Public universities have “really lost our focus”
hechingerreport.org
hechingerreport.org
"If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do no come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it."
Where would we be in the computer industry is the university of California and others didn't get DARPA and other funding to do their work on Unix. Ditto Bell Labs.
A viable counter-point might be the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, AKA where senior scientists like Einstein go to live out their days in leisure without contributing anything of value.
Look at how UC Davis's Chancellor had university police pepper spray peace student protesters, while she sat on the board of Devry, King Abdulaziz University of Saudi Arabia, AND a textbook publisher--clear conflicts of interest. The chancellor then spent university funds to try and hide the search results of her actions. Then after all this, she still leaves with her pension:
>Under the settlement, Katehi will remain on administrative leave for a year as chancellor emeritus, receiving her $424,360 annual pay with the promise that she will return as a faculty member. If she should choose not to return for at least a year, she would forfeit the chancellor’s salary payment, Klein said. Her faculty pay would be decided by UC Davis campus officials.
The UCs and other public universities are run by crooks.
Much better than the likes of UMich or such.
>The rapid rise in recent years in those students at the two highly selective campuses — to about 30% of the freshmen class — triggered much controversy among legislators and families.
However, the problem is still getting worse at other UC campuses:
>UC San Diego offered freshman spots to 10,313 students from other states and countries, up from 8,765 last year; Irvine accepted 9,413 of them, up from 6,564.
>UC Irvine spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon said that there is room on campus for more students but state funding won't accommodate more Californians.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-ln-uc-admit-20150702-sto...
And:
>Even as the University of California accepted a record number of freshman for fall 2014, admission rates at its most selective campuses reached new lows. Huge increases in the number of applicants, changing admissions processes and a growing emphasis on out-of-state and international students are driving them down.
>UCLA’s admission rate, which fell to 18.2 percent from 20.1 percent last year, reflected the school’s growing profile and popularity. Applications surged 7.5 percent to more than 86,000, while admission levels held steady.
>The drop was even more stark at UC Berkeley – to 17.3 percent this year from 20.8 percent in 2013 – under a new enrollment process that will see the university accept fewer students and then turn to an expanded wait list to fill any remaining open slots.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article2596255.ht...
Also, a lot of the increase in administration is essentially legally required. Universities can't get rid of their title IX offices, after all.
>A 16% (inflation-adjusted) decline in total state and local funding and a 13% increase in enrollment contributed to the sharp per-student funding decline between 2007-08 and 2011-12. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15, an 8% increase in appropriations combined with a 4% decline in enrollment generated a 13% increase in per-student funding.
Despite this partial recovery, in 2014-15, appropriations per FTE student were 8% lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than they were a decade earlier, and 11% lower than they were 30 years earlier. https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
It's a real bugbear for me that when people comment and give no geographical context.
In the UK university has returned to being a rich middle-class thing AFAICT, at least as a poor middle-class, working family there will be no hope for us to afford it under a regime like we have at present.
I think it goes a lot deeper than that, though. To me, I see three fundamental problems, in addition to what you mentioned, and the problem mentioned in the linked article:
1. Relying on grant money to fund universities, 2. Businesses expecting universities to do their work for them, and 3. The erosion of tenure.
All of these have been discussed more and more, but I don't think people realize how deep the problems are, and discussions get hijacked by political issues.
Grant funding needs to change. Not only is it nepotistic, but universities have become dependent on indirect costs. Nothing would make me happier if indirect costs got cut from grant budgets.
Businesses basically now expect universities to do their work for them. Train their employees, do their research, and so forth and so on. And certain political blocks reinforce this. Let's say you have a corporation trying to maximize its profits. They need R&D but don't want to incur the costs. So they go to the legislature and complain that the university isn't doing enough with "real world value." What sort of "real world research" would they like to see? Well, the corporation is all too happy to tell you. In the end, the corporation gets the state to pay for their R&D budget.
The irony about discussions about eliminating tenure is that you can already look at its effects. People focus on liberal arts departments, but in medical schools, tenure is very weak or nonexistent: "soft money" position is a euphemism for "phantom" position, as in "you can have this position if you fund it." All the problems with lack of replication in biomedical research? The result of chasing flashy results to get funding to maintain positions, because of lack of tenure.
I have nothing wrong with for-profit research, but there is also a need for nonprofit research, and a firewall between them. Right now, that wall is down, and it's eating away at things.
Ironically, I've come to think that one of the things that might save public universities is to cut their ties to government altogether, that is, to become private institutions. It would be nice if legislatures would do their jobs and fund them, but if legislatures are going to play this game and try to dictate what universities are doing anyway, why not call a spade a spade and just sever the tie?
