Shop Talk: Monday, April 11

Hear, hear! I went to grad/law/biz school at Northeastern, a middle-of-the-road university in Boston that has decided to abandon its founding mission of educating the poor and working class in favor of becoming a Wealthy and Prestigious National University in USNWR (much as BU and BC have in past decades). Their naked ambition in this regard has been nauseating, particularly since my resource-poor grad program was perpetually overlooked so they could build shiny luxury dorms and gyms and other such academic necessities. Naturally, the university that started in the Huntington Street YMCA now costs within a few hundred dollars of Harvard or Williams, but without the generous financial aid policies.

Much as you relate to your own alma mater’s practices, Northeastern has gone from ~65% acceptance six or seven years ago to about 33% acceptance today, almost entirely by sending thousands of glossy brochures and application fee waivers and letters of encouragement to high school students who don’t have the chops to get in. These students, of course, are rejected out of hand, and the acceptance rate plummets. Simultaneously, the school reduced its freshman class size.* It is a staggeringly dishonest practice, but it has results: Northeastern went from being an unranked regional university in 2004 up to 69th place in the last USNWR rankings – a jump of more than 80 places. Tellingly, the director of admissions now earns more than President Obama, and the newish president’s salary has increased by more than $300,000 over the last few years, according to the school’s IRS Form 990 submissions for the last few years. The university as corporation, indeed.

The grand irony, of course, is that no matter what Northeastern does to affect their rank, employers will always consider Harvard > BC > BU > Northeastern in their hiring practices, regardless of what the rankings state.

*Another factor are the school’s moves to phase out its traditional schedule, wherein students take five years to graduate because of lengthy co-ops. This will be achieved by reducing the amount of time spent on co-op. Of course, students don’t pay tuition when on co-op, and the university can turn over more students with a four-year program than a five-year program. Hmmm…

I agree with the posting, and this reply. My comment is tangential; I went to grad school at Boston (but not to any of the 4 schools listed). I agree that Harvard’d be at the top and Northeastern at the bottom, but I’d thought it’d be BU > BC instead of vice-versa. But, I didn’t do a close comparison … also this was many years ago, a few years B.F. (Before Flutie).

If corporations would stop outsourcing jobs to third world countries students would not be pressured into attending colleges when they clearly do not have the ability to pass. Bring jobs home, increase the selectivity of all universities, and close all diploma mills. When many of our college graduates can not read, write or communicate well, they are no bargain for potential employers. Universities were once private country clubs for the intellectually elite. Trying to teach toads on a log is a waste of time for everybody. There are good paying jobs that require skills, not education. America seems to have forgotten that.

I especially like the concluding comment: “may of them would have made those contributions even without the amazing educational opportunities they were provided…..” I had a student who flunked one of my easier courses. He never should have enrolled in college. But, he had an innate talent for engineering, invented a clever umbrella, opened his own factory and dropped out of college. Not unlike Bill Gates and others. Conversely, the majority of my students who actually graduate should not be released into corporate employment due to their profound lack of intellect and ambition.

Good article.

Thanks for pointing out a few of the many lines of elitist and just plain bad reasoning on the relationship between admissions criteria, grades, achievement, and graduation, which extend also to debt load and loan default.

Many who post frequently in CHE believe that the solution to higher education’s ills is to admit only the best and the brightest, leaving the others to . . . well, they don’t specify. We can see why some kinds of personalities would advocate this. Teaching very bright, highly motivated students makes you look good . . . until you realize that it has nothing to do with you and that these students will succeed with or without you and with or without your institution. Still, it is a lot of fun to “teach” the brightest or at least be around while they use you to learn. Real teaching is in play when you convey knowledge and proficiencies, eventually graduating someone who would not otherwise have succeeded were it not for your skills.

I agree that each decision to extend the benefits of education to a wider or even a different audience is accompanied by an obligation to identify and respond to the needs of that group. In one sense, however, the increased need for remedial facilities created by a decision to educate the underclass is not logically different from the obligation to invest more in recreational and social infrastructure created by a decision to educate the elite. Good education identifies the contextual needs of the students and meets them to the extent possible.

However, I’m not sure I agree that these decisions necessarily imply higher tuition. I see other layers at which the problem can also be addressed.

- First, is resource reallocation. Are we allocating outsize levels of “contextual support” to one group (perhaps athletics) and too little to another (perhaps the socially disadvantaged)? Most institutions would probably benefit from an open-eyed assessment of its current resource allocations.

- Second, you mentioned publics so I will use them as the example. The impact of public funding is twice that of tuition. Taxpayers pay at least $16,000 per student per year (more based on most models) while students pay about $7,500. Public support is declining for several reasons. To counter this trend we need effective arguments that the benefits of public higher education exceed the costs. These arguments need to be based on facts but we don’t have facts. In their place, we offer overworked anecdotes and vague unsupportable claims. The only way to build compelling arguments about benefits is to create, gather, and analyze metrics at which we now only guess. Armed with economically sound arguments related to employment, crime, public assistance, etc. college presidents might be more effective in dealing with legislatures. Yes, some of our elected officials are ideologues who cannot be reached by facts. At the state level, however, economic facts are exactly what drives most legislative decisions, especially once the posturing is over (exceptions such as New York, New Jersey, & Illinois noted).

Taking this back to U.S. News, they make these silly claims not because they are elitist but because they are ignorant. Only good metrics will show that it takes different resources to educate different types of students and that doing so is a public good. My personal opinion is that the greatest public ROI is realized when we remove a young member of the underclass from public assistance and place him or her in a career, even if it is based on a two-year degree, and even if we all had to work harder than usual to help this person become proficient and graduate. The elite will take care of themselves and members of the vast middle-group already have resources targeted at them.

So the question is, “Why does USNWR continue to get away with what most of us have known to be a patently misrepresentative set of parameters for its institution rankings?” The answer may lie in part to the political leanings of its owners/editors. But in a larger sense, the answer is that these rankings, like the anachronism of the official measures of retention and graduation rates, are not accidental. They serve the interests of the most traditional and influential institutions whose very influence depends in part on their continuance. And the only students and parents who can afford to pay anywhere near full freight at these places are those already in positions of power. The rankings are part of a racket promoted by the elite gang to maintain and enhance their position.

So what to do? The only way to combat this sort of thing is to come up with defensible alternative forms of evaluation and then promoting them to the public in every way possible. The truth is that the large majority of college graduates did not go and will not be going to the snooty expensive joints. And prominent exceptions not withstanding, most of the people who do the mportant work in our country did not go to one of these schools. It’s time we provided the analytical and research framework within which these people can stand up and proclaim the value of their educational institutions and the educations they received and thumb their noses at the snobs. Can we help? them–and us?intellectual and

Two of the lowest academically ranked major universities are the top ranked in football coaches salaries. Marvelous, just marvelous.

There is still a market, I suspect, for writers willing to pen such letters for others to send, or even to speak directly on their behalf.  I got the part of Cyrano on stage as a senior in high school in part because I had been known for polishing up the sweet nothings of classmates–the Abe Burows of love notes.   But more than the words themselves, the decline of love letters has probably been a consequence of the decline of penmanship.  These days hardly anyone (myself included) can “write a good hand,” and a typed love letter, even converted to a fancy font, just won’t do.  Even in those old high school days when guys copied my suggestions in their own handwriting for authenticity they were often so struck by the disjuncture between the sentiments and penmanship that they couldn’t go through with sending the note.  I did make sure I got my dollar first.