The Obama administration wants to rate institutions of higher education, based on factors like cost,graduation rate, income of graduates.
Most college and university presidents are upset.
It didn’t help that one administration official said that comparing the cost and quality of institutions of higher education should be no more difficult than comparing blenders. For some reason, the Obama administration thinks that it can play the role of Consumer Reports and thus improve the quality of higher education while lowering costs. How this will actually happen is anyone’s guess.
Many of the university officials pointed out that the institutions that prepare graduates for relatively low-paid professions like social work and teaching would get low ratings, as would those that open their doors to risky low-income students. Those whose graduates go to Wall Street will look stellar.
Some said they would be penalized for focusing on the liberal arts and sciences, where the ultimate payoff is less than in fields like engineering.
The Obama administration, which is never in doubt about any of its ideas or policies, plans to push ahead, so that it can hold the nation’s colleges and universities “accountable.” There seems to be no tempering its love affair with data. Having no success to date with its policies for K-12, it now plans to bring the same failed ideas of NCLB-Race to the Top to the nation’s higher education sector.
Why doesn’t the administration begin by regulating the for-profit sector, which has a historic record of poor performance and low graduation rates?
Well, no, it must apply its metrics of all institutions of higher education. This is NCLB style thinking. Leave these guys alone for a minute and they bring out their weights, measures, and scales.
Someone should tell them that the American system of higher education is generally considered the best, most diverse in the world, and it got that way without being controlled by the U.S . Department of Education.
Phase 2 of Obama’s Secret Plan to Lose the Midterm Elections — Again …
Agreed. Obama has no concern, compassion, or loyalty to those who supported him. Come to think of it, he has no conscience either.
LOL. I suspect that you are right there, Jon.
I rarely agree with Republican orthodoxy for limited government. Here i do.
But with them it is hypocrisy.
As it is with Obama/Duncan.
I saw this all coming ten years ago. We are now seeing our Dystopian future unfold. Just wait ten years. You haven’t seen anything yet…
Or, for a change of pace, the federal government could take their money and open free public community colleges and trade schools.
The only good plan I have heard is to rate colleges and universities on the default rates on student loan debt of their graduates and set lending practices accordingly (since that really is the issue, not education quality, necessarily). Otherwise, the Federal government should not be in the business of rating our colleges and universities or dictating what they do from an academic stand-point.
I disagree Joanna. What the federal government should do is make higher education free for all citizens. It could easily do that for a fraction of the money wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention if they closed all the corporate tax loopholes and ended corporate welfare.
I have mixed feelings about this. For the last dozen or so years many of us begged, pleaded, cried out in agony for the “higher ups” in academia to help us end the travesty of NCLB/RTTT. Instead many academics joined the chorus and were too busy figuring out how they could profit themselves.
Diane saw the light. Few others did/have. Few have had the courage to publicly criticize the reformers despite the protections of real tenure (unlike public school teachers, who only have the bare minimum of due process).
They busily gave unearned credence to people like Marzano and Danielson who have done nothing, absolutely nothing, of academic significance yet the established members of academe ceded all control to them without question or challenge because of Gates/Broad/Walton money.
It is a moment of schadenfreude for me, although I hate to see the once-great American system of higher education destroyed as they greedily pursue more and more student loan money and do little to nothing to ensure the worth of their very expensive degrees.
They have sold their souls to the highest bidder and lost their compass. I pity them for what I know is coming, having experienced it myself in public education, but I also believe they deserve to experience at least some of the horrors they helped heap upon me and my fellow teachers.
Do they expect the alumni to come to their aid? Perhaps we will. And perhaps we won’t be able to afford to, at least those of us who took our degrees in the liberal arts and education. Maybe the MBA’s and MD’s will help.
As painful as Obama’s ScorchEarth CorpEdReform has been and still is, Schadenfreude has been the secret ingredient for all the CorpEdReformers for years. Hateful & hurtful bullying of teachers while using our youngest children to do the job, has satisfied their pathological & unresolved & lingering hatred toward all teachers and now university profs.
Many of these CorpEdReformers are barely educated with Bachelor’s in Political Science or Public Policy. The richest among them is a college dropout, but knows everything because he is über rich with a purchased IQ higher than any of ours.
I am hoping that the university presidents and faculties cover their loins and show some backbone to save our intellectual capital which truly should never be for sale, but on the chopping block a la Obama & Co.
The US economy needs more college graduates like it needs a hole in the head.
Sure, Jim. It would be so much better for the United States, going forward, if the citizenry were more ignorant.
“What the federal government should do is make higher education free for all citizens.”
Modeled after what, the new Common Core public schools? This would be terrible, at least in today’s sociopolitical climate.
Education is never free, the best you can do is have someone else pay for it.
TE, we all pay for providing it, or we all pay for not providing it. The the latter is MUCH more costly.
Given the income levels of families that send their children to college, we would end up having the relatively poor pay to educate the relatively wealthy. Does that concern you?
TE, I believe in limited government because I believe that ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. However, I think that in education and in health care, we are all well served by taxation and redistribution to provide equity. But I think that that must be a purely redistributive process and must not come with centralized control attached. I do not see why, with progressive taxation to fund that redistribution, the poor would end up paying for the education of the relatively wealthy.
