A billionaire with too much money and no vision buys the University of Tulsa.
His plan gutted the liberal arts, raised default teaching loads across the university from five courses per year to eight, eliminated all academic departments, created new divisions to house surviving programs (including one called “Humanities and Social Justice”), and established a “Professional Super College” consisting of the formerly independent colleges of law, health sciences, and business.
The author Jacob Howland is a professor of philosophy at UT.
Depending on whom you ask, Diane Auer Jones has returned to the Education Department with either a mission or a vengeance…
Now, as the chief architect of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s higher education agenda, Ms. Jones is leading the charge to overhaul the accreditation system, and, to critics, revive the fortunes of for-profit organizations that operate low-quality education programs that have a track record of shortchanging students and taxpayers.
Jones is in charge of writing new rules for accrediting agencies that oversee higher education.
I wish you had a subscription to the Los Angeles Times so you could read this article in full. If you do, you should.
The University of Southern California had one of the nation’s best graduate social work programs. In search of more revenue, it made a deal with an East Coast digital startup to establish an online degree in social work, and enrollment ballooned from 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016. The university saved on the cost of dorms and classrooms.
The money was rolling in, but the big beneficiary was the tech company, which kept more than half the revenue and is now valued at more than $2 billion. USC’s once prestigious social work school has lowered its standards to admit students who would not have qualified in the past; its reputation has suffered; and it is “facing a budget crisis so severe that nearly half of the staff may lose their jobs.”
Maryland-based corporation 2U Inc. now services universities around the country and abroad, but it relies on USC for about a fifth of its revenue.
Industry analysts have pressed 2U executives repeatedly about the unfolding situation at the social work school, and the company lowered revenue forecasts last fall, citing in part instability at the Los Angeles university…
Part-time teaching positions are being largely eliminated and professors required to shoulder significantly heavier course loads. A university committee has recommended laying off up to 45% of the non-teaching staff….
2U takes a 60% cut of online tuition from the social work program, and the contract carries onerous penalties if USC breaks the arrangement. People familiar with the agreement told The Times it contains a so-called poison tail that requires the university to continue handing over its revenue share for two years after canceling.
USC’s contract with the company extends to 2030.
The arrangement has been great for 2U. Not so much for USC.
Investor Robert F. Smith was invited to give the commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta. Smith is the wealthiest black man in America, with a fortune estimated at $4-5 billion.
Smith described being bused to a high-performing, predominantly white school across town in Denver, where he grew up. He said he’ll never forget climbing onto bus No. 13 to Carson Elementary.
“Those five years drastically changed the trajectory of my life,” he said. “The teachers at Carson were extraordinary. They embraced me and challenged me to think critically and start to move toward my full potential. I, in turn, came to realize at a young age that the white kids and the black kids, the Jewish kids and the one Asian kid were all pretty much the same.”
After talking about how he achieved success, he dropped his prepared remarks and announced that he was paying all the student debt of the class of 2019, some 400 young men. The students were stunned, then broke into cheers and tears, along with their families.
This was a beautiful act of genuine philanthropy. Mr. Smith is not controlling anyone’s life, he is giving without strings or conditions. I know many readers will react by saying that higher education should be tuition-free, and I agree. But it is not. So for now, I say, thank you for this generous and kind act, Mr. Robert F. Smith.
Since the Washington Post is behind a paywall, here are other sites on which to read this heart-warming story, including a video clip.
As a graduate of an excellent, life-changing women’s college, this story strikes me as bizarre.
Harvard is trying to stamp out single-sex fraternities and sororities. Students who belong to them will be banned from no,ding campus leadership roles. National sororities and fraternities are suing the university for violating their freedom of association, as well they should.
The university says that it wants to stamp out exclusion.
Alan Aja, Joseph Entin, and Jeanne Theoharis identify the true crime in higher education: the abandonment of public higher education by the states and the federal government. The three authors are professors at Brooklyn College, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY).
They write:
The biggest scandal in American higher education today is the staggering disinvestment in public universities like CUNY, even as politicians and the public pay lip service to abhorring the inequalities in higher education. What would it mean to view as scandalous the well-documented decline in federal and state funding of public universities across the country over the last 25 years, at the same time students have been expected to shoulder the cost of those “missing expenditures” through tuition hikes (amid other persistent cuts to federal and state financial aid and vital support services)? What would it mean to view self-declared “education governor” Andrew Cuomo of New York as a part of the problem for the ways he has underfunded public universities in the state and to see members of the public who allow this as his accomplices? What would it mean to see the scandal that the broken ceiling exposes as part of a larger systemic problem directly tied to the current state budget’s continued underfunding of CUNY (which once again this time around, fell dramatically short)?
Nearly a quarter of a million undergraduates attend the City University of New York, and they are caught in a vicious bind. Tuition for CUNY — which was free until 1975 — has risen by 31% since 2011. It now stands at $6,730 for full-time students at CUNY’s senior colleges on top of the high costs of housing, food, transportation, books and other personal expenditures in New York City, where the majority of students attending CUNY come from families with incomes of $30,000 or less.
