This guide was a great help in our search.
Posted on 08/05/2007 12:25:01 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Is a bachelor's degree in English (or history or philosophy or political science or any other subject in the liberal arts) worth over $30,000 a year? As the sticker price asked by more and more private colleges crosses that threshold, many families are asking that question.
The liberal arts education I received enriched my intellect (though not my pocketbook), but if I had a college-age child today, I couldn't justify paying over $100,000 for a bachelor's degree. It boggles my mind when I learn of a 22-year-old owing over $50,000 with only a B.A. to his name.
Apparently, I am not alone in my opinion. Enrollment is declining at many private colleges. Many families balk at paying such daunting fees. Increasingly, the significantly lower expenses of attending a taxpayer-subsidized state college or a rarity like Grove City College (2007-2008 annual cost under $18,000) present the only affordable options for middle-class families. It seems clear that the over-$30,000 per year colleges must find creative ways to reinvent themselves if they are to prosper or even survive.
This is easier said than done. Colleges tend to be some of the most change-resistant institutions in the country. Over the past quarter-century, the pace of change in American business has been breathtakingly rapid, producing massive changes in structure and practice. Many new companies and industries have emerged, while many companies that thrived in the 1980s have ceased operations or been merged into other companies. By contrast, if you were to sit in a liberal arts college classroom today for the first time in 25 years, you would notice a few superficial changes in the classroom (the presence of personal computers and a couple of other high-tech gadgets) and a modest updating of the curriculum (e.g., the addition of a computer science department), but otherwise, everything would seem comfortingly familiar to you. However, the winds of change are about to blow through American colleges.
Market forces, in the form of declining enrollments in the face of increasingly unaffordable tuition costs, will compel colleges to undergo major changes, just as other businesses have been forced to change.
Yes, I wrote "other businesses." Most college professors don't like to think of their schools as businesses. In fact, at many colleges today, it is the fashion for liberal arts professors to denounce business as a sordid, morally and intellectually inferior activity - even when their own college's business department has more majors than any of the liberal arts subject areas. These intellectuals need to curb their ideological or romantic opposition to business both for the good of their colleges and for the sake of preserving their jobs. Like it or not, a college is a business, and if a college doesn't give its customers (students) good value for their money (a degree that pays a decent return on a $120,000-plus investment), then the college's customer base will shrink. If the customer base shrinks too much, the college/business may close and those anti-business professors will have a chance to learn how much their own sheepskins are worth in the job market today.
Unfortunately, the needed attitude adjustment hasn't penetrated some faculties yet. For example, I know of a college in the over-30-grand category where proposals to establish majors in areas with excellent employment prospects, such as broadcast journalism, are routinely shot down by committees of professors in the traditional liberal arts curriculum. On what grounds? That the proposed majors are "too vocational." The rule of thumb seems to be that if an academic curriculum makes one readily employable, it is unacceptable. That is a shortsighted, suicidal position to take today when American families seem increasingly less willing to pay for a liberal arts degree and then watch junior have to sell insurance to earn a living.
The trend is not in favor of the private liberal arts colleges. A century ago, 80 percent of college students attended private colleges; today, 80 percent attend the less expensive, taxpayer-subsidized public universities. Several hundred private colleges have folded in the past few decades.
Economically, colleges can't continue to pay the salaries of tenured professors who have only a handful of students majoring in their discipline. Unless a college has a rich endowment, such economic inefficiencies are an unaffordable luxury, and these colleges may have to cease offering these unpopular majors altogether. Instead of employing two or three full-time professors in a department with six majors, colleges may need to downgrade such majors to a minor served by one full-time professor supplemented by an adjunct part-timer or by having students take courses at another college in the area or perhaps taking courses offered over the Internet or by private enterprises such as The Teaching Company.
One way to repackage the liberal arts curriculum would be to move away from majors such as history, sociology, political science, and philosophy to something like "Asian studies." There will be abundant employment opportunities in business, government, nongovernmental organizations, missionary work, etc., for students educated in an Asian language and a comprehensive understanding of the history, belief systems, social structure and traditions, etc., of Asian countries. It makes more sense today to offer courses in Chinese language than in French.
It will be fascinating to see how higher education evolves to cope with current economic realities. Change is in the air. The status quo will go.
even still...so instead of tenured transgendered studies professors, you’ll have nontenured transgendered studies professors. You’ll have the same kids that will treat college as a place for guys to get drunk and girls to get wild. Tuitions will keep rising.
