Posted on 10/06/2023 5:44:34 AM PDT by karpov
The college-costs question invites a raft of sensible responses. But I’m a simple guy, and I’ll offer a simple place to start: Students, teachers, and staff should be expected to work harder. If students worked harder, they’d finish faster. If faculty taught more frequently, we wouldn’t need as many instructors.
Last winter, a survey of four-year college students found that 64 percent said they put “a lot of effort” into school. Of these self-described hard workers, less than a third devoted even 10 hours a week to studying. A decade ago, in Academically Adrift, NYU’s Richard Arum and the University of Virginia’s Josipa Roksa reported that students spent 12 to 14 hours a week studying, a decline of roughly 50 percent from a few decades earlier. We’ve normalized a college culture where 12 hours of class and another 10 to 12 hours of studying constitute a full week’s work. On the other hand, in Great Britain, the University of Cambridge expects students to devote 42 to 46 hours a week to “academic studies.” If American students worked a 40-hour week, they could complete their studies in two-thirds the time—and at two-thirds the cost.
And it’s no coincidence that the nation’s most expensive colleges are those where faculty teach just two to four courses a year: one or two in the fall and the same in the spring. This amounts to three or six hours a week of teaching for 24 weeks a year and the occasional office hour, with most time devoted to bureaucratic work, research of uneven provenance, or griping about campus parking. John McGreevy, the provost at Notre Dame, has observed that at his institution, the norm in whole departments is a 1-1 teaching load (that is, professors only teach one class per semester).
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Lol! That ship sailed about 30 years ago!
Faculty teaching loads ain’t the problem. It is immense administrative bloat and bureaucracy that is driving up the cost.
Funny how the damn schools and their clown “perfesers” are never mentioned in this multi-billion dollar Bidenskyyyyy Student Loan fiasco. The most guilty, the colleges are getting away without one mention of their guilt. The bass turds should be in jail.
Fire the DEI/CRT staff.
A college’s management sets the requirements of its teachers. The teachers determine how much learning must happen for students to make good grades.
A college’s management determines what it will allow its teachers to do other than teaching. Thus it sets the required teaching load on the teachers. The less the teaching load, the more expensive the teaching will be because more teachers are required per student.
From the article: “... at his institution, the norm in whole departments is a 1-1 teaching load (that is, professors only teach one class per semester).”
That is an expensive college, the speaker explains why, and those supplying money to students can decide if it’s worth the money.
Students should know by now that massive borrowing to attend expensive colleges might not work out so well.
From the article: “... at his institution, the norm in whole departments is a 1-1 teaching load (that is, professors only teach one class per semester).”
Otherwise, the minimum teaching load should be 3 courses per semester—if they are all different courses (3 preps). Four (4) courses a semester if you have pairs of the same course (2 preps).
Big Education (BE) has no skin in the financial part of their educational services or should I say indoctrination. BE charges whatever they want because they know the money will come in from the students anyway. Where the students get their tuition money is of no concern to BE.
If BE had to finance some part of the student debt things would be far more reasonable. Prices would come down and the quality of education would go up because a student who graduates and can get and hold a job is a student who can repay the loan from BE.
Colleges have excelled at persuading the public that they are indispensable for securing lucrative careers, but this couldn’t be farther from reality.
BINGO!
That’s easy. Don’t go. There are better things to do.
I advocate colleges having to co-sign federal student loans.
“The only way this is justified is if the professor brings in enough research $$ to offset ...”
Thanks. Didn’t think of that but is the research money that comes in spent on lowering tuition?
Cap student loans at 25K lifetime.
Watch college tuition start plummeting.
Life is easy when you know the rules.
Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors. The left has no clue how to create wealth, only how to consume it. People need to realize that since the left gained control of the Education domain its primary focus has changed from education to indoctrination and funding of leftist personnel , organizations, and political goals. Having the central government create a “banking” entity responsible for “educational” loans with little to no real oversight was the big payoff from controlling the education narrative for decades. Bloated bureaucracies, bloated faculties, degree programs with no economic value except for the left, and with most costs directly and/or indirectly funded by the public treasury is one of the necessary cornerstones of the leftist goal of total control of everything. This not a conspiracy theory for the simple fact that it has been done and exists.
Thanks. Didn’t think of that but is the research money that comes in spent on lowering tuition?
Whether than translates into an actual reduction in tuition (or reduction in the tuition increase) is anyone’s guess. My guess is: no. There is always something else to spend money on.
Fire at least half of the professors. 75% of the staff. 90% of all extra curricular activities and BS. Start teaching only worthy degrees again.
Large universities have 8-figure DIE departments. Not joking.
Best solution is that the colleges themselves make the student loans from their endowments. It wouldn’t take more than a couple years before they started making the requirements for students loans a lot stricter...
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