At the same time, CUNY’s per-pupil funding declined by 18% between 2008 and 2018.
Think of it. Students used to be able to enroll in a public university at minimal cost, or none at all. Now, they are saddled with debt for years after they finish college–if they finish. As Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote in her prize-winning book “Paying the Price,” the main reason that low-income students drop out of college is not because of their lack of motivation or ability, but because they can’t afford to pay the costs.
John Merrow noted the intense media attention on the recent college admission scandal, where rich parents found ways to buy higher test scores or pay for guarantees of admissions by pretending they were star athletes or paying off coaches to ask for them to be admitted or hiring a ringer to take the SAT for them.
He offers eight ways to repair the college admissions process.
Here are a few of his recommendations.
1) Elite colleges should stop participating in the annual US News & World Report college rankings process. Just stop! Because US News uses a college’s rate of rejection as an important measure of its quality, many colleges have stepped up their efforts to recruit applicants–just so they can turn them down. After all, the more it turns down, the better US News says it must be. If Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, MIT, Stanford et alia just said NO to US News, that would be a step in the right direction.
2) Get rid of the common application. It’s now too easy for high school students to apply to dozens of colleges with one keystroke, and many kids do just that, particularly if their parents don’t mind paying the fees. If we want to level the playing field, then colleges should do more reaching out to high schools in low- and moderate-income schools and help students apply.
By the way, the US News frenzy and the common application changed the admission process dramatically between our coverage of Williams in 1986 and Amherst in 2004. In 1986 prior to the common application, every application was read by at least two members of the committee, and the entire committee met as a whole for days (often arguing passionately about particular candidates). However, by 2004 the flood of applications had forced Amherst to establish a SAT/ACT cutoff point; applicants below a certain number were rejected without a reading. In 2004 Amherst had what amounted to two committees, which met and admitted and rejected candidates separately.
3) Administer–free of charge–the PSAT to all high school sophomores and juniors, because that test is a good indicator of talent and potential. It might be an eye-opener for many kids in low income areas, because now many of them don’t even try to apply to “elite” colleges because they feel they don’t or won’t qualify; their PSAT scores might help change their minds. Always remember that talent is randomly distributed, while test scores are closely related to parental income.
There are eight in all. Read them and see what you think. Equitable funding of all high schools is another.
Research indicates that a student’s four year record reveals more about his or her college readiness than either of the two big standardized tests.
Wealthy parents have always had advantages, including the ability to pay tutors to help their children.
Now we see that some parents paid to have someone take the test for their childor change the answers from wrong to right.
Fairtest has long kept count of the number of colleges and universities that have gone “test-optional.” The number now exceeds 1,000. The elite University of Chicago joined the list.
One thing is clear: from NCLB To the SAT, American schools place far too much emphasis on standardized tests.
When I first heard about a federal investigation of cheating and rigging of the college admissions process on behalf of wealthy people willing to pay, I completely misjudged the ramifications. I was not surprised.
Why was I not surprised? I was not surprised because admission to elite colleges and universities has long been rigged, though not as blatantly as the latest scheme. In the present story, ringers were paid to take the tests, and test answers were changed by proctors on behalf of students whose parents paid the price. That’s awfully blatant.
The old-time rigging was more subtle. Start with legacy admissions. If the college had eight applicants for every place, a student whose parent or sibling went to the same institution was likely to be admitted despite his or her grades or scores. That’s unfair.
Then there is the rigging that occurs when the college puts too much weight on the SAT or ACT, which favors students from wealthy homes, who have gone to the best schools and had advantageous life experiences. Numerous studies, including some released by the testing companies, acknowledge that the GPA (grade point average) is a better predictor of college success than the college admission test taken on a single day. That is why more than 1,000 colleges and universities have become “test-optional.” Go to the Fairtest website to see the list of test-optional institutions of higher education.
The scores on the SAT/ACT are also affected by tutoring, which is a function of parental income. So, not only do wealthy families begin with a big advantage, they can multiply their advantage by paying for tutors who are skilled in training students to raise their scores. Tutors can be very expensive. They may costs hundreds of dollars an hour. This skews the admissions process yet again towards those with money.
It would have been far simpler for the families involved in the present scam to pay a tutor $5,000-10,000, and they would have not been investigated by the FBI.
But there is one more way to get preferential treatment. Give a large gift to the college or university shortly before your child applies for admission. Daniel Golden, a journalist then at the Wall Street Journal, now at ProPublica, wrote a book in 2006 called The Price of Admission, about how wealthy people gave money to get their children into elite colleges. He referred to a little-known family named Kushner in New Jersey. A real-estate developer named Charles Kushner, who had graduated from New York University, made a gift of $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. Not long after, his son Jared was admitted to Harvard.
Golden wrote:
I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.