Any progressive tax that is going to raise enough revenue will have to get at least some resources from most households in the United States. I even question the current level of state support for my university when I think about the folks doing hard, low paying work and paying state taxes as I pass the BMWs in the fraternity parking lots.
So what alternative would you suggest, TE?
The current system has a significant redistributive component in it. Universities charge more to high income students, less to low income students. That could be expanded, and/or you could expand the means tested voucher system, Pell Grants, currently in place.
I used to be a doctrinaire libertarian. But there are these pesky facts. Technologically advanced democratic states that have a single-payer healthcare system have HALF the costs and BETTER OUTCOMES for longevity, infant mortality, and various diseases of affluence (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and cancer). Half the cost. That’s pretty significant. That suggests that we have the incentives all wrong.
I agree that markets fail in health care. I think a single payer system is inevitable.
But the question for me is always, how do you get the equity without the top-down command and control? I think that that question is answerable.
There is always some trade off between equity of outcomes and freedom of action.
Some. But we can establish limits.
I strongly agree!
I agree with Joanna, that is.
We have already sacrificed a generation to astronomical student loan debt which will longterm economic affects in our country. Why reify a sick system like that by agreeing to use it as a measurement tool?
Good Luck with telling them about how good we are! Some of our best High Schools are being destroyed by their policies and the parents of these children just do not seem to care? Public Schools and associated individuals are not valued and may never be until they are no longer public. Even the one Governor we thought supported the Public School system just announced his budget plan indicating NO COST of LIVING increase for schools until 2022 at the earliest due to the recession. All new money will either go into a Rainy Day Fund or pay into the depleted retirement funds. He will make it sound like schools and teachers are getting plenty of money, but the School Services Group hired to explain the realities of these decisions made it clear that there will be no money available for even cost of living increases! Who will want to become a teacher? Maybe the saying “if you cannot do anything else, then teach!” will become true. They complain now that few top students go into teaching unless of course it is to teach for America and only for a couple years to beef up your resume! What happened to the so called Power of the Unions! Where are all these Progressives! I retire in another year and I am already looking into moving to somewhere like New Zealand or Southern France so I can forget all of this mess created by people who are suppose to be representing ME! Right.
Jim has a valid point. Whether non-profit or for-profit, these unis are expanding seats based on ‘demand’, fueled by no alternative jobs and unlimited federal loans.
What should happen is what the rest of the Western world does: government sponsors seats to balance labor supply/demand.
For instance, in Canada, where teaching is a respected, high paid job, recently unregulated teacher colleges doubled seats, with a resultant mass unemployment problem. To correct the problem, the Ontario government expanded training to two years and culled some seats, having the teacher cohort over night.
But the market is corrupting. In Australia they are moving toward a ‘fee system’, where deans can charge unlimited amounts for greatly expanded seats. (It’s so corrupt, that until recently, the Australian government was granting permanent residency to foreign students after a two year degree was issued.)
An interesting call for increased government control over education on a blog where decreased government control is the orthodox line. Restricting the supply of those with teaching credentials would increase the salaries of teachers and average class size. Is that the trade off we should be willing to make? I am also curious about how you see schools of education selecting students for the government set number of seats. Would it be the usual mix of grades, standardized test scores and outside activities?
Ironically, as a doctoral student I sat in a session run by a Bush admin official from the USDOE who was discussing this very thing back in 2005-06-ish.. She said they were bringing the “accountability of NCLB to college to ensure all students got the college education they paid for”. Prior to that speaker, one of the college of Ed professors – another of those who had never taught but was somehow an expert on all things teaching – had discussed how NCLB was cleaning out bad teachers and was allowing for more private options in education like charter $chools, tutoring from outside agencies, and providing alternate licensure routes; essentially breaking up what he saw as the monopoly on K-12 by public education and teacher unions. I’d be really curious to be a fly on the wall in his office right now….
Could it be any clearer that Obama wants to eliminate liberal arts and social sciences in higher education?
It’s already happening. I read recently that in the 1970s about 23% of college majors were in education. Now it is closer to 2%. Our profession is dying.
According to the national education statistics business, health care professions, and the arts are all seeing substantial increases while the liberal arts and social sciences are all in a long, slow decline.
No need to be an education major when you can get 5 weeks of TFA training and enter a school district at the same level.
During the 1970’s the number of teachers in k-12 increased by around 50%. That might have something to do with the popularity of education degrees at that time.
No–a lot of it had to do with the entrance of students with disabilities into public schools and kids coming through towards the end of the Baby Boom.
It is that expansion of K-12 teaching openings that caused more students to be interested in a teaching career.
This is a flawed use of data. (Much the same as the flawed use of data from nclb tests, in fact.). Before you could do any sort of comparison here you’d need to (try to) compensate for things like the difference in percentage of the population pursuing college degrees and gender break downs, the number of professions that require college degrees, the gender of the people earning the degrees, the number of jobs available with their gender breakdowns… And probably a hundred other factors that would skew comparison. Numbers are deceiving… Don’t fall into the same trap as the people you’re criticizing.
