Perry's $10,000 degree
Rick Perry made some headlines by announcing his challenge to offer a college degree that only costs $10,000 total, including textbooks, over the course of 4 years. I wouldn't call it a proposal since Perry didn't suggest concrete ways to reduce the price; he just said colleges should think of ways to do it. The NYT then had a Room for Discussion piece on this challenge where they invited educators, administrators, people from think tanks to elaborate on what it would take to achieve such a goal (or how unrealistic a goal it is). The Texas think tank wonk obviously supported it, giving euphemistic suggestions of how to achieve it, like discontinuing the humanities, eliminating tenure, having online courses, etc. He, of course, did not mention what kind of an education that would result in. But there were a few others among the commentators, including professors, who saw such a policy as potentially workable, even if only partly.
I read all the commentary and out of the 12 commentators, I was disappointed that only two (Gaye Tuchmann and Marc Johnson) questioned the premise that college costs have risen dramatically. The costs have indeed risen, but they are not the main reason for increased tuition. The main cause for the increased tuition at public universities is the drastic reduction of state funding for higher education, forcing more of the cost of public universities on students in the form of tuition. Tuchmann and Johnson each give numbers at several representative states; colleges have not increased their costs as much as states have cut their support of education.
It was disheartening reading some of the replies to Tuchmann's analysis, some of which questioned just what period she was referring to as the good old days of public education. Um, if you read, she said exactly the period: the 1970s when states covered 85% of the cost of their public universities, as opposed to 10-25% now. Then there's the comments that attack her personally, such as the first one, which accuses her of being part of the problem for "only" teaching 6 hours a week. It's the same fallacious argument you hear with elementary and high school teachers, where work time is equated with class time. Sorry, but the clock isn't punched when you enter the classroom, it's punched much, much earlier. I'm glad that someone took these people to task in the comments (otherwise I would have):#29. HBdano's comment reminds me of how much folks outside of university-level teaching misconstrue the work that goes into preparing two class sessions a week. Crafting lectures that are engaging, informed by the most recent scholarship, and that fit within the arc of a class -- meaning that each class is designed to meet short-term and long-term goals -- takes an enormous amount of time that is not measured in face-to-face class time. I challenge HBdano to study a topic; prepare multiple lectures; work on classroom activities that will allow students to discover skills and ideas under their own steam; craft those results into the arc of the class; advise students; hold office hours multiple times a week; devote time to department administrative duties--such as planning how to work alongside the administration to grow course offerings in light of changes in areas of study or fostering student learning opportunities outside the classroom; supervise internships and independent studies, which are classes in themselves; stay current on the developments in her field; and produce her own scholarship so she remains in the conversations of her area of study. I do all of this as a professor at a small liberal arts college and I, and my professor wife, work nearly 70 hrs a week. (Oh, we also live in different states because of the incredble difficulty to locate tenure-line jobs at the same college.)
Most likely, Prof. Tuchman has a 6-credit load because she has been given a course release, or more, to run other administrative aspects of the college. If you have no idea what it's like to be a professor in the majority of American college and universities -- if, for instance, you imagine wood-paneled offices with whiskey and leisurely reading thanks to the ridiculous popular representations your(sic) fed on TV and movies, try our jobs for a bit before you dare suggest we work so little.
I also liked the comment right after that one: According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the average price of a new car sold in the United States is $28400. Many people get 5-10 years of use out of their cars. In this context does seem that a $10,000 degree that must for many last a lifetime be just a wee bit under priced?
The main thing that needs to occur to make universities affordable again is for states to get behind funding their universities again. After that, you can consider other factors that are driving up costs, many of which are unavoidable (lab equipment is just that much more expensive nowadays to do work that students need training for). The blame for increased costs often falls on professors who are vilified as not doing enough work, whereas the place where university costs have ballooned is administration. But, again, the general public doesn't have a good enough idea of how public universities are run and funded in order to know this.
And, really, think about how that $10,000 would pay for the university. That's $2,500 a year from each student, to cover all the costs of running the university: professors, administrators, building maintenance, facilities, etc., as well as the student's costs like books or lab equipment. Even if these courses were online, you'd still have staff maintaining the webpages and servers (and IT staff isn't exactly cheap!). How big would these courses be? And therefore, how much learning would actually occur in these classes? I know from my own teaching experience: students don't learn that much in 300+ student lectures -- for most students, all the learning occurs in 25 student recitation sections (which have another instructor, by the way), where the instructor can give more personal attention to the student's learning. If, say, such a course were done online, the learning would be impinged by yet another barrier from being the personal teaching that works best. This is not just me talking anecdotally, but rather there have been many academic studies of learning environments that have isolated personal attention as the biggest factor contributing to learning.
