Apt. 11D

Elizabeth Warren and the Academia Backlash

Alex MacGillis wonders if Elizabeth Warren's candidacy has been damaged by the academia backlash.

But when you're worrying about getting your kids through college in an era of $50,000 tuition, room and board, it is, shall we say, a little bit dissonant to have the rally for the little guy coming from a professor whose bottom line has benefited from those sky-high tuition rates...

Seriously, if Lizzie Warren, daughter of an Oklahoma City janitor, can't make the jump from the ivory tower, who can? Her troubles may be a sign that the academy's moat has grown wider than it ever intended.

 

Another Guest Blog Post

I wrote about public colleges and adjuncts at Megan's blog today. 

State Colleges

I'm working on an article about state colleges. Got any gripes? Got links to great research? Send it my way. 

(Off for the morning. Going to art school.) 

Nicholas Lemann Explains Why College Costs So Much

Nicholas Lemann:

College costs so much because people are paying for unstated social goals. Each college and university is a collection of many different activities, some of which pay for others. Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions. More broadly, the United States created the world’s first mass system of higher education. Hundreds, not dozens, of colleges aspire to be research universities—because there lies status, prestige, and intellectual excitement—and so they have faculty members with low teaching loads. That costs money. The system is built to take in just about all high-school graduates, and that costs money, too.

I said that in the comment section of this post and in this article. 

Vouchers For College Tuition

Dean Dad at Insider Higher Ed has a very interesting post about Pennsylvania's proposal for vouchers for college tuition.

Apparently, Pennsylvania is considering moving to a voucher system for public higher education. The idea is to zero out the direct funding for colleges and universities, and to replace it with money to students. Colleges’ funding will become a direct function of enrollment.

There’s a superficial appeal to the idea. Colleges would have to direct funding more intensively towards the kinds of things that result in higher enrollments or they would suffer cuts. At some level, the locus of power would shift to students, since he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Read the whole thing.

Making Colleges More Efficient

(Please excuse some typos and errors today. I'm using Steve's ancient computer to blog and, well, it's ancient.)

The New York Times continues to write about student loan debt. Finally. In today's article, we get a close look at E. Gordon Gee, the president of OSU.

E. Gordon makes a good penny.

Mr. Gee’s compensation package this year, moreover, is worth about $2 million, and The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him the highest-paid public university president. The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Mr. Gee had billed Ohio State for $550,000 in travel in the last two years.

He recognizes that tuition is at a tipping point and that student loan debt is out of hand. While he's not proposing a pay cut for himself or cutting back on his travel, he did improve the purchasing system for the school. He's also not cutting back on dorm or gym facilities, but he is cutting back on sabbatical time.

I think we need a serious discussion about what makes an essential college education. The basics. Colleges need to justify their expenses to outsiders, including administrative pay.

UPDATE: Andrew Hacker's opinion article in Today's Room for Debate is a must read. Hacker is a professor at Queens College, who has always taken a strong stance against graduate education. He refused to teach at CUNY-Graduate Center.

More colleges now give their faculties expensive sabbaticals every third year. A recent count found that 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors weren’t teaching. Nor can it be shown that research enhances classroom instruction; often the reverse is the case.

Nationwide, full professors average a not-humble $113,176. Faculty pay at Stanford has close to doubled in actual dollars in the last three decades. The president of 1,991-student Carleton College gets $593,132. I don’t doubt he has weighty duties; but the head of the Food and Drug Administration makes about a third as much.

Nationwide, full professors average a not-humble $113,176. Faculty pay at Stanford has close to doubled in actual dollars in the last three decades. The president of 1,991-student Carleton College gets $593,132. I don’t doubt he has weighty duties; but the head of the Food and Drug Administration makes about a third as much. Even while indenturing their futures with loans, students find they are increasingly taught by underpaid adjuncts, and in huge lectures where they peer at a professor from the 26th row. At another time, I’ll fault state legislators for starving public colleges. For the present, I’d say that the prodigal ways of faculties and administrators could use a closer look.

Also, read Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

Even More on Student Loan Debt

There's a great article on student loan debt in this weekend's New York Times. (May I just say that it is shameful that these stories never recieved attention from the higher education newspapers until now?)

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Please play with this great tool from the NYT about debt over time, by university, and by geography. 

I'm sorry, but I won't be here much today. The hard drive on my Mac is shot after six months. I need to back everything up and get a new hard drive today. Ugh! 

MOOC

In the historic sweep of technology, higher education stands apart as a bastion of old-fashioned thinking. But in anticipation that the information revolution is coming for colleges, Ivy League colleges are competing to create online classes without the Ivy League price tag and without the Ivy League admission hurdles. In a recent article in the New Yorker, the President of Stanford, John Hennessy said, "There's a tsunami coming."

Daphne Koller, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a free online classroom, believes that Hennessy is right. "The tsunami is coming whether we like it or not," she said. "You can be crushed or you can surf and it is better to surf."

Coursera is a massive online open classroom -- or MOOC -- that operates in conjunction with four top universities - Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Princeton. Co-founded by Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera currently offers forty classes on topics ranging from poetry to robotics. Like a traditional class, each online class is comprised of a series of video lectures with PowerPoint slides. Students can participate in discussion boards and are graded on the assignments. Students who complete the course with passing grades receive a certificate of completion.

Read more here. 

Black-Studies Departments, Academic Freedom, Blogger Freedom

I let the Riley controversy fly by me this week, because I was absorbed in other matters. It unexpectedly picked up a lot of steam with attention from every blogger and pundit. My two cents:

I've never taken or taught a class within a black studies department, so I can't say too much about the vigor of that particular department. However, race is extremely relevant to the subject of political science and a perfectly legitimate element of study. It comes into play when talking about representation and voting patterns. It is a huge element of urban politics, political theory, and political history. Is race studied enough within political science? Absolutely not. It is an important lens for understanding political action in this country, and there are not enough people doing work in this area. 

The study of race is also an important within other traditional departments in the liberal arts, like History, Literature, and Sociology. 

Does it deserve its own department? In an era of scarce resources, can we afford to maintain other interdisciplinary departments, like American Studies or Environmental Policy? These are fair questions that should be debated. 

Riley could have taken that tack and she would have had a perfectly legitimate argument. What bothered me most about Riley's post was that she targeted the dissertations of grad students. All dissertations are extremely narrow in scope and can be easily mocked by outsiders as parochial and silly. Also, it's plain mean to mock a defenseless grad student, who doesn't have a job yet or platform to respond to criticism in a major industry newspaper. 

More about the controversy from James Joyner. 

Open, Online, Massive, Elite

Earlier this week, I wrote an article about the creation of free, online, open classrooms by Ivy League colleges. I believe that it's going to be published later this morning. I tried to be fair and balanced in the article, but it's hard to anticipate who you're going to piss off. Inevitably, someone gets pissed off. It's hard for someone who was trained to always be the "Nice Girl" to deal with angry Internet commenters. Ugh. I'm pacing around my office bracing myself for some blows. 

In the meantime, here are links to two bloggers writing about this same topic: Dean Dad and Audrey Waters.