August 10, 2012, 11:12 am
By Peter Wood
The spiraling rise of component costs in higher education is helping to inflate the higher-education bubble. One of the reasons those costs are out of control is that colleges and universities see no merit in keeping track of some of the larger ones. You cannot exercise fiscal discipline if you have no idea what you’re spending. Higher education has at least two major cost drivers that it hides from rational oversight: diversity and sustainability. In Green Acres, I wrote about a new Solyndra-like scheme for getting taxpayers to underwrite the cost of a massive expansion of campus-sustainability programs. A new report from the College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, Second Nature, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers enunciates this ambitious way to farm out the virtually unlimited expenses.
The bubble also crosses paths with the…
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August 7, 2012, 3:39 pm
By Peter Wood
Stanley Kurtz’s new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, is not likely to be a campus bestseller. Some 88 percent of contributions from faculty members to candidates in the 2008 presidential election went to Obama and estimates of the percent of voting faculty members who voted for him range from 80 to 92 percent. Though some of the ardor for Obama has cooled, he remains far and away more popular on campus than Mitt Romney. Moreover, books arguing that Obama is committed to leftist policies receive an especially chilly reception from the left-leaning professoriate. The storyline they generally prefer is that Obama is a pragmatic centrist.
Spreading the Wealth, however, bears directly on the economic prospects of higher education. Kurtz’s provocative thesis is that under bland-sounding labels such as “regionalism” and “Building…
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August 1, 2012, 10:00 pm
By Peter Wood
I appreciate President Rosenberg’s praise of my skill as a writer and return the compliment. I also share his hope that my predictions about the financial mess that lies ahead for American higher education prove mistaken. I don’t welcome “collapse,” though I do think it is a distinct possibility.
Dr. Rosenberg takes strongest exception to my statement that too many students are going to college. His exception, however, is grounded on a quiet emendation of what I said, and several of the comment leavers have noticed this. Education, in my view, is among the highest of human goods and I would not want to deprive anyone of the opportunity to pursue it. But education and enrollment in over-priced college-degree programs are not one and the same thing.
Most readers here have no doubt run across President Garfield’s quip in his 1871 address to the alumni of Williams College…
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July 31, 2012, 11:57 am
By Peter Wood
How much does “diversity” cost a college or university? It must be a lot.
If you think of the number of diversity deans, provosts, and other administrators who owe their positions entirely to institutional pursuit of diversity, and count their salaries, benefits, overhead, and operating budgets; add scholarships and financial aid earmarked to students whose enrollment increases “diversity;” mix in the expense of faculty positions created primarily for the purpose of enhancing diversity; and top off the bill with programmatic items such as separate identity-group-themed student and alumni events and remedial academic programs for underqualified students admitted because of diversity preferences, the total is substantial.
But no one really knows the dollar cost of diversity because colleges and universities do not aggregate, analyze, or disclose their financial data in a…
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July 23, 2012, 8:12 am
By Peter Wood
The bubble-psychology of the consumer who holds fast to the belief that every bet is an investment; the mesmerizing allure of the prestige college that can dazzle parents to overlook the meretricious quality of the education it provides; the exigency-driven tuition hikes at public universities; the gamesmanship of college tuition—these are parts of the bubble as it currently exists (see Part 1), but they aren’t what drives its expansion. What is inflating the bubble still further is federal policy on grants, loans, and loan-forgiveness.
But even as the bubble inflates, there is a growing collection of sharp objects—the jackknife of online education, the hatpin of tax increases, the razor of state budget cuts, and the dart of public disenchantment—that threaten the whole thing.
President Obama made clear within a month of his taking the oath of office that he wanted to see a…
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July 20, 2012, 12:12 pm
By Peter Wood
The bubble in American higher education is inflating rapidly. Ironically this is happening just at the moment when large numbers of Americans are noticing that there is indeed a higher-ed bubble—that colleges and universities are enrolling too many students at too high a price; that the market for college graduates is saturated and oversupplied; and that there is a serious disparity between the costs and the rewards of the typical college-degree program.
One might think that parents who have some sense of this situation would think twice before spending tens of thousands of dollars (or more) on college, and encouraging their sons and daughters to go deeply in debt. But that hasn’t happened yet, at least not in substantial numbers. The psychology, as well as the finances, of this market differ from some classic bubbles. College degrees aren’t tulip bulbs, or overpriced condos. It…
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July 15, 2012, 9:44 pm
By Peter Wood
Updated 3:30 pm 7/16/12. Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, is under attack. In the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research, (Vol. 41, Is. 4) he published a peer-reviewed article, “How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.” No doubt had the study eventuated in the finding “no significant differences were found,” Regnerus would have received encouraging nods from the many academics who believe that to be the appropriate answer. But Regnerus’s data revealed “numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents.”
In the view of a good many academics, that’s not an acceptable finding. How many? Well, more…
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July 13, 2012, 5:24 pm
By Peter Wood
The dreadful scandal at Penn State reached another level on July 12, with the 250-page report of former FBI director Louis Freeh to the university’s board of trustees, culminating a seven-month independent investigation. The report makes clear the complicity of senior officials at the university in covering up convicted child molester and former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assaults on children. The officials include head football coach, the late Joe Paterno, university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, university vice president Gary Schultz, and university police chief Thomas Harmon, all of whom knew enough of the facts to act but who chose instead to turn a blind eye to Sandusky’s concurrent career as a child molester.
The officials chose to pursue a cover up, according to Freeh, because of their fear of bad publicity.
That probably…
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July 13, 2012, 11:44 am
By Peter Wood
After 25 years in bucolic Princeton, the National Association of Scholars has packed up its stuff and moved to New York City. We brought our collection of yesteryear’s college catalogs, our backfiles of Academic Questions (Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1987 features Virginia Hyman on “Principles of Feminist Scholarship”), and our library of several thousand volumes. We left behind office furniture that was probably second-hand three or four owners past. The junk haulers rendered judgment by taking a crowbar to my old desk and carried it out in splinters. I did manage to hold on to my prized Shine-O-Mat , manufactured by the Uneeda Corporation in 1948. It is a 150 pound gun-metal gray contraption for shining shoes, segregated into “Black Only” and “Brown Only,” and still produces a mean shine on your wing-tips.
Why New York? It’s a homecoming of sorts. NAS was founded here …
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July 6, 2012, 5:43 pm
By Peter Wood
The 2012 Report of the Platform Committee of the Texas Republican Party contains some strange declarations. On page 12 of the 22-page document comes this little paragraph:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Of course, virtually every party platform floats some strange ideas. They generally materialize out of the need to curry favor with narrowly focused interest groups that are active in a political party’s base and they seldom play much role in the actual legislative agenda of elected leaders. Still, the fringe pronouncements serve as…
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