It's an insult to have a man who has cut education funding so severely suggest that he has an idea of how to save higher education for the general public. I'm also sure that after having graduated with a 2.5 GPA in animal sciences from Texas A&M, Perry would have a strong idea of what education involves. Yeah, right. Even Barbara Bush was so alarmed by what Perry wrought to Texas education that she wrote an op-ed piece pleading for some education funding to be spared. No such luck. This is not the man we want in charge of our nation's education and it alarms me to think that he is a front candidate for the presidency.
I read all the commentary and out of the 12 commentators, I was disappointed that only two (Gaye Tuchmann and Marc Johnson) questioned the premise that college costs have risen dramatically. The costs have indeed risen, but they are not the main reason for increased tuition. The main cause for the increased tuition at public universities is the drastic reduction of state funding for higher education, forcing more of the cost of public universities on students in the form of tuition. Tuchmann and Johnson each give numbers at several representative states; colleges have not increased their costs as much as states have cut their support of education.
It was disheartening reading some of the replies to Tuchmann's analysis, some of which questioned just what period she was referring to as the good old days of public education. Um, if you read, she said exactly the period: the 1970s when states covered 85% of the cost of their public universities, as opposed to 10-25% now. Then there's the comments that attack her personally, such as the first one, which accuses her of being part of the problem for "only" teaching 6 hours a week. It's the same fallacious argument you hear with elementary and high school teachers, where work time is equated with class time. Sorry, but the clock isn't punched when you enter the classroom, it's punched much, much earlier. I'm glad that someone took these people to task in the comments (otherwise I would have):#29. HBdano's comment reminds me of how much folks outside of university-level teaching misconstrue the work that goes into preparing two class sessions a week. Crafting lectures that are engaging, informed by the most recent scholarship, and that fit within the arc of a class -- meaning that each class is designed to meet short-term and long-term goals -- takes an enormous amount of time that is not measured in face-to-face class time. I challenge HBdano to study a topic; prepare multiple lectures; work on classroom activities that will allow students to discover skills and ideas under their own steam; craft those results into the arc of the class; advise students; hold office hours multiple times a week; devote time to department administrative duties--such as planning how to work alongside the administration to grow course offerings in light of changes in areas of study or fostering student learning opportunities outside the classroom; supervise internships and independent studies, which are classes in themselves; stay current on the developments in her field; and produce her own scholarship so she remains in the conversations of her area of study. I do all of this as a professor at a small liberal arts college and I, and my professor wife, work nearly 70 hrs a week. (Oh, we also live in different states because of the incredble difficulty to locate tenure-line jobs at the same college.)
Most likely, Prof. Tuchman has a 6-credit load because she has been given a course release, or more, to run other administrative aspects of the college. If you have no idea what it's like to be a professor in the majority of American college and universities -- if, for instance, you imagine wood-paneled offices with whiskey and leisurely reading thanks to the ridiculous popular representations your(sic) fed on TV and movies, try our jobs for a bit before you dare suggest we work so little.
I also liked the comment right after that one: According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the average price of a new car sold in the United States is $28400. Many people get 5-10 years of use out of their cars. In this context does seem that a $10,000 degree that must for many last a lifetime be just a wee bit under priced?
The main thing that needs to occur to make universities affordable again is for states to get behind funding their universities again. After that, you can consider other factors that are driving up costs, many of which are unavoidable (lab equipment is just that much more expensive nowadays to do work that students need training for). The blame for increased costs often falls on professors who are vilified as not doing enough work, whereas the place where university costs have ballooned is administration. But, again, the general public doesn't have a good enough idea of how public universities are run and funded in order to know this.
And, really, think about how that $10,000 would pay for the university. That's $2,500 a year from each student, to cover all the costs of running the university: professors, administrators, building maintenance, facilities, etc., as well as the student's costs like books or lab equipment. Even if these courses were online, you'd still have staff maintaining the webpages and servers (and IT staff isn't exactly cheap!). How big would these courses be? And therefore, how much learning would actually occur in these classes? I know from my own teaching experience: students don't learn that much in 300+ student lectures -- for most students, all the learning occurs in 25 student recitation sections (which have another instructor, by the way), where the instructor can give more personal attention to the student's learning. If, say, such a course were done online, the learning would be impinged by yet another barrier from being the personal teaching that works best. This is not just me talking anecdotally, but rather there have been many academic studies of learning environments that have isolated personal attention as the biggest factor contributing to learning.
It's an insult to have a man who has cut education funding so severely suggest that he has an idea of how to save higher education for the general public. I'm also sure that after having graduated with a 2.5 GPA in animal sciences from Texas A&M, Perry would have a strong idea of what education involves. Yeah, right. Even Barbara Bush was so alarmed by what Perry wrought to Texas education that she wrote an op-ed piece pleading for some education funding to be spared. No such luck. This is not the man we want in charge of our nation's education and it alarms me to think that he is a front candidate for the presidency.