"Why College Is Never Coming Back"

I think any reform has to be more than a tax increase. There needs to be some slashing of services as well. It’s great fun for colleges to be a grand experience, but the focus has to return to education. Maybe students should get their counseling off campus. Maybe title IX issues should be handled off campus. Maybe there can be a consolidation of extra degree programs. Most colleges have a dozen different degree programs that could easily fit within a politcal science or sociology department. Maybe if the ratio of expenditures going to faculty vs admininstration is too low, the college doesn’t quality for federal assistance. Certainly, much of the money going to research grants could go to tuition instead. The public does not need to fund theoretical chemistry experiments that are just run on a desktop. None, or at least much less, of the pubic money should be going to private schools for research or anything else. If the NIH/DOD/NSF grant money went to public universities, you’d see a shift as the best scientists move from Harvard to Michigan.

This is what was lacking from Warren’s and Sanders’ “free college” plans. They were just planning to make all colleges free by footing whatever bill the colleges hand out. You have to also force colleges to keep costs in check or none of it works.

And, again, you only offer the discount to in state students. It’s fun but economically inefficient for students to leave their home state for college. Everyone should have an option for higher ed where they can work their way through school without debt.

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He’s right though. The ever increasing cost is due in part to the availability of loans of any size. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

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@Guba noted the decline in funding from the state from the 1980s, resulting in higher tuition, which contributed to the student loan crisis.

The University of Utah is a research university, now in the AAU. Over the past 10 years or so, the amount of funding from federal research entities has also suffered, notably during the Great Recession and from Sequestration budget cuts.

Where high quality, highly productive researchers could once expect about a 40% likelihood of having their grant applications filled, with funding provided to perform important research - which has frequently led to commercial spinoffs, such as Myriad Genetics - the “batting average” of researchers fighting for a smaller piece of the federal funding pie is now about 20%. This has led to researchers becoming full-time grant seekers, to the detriment of mentoring and leading the actual research effort.

Earlier this year, before Covid turned our society & world upside down, there were some high disturbing stories of high level researchers getting ensnared in providing research findings to China, for money. This rocked the wider research community, for good reason. (I don’t know of instances of this happening at the U).

One of my colleagues - not a researcher - responded “what do people think is going to happen as the funding for people’s livelihoods becomes scarce? Do reasonable people think seasoned researchers are supposed to become school teachers?”. In the China pay-for-research scandal, none of the researchers implicated were foreign, or even of Asian descent.

We’ve already had instances of high level researchers leaving for different countries - Singapore, the UK, Germany, Australia - where it’s not a continuous battle to find funding.

Beyond sequestration, the tax reform of 2017 has led to unthinkable budget deficits during (then) a boom economy. This increases the pressure to constrain research funding.

Before Covid, I was personally seeing an outflow of well respected, published researchers, for the variety of reasons above, and a less welcoming public atmosphere for immigrants, especially from non-white countries.

One of my colleagues, deciding to return to India after being in the US for a decade, confided “When we were undergrads back in India, the US was the place to be, for healthcare research. The best students in our classes were competing to see which US universities they could get into for PhD programs. That’s really not the perception anymore. It’s a much bigger world, the US is not the only place to consider, and fewer students are looking at coming to America.”

Some of the funding pressure is being taken off by philanthropists, but the historic challenge of universities has been that donors like to see their names on buildings, but aren’t so interested in funding ongoing operations.

If the current trend continues, I wouldn’t be surprised to see America’s best & brightest HS students interested in healthcare research starting to look for opportunities outside the US.

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Universities need to do a better job. When I went to the U it was very much possible for anyone to work the summer and pay your tuition for a year (assuming you were covered for living expenses). Not at all possible any more. Next, 4 years is way to long to get someone ready for the workforce. Later in life I realized 12 weeks of training in the military (IT) was more comparable than you can imagine to degrees that included 2 Pac 12 schools and a Cali JC, 2 in IT and 1 in Business. Even better I was paid to take the military training and they covered 2 of the 3 others thru grad school. The military training could have sustained me thru a career. I was not smart enough to plan this, I owe my good fortune to the draft.

This is a very interesting subject, and I’m now sorry I started the thread with that partially persuasive, partially over-the-top op-ed.

Anyway, on the topic of free expression, academic freedom, and the first amendment, this is an interesting piece by David French. I don’t share David‘s religious beliefs, I’ve never heard of Mike Adams until today, and based on the tweets quoted here, I doubt I would think much of Adams. Still, I think the points David makes here are interesting. I’m most interested in what happened at Adams‘s university.

Paid $4,100 for two semesters and wants a refund I guess :flushed:

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This is accurate. In most cases profs aren’t even lecturing- rather, they are providing the course materials/assignments/exams and telling students to complete them by certain dates. Does anyone think that’s worth the cost they’re charging?

