Things universities should do to rein in costs
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
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.
[shrugs]
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.orangecoastcollege.edu (if it matters)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't going to happen in the current environment. There is literally billions of dollars of profit at stake.
Only for the top schools in top conferences, which is a relatively small number of universities in the US.
So sure, it's not billions. But it's not necessarily a losing game for those non-top-tier teams either.
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)
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.
[1] Related read: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/upshot/student-debt-in-ame...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
It's hard to get exact numbers in large part because collages don't want them broken down and administators are the ones releasing statistics.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/30/...
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.
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.