What's happening a public universities is akin to what I imagine will happen with the Department of the Interior under Trump: a government run by foxes in the henhouse.
From the beginning, modern conservatives have seen the university as a cesspool of atheist marxism. Indeed, one of the founding books of the modern conservative movement was <i>God and Man at Yale</i> by William F. Buckley. So conservatives, especially at the state level, have worked to change the mission of the university from free inquiry to profit-making and supporting corporations, and they have largely succeeded.
I don't think the conservatives have anything to do with it. For one, most of the conservatives I've read work from within the academic system. For another, an original conservative might have been someone like Edmund Burke, who died in 1797.
What changed was - there was rather suddenly a lot of money. There was the mandate that "(nearly) everybody needs a degree." When you go from 5% of the population to 50%, things will be different. Take UT Austin - its endowment is sufficient that they need never charge tuition, but they do to keep capacity matched to demand.
What's really changed is just galloping careerism. Nothing else is needed to explain this.
As to conservative academics, ask them and they will tell you American academia is overwhelmingly liberal. It is the conservative politicians who brounght about the change, not the academics. Also one thing the conservative movement did in response is set up a vast network of think tanks to give brainy conservatives alternative employment.
And remember, there are two sides to this. On the one side, they force universities to become more like corporations by cutting funds. On the other hand, conservatives are pro-corporate and so are happy that, in order to get the needed cash, they had to do the corporations bidding.
As to galloping careerism, that begs the question of why, for the first time in history, ambitious people go into university administration, when that has always been a poor-paying job for people who were basically academics.
Conservatives are not uniformly pro-corporate. There may be a central tendency towards "free markets" ( or some caricature thereof ) but that's not a central tenet. I follow the Arnold Kling model; conservatives are primarily concerned with perceived barbarism. People who work steadily are seen as less barbaric. Corporations hire people.
Think tanks are an artifact of an expanding media system. I watch a lot of CSPAN, and they are a lot on there. There are similar liberal institutions, and varying degrees of conservatism even among AEI or the like. Much of that is simply exploiting the business model created by Wm. F Buckley.
I know nothing of who goes into university administration. but the tendency of people to go into administration in general should be apparent in the larger culture.
You're right there are different types of conservatives. But the conservative politicians are almost all strongly pro-corporate. That is partly because that is where they get a lot of their campaign contribution.
Conservatives who don't make the free market central I think should instead be labeled traditionalists.
IMO, the most succinct way to explain education now is: we subsidize it. That which you subsidize, you get more of, and it costs more.
It's worth noting that Governor Reagan was one of the first to take this path. He actually introduced tuition to the UC system just for "hippie-punching" the folks at Berkeley.
Queen's University in Kingston Ontario was founded in the early 19th century and run basically by the Presbyterian and United Church until the 1950's - when Ontario reorganized how public Unis would be funded.
Which I think is ballpark similar to how things operated in other countries.
I'm not making a point for or against - other than to say that this idea of 'government funded directly secular education' was kind of an anomaly in the history of higher education.
Worth noting.
It'd be nice to have a way to truly judge the merits of research ... so hard ...
Even harder in 2016 when everything 'must be measured' ...
What about the other 2/3s?
Those 'with degrees' seem to be doing ok, overall.
This without - not so good.
Germany has a 'vocational' system that enables/empowers those who don't want to go off and study Math or History, and it seems to work well, though it's very deeply entrenched into industry, into culture - and maybe somewhat unfair as it is kind of 'class perpetuating' ... by the time kids are 14 they are already being slotted into one stream or another (richer parents = more likely to go upstream).
I'll never speak out against 'more college' but America actually does put more than anyone else through college, and spends more $ and more $/capita than any other nation.
It'd be great to figure out a way to put the other 2/3's into the economy in a meaningful way. Nobody seems to want to speak for them ...
If I had the time and money, I'd start a university on this scale. The modern university in the U.S. has become a bloated monster, with more (and higher paid) administration than faculty, boutiques and fancy dorms, slick marketing departments, billion dollar sports facilities, medical clinics, etc. Ridiculous.
Obviously, my little thought experiment is rather simplistic; you're going to want to spend some money on labs for scientific research and instruction, and there's that pesky accreditation hoop to jump through, as well as accounting and legal expenses.
But still... we have lost focus. The mega campuses with huge layers of administrative fat do not serve their constituents well.
Now the mantra is that "college is the new high school" -- if you don't have a postsecondary credential you're essentially unemployable. If that's the case, should't society's calculus extend to the public funding of a solid undergraduate education?
It's no different from public funding of preventative care (e.g. inoculations) and fixing the roads.
"It’s a cycle in which colleges spend more and more money chasing research projects, building luxury dorms and academic centers to attract wealthy students, and engaging in activities that compel them to compete against each other, rather than focus on their own students."
