Higher Education
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-08-17/higher-education
Two professors examine the American higher education system and explain how students and parents can get the most for their money.
Guests
Andrew Hacker
professor of Political Science at Queens College, New York, and co-author of "Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - And What We Can Do About It"
Mark Taylor
chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, professor of philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary, and professor emeritus of humanities at Williams College. His latest book is titled, "Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities."
Comments
Please familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct and Terms of Use before posting your comments.
What about putting the owness back on the students? Professors are not there to entertain these kids, they are there to share their knowlegde. After a failed first attempt at college after high-school, I went back to school as early 20 something. I went to a commuter college (IUPUI in Indianapolis), and got a Great Education! Your educational process is what you make of it! My experience has been that you can learn as much as you want during your higher education experience.
Thank you, TEF
Diane, first on tenure. I am a labor and employment law professor. It is a popular but mistaken belief that tenure = lifetime employment. All tenure does is require that the employer have just cause to terminate you. Otherwise, you are an at-will employee who can be fired for any reason and without cause.
Second, it is true that tuition is out of sight. But why has it risen so high? One important culprit is the way the US News and World Report ranks schools. Its criteria tend not to be based on results that matter. Rather, they are based on inputs and those inputs are very high cost. This is not the whole story, but it is a very important part of it.
For years, the Washington Monthly has advocated a different form of ranking based on outcomes and effects.
I taught as a full time professor for five years in the humanities at a large Northeast university. I was appalled how little the tenured professors actually knew anything about the students. When the faculty was revamping the English major, I recommended a course entitled "What is Literature" because I had found the students really had no idea what it was or how to define it, even for students in so-called 'advanced courses.' The entire committee looked at me as though some strange comment had been delivered from a different universe. I thought the idea was entirely reasonable, and the most senior faculty member said "That's a wonderful idea." The curriculum had already been set in stone, so it was back to 'A Rose for Emily' as a short story in freshman English--a short story I had been assigned in middle school.
Dear Diane Rehm:
At approximately 9:45 CDT this morning you and your experts inappropriately cut off a poor man who was a bit confused but nevertheless conceptually correct.
Bucket Shop Laws did exist. New York's was enacted in 1909 in the wake of the Panic of 1907. And Bill Clinton did in 2000 sign a bill preempting state laws controlling bucket shops. Please see Eric Dinallo's 2008 testimony to the House's Agriculture Committee.
http://agriculture.house.gov/testimony/110/h91120/Dinallo.pdf
I suggest (a) that you vet your experts with greater care and (b) that an appropriate penance would be devote an hour of your show to correcting the misimpression with which you left your audience. Special Interests DO have too much influence! The Public IS being damned!
Yours truly,
William Pickard
Thank you for addressing issues, but beyond outrageous tuitions, tenure, building costs please address how educations alternative agendas short a country’s economic development by not putting out professions that are needed or conversely by graduating too many in some areas, some cases and this not only affects those graduating but our economy. It seems schools serve their enrollment programs and not the markets real needs.
My comment deals with on-line courses. As a college faculty, I am asked frequently to write letters of recommendation to employers and graduate schools. I cannot write highly supportive letters for on-line students. People can mask problems on-line that appear during face-to-face exchanges over 15 weeks in a classroom. These recommendations are the lifeblood of education for many undergraduate and graduate students I have taught. Can your guests comment? Thank you, Susan
Please ask your guests about civics education. Without a solid grounding in the foundations of our country and the duties of citizenship, how can students be equipped to be the leaders of tomorrow? Hillsdale College in Michigan requires that every student take a course in the Constitution. Shouldn't this be a minimum requirement at every institution of higher learning?
Thank you.
For many students, the cost of higher education begins with remedial classes. These classes don't count toward their undergraduate degree, but are rather preparing them for undergraduate work. The failure of secondary education, particularly to low income students ,leads to an increase in student debt
What suggestions would your guests give to art graduates unable to find work? Roberta Smith wrote a wonderful article in the New York Times (09.17.2009) called, "Artists Without Mortarboards," in which she recognizes the marketing of art degrees that rarely lead to financially viable careers.
