Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

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> Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in [higher education administration]? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.

1. This is a graduate degree.

2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all over the map — finance (including fund raising), policy, governance, student development, campus culture, etc.

You can’t just take a random professor or a random business person and expect them to be a good university administrator. It’s a topic worthy of research and study, imho.

All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of shit. I personally think that’s due to the folks who are shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed itself.

I'm not surprised that such a degree is available and needed, but having it pop up in a list of programs of a random university is curious. Surely the need for such a degree is limited and those who would seek it out would be keen on obtaining it from an institution that isn't struggling.

indeed, the failures described in the article seem to only strengthen the case for better training school admins

> Surely the need for such a degree is limited and those who would seek it out would be keen on obtaining it from an institution that isn't struggling.

This is the flagship state school. It’s hardly some random school. If this program is not at this school in the state, it won’t be at any school.

If you’re not from the US, every state has a “flagship” state school. Some have a comparably strong second school that usually covers agriculture and engineering (these are the A&M schools).

West Virginia only has one major state school, and WVU is that school.

West Virginia has a smaller population than Dallas. I don't see why students can't go to another state to get their education.

Cost?

> I don't see why students can't go to another state to get their education.

As a non-american, I am baffled by this way of thinking. Higher education is supposed to be a way to ensure that a state is self-sufficient in terms of some core competencies by retaining a small number of workers specialized in compiling, developing, and sharing industry knowledge.

Is West Virginia so empoverished that they can't manage to support the two dozen or so teachers required to support an engineering degree?

As an American, I think freebee56's thinking is very rare - intellectually most people understand the situation as you do, and emotionally flagship state universities engender a strong sense of identity in graduates and state residents, in some states even for those who didn't attend it.

Out-of-state tuition costs for any public university are usually double what it costs for in-state students. It would seem short-sighted to deprive WV high school graduates of a solid public school where they can get in-state tuition rates.

Then WV can negotiate with other states to allow students to attend their universities, paying in-state tuition, with WV making up the difference. Students get better-funded schools, WV can negotiate good rates.

There are various regional associations to address this sort of issue. A college friend, a Virginia native, wanted to pursue a master's in library science, but Virginia did not offer one. North Carolina did, and so through one of those multi-state compacts, he went to UNC and paid in-state tuition.

We don't expect towns of 2000 people to support a high school. They go to a regional school - perhaps only one high school per county.

That is a very good point, I didn't even consider it was possible to do that whole "negotiate in-state tuition and make up the diff in funding by another state" approach. Thanks for bringing it up.

A similar example, one that I think no longer exists but did for a long time:

Tennessee is legally divided into Western, Middle, and Eastern Tennessee. There are a lot of rules in the state constitution that respect these Grand Divisions; IIRC an equal number of TN Supreme Court justices must be from each division, etc.

Anyway, the University of Tennessee is in Knoxville, which is in the Eastern Division (and a long way from Memphis). The University of Mississippi, in Oxford, is only about an hour and a half away from Memphis. For many years, students living in at least metro Memphis (and possibly most of Western Tennessee) could attend Ole Miss and pay in-state tuition - which is why in The Blind Side, the family were Ole Miss supporters. Memphis is the cultural capital of the Delta region, which covers parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and Ole Miss (though not in the Delta) was the natural flagship university for the area.

Tennessee just paid Mississippi for its students. It was cheaper than building another university that would only have attracted students from a relatively small portion of the state.

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