St. Joseph College Picks New President

Jeff and Warren I truly enjoy your episodes and you guys have a great style that fits well when eating lunch. Sondra as with other guest are certainly brave to put themselves out there like this for the good of our community. I did have some lingering thoughts which I wrote on my blog which I hope help advance the dialogue. In part they center on three themes from the broadcast:
1. Benchmarking is irrelevant
2. Best practices is only what you can get done
3. Playing not to lose
Hopefully I have made some sense in the  discussion on assessing IT performance
Regards.

20 years ago an old friend of mine published an explanation of this, and predicted exactly what we are now experiencing. (http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Spirit-Page-Smith/dp/0140121838/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326365398&sr=1-1)

I hold three degrees:  one take at a state funded university, and the otehr two taken at the same Ivy League University.  The state university is one of the so-called public ivies.  The experience I had there, though, was truly a mixed bag, from superior to pathetic.  The experience I had at the Ivy campus, though was superior across the board, and I took courses from a wide range of departments, from political science, sociology, American Studies, education, engineering, art and architecture history, history of medicine and public heatlh,  to American and English literature.   Compared to the cost of my bachelors taken at the state school, the cost of the secondt two degrees was outrageous.  I would, however, do it again without hesitation.  Had the preperation I received in state supported public elementary and secondary schools been better, I could have avoided spending four years at the public ivy in the same state.  My better-half who is an MD took a Bachelors and MD on the same public ivy campus.  Whereas the experience while taking the MD degree was superior, the experience during the process of earning the Bachelors degree was the same as mine , a mixed bag.  Sadly, the same lacking preparation in a totally different part of the state’s public school system was also the source of ending up in that state’s “flagship” public ivy insitution.  In the end, it isn’t the school, it is the faculty.  The cost of  a superior faculty can not be too high.  Beyond that, there is the question of which is the most important:  knowledge to get a job, or being truly libearlly educated.  

Ah, graddirector, I feel your pain, as do many other Chronicle readers who get up at 4 am to squeeze in their morning read before embarking on a 14-hour workday.  If only it were as simple as exposing the lie that academics don’t work hard.  Of course most academics work hard, as do most other highly-educated people in professional positions.  But we’re sometimes not working effectively, and the end result is that we toil furiously to limited purpose.  Our lived experience of working very hard should not blind us to the reality that some of our efforts are futile.

For many, our classes consist increasingly of students with limited academic preparation and no deep vocation for learning.  We spend endless hours trying to help students think–or even construct a reasonable sentence.   But do we have any actual training in how to do this?  Are we developmental education experts?  Do we know much about how people learn?  Or did we learn easily, naturally, and with joy, and therefore rarely experience what our own students are going through? Many of my colleagues spend hours meticulously grading student work and correcting errors, but see little in the way of improvement.  We’re trying very hard, but we don’t necessarily know how to teach our current students.  We’re sometimes wasting our time, and theirs.

Meanwhile, the limited learning going on in college classrooms prompts accrediting agencies to crack the assessment whip.  More and more kinds of evidence, more and more standards of excellence to meet, more and more documentation that we have measurable learning goals, that we assess them using multiple tools, that we use the results of assessment to change curricula and pedagogy.  These elaborate and time-consuming assessment edifices, of course, are constructed by…disciplinary academics who are not really assessment experts!  The blind leading the exhausted and demoralized.

I’m reasonably confident that we’ll adjust, that we’ll learn how to teach our students, that we’ll figure out less time-consuming and elaborate ways to demonstrate that students are learning.  But in the meantime…back to the 14 hour days!

You’re funny. I am reminded of college freshmen who say off-the-wall things in class. The room goes dead silent, and everyone cocks their head at an angle in the vain hope that the next ridiculous statement to come out may actually be rational or informed.

Fortunately Mr. Bishop, this website is an excellent place to educate yourself about how higher education (actually) works. You will find a wealth of literary resources that can inform on most every issue and topic pertinent to college life, for students, faculty, and staff. The forums in particular are populated by hundreds of academics that do superb jobs answering common questions and dispelling common myths.

Ever since the post WWII Veteran’s Act, higher education has become increasingly identified with careers, vocations, etc.  Colleges cannot continue to have it both ways:  While not exactly or even mainly an either/or situation, it is folly for colleges to continue tracking the demands of the student market (which has been more and more sold on college on the basis of a better career, etc. and not the instrinsic worth of “an education” while bemoaning the lack of respect and interest in non-career-related programs (viz. the humanities). 

While colleges continue to push the marketability of their degrees, through status or through perceived competence, they cannot consistently ignore the demands of the market for accountability in the form of a good job at graduation.  Fact is that many trades pay way better than many degrees. 

>The forums in particular are populated by hundreds of academics that do superb jobs…dispelling common myths.<

Or perpetuating them, you condescending piece of work, presuming, as your remarks do, that you and your like-minded fellows understand the problem better than I could possibly, a joke in itself.