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My daughter-in-law is working on her masters degree in healthcare administration through Grand Canyon University. She was taking a class on statistics, and she could not get a tutor to help her - the ones who could supposedly help her kept bouncing her around saying that what she was studying was not in their field of expertise - and the professor refused to respond to her emails or offer any instruction beyond what was in the book. She queried some of her classmates and found that they were having a similar experience. I encouraged her to email the administration to share her concerns, but she did not feel like her concerns would be heard. She wound up dropping the class, but she will still need to take it later. I hope that her experience is better next time, but I worry about it.

My opinion is that the entire education system needs to be revamped, but I don’t think we have the stomach to do it. I think that instead of using the 19th century model that still overarches the education system today, we should start teaching to the jobs that we have today. I think that in 2nd grade, 5th grade and 8th grade kids should be tested for their aptitude and assigned to a course of education that is best suited for the child. By the time 8th grade is done, I think that kids are pretty well established in their learning patterns and it is pretty evident whether they would benefit from a college education or not. (At least I could tell with my kids.)

If the kids show an aptitude towards a college education, then let’s have them take more CE classes to reduce the amount of time they have to spend on generals at university to reduce the debt they accumulate. If the kids do not demonstrate a desire for college, then let’s put them through trade schools. Again, sit down with parents in 2nd and 5th grade to explain to the parents the trajectory their kid is on so that it is not a surprise in 8th grade, and if they really want Suzy to be a doctor, they can get tutoring or whatever to help her get on the path they want her to be on. I just know that my oldest would have benefitted far more from taking auto repair classes with basic English and math classes (maybe you could even teach kids how to create budgets for their auto repair shop instead of Calculus) than the classes to prepare him for college that he never intended to attend.

Following the 19th century model of taking summers off to work on the farm makes no sense in this world anymore. We need to remove the stigma from trades and let kids know that there is great value to society - and good money to be made - in doing manual labor. While I feel that there is value in a university education, it is not the end-all anymore. I mean, I studied music and eventually got a degree in Poli Sci with a minor in Spanish, after which I have spent the last 22 years as an application and database analyst. So while my degree gives me fun things to discuss, it has very little bearing on my career.

Like I said at the beginning, I doubt that we will change the way things have always been done. Until we do, however, I think that we can expect to continue to fall further behind the rest of the world in the quality of our education.

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I can say that while I probably did start to lean a bit more left than when I entered, it wasn’t really that far of a jump. And, tbh, after law school, my legal interpretation became more strict by the letter interpretation but I leaned policy wise more towards the left.

I imagine there are a lot of people like me who are maybe slightly different but not substantially so.

What I’ve seen in my experience is that STEM professors have become primarily researchers, meaning they become primarily full-time grant seekers (leaving research to the post-docs & grad students), and don’t focus as much on the teaching aspect. There are some that are good at and love teaching, but Universities are seeking professors that can bring in the grants and the money. They also throw some kickstarter money at them to set up labs. At some higher level schools, they will hire two former post-docs (hard to get in as a professor straight out of PhD at high level universities due to supply/demand) for 1 tenure track position and let them compete. This drives a terrible work-life and frankly, I’ve seen more foreign professors willing to pay that price for their career, which can make it harder for students on the education front (not trying to bash foreigners, but clear language and communication needs to be evaluated). Performance is based on research dollars and papers published. As long as teaching is adequate (read, at least mediocre), administrators are content. As long as they serve on a couple committees and check that box, they look the other way.

Universities are incentivized to raise prices to offer more amenities to attract students to gain prestige and rankings to attract better professors (and provide their cheap undergrad/grad labor force) to attract more grant money (of which the university gets a good chunk) and the cycle repeats. Loans fuel the fire and banks happily participate with a guaranteed return.

I think some of this is because government and private labs have decreased and outsourced research to universities. There used to be major labs like Bell labs, Kodak, GE that had massive research centers (there are still some, but fewer and less funded). Corporations wanted to eek out more profit and the investments were not helping quarterly earnings. There are still government labs (my dad was a career guy at one) but they are more narrow in focus. I just think this feeds the shift of where the money is going and how it has changed the purpose of Universities and the vision on what the real goals are (primarily to provide the workforce for the state/region). Universities just seem to have lost their way in the pursuit of money and prestige/rankings.

Edit: for full disclosure, I received an M.S. and Ph.D. in a STEM area and benefited from the system - getting free tuition and fees and a modest stipend ($15k-$20k/year) and scraped a few fellowships or scholarships together. When evaluating staying in academia to continue research and teaching, it was the continuous grant-writing that turned me off and I decided to work in the private sector (and a couple years at a gov’t lab). But I’ve seen the career path of grad-student colleagues. Actually, the professors usually don’t get rich of the research. They are limited to their 9-month salary and can add 3 months from research. In return the tenure provides job security and sometimes they then ramp down the hours, but usually their research is their passion anyway. Money goes to equipment (which improvements help with future research), grad student costs, but the university overhead/cut is crazy.

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