In regards to student loans, I graduated in the early 90's with a Masters Degree and racking up only $10,000 in student loans. How? Because I waited tables and had a Graduate Assistantship on campus. Many of my classmates took out student loans not only to pay for college but also to spend their summers traveling around the world. I was amazed how these "students" purchased cars, cruises and other goodies on student loan money. Is this always the case? Of course not, but it would be interesting to see how much student loan money is actually spent on education instead of at the local pub.
Diane and Guests,
PLEASE DON'T LEAVE THE LISTENERS THAT THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO SEND THEIR BRIGHT CHILDREN TO THE "TOP COLLEGES." The astonishing thing about many of them is that up to 80% of the students are in fact paying full fare, which means that their families can easily afford the $50K per year cost. The college I'm most familiar with is Dartmouth, where roughly 51% of the students are on some level of financial aid and again, with the cost being above $50,000 per year, applications are at record rates and the colleges do not award financial aid until they've already admitted their next class, and roughly 50% of the students are still able to pay the full price of being there. During the boom years, these colleges also did away with loans, so financial aid is 100% grant. So, people with children who are smart, accomplished, and self-propelled, those children should definitely apply to Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Williams, Stanford, etc. If that child has some special talent, that should be highlighted and will most likely help that child be admitted. Also, these same schools are now awarding financial aid to international students on the same basis as to American students. So, again, families with good students should encourage their children to apply to the best colleges they can. In my family's case, my son was offered a 100% grant for Stanford, a smaller package to Harvard, and no financial aid at all to go to our state university where he was admitted to the honors college. He ultimately decided to go to Harvard, and of course our state university would have been the most expensive option for us. PLEASE TELL YOUR LISTENERS ABOUT THIS.
I have six children ranging from 19-30 and the last is about to enter a state college.
2 comments:
1. FOUR YEARS? Admissions counselors are now saying that a student should not expect to graduate in 4 years, rather 5 or 6. The availability of courses needed to begin my sons major is 0. He will have to begin his 8 semesters of his major another semester due to full classes. He applied on time and was accepted to this program and now must graduate later and they do not promise or care about his concern for the debt.
2. Coming out with a great amount of debt and then having a degree in say "history" where you can't actually get a well paying job and now you can't pay for your own house or pursue your dreams.... now you must live with your parents till you decide what you can do with the degree and the debt!
I was shocked to hear the way one of your professors discuss salaries and vacations of full professors.
First: There is huge variation in professor salary. Part of this is due to private sector demand. Business school and medical school professors earn a ton of money, German and history professors much less. Star performers (Nobel laureates, etc.) also earn a lot. Assistant professors earn relatively little (30-50K). Citing "six figure salaries" is irresponsible, given this variation. Even the few six figure salaries are typically much closer to 100K than 500K, and never 900K. YOU SHOULD CITE MEDIAN salaries (not maximum or means).
Second: There is huge variation in what vacation means. As an associate professor receiving a 9 month salary in a department with a PhD program, it is expected that I spend the summer DOING RESEARCH and TRAINING STUDENTS.
comment deleted
One of the professors did not want to comment on the quality of the students the colleges and universities get. I think this is wrong, I am a high school teacher and we need the criticism of our clients and colleges are some of our clients: they gets some of our products.
One word about financing. When I was in graduate school, I chose not to go into debt while I was earning my terminal degree in a humanities field. I could not imagine going into debt for a humanities doctorate, and I was astonished to learn how much many of my fellow students were in debt. In effect, they were paying themselves 20,000-30,000 per year to go to school, maxing out student loans. When I graduated, I had to fill out a government survey that amasses demographic data. I had been hired while ABD, and the fact that I had a contract faculty job and no student debt, the school official told me, indicated that I was a statistical freak. I was merely being fiscally responsible for my education. Had I been pursuing a more financially lucrative field, debt may have been more attractive.
In the larger culture, debt became a way of life in the last two decades, and many of my fellow students bought in, living well beyond their means while they studied. That was the American way at the time, and to some extent it still is.
I teach at a university in the west that has grown from a community college to a state college to a university in 15 years. Enrollments are exploding, and next week when I return to campus, I expect to see a sea of late-model gashog pickups in the parking lot. Undergraduates now expect to enjoy a higher standard of living while they study. The easy access to financial aid begins earlier and earlier, and people do not realize they will be paying off student loans well into their careers.
