When the topic on Ethics Alarms is education, Michael frequently scores a Comment of the Day, and he did it again following the post on the University of Maryland spending a fortune on its president’s residence. Here is his effort to help us understand the conduct discussed in The Priorities of U.S. Higher Education Defy Understanding. And I’ll have a closing comment at the end.
“I have asked these questions about what is driving up college costs. Here is what I have found:
“(1) Not faculty: Faculty salaries haven’t been going up much, probably not as fast as inflation. Tenure track faculty are being replaced by throw-away adjuncts and lecturers who are paid less and the remaining tenured faculty are getting sub-inflation rate raises. To put things in perspective, some NCAA coaches make more than the top 100 faculty at my institution and it only takes 2.5 student’s tuition to pay my salary and benefits.
“(2) Administration: As with the rest of US business, management is getting bigger and bigger. Vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, assistant associate vice president, Deans of this, but not that special interest group , specialty analysts and advisors, and the staffs for all of the above are growing much faster than inflation.
“(3) Luxury accommodations: Students don’t want to live in a dorm anymore. They have a master suite at home and they are not going to share a bathroom. They also need a wellness center (not a gym) with a climbing wall, jacuzzis, saunas, and a massage parlor (well, not yet, but next year…). These cost a lot of money and that gets tacked onto the tuition.
“(4) Sports and recreation: Sports are very expensive. Facilities, coaches, trainers, ‘scholarships’, and travel all add up. For non-revenue sport without an expensive facility costs (say volleyball) you are looking at $8000/player. Don’t say “But my school’s sports MAKE money”, they don’t.
“(5) Specialty centers and museums: They cost a lot of money and have to be funded somehow.
“(6) Manicured campuses and newly renovated buildings: Students don’t want to go to a campus where the buildings look old.
“The result is that at my school, only 1/3 to 1/2 of the budget is spent on education. But it gets even worse. The state schools in my area charge around $15,000/year in tuition and fees, but they get funded by the state even more than that. In fact, if my school was given the same layer of state funding that the state schools get, the students could go at no additional cost. I don’t mean tuition, I mean tuition, room, board, and books! My median class size is 7 students, but the big schools that teach sections of 600 students spend twice as much. The difference is the amount of sports, activities, foundations, centers, museums, and other academic activities they have. From the numbers I have seen, my guess would be that the average state school spends less than 1/4 of their budgets on educating students. With such a reality, education is not a major emphasis. Now, things such as the mansion should make more sense.”
Well, this helps explain it, but it still doesn’t make sense. What Michael is saying is that neither the students nor the schools care about education as much as comfort, trappings, buildings and sports, but the nation and public wants and needs the young generations educated. It seems to me that education was once regarded as an ordeal, in which a dedicated student gave up social engagements and worldly pleasures to train his or her mind. Then a diploma meant something: self-discipline, hard work, dedication, and demonstrable mastery of a field of knowledge.
There is no reason at all why a school couldn’t be established in which students were subjected to rigorous, difficult, challenging course work in Spartan surroundings with few amenities, administered by distinguished teachers and graded stringently, all for a fraction of current tuition levels. And the school’s graduates would be hired, because they actually knew something, and had proven that they were more interested in knowledge than sports, booze and sex. It wouldn’t matter if the school was accredited or not. The product would be superior.
All it would take is for some billionaire to be smart enough to help such an institution or five get started rather than to endow another useless chair in environmentalism or city planning. This is a problem that can be solved, if anyone really cares enough to solve it. Create diplomas that mean something, that are affordable, and that motivated students will sacrifice to acquire. When that Harvard, Yale, UVA or Stanford degree stops fooling people, I guarantee they’ll shape up in a hurry.
Ethics Alarms 
“It seems to me that education was once regarded as an ordeal, in which a dedicated student gave up social engagements and worldly pleasures to train his or her mind.”
Great line. That’s what I thought education was when I started university in 2003. Later I would marvel at the old photograph in the student activities center that showed members of the school’s first fraternity engaged in mandatory study time.
“And the school’s graduates would be hired, because they actually knew something, and had proven that they were more interested in knowledge than sports, booze and sex.”