Obama/Duncan & Co. – on a roll to demolish Academic Freedom, guarantee successful employable outcome, 100% four year graduation rates! send ALL to college, no student loans while Arne is pushing student loans on Twitter to 18 year olds, hold Gate$ $B over universities mortar boards! Gut & BREAK what ain’t been broke!
Good Job, Mr. President. Remembering our Veterans on this Memorial Day where hopefully NO Veteran would ever need medical ‘care?’ from VA hospitals. You have much work to do, but you are too busy chewing up our children’s education, P-16. Your children may not be safe with your university gutting…are they going outside of the US to get their college education?
Outrageous! Unthinkable! Frightening!
What are Obama’s True Motives? Really?
He’s all about himself, and planning to become a multimillionaire when he leaves office.
Not being satisfied with “improving” elementary and secondary education, the Bush/Obama education juggernaut rolls on, reforming everything in its path and making sure we’re all “accountable.” When the Obama presidency began, if someone had told me that the term “Bush/Obama” would be part of my vocabulary I would have thought them mad. Well, time wounds all heals, and here we are in the brave new world of NCLB/RTTT, and I’m going to tell you it sucks. But slowly, like all real societal shifts, a movement is emerging among teachers, parents, administrators, social justice activists, and union organizers that is making for some pretty strange bedfellows as the left, right, and center all realize, each for its own reasons, that this whole education reform thing is a steaming pile of crap and has implications way beyond the hallowed halls of academia. How long these not-quite-coalitions can hold together is anyone’s guess, but let’s hope it’s long enough to put the reform beast to sleep for good. One of the bright spots that may emerge from this witch’s brew is if the furor over things like VAM, PARCC, testing, vouchers, and charters proves to herald the re-emergence of strong teacher’s unions that truly have a powerful voice in making education policy, are proactive, and that respond to the voices of their members. Another may be the beginning of a real conversation about the effects of poverty and wealth/opportunity inequality in this country. In the meantime, gird yourself for battle or get out of the way – it’s a war for the soul of public education.
well said!
If we really have freedom of choice, should these colleges not simply publish their statistics and then let the buyer beware? I’m really caught in between a rock and a hard place in my thinking on this one because of this:
On one hand, the gov’t loans are what make college loans affordable and accessible, otherwise, we’d be facing rates greater than that of mortgages for what are largely loans that have no collateral other than what the government puts behind them.
On the other side, colleges have responded by steadily increasing rates, getting people to take loans that for them are no-risk but that should not go to college or are not ready to do so, and basically finding ways for people that are desperate for what they believe is their only chance at making a living wage for less effort than slave labor, take risks that they overcharge people for.
I sort of agree with the goals of the Obama administration in accountability, but I do not agree with the totality of its control, its belief that their administration is beyond corruption, and the collateral damage that we can see coming from this and the imperfect measures being selected.
There must be an in-between, I’m not sure I know what it is though between the government wielding absolute control of education, colleges having free reign of the economic system in what everyone admits is a huge tuition bubble stemming from the riskiest type of loans that almost anyone can get, and having no government involvement leading to a self balancing of colleges, but excluding a great proportion of the population (leading to a de facto educated/competitive richer class).
I am not sure why a government rating system means absolute control of education.
Because their rating system as proposed, ties government loan backing to the rating system. That means whatever they choose to measure (or not measure) will guide colleges with a fairly steel hand on a macro level. Without money, colleges can’t function.
Federal government aid is about a third of total spending.
You say that like it’s insignificant – imagine as a college your budget is cut 33% (or more) overnight if all federal funding were removed? If you think that wouldn’t change how colleges act to an insane degree such that all but the most elite schools with the highest endowments, could manage with less, I don’t know what to tell you if you are going to live in la-la land.
I think the doubling of federal money flowing to post secondary education is as likely a result as the elimination of federal funding of post secondary funding. Neither is very likely.
I am not sure why a government rating system means absolute control of education.
Listen to yourself, TE. YOU are finding yourself making comments in support of increasing state regulatory control of market behaviors, dismissing concerns about this slippery slope by characterizing those concerns as extremist. Doesn’t this bother you?
Perhaps we are just more used to being rated and judged. No student need to go to college, no student need to go to my institution, no student need to major in economics, and no student needs to take my class.
There’s a boiled frog phenomenon occurring here. Yes, we have become more and more used to what, if it had been instituted at once, decades ago, would have been soundly rejected. In fact, that’s just what happened when George Bush Senior floated the idea of national standards and national tests. He was universally shot down by folks left, right, and center. He RAPIDLY withdrew the idea. But the social engineers and profiteers who put forward this idea gave it a new birth in NCLB and its full flowering, as originally conceptualized, in CC$$ and RttT.
Every student in a Common Core State must follow the Common Core progression and take the Common Core tests as a condition of moving to the next level. Every curriculum designer must follow that progression and employ those formulations. Every evaluator must use the CCSS-derived evaluation rubrics. Every teacher grading an assignment must use the CCSS-derived grading rubrics. Even the child who drops out and takes the GED and plans on becoming, say, a cosmotologist or auto mechanic, must now take the new Pearson-owned Common Core version of the GED. And on and on and on. The whole point of Ed Deform is this standardization and centralization of command and control, so to suggest that people still have choice with regard to their educations is disingenuous.
