture has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with appearing high class, but without the money. Robes, fancy eating spots, stone everywhere ... it's all about appearing upper class.
Wait, most universities don't offer summer classes? Where I went to school there were fewer students enrolled over the summer, but that just meant campus was a bit less crowded, not that it was a ghost town.
My uni offers summer classes, but mostly for intro classes. This means if you transfer in or are a second year student, you have slim pickings in the summer offering.
I would have gladly attended 90% of my classes in the summer had they been offered to students. Especially, those mid-tier classes that are only offered in Spring or Fall. IE: intro1 (Fa, Sp, Sum1, Sum2) -> intro2 (Fa, Sp, Sum1, Sum2) -> mid-tier class (Spring only) -> opens up 10 classes.
There were summer courses for grad school. I think undergrad didn't have any summer classes. (My experience is from 15 years ago so maybe things have changed).
The summer classes are usually second-class citizens though: the material is divided up into individual classes assuming the normal-length semesters, so summer classes are always rushed.
Cutting research and enrolling more students isn't necessarily the way to go.
How about save money for both students and the university. Drop the absurdly nice housing that's going into them. This will reduce room & board fees and cut staffing, construction, & maintenance costs for the university.
Athletics: Drop athletes that aren't student athletes. I'm sorry, but illiterate players don't belong in college. It's a disservice to them, the rest of the students, and the university's reputation. Stop spending astronomical amounts on football (primarily) and other sports, even if it pays for itself it's not needed for an academic environment. Rein these in, keep athletics but cut the programs so they aren't (budget-wise) on the level of some professional teams.
>Athletics: Drop athletes that aren't student athletes. I'm sorry, but illiterate players don't belong in college. It's a disservice to them, the rest of the students, and the university's reputation. Stop spending astronomical amounts on football (primarily) and other sports, even if it pays for itself it's not needed for an academic environment. Rein these in, keep athletics but cut the programs so they aren't (budget-wise) on the level of some professional teams.
This isn't going to happen in the current environment. There is literally billions of dollars of profit at stake.
You know those games that big universities play against smaller ones? Those smaller schools get paid to participate -- typically in the millions range. Why else would they willingly walk into a high-probability loss situation?
So sure, it's not billions. But it's not necessarily a losing game for those non-top-tier teams either.
> It's a disservice to them, the rest of the students, and the university's reputation.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you but for lots of big public schools the reality is that reputation of football/basketball teams is as important (if not more) than academics, particularly WRT to alumni dontations. Those 2 in particular are also generally quite profitable for the big schools (isn't free labor great)
re: Athletics: I'm not sure I agree.
Kids that wash up out of minor league baseball (instead of attending college) end up with nothing. Kids that play college football at least have a degree from a college which is worth something.
If anything, I feel the college football players get exploited. They create a hugely disproportionate amount of value to the amount that they receive in return.
> They create a hugely disproportionate amount of value to the amount that they receive in return.
You can actually immediately see this with the constant busts of universities breaking NCAA rules on player compensation. If these athletes truly did not bring value, then there would be no reason to break these compensation rules to provide value back to them.
Plus I remember reading an article a while ago saying that universities had no incentive to cut costs due to student loans. Effectively, student loans are at least partially responsible for driving ever higher costs for tuition.
I'm very frustrated about this as I would like my (eventual) kids to go to college at my alma mater but at $40k+/per (for a public school !!!), I can't fathom that happening.
I remember reading an article a while ago saying that universities had no incentive to cut costs due to student loans.
If universities didn't have an incentive to cut costs, why the shift to adjuncts? Just to make life shitty for junior faculty? Do you really think that's plausible? Really?
(tongue only partially in cheek) They're only cutting costs in areas that potential students can't observe / don't care about, like teaching. They won't cut costs in important areas like admissions staff, gym facilities, football stadiums, and fancy architecture because students see those things on tours.
Professors are not rewarded for doing a good job at teaching. They are rewarded for paying for their own salary using government research grants. Universities have their priorities badly misplaced from what I have seen.
Who writes this kind of reality-free trash? The author talks about reducing administrative costs, but with today's universities you have no choice. You can throw an upper-middle-class kid into university and he will do just fine. But first-generation students, non-traditional students, foreign students, students on athletic scholarships &c need support services, and access has been expanded so much that these things consume a substantial part of the budget. You have no choice but to offer them. Without them a substantial part of the student body would fail out quickly.