    Unfortunately for our students and our nation one of the reasons higher education has become a promise pit is because of those who lobbied to ensure profits could be extracted out from what had been a equitable and effective system. And that detrimental condition has its origin at the point when student funding transitioned to privatized profit provided by public resources. After the privitization of student lending there was a incredible impetus to ensure that non loan aid to students be reduced making academe reliant on lending for much of its revenue. And equal emphasis to reduce proper overall funding to academe also resulted due to related political influence trading.
    Despite the scandals such as the 9.5, which resulted in massive losses in both public monies and public trust the inherent corruption of this system continues. Obama and Duncan did something in ending (sort of) the sub loan programs but that 900+ billion of student debt (massively overleveraged) means that those who hold it can also hold our educational and economic policy by the throat. And so what little reforms are done are either not enough or undermined.
  As Mr. Seligo noted the colleges have played the glitz game with the debt money in part due to the difficulty of having to sell what had been a public service to a public which is increasingly aware of and cynical about the imbalance of cost to benefit in academe. The sickening aspect is that these type of decisions are a expanded influence the more glitz the more debt and the less validity for the value of college studies.
  And it is unwise to look to the community colleges to break this cycle as proportionally yes the debt is less but the proportional cost to the populations they serve is actually more when their available resources and potential future income are considered.

“Many of my colleagues spend hours meticulously grading student work and
correcting errors, but see little in the way of improvement.  We’re
trying very hard, but we don’t necessarily know how to teach our current
students.  We’re sometimes wasting our time, and theirs.”

I’ve been teaching undergrads for almost 17 years, and I sometimes amuse myself by tracing my evolution as an instructor. At first, every failure was a challenge to me and I rose to the challenge by using some (or a lot of) face-to-face time to explain, to review, to try to stimulate and motivate (I absolutely love to learn new things and thought that, if I could show students just how exciting the world of science could be, then they would be, well, just like me!). After many hours of hard work (on my part), I would give the student another chance to pass the course (sometimes I bent the rules a bit because I just couldn’t stand failing a student: it would mean my failure also!), and well, as you can guess, the student would show no improvement the next time. After awhile, I realized that I wasn’t a tutor and would encourage failing students to make use of all of the professional resources available on our campus (study skills, note-taking, time management, stress reduction, etc.). I was only somewhat relieved to see that it wasn’t just a failure on my part: that these students also rarely seemed to improve after the professionals stepped in. Eventually, I made two decisions: 1) that my primary responsibility is to my discipline, and I must ensure that my students respect the discipline and learn to appreciate that they must work hard to become proficient in it; and 2) that it will up to the student to figure out how to become proficient in the discipline, that it’s a road they must travel alone but, if they stick it out, there will be rewards at the end. Sure it’s fluff, but it’s kept me sane all these years.

Now, as one of the most senior instructors in my department, I’ve become the crusty old curmudgeon whose courses are “tough”, whose marking is “tough”, and who expects too much from students (according to what the students say on my course evaluations). But my overall ratings are quite high and the elective courses I teach always have a waiting list, even when similar courses aren’t full. There are too many students in universities today who don’t belong there: decide which ones you can help, and put your valuable time and energy into them, and realize that sending the message to students that they are failing with their current approach to being a student can also be doing them a favor.

When I was in graduate school, I received a letter from our university president telling us that my university was proud to remain affordable to students (we had just seen our graduate tuition jump from 11,000 to 14,000–which I know is less than many of you out there paid).  I sent a reply calling his claims of affordability (our graduate teaching stipend was 11,000) were risible.  The reply was to point out the comparatively low tuition and to ask what I meant by “risable,” and to correct me by saying that tuition was “raisable.”  That’s all I needed, to know that university presidents need to be kept out of the loop.

Being ‘liberally educated’ is only for the rich now. College to get a job may be useful if its in an employable discipline. In IT, if I had it to do over again, id have skipped college, paid 20K to get a Cisco CCIE(assuming I had the brain to do it, which is way harder than the worst, and multiple immediate offers of employment. Then after getting a job that paid better than slave wages, get myself ‘liberally’ educated, provided I had enough dramamine to stomach it.
Young engineers I know coming out of college have 80-100k of college debt, limited prospects, but have no employable work skills. No education is worth that unless its employable.

I couldn’t respond to your lower comment wherein you stated ”
Or perpetuating them, you condescending piece of work, presuming, as your remarks do, that you and your like-minded fellows understand the problem better than I could possibly, a joke in itself.”

I would remember that we can read your facebook page and it seems pretty clear that you’re more a conservative troll than someone who has extensive background knowledge in higher education.

Cars are subject to lemon laws and consumer protections.  College degrees and student loans are not. If your new car doesn’t work, you have recourse. If your new degree can’t get you employment, well [insert BS "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" nonsense here].