My post was about the proposed federal rating system for colleges and universities, not anything about the CCSS.
This is a package deal. Bill speaks. Obama rolls over. Many of these high-level Ed Deformers have been talking this line for some time now–extending the CCSS, standardized assessment, databases of student responses and scores, and school evaluations based on those to the post-secondary level. This was all part of Arne Duncan’s technology blueprint at the beginning of his tenure as secretary of the Department for the Standardization, Centralization, Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, and Bill has been laying out the plan along precisely these lines for many years now. This is just one piece of a package deal.
I speak not about the doubling or reduction of federal funding. Simply that by tying “results” to the distribution of loans over time, is remarkably short sighted. The government control comes not from having a rating system, it comes from the control of the federal backing of student loans and choosing which colleges they will approve those loans for.
The second the government says “we won’t give loans to students at X colleges” – the borrowing costs at those colleges shoot up practically automatically. That means colleges become beholden to whatever will keep them qualified for backing federal student loans, and that’s whatever the government wants (measures).
The best comparison to K-12 education is the shut down/turn around of schools. It’s unclear yet how much notice the government will give colleges and what “ways out” they will be given (think of the NCLB waivers given in exchange for promising certain changes). The schools will undoubtedly be told to make Y changes to keep the government backed student loans flowing.
If they refuse to make those changes, do you think the generic college in question here could keep enough students who would almost all now be taking out loans that are neither guaranteed to be paid to the college, and will cost the student much more?
This is where the turn around would happen as the college would go out of business or bankrupt for refusing to comply or else find ways to lower their costs extraordinarily….probably on the backs of their staff, and then lose their best and brightest to places that could pay them adequately. There is plenty of precedent for this in K-12 if you want the foreshadowing.
Directing student loans and more specifically, what will qualify a college to receive them, is analogous to total control.
Actually I would say the best comparison is to for profit online charter schools. Most would agree that their students do not end up doing very well.
I should also say that the majority of graduates at my institution do not have any student debt at graduation.
You say, TE, that the majority of students at your institution do not have any debt on graduation. How is that so?
We are relatively cheap among other things. In state tuition is under $10,000 a year (out of state is a little under $24,000 a year). NYU’s tuition, for example, is $23,085 per semester. IU’s in state tuition is a little over $10,000 a year, out of state is a little over $33,000 a year. An out of state student would save roughly 50% in tuition from attending my institution compared to NYU and about 25% on tuition compared to IU.
A student that was really concerned with expense would also take a large number lower division classes at some of the states community colleges, many available on line (though there is a nearby community college with easy transportation back and forth). The cost for community college credit hours is much lower and they transfer seamlessly to my institution. This is going to be an issue for state four year colleges moving forward, but only economists seem to see it at the moment.
I knew they’d abandon Common Core support once the testing was in place. Now that the tests are in, it’s on to higher education!
Good luck with that Common Core thing, public schools! Let us know when you get the test results!
There is no question but what the Education Deformers have colleges and universities in their sights. Centralization, regimentation, standardized testing, databases of responses and scores, computer-adaptive learning platforms, reduced teacher rolls and pay, regimented evaluation systems, the end of due process rights.
Coming to a college near you.
Control of U.S. higher education by a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Here’s a good piece from 2011 on what happened to gut the rules governing for-profit colleges.
You’ll recognize the names of many of the lobbyists:
“But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year.
The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.
A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — were hired to buttonhole officials.”
So Obama left intact the worst abuses of the for-profit colleges, but now has his target set on killing liberal arts education.
First they came for the K-12 teachers, and the universities didn’t speak up …. you know the rest.
Ah-ha!
Now it’s higher education’s turn to deal with O-drama’s education ambitions.
Someone as unsophisticated as Obama and Michelle could onlt equate numbers with university performance.
I will say, this president knows how to play every moment based on who he is and what he thinks he can project to the public.
But does that not make him quite similar to any other politician?
Exactly. How many times over the last few years have we BEGGED universities to stand with us, and they have not?
Now it’s their turn . . . . . This is going to be interesting. We should still consider us as part of them and they as part of us, nevertheless.
A few random thoughts:
(1) The idea for these college ratings, like all of these data / testing / ranking / rating ideas, is EXTREMELY reductionist. It assumes that economics are the chief, if not the only, reason students select a college, and that their chief economic motivation is greed. Unfortunately, the rising cost of a degree forces students to make decisions based on money, which is sad.
(2) Colleges are certainly guilty of fostering the “college-as-business, student-as-customer” paradigm that has the unfortunate side effect of reducing the importance of actual learning. Students who are paying thousands of dollars per class expect high grades: they are paying for this diploma! Learning again takes a back seat to data; grades matter most. By swallowing the specious idea that schools are businesses (rather than institutions of learning with higher goals than mere profit) our colleges and universities have become nothing more than bean counting bureaucracies. Don’t worry: it’s only the students that suffer.