And then the author talks about leaving campus open all year. When you ply faculty and teaching support staff at my university with sufficient alcohol they will eventually admit that Summer term is done for the extra tuition income. When you ply them with more they will also admit that soon they will add Winter classes for even more cash - not that anyone can learn anything substantial in these three weeks.
And finally the author recommends to drop research and go back to teaching. In theory that sounds good. In practice, universities have been forced to fish for grant money because state support has been scaled back. Also, in my observation, the worst teaching is done by full professors in their Fifties, who have long checked out and are not keeping up with current practice.
Maybe it's time to get rid of tenure and increase state support.
>And finally the author recommends to drop research and go back to teaching.
That struck me as pretty disingenuous too, considering how lightly he glossed over the real-world problem of "labor as a cost of doing business" mentality that has shifted teaching toward adjunct staff members. It's almost like he doesn't care those starting out in their career, who would likely become the next generation of great teachers at a reasonable price are pretty much being shoved into poverty from the get-go. No intelligent, worthwhile teacher/professor can withstand that kind of lack of support all while being fed lines about how "we have to cut costs" like the examples mentioned.
Nontraditional students add minimal administrative overhead. There are plenty of schools that are dysfunctional or pad their budget for various reasons, but done well this is really cheap.
Universities spend ungodly amounts on things like recertification, advertising, internal busywork, fundraising, government requirements etc. Abstractly this stuff adds zero value for students, but good luck telling an auditor you have better things to do with your time. And internal politics is all about how someone changes things not how this pet project actually helps students.
> Nontraditional students add minimal administrative overhead.
Do you have any evidence either way? Both sides are just claiming this as a fact. The actual numbers can decide this.
(Even if the non-trad students do cost more, there may be good reasons to spend the money. I'm not arguing either way. I just want to see these opposing claims supported).
Agreed on the research front: here in the UK research grants are so competitive that unless you have some university money to start your project before even asking for external funding, you're not likely to win the grant.
And from the accounts of my colleages, teaching loads are on the rise here though I don't know about the US.
On the admin front, I did hear about an anonymous university having a large and long meeting discussing the colour of their logo last year.
> A better approach would be to offer comparable pay and status to professors who spend most of their time teaching, reserving reduced teaching loads for professors whose research continues to have significance and impact.
I think the problem with this is that you have no idea up front which research is going to be significant and impactful and which isn't. If you knew what the outcome was going to be, it wouldn't be research, now would it?
People optimize for what you measure. If you want numbers they will pump out numbers, if you want citations they will set up citation rings etc.
The real solution is to realize research is best ignored. Don’t count it for anything in any way. And they people who stick with it will likely focus on actual important things.
Well, in keeping with Mr. Pearlstein's desire to identify things "universities should do" in a vaccuum of authority where neither of us can enact change through a dictate by fiat avenue, I'll take a crack at four even more aggressive and not-likely-to-happen scenarios, and I'm not even getting paid to write them!
1. Downsize course offerings in areas where graduates can not be reasonably expected to recoup the cost of a University education in the forseeable, full-time job market - such as journalism.
2. Perform genuine, rigorous auditing of participating in NCAA sports for cost-benefit analysis and completely shut down programs which do not recoup or actually cost money.
3. Become fiscal mentors to prospective and current students by engaging in hands-on financial counseling with respect to private loans and income earning potential.
4. Drastically reduce the number of Freshman and Sophomore students and aggressively recruit potential graduates through the Community College systems nationwide.
I mean, there are a lot of ways to save money, and while I can enjoy comfy-armchair musing as much as the next guy, sometimes articles like this one just seem so out of touch.
> Drastically reduce the number of Freshman and Sophomore students and aggressively recruit potential graduates through the Community College systems nationwide.
Doing a 2-year stint at a community college is just about one of the most sane things a person can do. At the end, you still end up with a bachelor's degree from whatever university you finish at, indistinguishable from any other graduate. And you do it typically at a fraction of the cost. Oh, and often community colleges focus on teachers with industry experience, meaning that you're not learning about software engineering from a computer science academic that's never actually been a software engineer.
Doing a 2-year stint at a community college is just about one of the most sane things a person can do.
