February 8, 2010 – 10:23 pm
David Moltz over at InsideHigherEd.com writes about the burgeoning “honors programs” at community colleges. These are attracting smarter kids with their lower prices. The research universities would like to believe they can charge top freight forever because the world’s just beating a path to their door, but now they have to compete with these programs. That’s good news, I say.
February 5, 2010 – 3:34 pm
The NYT’s Eric Lichtbau brings us news that the Obama administration is running into some steep resistance from the bankers who might be cut out of the student lending business and replaced by an automatic teller machine at the Department of Education. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of the loans so why bother keeping all of those fancy pants loans salesmen trying to “give aid” to the students. In the end, the loans end up back in the hands of the US government so the layer is pretty useless.
While I admire the guts of the administration to change things, I don’t think it’s setting the target high enough. The private loan brokers don’t add much to the equation and they don’t cost much either when all is said and done. The real cost is the fancy buildings, the high salaries, and the proliferation of “research”. All of those drive up the cost of education.
February 5, 2010 – 3:29 pm
The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Pilon digs a bit deeper into the hypefest from last year and finds that we should be skeptical about the $800,000 extra that supposedly rains down on the heads of those anointed with college degrees. The College Board was just a bit too optimistic. Sure, they were pushing the number $800k on their website, but the survey’s author says that the number is really $450k. Mark Schneider, a skeptic, says that $280k is an even better estimate.
Those numbers are just the average, of course, built by mixing in the pre-law, engineers and football players. The top earning graduates of Stanford often make $2m+ because they go right to the major leagues and their numbers are rolled into these averages. In cases like this, most of us are below average and there’s nothing that Garrison Keillor and the folks from Lake Woebegone can do to gloss it over. Imagine that 1000 people in the class make $30k on graduating and 1 person makes $1 million. Then 1000 are below average and 1 is above average. Yet the College Board wants to talk about averages!
It is entirely possible that more than half of all college degrees are a net loss for student because engineers distort the averages.
February 4, 2010 – 6:17 pm
The highest paid college president in the United States, Shirley Ann Jackson, just got a rejection note from the zoning board. The city’s engineers said the university’s plans to build a 41-44 foot high, 9000 square foot mansion didn’t come with a good enough reason to vary from the past rules. The average humans in the same neighborhood get by with homes that are no more than 25 feet high. RPInsider zooms right in on a nice quote that comes to us courtesy of the Times Union’s Larry Rulison
“I wonder how RPI, which is known for its engineers, why someone couldn’t present a proposal that fits inside the city limits” said the zoning board chairman, Jay Vandenburgh.
February 4, 2010 – 6:07 pm
More education is always better, they say. Who is “they”? I don’t know. Probably someone from the academic industrial complex because it’s just part of the conventional wisdom. If you’re wondering whether it’s true, though, read through some of the comments about this post on TemporaryAttorney. One writes:
Employers view a law license worse than a sexual predator rap sheet. They fear someone who is OVERQUALIFIED and might potentially sue them.
Yeesh.
February 3, 2010 – 4:05 pm
The Onion weighs in with their own wonderfully bitter sarcasm. Enjoy:
“In the process, thousands of graduates have emerged with degrees, but few or no skills applicable to everyday life. And many are as unprepared to enter the job market as they were when they first enrolled.”
February 2, 2010 – 10:30 pm
Jacques Steinberg at the NY Times brings us news that Williams college is bringing back the student loan. For a few years the place tried to follow in the path of Princeton and offer pure grants, but more fiscally tough minds are now in charge.
While I understand the temptation to squeeze the new graduates and get them to pay into the honey pot, I think this is just taking advantage of their position. The stock market bounced back. The campuses are already nice enough. This is a way to make sure that they can create fat jobs for their buddies.
February 2, 2010 – 10:22 pm
Most of the time I sit here thinking that I’m glad I’m not in college facing the huge debt loads. Then every once and a bit I get a wake up call. Richard Vedder over at the Center for College Affordability drew my attention to President Obama’s decision to write much bigger checks to anyone who wants to go to college. As I’m a tax payer and our esteemed government is running a deficit, it means that I’m taking out huge college loans whether I like it or not.
If the education had a chance to help every single person, I might be more for it. But we need to face facts that a college degree is a bit of a luxury. Some engineers might need it, but most people can get along quite well without the idyllic time in Eden pondering the great thoughts. Nurses don’t need general studies before nursing school. Heck, doctors probably don’t need much of those pre-med courses because schools are able to offer catchup degrees for bachelor’s students who change their minds. We don’t need to spend this money.
The worst part is that the schools will probably waste it. When given more aid, they always turn around and boost tuition further. Bigger checks from the government don’t help because the schools just keep squeezing the parents until it hurts. Sigh. I’m beginning to understand why the people in Massachusetts voted for a man who used to be a nude model for Cosmo.
January 31, 2010 – 1:06 pm
Now that the police have found a healthy and self-sufficient Phil Agre, I can make a snarky comment. He was a professor of information sciences at UCLA and then he just stopped coming to work. Finally after a number of months, his family noticed he was gone and took action. Here’s the great sentence fragment from the missing person alert:
“sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.”
Some sweatshop bosses fire people who go to the bathroom without permission and some companies are a bit more lenient. But imagine a business that can’t narrow down the window of disappearance to smaller than six months.
Perhaps he was off doing “research”. Maybe he was on a self-imposed sabbatical. I don’t know. There could be an explanation that I would accept, but the most plausible one to me is that Prof. Agre didn’t have any responsibilities between exams in December 2008 and May 2009. So no one at the university noticed when he wasn’t around. It was his family, not the boss, to notice that they haven’t heard from Uncle Phil in quite a few months.
President Obama wants the taxpayers to cough up more cash to support this world. Most of these taxpayers have bosses that will notice if you’re not showing up for work. I wonder if UCLA cut off Agre’s paychecks yet. Given what I know about universities and tenured folk, Agre’s checks could still be automatically appearing in his account every two weeks. Gotta love academia.
Somewhere there’s a university leader arguing that the taxpayers need to support more excellence like this.
January 30, 2010 – 2:28 pm
Every law school likes to brag about having full employment of its graduates. TemporaryAttorney.com brings us news that Georgetown is hiring its unemployed to help with reviewing the applications for scholarships. It all sounds so nice until TemporaryAttorney points out that the jobs are coming just as the school tries to count the number of employed students at the 9 month mark. I hate to be as cynical as TemporaryAttorney.com, but it’s hard to avoid it.
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