This has to do with federal student loan subsidies.
"Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. “The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt,” he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business, and less like a public good that all students can afford."
I think that ship sailed back in the mid 1990's. I really don't know of many students these days that are there to 'just learn', most are there because they know they need to have a diploma to have any realistic chance in the job markets. Again, this issue stems from federally back loans in part.
"But I think some of it is just that it was more important to have a kind of a national profile than it was to do really good regional service. Shifting from regional service to national profile created competitive costs; you just tend to duplicate a lot of things that other people have. Then later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when you’re starting to compete for blue chip out-of-state students, the arms race in facilities accelerates, and just re-accelerates after 2008."
Here he is talking about the US News rankings, something that I remember hearing about while applying to college, but not really ever reading. I don't know what the faculty are seeing and hearing, as I am not one, but are those ranking really that important to prospective students? I was under the impression that they just applied to schools, see what came back, and then chose, though that may have been just me. Many schools have an application fee, but can they really be garnering that much money on the fees as to justify all these amenities? I guess that I am saying that using US News as a scapegoat is ... fishy to me.
"Undergraduates and academic graduates students became more of an afterthought at the senior management level. They were kind of the revenue source, in terms of tuition and general funds per capita, but then, after that, they were not at the center of policy. We really lost our focus."
Sing it from the mountains, Brother!
"Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don’t just go down the street to the machinist shop that’s still open if they lost their factory job. They can be eligible for a whole range of jobs, or build jobs and businesses on their own with these skills."
The sentence is a bit confusing, but is he saying that a machinist job is a default one? Wouldn't he just say a barista or a Target checkout person as a default type job? I think that the author's words here may have been somewhat mis-typed.
All in all, the author's book adds yet another piece to the jeremiads of countless academics. The core issue, it seems, is the money. We all idealize this gilded age era of Harvard and Teddy Roosevelt, but forget that those were the scions of America, with near limitless credit if not money outright. My father once told me 'if the office is a mess, then the secretary is stealing'. The author may be on to something when it comes to this mess. Perhaps there is a lot of corruption going on that is responsible for this very large issue of funding problems.
No. Barista or checkout cashier are unskilled jobs. This sentence is talking about skilled blue collar jobs. If you are a factory worker, you have the same set of skills that would be used in a machinist shop. The author is arguing that "technical skills" only qualifies you for a narrow set of jobs, but "high-end cognitive skills" qualifies for a broader range of jobs.
I won't speak to my own abilities, since I don't consider myself to be smart, and also because people, myself included, tend to be terrible at self evaluation, but I can very comfortably say that I've worked with many people from similarly lacking educational backgrounds who are incredibly smart, have a wide range of interests, and are unbelievably inventive.
This isn't to knock college education, I'm sure it's a wonderful environment in which to learn and mature, and I'd love for it to be made available to more people, particularly lower income working class people, but I don't think it is the only path to intelligence or knowledge.
Edit: Just to be clear, my response wasn't meant to imply you personally feel this way, it was just a general observation.
There are certainly a lot of intelligent people with only a high school degree and a lot of stupid people with a bachelors degree. When it comes to finding jobs, the bachelors degree is mainly a form of signaling.
A year later, their ranking fell (to a lower tier), and the official line was that US News rankings are not important.
that's more or less how it still works at the good private schools, with exceptions at the margin for extremely bright talent from less wealthy family/means.
public schools are supposed to break this pattern, but the best ones basically have turned into the same thing (california, michigan, virginia, north carolina, etc.) with their own hierarchy of elite campuses/locations and in-crowd associations (greek, etc.)
the entire system breaks down if you treat it as something fundamentally different, or have some invented set of expectations for what you get out of it.
I put "liberal" in quotes, because real liberalism is much more broad-minded than what's on much of our universities. Real liberalism isn't about making your opponent shut up; instead, it's about recognizing their right to exist and to have their say.
Sorry - by diverse set of people are you talking about people who would be inclined to get and would be accepted to receive a liberal arts degree at an elite university?
At one point, I think a university education served, sociologically, as another barrier separating the upper class from the rabble. Do you think diversity of opinion was perhaps more tolerated when the only students were children of the rich? Would universities have defended their cultural values as ardently as they do now, when membership in that culture was enforced differently?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philoso...
I agree with your sentiment, but I think downvoters are misattributing it to the Wikipedia article I linked to.
Sorry for the confusion.
> At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business
FWIW, I agree with the op's sentiment.
I went to college in order to get a "real" job with a salary and benefits. Oh sure, I had a few cool classes that made me think and be philosophical, but for the most part, I saw college as a means to get ahead and earn more than my peers who didn't go to college.