Really? I know how introductory courses are taught at the local community college, and there's the MIT/Berkeley/whatnot lectures online. It's a difference between day and night! Of course you can watch the Youtube lecture instead of the tripe they feed you at the c.c. but you do miss out on interaction with fellow students and professors. This means missing out on a lot.
I went to community college for two years. I'm at Stanford now, previously Berkeley. I don't feel like I missed out on much by going to a CC, except debt.
Anecdotally (albeit from multiple sources), the scholastic bar for a CC transfer is lower than that of a HS to 4 year college route.
GP was likely someone who could have passed the HS to University bar without having to go the CC route to increase his or her odds.
Personally, I advise younger friends or international transfer type students to consider the CC->University track especially if they are naturally bright but didn't get the marks needed to pass the direct enrollment route.
I've known several Chinese students with very low SAT scores (because of the English sections). Your advice for international students is reasonable but possibly not necessary. Of the best three that I knew well:
- One had her heart set on attending a UC school. I particularly recommended applying to a california community college because of their low standards and strong UC admissions preference. Her SAT scores were somewhere in the 1400s (out of 2400), but she was admitted to UC Davis directly.
- One had an SAT score in the 1700s, far and away the best of her cohort. She applied (and was accepted) to University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is quite happy there.
- One had an SAT score in the 1300s (in my opinion the smartest of the three), and, in what was to me a shocking move, applied to and enrolled at a University of Alabama (I don't know which one -- USNews lists several). But she transferred from there to Georgia Tech.
Universities seem to be aware that SAT verbal scores are poorly reflective of foreign students' actual abilities, and they really like the inflated international tuition.
> GP was likely someone who could have passed the HS to University bar without having to go the CC route to increase his or her odds.
That's true. I was accepted to Berkeley, among other top schools, straight out of high school. I chose to go to community college. The point being: going to a CC did not negatively impact my personal outcome, and should not be discouraged as an option when it can benefit a driven student.
I tend to agree with verisimilidude that that's mostly driven by those students being the type of person who goes to Tumbleweed Community College, and that if you expelled everyone from Tumbleweed Community College and conscripted a bunch of students from, say, UNC Chapel Hill, they'd be fine.
In other words, while CC students are a very low-quality population, your personal outcomes are unlikely to be dramatically affected by where you choose to go. The bad outcomes of CC students reflect selection bias, not a treatment effect of the community colleges.
I did 2 years at community college [1], and it was great for me. At the community college level, calculus 3 and calculus based physics classes were small and there was a lot of instructor time. At a larger university, calculus and early physics are often large lecture classes, which can be more challenging to learn in.
Some community colleges are better than others, so if your plan is to go to community college for two years and then transfer, it's a good idea to go to one that has a high transfer rate, even better if it has curriculum alignment with the school you transfer to. I ended up doing 3 years after transfer because I also changed majors, and didn't get into the school I wanted to transfer to, but I had completed almost all of my general education credits, so I could concentrate on the major classes.
I've seen the other side of this -- I taught at West Podunk Community College for a year. Their quaity control on instructors was not great. I know, because I was 22, with a very fresh B.S. in Computer Engineering, hired to teach C++. Neither the administration nor I had fathomed the depth of my ignorance when it came to C++. (Although this was 2001 and there was an order of magnitude less to C++ than there is now. It had only just been standardized!) I did badly enough my first semester that one of the students asked for his money back. After that I realized I needed to go lighter on OO, turned things around and managed to teach a relatively sane subset of C++ in the spring and summer.
The students, on the other hand, were great. Some of them were professionals trying to learn a new skill. Others were saving money on the first two years of school. Fully a third were Chinese, trying to establish a U.S. academic record. They sat in the back and the students who understood me would translate for the ones who didn't. The translators generally did very well. At the end of the year, when I moved on to other things, I had gained a huge amount of respect for community college students.
Community colleges and the students they serve deserve more resources so they can stop hiring clueless 22-year-olds.
> 2. Perform genuine, rigorous auditing of participating in NCAA sports for cost-benefit analysis and completely shut down programs which do not recoup or actually cost money.
As far as I understand things, this would be grossly illegal -- Title IX is interpreted to require schools to devote equal budgets to men's sports and to women's sports, but women's sports can't earn any money back. You could just charge that against the men's sports, but you might end up canceling really popular sports, like basketball.
Um, I didn't say anything about distinction between Men's and Women's sports and I didn't intend to do any such thing.
