NWR: Searching for a College

I would return to Sputnik-era levels of public funding, for starters, but I am not running for public office.

That era's obsession with keeping up meant that we have big research universities -- with all the costs that go along with them -- in every state, often lots of them, whether we need that many or not. It seems unlikely those days are coming back anytime soon, and I've never seen a compelling answer for how to adapt to the years of the skinny cow. The most common answer seems to be to jack up tuition and hire a bunch of expensive consultants and administrators.
 
originally posted by maureen:
originally posted by Tom Glasgow:
House prices are correlated with tuition? Well not since 2007.
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I trust you do understand that your summary of what I said isn't accurate.
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I was wondering if you were referring to tuition/costs being funded via home equity or refinancing a mortgage.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by fatboy:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I've got two cousins (separate families) going to computer game design degree programs. Is that a 'trade'?
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I have an Italian friend whose son went to such a program in Scotland of all improbable places and has actually been employed ever since graduation.
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why so improbable?

leaving aside one c e shannon (and obvious card carrying mick), the grubby scots thumbprint is more than all over the development of information and communication systems (start with clark, bell, and baird, and end wherever you feel like).

fb.
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Also, and perhaps less illustriously, Silicon Glen is the home of the developer of Grand Theft Auto, which seems to be a big deal.
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Well, in my defense, ce shannon seems per wiki to be as American as zinfandel and GTA a product of the "UK" and hence St. Andrews did not seem an obvious hotbed of gaming but I know better now.
 
The only real way to control prices would be to dial back the ambition of private universities to be research institutions. Make the vast majority of our universities teaching colleges, reduce amenities, administrators, and research support and raise teaching loads and classroom sizes back up to 1960 era levels. I don't know that that's a good thing, at least economically. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that our university system is one of our hottest international trade products. It is at least partially supported by large numbers of international students who come here and pay our tab. It might be more just to provide a college education at a reasonable rate, with govt. support to more of our own citizens. But a lot of things would be more just.
 
Now you're moving on to the more technical discussion of how much of the cost of higher education is supported by tuition and how much by endowments and grants. The one thing that does not sound right, though, is that I don't think class sizes were bigger, were they? Teaching loads were higher, sure, but I don't think the average class size was bigger, unless you mean that the proportion of graduate seminars has gone up and effectively driven average sizes down.
 
originally posted by Cliff:
Now you're moving on to the more technical discussion of how much of the cost of higher education is supported by tuition and how much by endowments and grants. The one thing that does not sound right, though, is that I don't think class sizes were bigger, were they? Teaching loads were higher, sure, but I don't think the average class size was bigger, unless you mean that the proportion of graduate seminars has gone up and effectively driven average sizes down.
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Hasn't there been an increase in the number of majors available?
 
Sure, but I don't see what that has to do with the cost of higher education in any direct sense. The real expense in this case is the tenured professorate, which has not kept pace with the student population. The nominal expenses of splitting, say, economics, sociology, and anthropology from politics in the late nineteenth century has been recouped lately by recombining them at many schools -- and those are really nominal costs in the grand scheme of things. Creating new departments is a headache for administrators because academic departments have a measure of autonomy, unlike "programs" or "studies"; they are more cumbersome to work with but not necessarily more expensive.
 
When I was an undergraduate--and not at a large state school--history classes with 500 people and sections taught by grad students as well as philosophy, anthropology and lit. classes with 50-100 were quite common. If one wanted to be sure of small classes as an undergrad, one had to get into the major seminars. AU makes a selling point of small classes, so maybe my undergrad experience is still the norm, but I'll bet not. The expense of the tenured professoriate is partially offset by the rise of non-tenure full time faculty who teach higher class loads for less money. That is only a partial offset, I expect, if only partially, because of class size.
 
Schools like mine have coped with massive enrollments by turning to adjuncts while keeping class size smallish. State schools with graduate programs tend to go with huge lectures and grad student TA's. Among other things, the jumbo-lectures let administrators claim that all those students are taught by tenured professors, even if they only meet on either side of a podium in a huge lecture hall.
 
originally posted by Cliff:
Schools like mine have coped with massive enrollments by turning to adjuncts while keeping class size smallish. State schools with graduate programs tend to go with huge lectures and grad student TA's. Among other things, the jumbo-lectures let administrators claim that all those students are taught by tenured professors, even if they only meet on either side of a podium in a huge lecture hall.
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Cliff has got this one right. At my large, public University in my particular discipline, we teach 4,000 students a SEMESTER general chemistry and 1,000 students a SEMESTER organic chemistry. So, let's do the math: if we wanted to keep class sizes down to 30 students per class, we'd need to teach 133 different sections of general chemistry and 33 different sections of organic chemistry. Because, as an R1 institution, we require that a professor teach only 1 lecture class a semester, we'd need about 200 professors to cover our teaching responsibilities. Since, in reality, we are a faculty of 52-55 (it fluctuates biannually) we instead teach lectures classes in those two subjects of 450 students (the capacity of our largest lecture hall). That still requires about a dozen different sections of gen chem and 5 different organic chemistry classes (class sizes are closer to 200-300 for that) and about a dozen faculty to teach them. It also requires close to 100 TAs to supervise lab classes, help grade and run recitation sessions.

Our chem majors, however, are placed in classes their last two years that will never exceed 30 students, so we do our best to treat our majors well. I'll also note that, within our University, we are an exemplary department as a) all of our faculty, even Nobel Prize winners, teach lecture classes and b) no class is taught by a TA or postdoc. Alas, this isn't true in some other departments, most notably our social sciences departments.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by David Erickson:
For international business studies, I'd take a look at Thunderbird in Arizona. I don't know what their rep is like these days, but once upon a time they were the only game in town.
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I think Thunderbird only offers a graduate program.

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Calloo! Callay!
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Chortle.

originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
So, Bill, what really did you learn from all of us experts at expostulation and drift?
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I'll take a lot of responsibility for that. This topic of universities and educational objectives is something that I think about a lot.

Bill, I hope you got some useful info.
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What do you think is the proper unit of measurement for educational quality? I've been thinking about this question but not getting anywhere.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
What do you think is the proper unit of measurement for educational quality? I've been thinking about this question but not getting anywhere.
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And this is where the real culture wars begin.
 
originally posted by Tom Glasgow:
originally posted by maureen:
originally posted by Tom Glasgow:
House prices are correlated with tuition? Well not since 2007.
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I trust you do understand that your summary of what I said isn't accurate.
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I was wondering if you were referring to tuition/costs being funded via home equity or refinancing a mortgage.
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no - I was saying that just as the prevalence of cheap and plentiful mortgage financing helped spur the rapid increase in housing prices so too has the wide availability of student loans helped spur the increase in tuition costs.
 
originally posted by maureen:
I was saying that just as the prevalence of cheap and plentiful mortgage financing helped spur the rapid increase in housing prices so too has the wide availability of student loans helped spur the increase in tuition costs.
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Why didn't that happen with the GI bill?
 
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