(3) Having said that, it is unfair to blame the colleges and universities entirely for the rising cost of college. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that cuts in state funding to state university systems has a lot to do with it as well. A large percentage of students attend state schools in their home states, and as states cut the budgets for these university systems, tuition goes up.
(4) On a related note, “College for All” is a myopic solution to our problems. It conveniently ignores the fact that jobs that don’t require a college degree have all been outsourced by our large companies that also receive corporate welfare. It also ignores the fact that, for the most part, a college degree is no longer a sure ticket to the middle class. (I don’t know jack about economics, and I really think economics is the science of valuing money more than people; but what happens when the market is FLOODED with workers who all have college degrees? Will jobs materialize for them?)
(5) Accountability: Have you ever noticed that the people who talk about accountability out of one side of their mouths will always deny responsibility for anything out the other, and are only really interested in holding OTHER PEOPLE accountable? Why are the people who write these laws never talking about holding themselves accountable when they don’t work? It’s never the fault of the planners, only of the people they force against their will to put into action a plan that everyone knows is ridiculously bad. If NCLB and RTTT aren’t miracles, it must be the teachers and principals and the students who are at fault; it can’t be that the plan was demonstrably horrendous from the start.
(6) Obama seems to me to have revealed himself as a technocrat, though his “experts” leave much to be desired. If you want to know why technocracy is a bad idea, read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonegut, “The Technological Society” by Jacques Ellul, or “Technopoly” by Neil Postman (among other books). But hurry: soon there won’t be anyone with a liberal arts degree with whom you can discuss strange things like “literature” or “social criticism.”
well said
mainemoxie,
You’ve outlined and detailed splendidly our educational dysfunction.
• The concept of education – and this is true of public education and higher education alike – has been reduced to economics (“jobs,” “global competition”). The notion of a liberal arts education, or more importantly, citizenship education, is all but nonexistent.
• Colleges and universities have helped to foster the dysfunction. Their “leaders” have bought the economics agenda entirely (more endowment cash, higher administrative salaries based on rankings…).
• State legislators have cut back on higher education funding. In many places, they’ve cut K-12 education seriously. It’s not just fallout from the Great Recession either, it’s ideological (think Kansas).
• College may not be for all kids, but all kids should have the option – of college, or vocational training. K-12 education should be focused on equity and democratic citizenship – which certainly requires critical and reflective thinking, and in-and-out-of-school practice. But the fact is that an awful lot of jobs in the near future will NOT require college degrees, and even those that do (STEM) are already glutted. But STEM employers (defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, tech companies) say there’s a “shortage,” and the STEM crisis has been embraced by big business.
See my comment here: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/05/27/how-funny-is-vam-prepare-to-laugh-your-head-off/#comments
• Republicans have yet to hold themselves “accountable.” much less to take any responsibility at all, for the abysmal failure of supply-side economics – which over thirty years has piled up deficits and debt and transferred vast sues from public treasuries to private bank accounts – or the gross error of the Iraq War, which has already drained nearly $2 trillion from what could have been an investment in promoting the general welfare of the country. Those who lobbied hard for supply-side policies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, now champion “accountability” for public schools in order to ensure “economic competitiveness.” You see the nonsense.
• Obama has shown that he really doesn’t know much about, nor apparently does he care much about, teaching and learning and public education. He’s basically bought the “competitiveness” argument(s) of Wall Streeters and corporate “leaders.” Race to the Top and Common Core are his and their babies.
He’s helped them to pass the blame. And that’s a very sad commentary.
This is what now passes for journalistic commentary on the value of higher education (granted, it does make some good points):
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/05/28/316344968/when-college-isnt-worth-it
I say, “It’s time for education to rate our government!” Government: F- 0.00%
Support our 3rd party candidates!
C’mon, Gerri.
You’re not being fair.
I’d give the government an F+.
Welcome to the Land of the Free^TM.
Mr. Obama: you do not want to hear my rating of your administration’s performance.
Bob, you’re too much!
Agreed!!!!
This “accountability” push is only going to work if higher ed has some set of common standards, followed by some common tests.
thenexevel
They are busy standardizing everything as we speak.
Sorry! I wrote thenextlevel and my phone corrected me.
You are forgetting that most working in higher education are low paid workers who don’t make wages they can live on and don’t receive benefits or retirement pensions.
“You are forgetting that most working in higher education are low paid workers who don’t make wages they can live on and don’t receive benefits or retirement pensions.”
Which makes me wonder why the cost of college has gotten so ridiculous? Have their bureaucracies really gotten so big and their salaries so inflated? As far as I can tell, every public service entity that has allowed itself to be consumed by a corporate ethic has ended up costing us far more than we were promised would be saved in efficiency and cost savings.
2old2teach,
I don’t think this is necessarily true. The 70% figure seems to refer to non-tenure stream faculty, not just part time faculty. I have had health and retirement benefits for over 20 years as a non-tenure stream faculty member. When President Obama taught as a lecturer and senior lecturer at Chicago he was part if the 70% of faculty who were off tenure track. I suspect he received benefits as well.