Abolishing tenure is a quick fix and I just don’t see it as the root of the problem.
Other people may have different experiences. I would like to hear them. This was mine, and even tho I’m a supporter of CCs and have some additional knowledge of them as my mother taught at one for years, my choice would be to send my child to an affordable 4 yr school.
I saw some of what you speak of, students who just were filling a seat, or blowing off class or not taking class seriously at all.
Then I met the people who were really motivated to learn and understand and actually grasp what was being taught, granted they were maybe 20% or so of the students but they were quite sharp and highly achievement oriented.
And it should be pointed out that the same apathy can be found at a BA college or university, only it costs more to do it there....caveat emptor.
Tenure represents the ultimate restraint of trade in the market for college level educators. Eliminating it would restore competition and consumer choice. I doubt many of the people now paying the bill would continue to be so inclined if they were given a say in the matter.
They work for the government, or for "nonprofits" getting money from their friends in the government.
We need to zero all subsidies to higher education yesterday...
interesting read
Colleges....in the face of world wide web information availability, may well be anachronisms...captitol cost and investment outweighing the return.
Thanks for the heads up — and yes I’m scared. Amen.
I will tell you why I was raised to believe a college education was so important. My brother and I [both of us now right around 50 yo] were the first to attend college in my family. Our grandparents came off the boat from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, they worked in the steel mills and coal mines in southwestern PA. My grandmothers cleaned houses for a living and they helped my parents pay for my brother and I to go to college. It was the American dream to have your kids and grandkids be better educated and to do better in life than you and your parents. They wanted you to do a job that didn’t entail “getting dirty”. My brother would have been perfectly happy being a motorcycle mechanic, but that wasn’t an option in our house. it was college, PERIOD. he is a very successful petroleum engineer now. I graduated from college and went to law school.
Graduate school, majoring in something that will get them a job, or Law School.
As a GIGILO???
The founder of the new university that can charge only $10,000 a year and deliver a better education, less overrun with leftist pap, filth, and wasting of everyone's time with the latest French navel gazing exercise...
and mo wrote:
Colleges....in the face of world wide web information availability, may well be anachronisms...captitol cost and investment outweighing the return.
You folks must want to abdicate the sciences and engineering to other nations. Do either of you have any idea what it costs to train a competent scientist to do research at the state of the science in chemistry, physics, or materials science?
For example, a research grade field emission transmission electron microscope, required to study virus structure at atomic resolution or nanoparticle structure at atomic resolution costs approximately $2M (or more, depending on attachments.) Other instrumentation (e.g. a secondary ion mass spectrometer or x-ray photoelectron spectrometer) to study surface composition or a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to study chemical composition have similar price tags. Do you really want students to graduate with a BS or higher degrees without ever having touched this kind of instrumentation? Currently, such instuments are funded by government grants, alumni donations, and tuition.
Not all of the university's money goes to support profs like Ward Churchill... Is there largess without return on investment? Yes. But let's not "throw out the baby with the bath water."
This guide was a great help in our search.
We weren't about to spend our retirement just so they could get a college degree. We planned to put them through 12 years of Catholic school; the rest was up to them.
The oldest did get a full scholarship to a State school, where he ended up staying for five years, because he changed majors so he could get ready for Law School. He did loans for his three years of Law School, and is now working as an attorney in Boston. #2 son didn't get a scholarship, but we got Financial Aid because #1 was in school at the same time. The FAFSA form didn't ask if the other kids in college had scholarships. ;o) He went to a private university, though, so he had some hefty loans. He wanted to go to Grad school, and was feeling down that he'd have to get even more loans, but SirKit told him to go somewhere where THEY'D pay for grad school. He's now at UT Austin in his 4th year of a 6 year PhD program.
#3, our only daughter, was homeschooled through high school, and she ended up getting a 3/4 scholarship for a small Catholic university. She's going into her Sophomore year. Our youngest son is going into his Senior year, and he's already thinking about reasonably priced colleges to attend.
I am sure that you are gakrak, it’s tough out here in the world so to speak, but if you have raised your daughters with values then you may have given them more then a college education can give them.
IMO, successful people all have the same traits no matter their degrees.
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