Posted on 11/26/2008 6:49:28 AM PST by reaganaut1
On August 6, 2008, the Washington Post reported that tuition and fees at public colleges in Virginia will increase by an average of 7.3 percent this year. The article was four sentences long and ran in the Metro section, below the fold, in space reserved for unremarkable news. The drumbeat of higher education price increases has become so steady in recent years that it barely merits attention. But the cumulative effect is enormous: the average price of attending a public university more than doubled over the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation. The steepest increases came in the last five years.
And there’s nothing routine about the way college costs are weighing down lower- and middle-income families. Students are still going to college—in this day and age, what choice do they have? But some are getting priced out of the four-year sector into two-year colleges, while others are trying unsuccessfully to simultaneously hold down a full-time job and earn a degree. More students are going deeply into debt, narrowing their career options and risking catastrophic default. The lightly regulated private student loan market, which barely existed ten years ago, now controls about 20 percent of loan volume, burdening financially vulnerable undergraduates with high interest rates and few legal protections. State and federal governments have poured tens of billions of new taxpayer dollars into student aid programs, only to see them swallowed up by institutions with a seemingly unlimited appetite for funds.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonmonthly.com ...
The whole purpose of the FAFSA is to get your financial information. In Ohio you must file a FAFSA in order to get the Ohio choice grant (I have one kid in a Ohio college) which has been going down every year. The FAFSA is then used to determine what savings your family has and how much the University can grab. The Expected Family Contribution (EFC) score you get from filing the FAFSA is meaningless and the Universities will tell you they ignore it. For 2 kids in college I'm having to pay well above the EFC, so I can testify that it is BS.
Another thing about the FAFSA - if your FAFSA information doesn't match your IRS filing, you are opened up to an audit. Also, they like you to file the FAFSA early (by the 1st week of February) and then correct it when you file your taxes in April (since good Republicans always owe). The schools look at the highest score you have. They got real bitchy with me this year because my April score was lower. They demanded I verify the February score. Then Penn State told me "we dont use the EFC."
I must respectfully disagree with you on the subject of communication—I teach interpersonal comm, and I think it’s one of the most valuable courses a student can take b/c it’s essentially a “life skills” course. While I couldn’t tell you anything about a majority of the classes I took in college, understanding how the communication process works, what one can do to be a better listener, solve conflicts more satisfactorily, etc. are valuable things that students need to know. (I often wish that this was a course required in high schools—and even lower grades—because there is so much there that is often taken for granted but is very useful in knowing; and not everyone has a good enough upbringing to relate to others effectively).
But as far as the rest: although I’ve been an adjunct for well over a decade, I will never be a full-time professor at any university. Why? I will probably never get my PhD in order to do so—because what I want to do is to be in the classroom and TEACH; whereas to be a full-time professor, most universities and colleges want faculty who (as has been said here) will be “valuable” to the department because of the research and publishing they do—NOT as much for their teaching (which is what it should really all be about in the first place—it is SCHOOL, after all!). Therefore, I’m not wasting my money or my time for a degree that will, yes, allow me to teach—but also enable me to get a job where the pressure to succeed will be in the areas I am *not* interested in, and will “relegate to the back seat” the teaching about which I am so passionate. I suppose I could still do so, in order to be there and teach as much as I can...but then there is the pricing of getting that degree, which I can’t afford anyway.
I’m considering stepping back to adjunct — I’d make more money, and actually spend more time in the classroom, and spend less time in BS committee meetings.
A lot of free feed to the dumb cattle herd makes for indulgent, indolent, inefficient cattlemen and slaughtering houses.More refined explanationThe cattle are the students, the cattlemen are the schools, the slaughterers are the banks and collection agencies.
+ Oodles of "Easy" up-front moneyFinal accounting:
+ Borrowers too immature, 18 is now age of major contracts
+ Parental oversight of major expenses beaten-down by cultural consensus
+ Borrowers not educated in understanding long-term debt and payment burden
====
Easy $$$$$ in weak hands with deep pockets!Add more:
+ A parasitic cancer-like bureacratic structure of "research" and "education" grant makers in the fedgov, and to some lesser extent in the stategovs.