It would be interesting to see a study of the percentage of classes taught by part-time adjuncts not paid any benefits by the institutions employing them. It is no secret that there has been an explosion in the percentage of faculty to whom that applies. We now how millions of at-will adjuncts receiving no benefits and less than a living wage because they are limited to fewer classes than would give them full-time status. TE must know this. He’s an economist for crying out loud.
The best I have been able to find is that the 70% figure refers to non-tenure stream faculty. That 70% includes myself, friends that earn in six figures teaching economics at other state universities, and every senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.
And so it is your assumption based on that observation that a large percentage of the actual teaching in universities is not now done by adjuncts without full-time work and without benefits? This does not accord with my experience. I have known too many people doing just that–teaching a couple classes and trying to get by. And, interestingly, this started happening at the same time that top-level university administrative posts started being filled with people from business and political backgrounds rather than by career educators.
Robert,
I did find this: http://agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforce
At my institution, a public research university, part time adjuncts are most frequently used to teach lower division language courses. My institution teaches around 40 different foreign languages, typically in very small classes for the more obscure ones. If we had to teach classes using only tenure stream faculty, my guess is that we would teach no more than 10 different foreign languages.
For those wishing to learn more about forming a union on your campus, contact
http://adjunctaction.org/
A new documentary film about adjuncts:
Here’s the scam: you continue to market, aggressively, to fill your PhD programs, and at the same time, you increasingly make the positions for those PhDs contingent ones. That decreases salary costs enormously and enables the DRAMATIC increase in administrative salaries.
from the Washington Post:
Between 1975 and 2005, . . . the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.
If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.
I learned this lesson the hard way a while back, as did many of my friends.
The increase in administrator costs has not really been at the provost or dean level, it has come from increased non-faculty student service positions.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/charts-college-presidents-overpaid-pay
Each college or university just has one though. It does not compare to the increase in the number of academic advisors and other support staff.
That’s my understanding as well, TE. And that increase in support staff is largely attributable, I understand, to regulatory compliance.
The high cost of having politicians run our educational system.
Certainly compliance with ADA has increased the number of support staff.
Oh, come on, TE, compliance with a hell of a lot more than ADA.
True, but you might want to distinguish between regulation driven spending that you approve of and regulation driven spending that you think is wasteful.
If your point is that there is good regulation and bad regulation, well, that is quite a revelation, I must say.
I tend think that mandating WHAT IDEAS CAN BE TAUGHT AND LEARNED via government-promulgated “standards” and “standardized tests” is beyond the pale. But then, I don’t care to be ruled by IngSoc.
Regulations about what is taught are not causing the expansion of academic support staff.
Just wait, TE
Those are very much in the works. The post-secondary Common Coring and standardized testing will begin shortly.
These haven’t hit the colleges and universities big time yet, but they will. But junior colleges and community colleges know them very, very well. Lots and lots of work-training programs with very, very specific requirements.
If they have not hit yet, they are unlikely to be the driving force behind increases in administrative costs over the last few years.
I did not say that they were.
And Bill Gates thinks that that’s the model we need for higher ed generally. He talks about this ALL THE TIME. Standardized tests and curricula that have to line up with them to ensure a trained workforce.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/university-president-financial-perks-petraeus
“Let’s face it. We’re addicted. OK? The system is addicted to contingency. It’s the fundamental business model of higher education.
Matt Williams Adjunct Vice President, New Faculty Majority (NFW)
“Administrators are addicted to cheap labor. That’s all it is. I don’t think there are any arguments that contingency is a good thing for anybody. It’s not good for the faculty; it’s not good for the college; it’s not good for the students. It’s particularly not good for the students.”
Suzanne Hudsen, Lecturer, CU-Boulder
“Let’s face it. We’re addicted. OK? The system is addicted to contingency. It’s the fundamental business model of higher education.
–Matt Williams Adjunct Vice President, New Faculty Majority (NFW)
“Administrators are addicted to cheap labor. That’s all it is. I don’t think there are any arguments that contingency is a good thing for anybody. It’s not good for the faculty; it’s not good for the college; it’s not good for the students. It’s particularly not good for the students.”
–Suzanne Hudsen, Lecturer, CU-Boulder
“4C’s has its statement, MLA has its statement, NCTE has its statement, and everybody’s got their statement about why the treatment of adjunct faculty is unjust. . . .and you know, everybody knows. I don’t think there are very many people in our field who don’t understand how bad the situation is.”
–Seth Kahn Associate Professor, West Chester University
I just did a quick count of the adjuncts teaching at the Stern School of Business at NYU. There are an impressive number: 118. It looks like many are part time (one adjunct, for example, also teaches at the City University of London Cass School of Business). Are those the adjuncts we are worried about?
It is important to understand what the numbers mean.
Yeah, TE. That’s what I’m worried about. The occasional highly paid business executive who teaches an occasional evening course because he or she thinks it would be fun to do or would be a nice addition to a resume, not the hundreds of thousands of people trying desperately to make ends meet with a PhD in English, 2 classes to teach at a local university, and a job at Starbucks on Saturday and Sunday.
I agree that about half of all English graduate programs should be closed. You don’t need to train for six years after college to teach first year composition classes. Economics departments have ended up roughly balancing openings and newly minted doctors.