I meant look at the entire participation within the NCAA. That means both Men's & Women's and if the overall analysis is that participating is barely a break-even proposition or actually loses money, then shut all of the sports expenditures down. Popularity doesn't always correspond to profitability and that should be scrutinized if discussing "saving money" in higher education.
The author is assuming that universities want to rein in the costs in the first place. Universities are a business, and just like any other business, why would they want to make as little money as possible? Their main goal is to give students an education, while also making as much money as possible.
I always wonder when somebody proclaim they have best universities, what does it actually mean? Eg. methodology in this article http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/... Basically it is all about reputation that is very subjective and if you are not good, the name will not help you or research that is nice if you want to do PhD otherwise it is not very useful for you.
I would recommend people in US to study abroad. You might learn a new language and you will receive equally good education and it will be much cheaper for you.
The issue of administrative costs (e.g. IT) growing rapidly boils down to the fact that there are no economic forces that would otherwise enable the administrators to be held accountable for their spending.
In the private sector, if you are responsible for a P&L, and "P" isn't a positive number, you'll eventually lose your job. In higher ed, there is no metric that similarly lays bare whether an administrator is effective or not. This allows spending to run rampant and weak managers to thrive, which just continues the cycle.
If anybody figures out how align spending with outcomes in this sort of environment, they deserve a nobel prize in economics.
Some of the Purdue campuses in Indiana have reduced their administrative cost by re-aligning and pairing two commuter campuses together with one administrative body..expected savings $500 to $1000 off of tuition costs per student.
The only way to do it without swimming against the economic flow is to create some new universities not encumbered by all the academic cruft that accumulates over multiple decades.
Any new business that can focus solely on the elements of what makes university education valuable in the first place, and can maintain that focus for enough time, will end up eating the old guard's lunches, turning out grad with 90% of the useful skills and 50% the advantageous social connections, at only 10% the cost. Those grads will go on to jobs that pay 75% as much, but their student loan payments will be 10% as burdensome.
College-age kids are not quite so dumb as to never realize that they could get along just as well academically, at less cost, while living in a decrepit old dorms, capsule hotels, discreetly parked converted vans, or parents' basements.
In short, existing universities can do nearly nothing to meaningfully cut their own costs. Their hands are tied by foundation requirements, tradition, alumni expectations, and countless boards and committees. Their budgets are so strictly controlled by vested interests who have built both careers and pensions on them that they can sooner fire an adjunct than to refrain from installing a bronze plaque dedicated to Someguy Alumni in the Inverted Aquatic Basketology building.
Start 100 new universities from scratch, and let 90 of them fail. Repeat until tuition falls permanently.
The biggest thing that would help rein in costs would be the elimination of all the "free money," i.e. loans, that students can get to pay those costs. If students can't pay those costs, they won't. Universities will either then reduce their costs, or go bankrupt and be replaced by institutions that will.
This could be accomplished with a couple of changes to current policy. First, remove the restriction that makes student loans nondischargeable in bankruptcy. Second, get the Federal government out of the business of providing student loans. With these changes, private institutions will only lend money for education if they have a reasonable expectation that the money will be paid back. That'll dry up the "free money" spigots.
Back in the 1960's, it was possible for a student to pay for his education by flipping pizzas at night and over the summer, without having to take out loans. That's the standard we should be shooting for.
It'll likely be part of a cross generational compromise. So due to educational debt the kids can't buy their ancestors overpriced real estate or pay SS taxes sufficient to keep SS afloat. The solution is government education loan jubilee day paired with an increase in SS taxes such that the kids end up paying as much as before, but now their balance sheet is more mortgage positive. Meanwhile the old people keep running the SS ponzi for a couple more years.
Give accreditation for MOOCs. Many are well designed (more so than community college and often regular college) and provide a far more social experience than showing up to class and not asking questions (which is the case 99% of the time).
I am a professor. This man's ideas are totally naive. Universities and colleges are engaged in a cold war to avoid gaps in endowments, buildings and other metrics of prestige. Their students are willing to pay more for this prestige and so the cost goes up. It's simple as that. If universities that decided not to heavily invest in themselves were effective at generating that prestige, the cost wouldn't be going up.
Only a fraction of the people at the university are there because it is a place of learning, and almost all the people are engaged in research. Many of this guy's ideas are worse than bad, they are poisonous.
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