The education arena is a microcosm for a culture's debt tolerance--with all of the prolonged "hidden costs" that accompany it. Until that value changes, escalating costs will feed into a cycle in which people effectively pay themselves (as well as the institution) to attend institutions of higher education.
I have to agree with one of the callers commenting that high school students do not enter college ready to learn college-level materials. I am a high school math teacher and we have an enourmous pressure to make sure every student is in "honors math" course for the sake of status. As a result "honors" courses are so watered down and really not what it should be.
At the same time, I have to say some of my professors did not really prepare me for my career either. Many of the educational theory classes I took in college have no value for my actual teaching career. Being an actual classroom teacher is nothing like how my education professors explained it to be. I now wonder if my education professors were ever real classroom teachers before they became professors1
The present college situation is over the top and this country is over the top. This problem is across the culture in all areas and it may only be solved by a mechanism unacceptable to the present society which will result as a lose of cohesive structure.
I have spent 35 years teaching in a midwest university. I agree with your guests that higher education has become far too expensive. Much of this has been caused by a continuing erosion of state support with the burden of costs being shifted to student tuition. Most state universities depend on tuition to cover more than 60% of their budget. State support is often less than 30% with the remainder made up by gifts and private revenue streams. The recent economic downturn has exacerbated this balance, further reducing state support. Your guests position that universities "spend like drunken sailors" is far off the mark for the overwhelming majority of institutions. One could certainly argue that your guests did considerable harm in undermining the work of dedicated faculty and further eroded public opinion and support for higher education.
Your guests position that tenure is an abuse, not necessary and not based on academic freedom is also way off mark. In troubled times, faculty taking unpopular positions that might ruffle potential large donors is a real concern. In point of fact, tenure offers universities administrators safe haven from external pressures to dismiss faculty. Tenure also, offers professors the necessary safe haven to engage in blunt and potentially offensive classroom dialog as part of the higher education process, and to be critical of administrators when necessary. Please also be reminded that tenured faculty can, and have been, dismissed for cause
I value the Diane Rehm show for it's timely topics and balanced presentations. I am frankly surprised and disappointed that this program only featured guests critical of the current state of higher education. These guests gave highly biased opinionated information that I suspect left most listeners with a very distorted view of what really happens in higher ed.
Perhaps you can counter this with a show titled "higher education, what's working and how can we make it better?".
Re: the recent graduate who called in to complain about his debt load after choosing to attend an out of state college and designing his own major: I was surprised that no one on the panel noted that this student created his own situation, but didn't want to take responsiblity for having done so. To avoid debt or at least minimize it, he could have gone to a two year community college, lived at home, then attended an in-state college or university. Where is it written that he should be entitled to name his own price? Re: his decision to "choose his own major" in freshwater resource management: unless he graduated from high school already expert in biochemistry, physics, and engineering, he is not qualified to design his own course of study. He complained that professors weren't interested in working with him: perhaps they were relectant to take on unpaid independent studies. Perhaps the students in the courses they are actually paid to teach have first claim on their time.
Re: faculty salaries: I was surprised at the disinformation Prof. Hacker was permitted to disseminate. Visit the website of Academe (easy google search) and look at their annual report on faculty salaries: 6 figures are an anomaly, not the norm. I earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, have 20 years of teaching experience, and won teaching awards at each institution where I worked. I now teach at a two year college and earn a little over $50K. What "should" I earn, given my training and experience? Would anyone have this discussion about doctors, lawyers, investment bankers? Re: faculty working hours: I have 15 classroom hours per week. Of course, I also must prepare those classes (2 hours of prep time on average for each hour in class), grade papers & exams, advise students, and serve on committees to do things like write outcomes assessment reports for accreditation. I typically work 65 to 70 hours per week during term time. Ah, but I have summers off, right? True, I don't teach in summer. I also do not get paid in summer: a pertinent fact that Prof. Hacker failed to note. However, in summer, I do research, write articles, and prepare new courses--on my own dime and my own time, because I don't want to dial it in year after year. I am pretty typical of academics I know.