The part time professionals do more than pad their vita, especially in professional schools. It is important to get practitioners into the classroom.
Actually, TE, it takes enormous training to be able to teach composition classes well, though, alas, not enough attention is paid to designing programs that would suit people to being top-notch composition instructors. We’ve decided, for some weird reason, that this most essential skill is something to hand off to warm bodies, perhaps because those most needing the training are the students in whom we don’t wish to put much investment. It’s much a much simpler matter to become an expert in Milton and to teach the Milton course than it is to become an expert in the many, many areas relevant to the teaching of composition, but the folks who teach the Milton class are the highly paid, top-ranted, tenured professors, and the composition instructors are poorly paid contingent workers.
If it were up to me to reconstitute an English Department at a major university, then the position of Professor of Rhetoric and Composition would be the most prestigious and highly paid in that department, most full professors would teach composition classes, including introductory ones, and the department would do a lot of empirical research into topics related to composition and composition instruction. And believe me, that department would move the field far, far past the kind of thing typically done in those intro comp classes. At the height of his fame as a scholar of Romantic literature and hermeneutics, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., chose to teach intro comp classes. Why? Because they matter.
Most English departments (and, for that matter, most language departments) think of themselves as literature departments. The schism is clearest in language departments, where the language acquisition folks are typically looked at as second class scholars and often have difficulty getting tenure.
To our shame, TE, this is so. In my ideal world, that composition professor would know enough about syntax and language acquisition that he or she would understand, looking at a pattern of errors in a kid’s writing, what nonstandard rule of the syntax of the language the kid has internalized and so how to begin to go about fixing that. Among about a billion other things.
Interestingly, Bob, English PhD students don’t get much instruction or do much study in Rhetoric. At least not when I was in grad school. It’s a big mismatch, since I’m sure most of these students go on to teach writing than literature. I would have assumed that there would be a lot more emphasis today on Rhetoric as a field of study than there was 20 years ago. But I don’t know whether that’s actually true.
Yes, I know, FLERP. And while I don’t approve of the government getting into the business of forcing schools to become institutions for implementing its inevitably myopic, backward notions about proper career preparation (to be measured, of course, by standardized tests developed by Pearson/Gates, Inc), it does seem to me that scholars in college and university English departments have been blind to the importance of training for future English teachers in areas such as logic (informal logic, at least) and rhetoric and linguistics. If English teachers, generally, were better trained in linguistics, language acquisition, logic, and rhetoric, much of the CCSS in ELA would have been laughed off the national stage when it first appeared in draft form. I also dream of the emergence of a breed of empirically minded English professors interested in conducting SCIENTIFIC studies of genres, literary forms, and extra-clausal discourse relations. There is a little bit of this work being done, but I hope it really takes off. I especially think that prospective English teachers should take a lot more classes in the linguistics department and dearly wish that linguists themselves would take more interest in the training of teachers, who often have completely uniformed folk notions about matters like how people learn the grammar and vocabulary of a language. Preparation of future teachers with regard to literature also leaves something to be desired. In my entire training as an English teacher, I had only ONE class in children’s literature and NONE in YA lit, and anything I know about those (which is quite a lot) I have learned myself, on the job and/or on my own time.
Think, for example, of the importance of giving writers in training actual audiences and publication opportunities for their work. You would think that, in the internet age, teacher training programs would be teaching future teachers how use web technologies to publish student writing and to do collaborative review. I haven’t seen or heard or read about much of that. There is a lot that could be done to improve English teacher education programs. But if our government gets involved, those programs will be all about training teachers to deliver scripted CCSS lessons in preparation for PARCC or SBAC or whatever other inane, invalid standardized tests replace those once they are revealed to be the disasters that they are.
I just ran across this article and thought it relevant to our discussion of both free university education and high quality faculty.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/olin-college-of-engineering-is-in-the-red/78549?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
TE, are you an adjunct. Most adjunct faculty are paid per course, and they do not earn a living wage.
Being paid per course is not definition used in the Chronicle of Higher Education article, the only source I could find for the 70% figure. That article claimed that 70% of faculty were not tenure stream faculty. By that definition I am counted in the 70%, as is every senior lecturer at the University of Chicago and certainly all the non-tenure stream faculty teaching at the Stern School.
Here again is the link to the Chronicle article: http://chronicle.com/article/Adjuncts-Build-Strength-in/135520/
Slightly off topic, but folks might find this paper interesting: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19406 . It compares student outcomes for classes taught by tenure stream faculty to outcomes from classes taught by non-tenure stream faculty.
This notion that intro comp is EASY and that ANYONE CAN DO IT is a pernicious one. It’s one of the reasons why composition is taught so poorly and why we graduate so few students who can write worth a damn. It’s MUCH easier to teach the Milton class well. And one doesn’t need to know a fraction of the knowledge that is relevant to expert-level teaching of composition.
The real issue is that teaching intro comp is A LOT HARDER and A LOT MORE CHALLENGING and so A LOT LESS FUN TO MOST PEOPLE than is, say, giving that graduate-level seminar on Heidegger and Derrida or Blake or the minor Elizabethan dramatists or whatever. Those upper-level classes allow one to indulge what is already a professional passion.
