[W]ith his 2011 state of the state address, . . . Perry challenged Texas's public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10,000 in tuition, fees, and books, and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.
The idea met with skepticism. . . . Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, posed the rhetorical question: "Do you really want a stripped-down, bare-bones degree?" . . .
If these reactions suggested Perry was out of step with the higher-education establishment, the public's reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers. Baselice and Associates conducted a public-opinion survey commissioned by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently. Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost.Now that the program is solidly launched, showing some success, and being emulated in other states, critics fume that the degrees are substandard "applied science" affairs, as if that were a bad thing. Myself, I look forward to the trend gaining traction in a broader field of academia. My own college degree would have cost about $10K if my folks had had to pay cash (instead, it was a perk that reflected in part my father's modest salary). Admittedly, it was a diffuse liberal-arts kind of degree that left me ill-prepared to earn a living, but it got me into law school, where my subsequent degree cost only a few hundred dollars for each of three years, being, presumably, heavily subsidized by the backward state of Texas. Once I had that one, it was no problem earning a living.
It's true that this was thirty years ago and that there has been inflation since then, but inflation doesn't account for a 440% increase in tuition over the last quarter century, and anyway my university was expensive in comparison with state schools, even if it was a bargain next to the Ivy League. Nor am I persuaded that today's youth are receiving fabulous educations that are 4-1/2 times as valuable as my cut-rate affair, either from an intrinsic point or view or in terms of being able to get and stay employed. Wherever the extra money is going, it's not making the difference between a good education and a "stripped-down degree."
As for where tomorrow's students are going to receive their essential political indoctrination, well, if the public primary education complex and the media can't find some way to pull that off, then there must be some progressive foundations that can cough up the necessary funding.
On a related subject, I'm enjoying Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World," about Finland's astounding success in catapulting its education success to the top of the world in only a few years. Did they do it by spending a bunch of money? Did their kids suddenly get smarter? Did they implement more and better tests and national curricula? No, they started hiring teachers only out of the top quarter or so of their classes, then gave them a lot of autonomy. Magic.
4 comments:
I firmly believe that most Universities have priced themselves out of the value of the degrees they are issuing. Furthermore, I submit that a degree (except in a few specialized fields such as law and medicine) does not actually demonstrate a level of mastery to a potential employer. Instead it shows the employer that the graduate is trainable and has a modicum of discipline. My own degree in Computer Science taught me very little practical knowledge which is applicable to my job (even though I am in the IT industry). But thankfully, I got mine on the GI Bill and at a reasonably priced State school here in Georgia.
I went to an expensive private school in the middle of Iowa. There, we had a PhysEd requirement, for the health of our bodies--all four credits worth, spreadable over the four years. And it could be satisfied by taking a fencing course, playing golf, jogging around an indoor track for awhile....
But we also had a physics department whose electron microscope was, at the time, the most powerful in the state. Our Psych program had an animal surgery that was as good as most in the state.
We also had a Faraday cage, the only one in the state at the time, in which we could conduct our experiments on pick-a-neuron in a rat (or cat--dogs were too expensive) brain.
We built the cage ourselves--the prof who had the idea after one of my rat implants picked up WLS out of Chicago and a couple of us students. With materials and money we generated on our own. The long pole in the tent was the bureaucratic one of getting the college's permission to build the thing in the basement of one of our buildings. That took about 10 minutes, including the walk to the President's office.
We didn't build the electron microscope ourselves, but not everything in a college education needs to come from OPM.
I'm not sure a college degree really can be had for $10k, but Perry is on the right track. There's nothing wrong with an AB (because my school was cool) in Physics or Psych, though, that does Physics or Psych as the actual concentration rather than an area of partial attention in among all the froo froo that schools currently require. That sort of degree would drive down costs to nearly $10k.
Eric Hines
I would also like to comment on the "stripped down degree" thing. Much of my required course credits had absolutely nothing to do with Computer Science, nor with even a general Bachelor's of Science degree. The general argument is that you need to have a foundation in history, philosophy, art, music, literature, and so on, in order to be a well rounded student. And I know Grim has previously proposed that "specialization is for insects". I'm not even going to say that's incorrect. But having some choice in whether I want to spend thousands of extra dollars (or in the case of some schools, tens of thousands) for the privilege of being well rounded vice getting a core curriculum degree might be one way to keep the costs down.
But I would submit that the universities would never sit still for that option. Why? Because it directly takes money out of there revenue stream. Having one or two years worth of coursework that has nothing to do with the students' majors is just too much money for them to allow students to bypass paying. So they will continue to insist on those "core classes".
And finally, I would posit that perhaps the Bachelor's Degree is not the place for a "well rounded education". No one argues that someone seeking an advanced degree of a Masters or Doctorate needs to take a public speaking class (outside of perhaps an advanced communications degree), and yet we require it in what is generally considered the prerequisite degree for "professionals"? If one has not acquired some rounding through High School, I don't know how much is going to be imparted through a single semester course in "Humanities" that the student takes, not out of interest, but out of necessity. I had my love for reading well before I ever attended college. I was frankly bored stiff in the literature classes from college. And in fact, I can't actually recall a work of literature that we were required to study for those classes. So if the intent was to make me a more well rounded person, I guess time has worn me back into my original form.
If the circus documented over at Legal Insurrection is any indication, our colleges suffer from having too much money.
There is an entire cottage industry comprised of people who allegedly hold teaching positions, but actually engage in political organizing.
The segment of the cottage industry that is currently being examined is the "BDS" "movement," which is an anti-intellectual, anti-historical advertising arm of HAMAS. Their entire purpose seems to be to slander, isolate, and silence students and teachers from one country -- Israel. The information about Israel's alleged sins is false, and derived from the HAMAS advertising campaign against Israel.
Another segment is occupied with creating more teaching positions to fund more political activism.
A recent example is the "student demands" for a list of budget items at Dartmouth.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/04/dartmouth-grievance-list-designed-to-ensure-mlk-jr-s-dream-never-comes-true/
That document is a treat to read, and it did not come from a bunch of people in their late teens or early twenties. It essentially is a demand that Dartmouth finance their favorite political causes by hiring teachers for fluff positions.
Valerie
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