Hello, Diane. Your show on Higher Education was remarkably thorough given the complexity of the problem and the brevity of time available. Surely, 'the University' will have to change soon, and just as surely, it won't do so until we require it to. The principal difficulties you covered --exponential increases in cost and serious lapses in teaching-- probably have less to do with policy matters like tenure and curriculum than with the structure of university governance. A university, ANY university, whose board of directors AND president fail to provide support for --and active involvement with-- faculty teaching quality and innovation on a level AT LEAST equivalent to their rewards and involvement with athletic programs and administrative staff will continue to decline like some colonial outpost where the staff dress for dinner while the roads decay and even the memory of the mother country is lost in the darkness. When students encounter teachers who love what they are doing and will go with them to the edge of the discipline where there are many more questions than answers then real learning will happen in spite of whatever obstacles turn up. When they don't find such teachers they will get no education no matter how many certificates you award them.
Thanks again, Jim Watt
Not much was mentioned about the salaries made by coaches. Often, the football, basketball coach earns more than the university president. Also, why does a university need a sports program at all?
City College does fine without sports teams.
I have several comments to make relating to this debate, which predictably has turned into a public flogging of professional academics and the system that protects them, a system that, we should be grateful, allows them to air views themselves or permit their students to air views that might not be politic or in the mainstream. Granted, there are those in the academy who abuse these privileges, but the majority, from my experience as an academic, are committed and thoughtful. We don't do it for the money, our incomes almost always being relatively modest, or for the job security. As with other commentators posting on this site, I found the two guests either suspect in their commitments (Professor Taylor has some personal interest in promoting his own for-profit business) or offering skewed data and disingenuous arguments. Some significant portion of the increase in the cost of college have nothing to do with faculty salaries: The professionalization of athletics; the need for the university to cover a portion of the costs when they accept grants, including science grants; new, expensive dining halls and exercise facilities to attract wealthy parents; etc. It would have been interesting to hear more about these aspects. Instead, what we got was the now ritual symbolic execution of the professor who doesn't listen, who cares only about research, and the beatification of the "caring" (but perhaps less knowledgeable) small college professor. And then there was the familiar, tedious attack on "useless" lines of research, taking aim at the easy target of English literature. But what about the masses of suspect research in business? Or religion? (Do we need another book or article on Jesus? What if that question were posed?) Or research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies? No, too hard to attack these areas. Easier to go after the English professor. These two guests did not offer the most intelligent critique of higher education. I'm very disappointed.
Like several others who have commented here, I too was taken aback by this utterly imbalanced show. It played right into the right wing caricature of faculty as overpaid (with our $50,000-60,000 salaries), idle (with our 50-60 hour work weeks) dangerous (because our speech is still somewhat protected by an outrage called tenure) and self-indulgent (because we engage in a useless waste of time called research). Clearly any academic insider who promotes this line can be guaranteed high royalties from a trade press and plenty of airtime. While there is no question that students out there are suffering with high debt and few job prospects upon graduation, to blame it all on a class of individuals who with few exceptions care deeply and primarily about educating students, is to ignore all the deep structural factors at work. So next week can we expect a one-sided public flogging of nurses for the ills of the health system?
The comments of your guests about the work of professors don't reflect what I have seen as a PhD student in biology. Perhaps it is because they are focused on the humanities. My major professor works 9-5 every weekday, summer and winter: teaching, doing research, writing grants, writing papers, ect. He is also found in the lab about 50% of weekends, and most holidays when the university is closed.
University research is VERY important in the sciences, quite apart from teaching we would have almost no basic research done in animal behavior or ecology (just to name two fields I know about) if not for university research programs. But research can also serve to get students interested in science. I'd have had a much less quality education without working in various labs. And professors who use their research to bring a little extra something to the classroom are, in my experience, often the best.