And so the folks with the power in the departments choose to teach the upper-level courses and to push the comp off onto contingent employees. And that decision has NOTHING WHATSOEVER with teaching intro comp being something anyone can do. If people had given this the slightest thought, they would recognize the truth of what I am saying. Reading Derrida well is difficult, yes. But teaching intro comp well–with actual success–is MORE DIFFICULT by far.
And, as I said, there is far more that is relevant to be known. The ideal composition professor would be a master of syntax, morphology, rhetoric, formal and informal classical and nonclassical logic, probability, discourse analysis, genre studies, stylistics, lexicography, language acquisition, sociolinguistics; psycholinguistics, and philosophy in general and philosophy of language in particular. He or she would also have a broad fundamental command not only of the humanities but also of the basics in scientific and technical fields–an education cutting across curricula in all the other departments of the university.
This, TE, we should have learned from what the AI folks have been doing for decades now: THE THINGS WE THINK OF AS BEING MOST SIMPLE ARE THE HARDEST.
and about them the least is known
and to the extent people think they know, they are generally fooling themselves
cx: uninformed, not uniformed, of course
Wow.. imagine if we were to hold our very own education secretary accountable for the test scores of our students. Why do we stop accountability at the school level? Where does “the buck stop”??? Should it not stop with the one who is enforcing the policy that teachers are increasingly being forced to follow??? Duncan has been in office for quite a while now. If he took his own brand of medicine… he would be looking for a new job while applying for unemployment! The data on him would be abysmal. As for the president … should he not be held ACCOUNTABLE for all he said he was going to do during his campaigning days??? Let’s put together “that” rubric and see how he scores! There is such partisan politics and he was going to build bridges. Every time he goes before Congress, we can see he has failed to build those bridges! Hmmm how would he fare if he was subjected to rubrics and data based on what he was supposed to accomplish??? Was he not famous for saying “Yes we can..” I so hope that Obama does not succeed in ruining the university system of this nation. Imagine if every university had to teach the same exact subjects so that the syllabi were all laid out in cookie cutter fashion…the profs teaching Poli Sci 101 taught exactly the same thing week to week. Is this what we want in what is supposed to be a “free” country? Would this encourage free thinkers or innovation? Diversity of beliefs? Only a moron or someone with undisclosed non education motives could possibly think that the “common corization” of our university system will benefit this nation.
The standardization of college courses has already begun in New Jersey.
Just when I thought we hit rock bottom …. along comes this:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16738/trafficked_teachers_neoliberalisms_latest_globalized_labor_source
breathtaking
I recently read the phrase, “Assuming students are rational actors…” and had to laugh. The writer was proposing an economics-based, data-driven approach to college admission. If there’s anything that students (and their families) are NOT, it’s “rational actors.” This is not to say that they are irrational; I simply mean that despite all the thought and research that may go into the college search, there are far too many non-rational factors to consider when thinking about colleges. However much data one accumulates or however one considers rankings, etc., when the time comes, there’s too much else going on to assume rationality (except for the $$ considerations, and even those can be wildly disregarded, as we see).
Reminds me of my high school physics class when the textbook would say, “Assume a perfect vacuum.”
Other things being equal, you are at imminent risk of receiving an explanation of what “rational actor” means in economics.
I will bite. In economics, rationality is a pretty minimal requirement, basically requiring that people choose consistently.
More to the point here might be Arrow’s theorem applied to multi-criteria decision making. If you want to choose a school based on multiple criteria and want your overall ranking order of schools to be 1) complete (any order of schools is allowed for any of your criteria), 2) to acknowledge unanimity (if school A outranks school B on all your criteria you should rank school A higher than school B), 3) to be transitive (if school A outranks school B and school B outranks school C, school A should outrank school C), and 4) only do pairwise comparison (the overall ranking of school A compared to B should only depend on how school A and school B rank in each of your criteria and not on what you think about school C), the only procedure to guarantee 1-4 is to just pick one of your criteria and use it instead of trying to combine criteria.
IDIOTS….. you all voted for this guy. REAP WHAT YOU SEW.
Not all here voted for this guy. That’s a gross overgeneralization.
True, I should have not generalized in such a broad fashion. Seems like a lot of people in the “education” field are surprised by where our country and education system are going. Remember all the times the work “progressive” was used during the campaigns. This is it! Most of you posting here got what you voted for. We all should have done a bit more research before pulling the “leaver of change”; not once, but twice! I pray for our youth, future, and Country.
The alternative was Mitt Romney, who acknowledged placing his dog in a crate on the top of his car and driving hundreds of miles.
Romney’s explanation of his failure to show his tax returns, could have refuted the rumors about amnesty and UBS.
He could have taken a strong stance in support of all Americans, not just the 1%.
He could have reassured voters that he wouldn’t appoint jurists that think corporations are people when it comes to political spending but, not people, when it comes to liabilities for wrong-doing.
In contrast to the absurd notions of the listeners of AM radio, if the election was held today, the outcome would be the same because the candidates, funded by the far right plutocrats, are abominable.