+ an external parallel structure in academia set up to receive grants and grow and grow by bigger grants
+ the easy money from the four-years-from-entry-to-slaughter-house cattle
+ active support of media and cultural PR
=====ACADEMIA, the city of GOLD!
The slaughtered as ignorant uneducated debt-zombies. Working in menial jobs when they can get them. Constantly scrapping to stay ahead of the collections agency and living in multi-apartment flop houses that used to be used by the illegal workers from Central America and Eastern Europe.
Sad. Worst to come. Sorry.
I do realize that some 100/200 level courses are going to be smaller. I went to a major university where there would be 100 plus people in an auditoroum. To me that was a racket. The upper level classes where the class sizes come in at 20 students are a different matter. In this case the university was billing $2.5K for the class which earned them only $50K for the 3 hours per week we were in the class for the semester.
The instructor costs are not the problem though.
I strongly disagree with your assessment here. Having been through both a 4-year electrical engineering program and a 4-year liberal arts program (at a Conservative Christian college), there is value in a liberal arts curriculum, specifically in history, political science, geography, English, and modern and classical languages.
When I was first an engineering student, I found that I was being taught all kinds of math and physics and hard core technology, but I wasn't learning how to THINK and I sure was not learning how to write or communicate worth a damn.
Ultimately I felt cheated by my engineering education, so much so that I went back to college and got my degree in history. I went on to earn a Master's in history and am now gainfully employed using that degree.
So, it's not necessarily the curriculum that's bad, but the Communist professors who have infiltrated academia since the 1960s who have given liberal arts a bad name.
And despite what many on this forum may believe, college is not a vocational school, but supposedly an institution where young men and women are educated at a higher level than high school and where they can learn to think and communicate their ideas efefctively. Granted, the system is failing at that for any number of reasons, but in the old days, a classical liberal arts education was the entry way into the professions such as law and medicine and the clergy.
Just my .02 worth.
You’re right on! I did a year of Ph.D. work and walked away after I discovered all the petty politics within academic departments and exactly how most professors feel about teaching, which is not much more than annoying chore to them.
For ex, full scholarship aid to the "underpriveliged" is income redistribution and is a huge amount (conveniently omitted), and all the layers of college beauracracy ( tons of useless administrators, Angry studies B.S. departments (ie womens studies), ) The biggest facillitator is the government subsidizing and guaranteeing student loans. If that pipeline were tightened, half the colleges would go under.
Just look at the growth in U of Phoenix ! Thats the solution, especially for boys, I would say.
I have one kid left to go, Ill be damned if Im paying full price at some status ridden overpriced Club Med -like P.C. re-education resort/school.
The career path into medicine and law is changing too. The overwhelming majority of the people I know whose career aspirations are law or medicine are attending engineering school. For medicine, the hard sciences help a great deal with the MCATs, and for law, the undergrad in engineering puts you on track to be a patent attorney, which can be quite a lucrative proposition. However, most people go the engineering undergrad route because grad school is too darn expensive to hack through on an undergraduate degree in a field where you don't make much money. That, and the backup of a steady job in case medical or law school falls through has a certain appeal.
Once upon a time there was a value in a liberal arts curriculum. But this isn’t “once upon a time.” This is now, and it takes considerable naivete to think that sociology, english, history, and other non-science/engineering departments haven’t been almost entirely captured by the tenured left. In fact, that process was mostly completed 20 years ago. Since then it has just been a “mopping up” process in which smaller and “conservative” schools (including seminaries) have been coopted by the left’s worldview. Liberal vermin have even been able to force their dreck into the military academies and places like MIT and Cal Tech.
Your chance today of learning to think sitting at the feet of some post-modern “professor” of literature, for example, is roughly nil. Your chance of learning to think studying chemistry or physics is vastly better. As for communication skills, the average product of liberal arts departments today has nothing of value to communicate. Moreover, the standards in these “disciplines” tend to be so low today that high level writing or speaking skills can scarcely be counted among the things a student accumulates along with his nearly obligatory $40-60k of student loans.
