Posted on 05/18/2016 7:12:06 AM PDT by MichCapCon
The Michigan Legislature is currently debating how much more it should spend on the state’s public universities. Gov. Rick Snyder and the Senate want to spend an extra $64 million while the House wants to spend an extra $51.6 million. These amounts would increase current spending by 3.4 to 4.2 percent, which is well above inflation.
Total state spending for public universities is at $1.5 billion, though the amount each institution receives varies widely. And what are we getting for that money? Not much.
Proponents argue that more college spending means more college degrees and a better-educated citizenry, which means a more prosperous state. But that proposition is not supported by the data.
Here is a chart comparing a state government’s spending on higher education and the state’s educational attainment. The vertical axis is the percent of a state’s population with a bachelor’s degree or higher while the horizontal axis is per capita spending on colleges. If there were a correlation, the dots would move higher from the left to right. They don’t.
As you can see, there is no correlation. But perhaps there is an anomaly in there. What about looking at this over a longer period of time?
Here is the same chart, but looking at states over nearly a decade, from 2005 to 2013.
State Higher Education Spending and Degrees, 2005-2013
Again, a basic look at the data provides no evidence that more spending will lead to a more educated population. If anything, there is a negative relationship.
If lawmakers are interested in improving the overall education levels of its residents, then simply increasing the tax dollars given to state universities is a poor way of accomplishing the goal. The state would be better served by discussing how to reduce the level of taxpayer dollars going to state universities and using that money for something else (or letting citizens keep the money).
Screwed up kids, voters for Bernie.
I would wager that over half of the university degrees granted are worthless.
I would venture to say most of the money goes for more staff, upgrading facilities beyond plush and salaries.
The reason the price of higher education has increased at up to several times the rate of inflation over the years is because of unbridled government spending. Basically anything the government gets its hands into turns to crap. We find professors like Elizabeth Warren, fake “Native American” getting paid huge salaries for doing very little work.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth Warren is becoming more the rule than the exception. One of my uncles spent over a decade hanging around collecting degrees at universities. Now he feels entitled to collect a very large salary because he is so highly educated. But he didn’t spend all that time at college because he wanted to make himself an extremely valuable commodity; he did it because he was a hippie trying to avoid having to make his way into the real world for over a decade. Thanks to the government many people like him who are life long malingerers are currently collecting huge salaries for doing very little.
I would wager your estimate is too low.
Yeah but the school administrators get six figure salaries, so what so they care.
Once again, subsidies encourages graft.
Eliminate ALL diversity staff and programs. That will free up some cash.
History tells a lot of this story.
Before 1945, most university operations consisted of professors, some minor support staff, and a chancellor. It’s after the G I Bill came along and massive expansion of college staffs (not really the professors) that this all screwed up the economics or pricing of operation.
If you dig down into normal state-sponsored colleges today, you find that they are primarily run (class-delivery) by very junior professors or professors without tenure.
For most university operations to keep their “Micky Mantle-status” professors on the staff....they have to agree to only limited classes. This generally means that for every ten professors that you ought to have on the staff....in reality, you end up with sixteen to eighteen people doing what ten ought to do.
My general solution for fixing a lot of this...unless some state governor wanted to open a hornets nest and demand changes....is to create two tuition rates. The first for first and second years of college would relate toward trying to keep kids to limit their education to an associates degree (probably what sixty-percent of the kids should be aiming at today). Then the third and fourth classes...I’d double in cost for the students and make it a hefty amount, which you’d have to ask the question....will you ever get the money back via salary. In three or four years...the shift in attendance would start to occur, and we’d downsize the university program to the point where it should be.
Reform is easy. It begins with a state legislator saying that the *purpose* of government funding for universities is so that students will be able to get better jobs than they could with just a high school diploma.
Then that legislator holds up a list of college majors offered by the university, which also lists how many students were hired in that field of study within six months after graduation.
At the top of the list will be majors like nursing, that is an expensive degree, but almost guaranteed job placement; along with subjects like criminal justice.
At the bottom of the list will be majors like ethnic and gender studies, literature, drama, some specialized political science and history degrees, some psychology and counseling degrees, etc.
While these may be enjoyable for the students, they do not fit in the “better jobs” reason for subsidy. So while those courses should still be offered, they must be fully paid by the student, not the government.
And this means not just the state government, but also that no student loans should be permitted. And this is important.
Even if a student wants to take a dumb subject, if they can gather *all* the money to do, fine. But they should not be allowed to impoverish themselves with a crushing debt load to do so. This is little more than usury, so should be prohibited by the state.
The vast majority of people teaching at colleges are not professors, they are instructors.
The question is, how many grads wind up staying in-state to work, if many leave the State, then it’s not worth the investment.
I think the biggest issue with colleges anymore is they have become a place where students go to learn about something. Colleges need to be a place where students go learn how to do something. Graduates need skills employers find valuable.
huge salaries for doing very little.
Is that not the goal of the younger generation?
Gosh been working since 14 and at 54 no end in sight!
All of the people on my wife’s mother’s side were educators. Teaching is an honorable profession that has been contaminated by leftist leadership, the government and by unions. Because of government involvement the bureaucracy has grown to ridiculous proportions and there has been no meaningful efforts to keep costs down. And because of the money from government sponsored grants and loans the situation is not that much different at many private institutions.
It has evolved into a very sorry situation. One for which I can think of no meaningful solution, so I appreciate your suggestions very much. Unfortunately given the current state of affairs, I doubt whether anything similar will be implemented in the near future. It is hard to imagine a scenario with a bright outcome for most of the productive sectors of the US economy which will provide jobs for the graduates from our educational system. As you say most students are currently being directed toward degrees which are not all that helpful to their futures.
I have seen this first hand in our own family. Our youngest daughter did get an accounting degree, first from a community college and then she completed a four year program while working for local businesses. But while we were at her graduation ceremonies I was shocked that the vast majority of degrees being awarded seemed to have no actual marketable value outside of government and education. Then strangely enough our daughter actually was offered a job as a human resource director that does not use her accounting training at all.
I suppose that this type of thing has often been the case in the past, and many of those with degrees in subjects that would appear to have little value actually do get jobs partially because they have a degree regardless of what it is in. But at this point has the cost of an education become so high that students can no longer afford to spend years studying subjects that have no direct relationship to what they will be doing after they get out of school?
There is only one liberal solution to wasteful spending—spend more!
If there were no government money in higher education then college would be affordable for just about everybody without the hangover of mammoth student loans and the directing of students into dead-end majors.
Eliminate ALL government financed programs. Eliminate ALL government financing of higher education with the possible exception of the military Academies. Evem those would be substituted by the private UNfunded-by-government sector by making becoming an officer a matter of tests. The private market schools would fill in all the requirements in private Military Academies. They woule “teach to the tests” which is, of course, what the Academies do- teach for the specialty.
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