I've also seen first hand how many large corporations won't even interview you unless you have a four year degree. Doesn't matter if its relevant or not (I have a liberal arts degree and am a developer) they just want you to have a college degree.
You have to remember a lot of colleges are also prime recruiting grounds for the big SV companies and startups as well. In order to continue to get grant money and other perks from these companies, they are essentially forced to do the will of the companies they are in bed with.
While it would be nice to have colleges be truly "higher learning" places, I doubt it will change anytime soon.
I realize that it may not square with most peoples' motivations, but in my ideal world it would be. I also think that, on the whole, college students will lead better lives and have better career outcomes if they first focus on learning. The interviewee goes on to say:
> This has to be liberal arts and sciences. Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don’t just go down the street to the machinist shop that’s still open if they lost their factory job.
The "high-end cognitive skills" is the important part. What you learn at college isn't necessarily the material, but how to think. That skill will serve you well in any job you have.
Education that is entirely academia-centric has a tendency to turn universities into useless, navel-gazing ivory towers.
They must be forced to meet upon a common ground.
Having graduated from college, I cannot envision myself returning for any reason other than to get a new stamp on my academic passport, authorizing me to work in either higher-salary jobs of my current field, or to change careers. All my curiosity itches have been satisfactorily scratched by link-walks on the Internet, libraries, museums, educational television, and garage projects.
I never cared for the softer side of learning, in classes that do not have objectively correct answers to problems that may be defined precisely. I certainly never cared for the excessive administrative overhead, or the disproportionately large expenditures relating to athletics. But universities cater to a diverse body of students. If I deny someone else their inverted underwater basket-weaving course, I might not get to take a course on RISC-V assembly. If I deny someone their football or basketball teams, there too goes my marching or pep bands.
I think most businesses should be focusing on vocational academies specific to a particular industry as their employee training programs. Universities should be focusing on producing universally competent individuals as their graduates. If you just want a job, you go to the academy for a length of time dependent on the complexity of the field, and come out ready to work it. You go to university if you want to be able to be able to triangulate a distress signal, navigate to the transmitter, pick a lock to gain access, extinguish a fire, perform first aid, transport the victim to a hospital, and then write a dramatized short story about it. While fending off ninjas, zombies, robots, and/or pirates. Universities should be producing people who can think critically and adapt to rapidly changing situations, not just cranking out an improved tier of worker drone. And every last university graduate should have the capacity to (eventually) answer any question that has never yet been asked, from "What is the mass of dark-matter particle-X?" to "How many dollars is 1 kg of particle-X worth?" to "What sort of name should we give to particle-X once we prove that it exists?"
My current opinion is that the blame for dilution in the value of higher education lies with the business leaders and their paid-for politicians, who have demolished employer-run job training programs, beaten down the unions that provide apprenticeship educations, and launched for-profit colleges that chip away at the funding of universities without meaningfully contributing to education, then made the bachelor's degree an entry ticket to gainful employment. The business-folk are not going to bend as long as they hold all the leverage. They will continue to corrupt academia with other people's money as a means to cutting their own costs for next quarter, and the future 20 years from now be damned.
At this scale, the only feasible solution is for academia to appeal to the heavy hand of government, which could then force business to stop undermining the foundations of higher education (until the regulators have been captured again).
On the other hand they're not shy about publicizing data that shows people with degrees will earn X more money over their lifetimes as a result of the degree and fostering a culture in which the opinions of people without credentials are dismissed.
Another source that examines the transformation of public education under the program of neoliberalism is Wendy Davis's Undoing the Demos. Here is a review by a mathematician who contextualizes her account in his own field [3]. It is a particularly touchy subject for me because I am starting to see mathematics departments cut down to size because they are not profitable (the latest one here) [4], and to see something so foundational and culturally important (to me, anyway) stripped away because it is not profitable is horrifying.
This is not just the natural course of the world. These transformations of our social institutions are deliberate and engineered. Whether or not you think it's a change for the worse, well, that's up to you. I personally think it will lead to a crisis of capitalist civilization and as a student of history I'm aware of what happened the last time capitalism was in crisis.
[0] http://rohcavamaintenant.free.fr/CLE%20USBAICHE/USB%20KEY%20...
[1] http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...
[2] https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberali...
[3] https://mathematicswithoutapologies.wordpress.com/2015/05/08...
[4] https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2016/09/disaster_at_the...
My high school sent a lot of kids to Harvard and other Ivy League schools and those students were about 1/3 wealthy suburban kids and 2/3 city kids, many of whom paid no tuition at all.
At MIT I thought I was unusual for having attended a private school.
I think the small number of schools with huge endowments (mostly not huge schools) can afford to be less financially selective. It's the fat part of the bell curve that can't afford to take the same attitude that gives rise to the problems discussed here.