Really? If that’s the case, why isn’t it the case that only the best graduates of today’s universities are being hired? It wouldn’t be difficult, for instance, for a prospective employer to request transcripts and judge whether a graduate had been taking blow-off classes or had been actively engaged in his or her education. There are also various ways of determining a person’s conviction, intelligence, and knowledge, which don’t easily translate onto paper.
“It wouldn’t matter if the school was accredited or not. The product would be superior.”
The hell it wouldn’t matter. You can’t honestly believe this. The same objection applies. If employers were looking only for the best educated graduates, they could pick them out of the existing system.
“When that Harvard, Yale, UVA or Stanford degree stops fooling people, I guarantee they’ll shape up in a hurry.”
And when’s that going to happen? It isn’t a lack of competition that’s holding such institutions back. As it stands, Harvard and Yale graduates aren’t being hired because they’re the best educated. They’re being hired because they’re Harvard and Yale graduates. And also, they’re sometimes not being hired.
There is literally no way to tell who’s the best educated or the most able, Ed. Everyone has a B+ average, and A’s go to people who were C students 20 years ago. So connections and prestige are all that matter, plus extra-curricular demonstrations of initiative, which one could do without going to college.
“They’re being hired because they’re Harvard and Yale graduates” because those schools get the best students coming in, not because of anything those schools do with them afterwards. Hire the top students right out of high school, and teach them yourself. Everyone would save money and be better off. Make the colleges show that they add something besides “socialization.”
This is why I would prefer to hire a graduate from the U.S. Military Academy over a graduate from Harvard or Yale, if I were an employer offering a $45,000/yr. entry level position and the candidates had equivalent out-of-college work experience West Point demands high standards for both entry and graduation. (While West Pointers usually have six years of experience as an Army officer when they go into the civilian workforce, some of them may be honorably separated from the military early for health or other reasons.)
This comment, coupled with runaway confirmation bias, made my day. Performance standards haven’t disappeared everywhere, and I can’t think of a better example of, as Jack puts it: “[a school] in which students were subjected to rigorous, difficult, challenging course work in Spartan surroundings with few amenities….” The military academies are far from perfect, but I like them an awful lot in comparison to the alternatives.
“Hire the top students right out of high school, and teach them yourself.”
Oh, absolutely! It’s imperative that that become part of the new modus operandi. It frustrates me to no end when, for instance, the President says that manufacturing will be part of what grows the economy in the future, and that we should therefore be giving college graduates the training to prepare them for those jobs. Is there anything that a college degree adds in terms of aptitude for training in manufacturing, that a person could not gain at the high school level?
Whatever the job, what’s the first thing an employers is going to do once he brings on an applicant, whether from high school or college? Train them. No college curriculum will teach a person the exact procedures, technologies, policies, etc. that he will utilize once employed. Highly technical fields teach some of them, of course, but I cannot fathom how any college degree demonstrates that a person is more capable of shuffling papers around than an earnest eighteen year-old would be.
There are college degrees that are useful, to be sure. A Finance degree is very helpful in getting finance-related jobs. Ditto with Engineering degrees and engineering-related jobs.
An English degree, on the other hand…
You’re missing my point. There are many, many jobs that don’t require any particular degree, but do require a degree.
I think an English degree is useful if your job requires that you express yourself verbally. I think a Philosophy degree is useful if you have to think critically or argue persuasively. But I don’t think those degrees are the only things that demonstrate those skills.
And if I may be so presumptuous, Michael, I suspect that your comment is inching toward the oft-repeated idea that if everyone studied technical disciplines, no graduates would be unemployed. Engineering degrees are helpful in getting engineering jobs, but there isn’t an unlimited supply of engineering jobs. In fact, Nuclear Engineering majors have one of the highest rates of unemployment.
If I had my way, Edward, there wouldn’t be an unemployed nuclear engineer in the country… and there’d be room for a lot more besides. But from colleges worthy of the name.