I was very disappointment in the show today. The rising cost of college is an important subject, and it deserves scrutiny via a rigorous and informed discussion. But your guests presented many gross distortions about the actual costs of college, and there was no attempt to correct these. Among these was their failure to acknowledge that the "sticker price" of most colleges is far above the price most students pay. One of your guests declared that "tuition at many colleges today exceeds $40,000, and that is larger than many family's income." It is indeed an alarming statement. But what it failed to acknowledge is that a student from a low income family who was accepted to that college would almost certainly be awarded a full tuition room and board scholarship. Those accepted to Harvard, for example pay nothing if their family's income is below $60k. If it falls between $60-180k, they will be charged no more than 10% of their family's income. The authors of these books surely know this, but deliberately chose to leave that information out of the program. Why? The fact of the matter is that at most colleges, only applicants who are 1) average or below average students for that institution and 2) come from very wealthy families pay those shocking prices to attend. Tuition, room and board are deeply discounted for everyone else. My son was accepted to 10 colleges this year whose tuition room and board costs were in the $40-50k a year. He is an above average student, but not a star. After merit scholarships and financial aid, the final cost to our family ranged from $19k-23k a year. Still a sizeable amount of money. But when you consider that about $10k is to cover room and board, those prices seem reasonable for schools with very small class sizes and excellent student-teacher ratios.
As I was listening to this show, driving to an adjunct committee meeting of the Massachusetts Community College Council, I became more and more dismayed by the very limited picture of higher ed Mr. Taylor and Mr. Hacker were sketching. They mentioned, I believe, that there are 300,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the U.S., but they failed to mention that there are a million (that's right, 1,000,000) contingent faculty. What, or should I say who are contingent faculty? Despite holding advanced degrees and having many years of experience, we are the untenured, and untenurable. Sometimes we teach only one course per semester, but sometimes we teach five, or six, or more courses, at two or three different institutions. Some of us have full-time jobs, but they are limited to one, or two, or three years. Some of us are graduate teaching assistants. All together, we teach more than half of the courses offered in our colleges and universities, and in some institutions, we teach upwards of 70%. Some of us have health insurance, but many of us have no benefits. All of us earn considerably less per course than our tenured colleagues. Perhaps The Diane Rehm Show could air a program where leaders of COCAL (http://cocalinternational.org/) or New Faculty Majority (www. newfacultymajority.info) could present another face of higher ed in this country.
As a professor and avid listener, I was disappointed at Hacker’s unfair and sanctimonious assault on faculty. The cost of higher education has skyrocketed, and some institutions don’t deliver, yet the guests' derision of the work of most professors is misdirected.
1. Tenure is earned based on job performance. The privilege of relative (but not absolute) job security is an incentive to offset low salaries.
2. "Six-figure salaries"? Not in my field. Not at my institution. Salaries in law, medicine, and business are high, but most of us earn modest salaries. We teach because we love our disciplines and want to educate students.
3. Hacker described our jobs as "cushy." What? Most faculty receive a nine-month salary. I teach 6 to 8 courses per year and work a 60- to 70-hour week. During the academic year, I have NO weekends: I prepare classes, grade assignments, respond to student e-mail and blog posts, and worry about the next deadline! Summers off? In 20 years, I have NEVER had a summer "off." With my teaching load, I can only keep up with my field, conduct research, and write for publication during the summer.
4. Sabbaticals are not automatic: We compete for them. Some profs never get them. Hardly recreational or self-indulgent, sabbatical projects immerse us in our fields: I bring my learning right into the classroom. Hacker's belittling of research is perplexing, if not insulting. Without research time, would Einstein have proposed the Theory of Relativity?
5. Colleges "spend like drunken sailors"? Which ones? Career administrators are overpaid, but accusing colleges of fiscal irresponsibility is misguided. With declining enrollments, my institution's board has kept tuition costs down, enhanced financial aid, and kept faculty and staff compensation competitive by postponing capital improvements and undertaking impressive private fund-raising.
By ignoring such realities, Hacker has done a disservice.
I listened with interest to last evening's rebroadcast of your program on higher education. I feel, however, that despite the fact there are some examples of abuses of the system to be found, the presentation was unfairly biased against the teaching profession. In the mid 1980s I taught for eight years in a liberal arts college making less than $20,000 annually, a fairly representative and appalllingly low salary even at that time. I have now taught in a professional school (pharmacy) for 16 years and have barely edged into a 6-figure salary. Teaching is the primary focus of my position, although service and research are also required. I routinely work 50-60 hours weekly for 12 (not 9) months out of the year, as do most of my colleagues. Some work considerably longer hours. Almost all of us could make more money in the private sector, and the majority of our students immediately make a higher salary than we do as soon as they graduate. I and my colleages feel called to teaching, however, and I am proud to be associated with this dedicated and hard-working group.