The truth is, he has simply spent tens of thousands of dollars to be marinated for 4 years in the false worldview of cultural marxism, various virulent strains of feminism, nihilism, and environmentalism.
Yes, some schools, the number of which you can probably count on your fingers and toes, still have worthwhile liberal arts programs. That’s optimistically about 20 out of roughly 2,500 degree granting 4 year institutions. Bear in mind, too, that about 50% of all students attend 400 large universities.
St. Johns, Thomas Aquinas, and a few others may fit the bill, but these exceptions hardly matter.
BTW, I have a couple of liberal arts degrees.
I had some very good personal reasons for rejecting my engineering education and I don't regret it. Have I had to work to make my liberal arts degree lucrative, you bet, but in the long run, it's paid off handsomely for me and I get to do things and go places that most engineers only dream about in their cubicles and at their work benches.
Like I said on another thread, everyone can't be an engineer or a scientist. There are jobs out there for liberal arts majors who have worked hard and want to continue working hard. It's all about taking personal responsibility for yourself and being dedicated to your professional career in whatever you decide to do.
A related reason is that the nominal tuition at many colleges is a lot more than the actual cost to educate a student. Colleges shift the excess money paid by students from families that are too well off to obtain financial aid, in order to fund scholarships and grants for other students.
The high nominal tuition also causes students to take out much higher loans which greatly increase the funds available to the college. The colleges then expand and pay higher salaries, becoming dependent on the government loan money.
The whole thing is highly parallel to what is going on with health care prices.
Another factor increasing college costs is an economic law that says that any activity which is not becoming more efficient over time will increase in cost.
“Like I said, I went to a very good Conservative Christian college that is still Conservative and Christian.”
As I mentioned, the market share of such schools (i.e. liberal arts schools that are conservative and have high standards) is so small that they hardly matter in the overall scheme of things.
Good for you if you found one. Even better for you if you’ve found gainful employment that you enjoy.
Perhaps some do; many don't. Many professors teach courses that should not exist at all, in departments that likewise should not be. Other professors teach lies, intentionally, in order to promote "social change." In other industries, the consumer is the ultimate judge of what constitutes useful work. In colleges, the consumers (students, parents, and the taxpaying public) have no say whatsoever in what type of "product" is produced.
Dorms when I went to college supplied simple, but ample rooms. Now, they require expensive technological safety systems and people to monitor who comes in and out. The rooms themselves are a lot fancier. If they are not, kids go to schools where they can find them.
No student selects a school on the basis of the on-campus housing, period. Hardly any student voluntarily remains in on-campus housing past the required freshman or perhaps sophomore year. Campus housing is a terrible deal, always vastly more expensive than living off campus, considering what you get - and off campus there are no thought police telling you what words you are allowed to say, and when.
Your argument about liability, while it has some merit in that lawsuit abuse has driven up the cost of everything, is likewise a red herring. In point of fact, the largest part of the budget of any college is salaries. And it's not the robber-baron TA's taking the school to the cleaners, either. It's the overpaid and overabundant administrators - and the professors, many of whom are likewise overpaid, considering their so-called "skills" and the actual value of those "skills."
Winner!
Maybe so...but not in MY communication department. As far as I know, all our instructors expect students to develop strong skills in both speaking & writing (for example, we have a nationally-ranked forensics team and students who've presented papers at conferences along with professors). It is emphasized to us several times a year how important this part of our department mission is. However, that is an inference; the only instructor I can speak about with absolute knowledge is myself. In my communication class, I bust my students constantly on grammar, spelling, etc. as well as their speaking & presentation skills. (It often scares me the *lack* of writing skills that some of them have, considering that they've already made it *into* college!) Granted, I don't get to spend as much time on those particular things as I'd like b/c we have so many other aspects of communication to discuss; but I solidly enforce college level writing and skill development as much as possible. They are, after all, there for a reason. Whether they *leave* college with such skills depends on the student--I've seen some students develop into great speakers and better writers through a semester; and some that couldn't care less when they came in as long as they passed, and remained that way after they walked out the door. I do what I can...it's up to them to do the rest :)
One, get off the East Coast. Two, English graduate degree? HR needs good writers and technical writing is not a bad gig either.
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