Hire them out of high school and teach them yourself? Why? Because we don’t have enough people who don’t know how to think walking around? When I was in the corporate world we never spent training money on training that wasn’t specific to our structure. We trained them how to work for us. That’s great if that is all they ever had to do. If they ever stepped out of the office, I would really hope that they had training other than that provided by us to rely on or they would have been in big trouble. We didn’t worry about them beyond their cubicle. I suppose if I was the corporation, the idea sounds great. It would have made passing off all that propoganda we pumped out as legitimate science much easier. It also would have allowed them to move forward with every decision they made to operate outside the law. As it was, the University educated laboratory and quality control staff stopped them in their tracks every single time. At least in Canada. There were other countries that were not as successful and became a dumping ground for product that could not pass guidelines here. I say spare me from the day that business replaces education please.
But it already is. Companies have no choice, because the schools aren’t doing the job.
Perhaps if we took the business people out of the equation on campus and left it again where it should have been all along… with the faculty.
Like Timothy Leary, Danielle? His disciples are alive and well on every campus and in charge on many.
Never been much of a fan of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy. Often wondered if he got his ideas from the College of Holy Cross or West Point. Seems unlikely they came out of Alabama. I hope I have never said anything here that places me in support of synthetic or semi-synthetic drugs. Anything requiring a lab to make it should be regulated. However, in his day, it wasn’t. I don’t think we need worry about his followers, Steven. They should be sufficiently spaced out to be ineffective by now.
I only wish! But the Devil seems to take care of his own in even this.
Right—the faculty that creates courses like “Occupy Wall Street” and “The Films of Keanu Reeves” and that doesn’t have the guts to flunk a single student or grade an illiterate essay lower than a B-.
They also create course like Scientific Reasoning in American Political Thought and Biblical Emphasis Week to Illuminate Ezekiel. I’d sign up for the Occupy Course before several others I can think of. So you wouldn’t send your kids to Brown and I wouldn’t send mine to Harding. I don’t see the problem with diverse course content.
I think the guts problem is more the business side of education. All the faculty I know have no problem grading appropriately. It is the administrators that come back asking for a curve so parents don’t get upset and take their tuition elsewhere.
If they have “no problem” grading appropriately, then why don’t they? That’s a cop-out. The administrators cave to the bitching students and parents, and the faculty caves to the administrators. Integrity? Courage? Responsibility? A course that doesn’t distinguish between the star and the slacker with more than a plus or minus tells employers nothing. I once had an intern from a state school who was a straight A student and actually THOUGHT SHE WAS SMART. She couldn’t write at a 7th grade level! She was naive and unable to solve problems. That was many years ago, and the problem has gotten worse.
The guts problem is, in fact, a market problem. Employers hire the grades, not the courses; ditto grad schools. I refused to take the guts, and my grades showed it….grad schools didn’t care; all they cared about was GPA and test scores. I don’t regret using college to learn rather than to score high grades, but the system is slanted to make students choose otherwise.
I once knew a professor that was told, when she submitted grades in which more than 70% of the students failed the course because they could not write above grade school level and therefore failed to articulate any learning they accomplished in it, that she could not fail that many students because it would “say” something about our pre-university education system. She was told to look “beyond” the grammer and spelling to find something relevant in their essays. I am not disagreeing with you in principle, Jack. I just think that putting University back in the hands of the faculty who would provide a wide range of positions to consider is a better solution than giving it to business who would have a single, profit driven focus. Regardless of preferred methodology, I think our goal is the same…. producing thinking, functioning graduates.
Agreed!!!
Spartan surroundings; stringent rules? Degrees that mean something? Try my alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute. Or the Citadel in Charleston, SC.
Michael’s comment is tremendously enlightening.
Congratulations John regarding your survival at your alma mater, and I’m sure it sounds cliche’ but I mean this sincerely: thank you for your service. I too was honored to be admitted to one of those federal academies (I won’t say which one), and even graduated (somehow).
Jack, you’ll like this: in my days there, they even had cadets appointed as Ethics Officers, and had a cadet-run Ethics Board or somesuch. I don’t know if that is still part of the program. How I managed four years without getting called before that gang is another miracle just slightly less miraculous than graduating. It was the Honor Code that got the most attention; for simple me, abiding it was easy. What a girl-crazy, music-obsessed hippie I was!
It is a tradition in military schools for cadets to judge disciplinary violations by other cadets (although some sentences like expulsion are subject to approval by the head of the school).
True dat, what you say Michael E. I should have closed my earlier comment with: Had I tried college at a civilian school, without having to assimilate the military culture, I would not have lasted my first semester.