Edit: like a new car, the value of a new degree drops precipitously a few months after graduation, when many employers start looking ahead to the next class of graduates instead of looking back at the “day old bread.” The relevance of a new college grad sans employment can almost be measured in weeks.

I must say, this is one of the most thoughtful comments regarding the cost structure of higher education I have seen from a college president.  Thank you.  If I might, I have a few unrelated questions.

- There is a pretty strong conception among many venture capital outfits around Boston that only Harvard and MIT grads have ideas worth funding, no doubt because so many VC partners attended MIT or an Ivy.  One hand scratches the other…  Consequently, if someone from BU or Wentworth or Tufts or wherever has a genuinely good or great idea for a product/site/widget, s/he will encounter a lot of closed doors in Back Bay, Cambridge, and Waltham.  Have you found this myopia to impact WPI grads?

- Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg recently came back to Boston/Cambridge to recruit.  He made it no secret that he was only recruiting from, you guessed it, Harvard and MIT.  Evidently, no one from the other 80-some odd Boston-area colleges and 30-odd Pioneer Valley colleges knows how to write code.  What was your take on that, if any?

- Moving away from the sickening notions of prestige = talent that pervade our corner of the country, how does an institution or student balance their education between specialized coursework and training that has immediate benefit for an employer, and skills that might be more versatile in the long run?  In other words, how does one ensure they can find another job if their chosen speciality goes the way of the passenger pigeon?  One reflects on the many laid-off aerospace engineers – genuine rocket scientists! – after the end of the Apollo program, or of the thousands of unemployed Silicon Valley workers after the dot.com implosion and the “discovery” that most of their work can be done in developing nations for a fraction of the cost (or done stateside by folk on work visas).  In other words, in our global economy where so much of the work force and their accumulated knowledge and experience is considered utterly fungible and easily interchangeable, how can one safeguard against such occurrences, beyond moving to the low-cost countries themselves?

Whether a college education is “worth it” also depends on one’s major. A degree in Applied Mathematics, for example, will be worth much more than a degree in Ethnic Studies.
 
It’s also interesting to compare the benefit:cost ratio of a two-year certificate of competency in a high-paying vocation, awarded by a community college, to the benefit:cost ratio of the four-year degree in Ethnic Studies. Community colleges’ tuition is less, as is the length of the program (two-year versus four-year). If the community college student lives at home, his cost for food and rent is less; and even if he’s a full-time student, his opportunity cost of foregone income is less. Finally, it’s unclear whose compensation would be higher.
 
For this person, the “college premium” may be small or negative. Yet, despite having little competence or interest in academics, he may feel obligated to earn a worthless four-year degree– incurring lots of debt to do so – because he has bought into the LIE that he cannot be successful without a bachelor’s degree. 

superficial, warmed-over drivel. everything has gone up in price and the consumer price index does not adequately reflect higher education. higher ed has a more relevant index which commentators with their axes to grind either overlook or ignore. as was noted in another post, the price of a car has gone up dramatically since the 70s and there’s no lasting value. it’s not an investment, but a cost of living. most items we buy meet those characteristics. higher education does not. when will higher ed commentators start noting that the skyrocketing costs of consumer products that is needed to pay ceo salaries and shareholders has taken ever so much more money from our pockets and created such a huge wealth gap that people are noticing and expressing that awareness through the occupy movement and support for it. are they deaf to such obvious signs of public discontent? they must be, because they want colleges and universities to imitate business. then, when we do–by charging what the market will bear (or just what we need to make up for declining state financial support) or paying our ceos–they cry foul. which is it smart guy commentators–should higher ed act like a business or not? 

At least the Chronicle’s editorial director is willing to let us know that he is not neutral on the question of higher education’s value. This helps explain much about the editorial choices.

>Your assertion that MS students work harder than a tenure track assistant professor is simply absurd and shows a clear ignorance of a professor’s day. <

I'm MUCH more familiar with 'a professor's day' than you want to believe, or I will take time to explain. Sincere congratulations on spending most of your day in ways '…directly relevant to teaching…' but I would ask you to consider the profession as a whole, and reflect on the percentage of your colleagues and mine who can honestly make the same claim. Parents send their children to school to obtain an education from legions of people who have a very different goal for their efforts, and that is the long and short of it. As you are with the sciences, reflect for a moment on how much public money is lathered on your discipline's projects, and how contemptuous multitudes of scientists are regarding the public and the non scientist science students that blunder under their sway.

I have examined the Higher Education Price Index and it’s a self-serving piece of circular nonsense that is completely irrelevant to consumers’ ability to pay for college. 

Like the CPI, HEPI is based on a “basket” of goods and services that Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) buy, the greatest portion of which is labor. Now, here’s the catch: if the (weighted average) costs of the goods and services in the IHE market basket increases, THE HEPI INCREASES by the same percentage.

Think about this for a moment. It’s as if you go shopping for a car and find that the model that cost $20,000 last year now costs $21,000 — an increase of 5%. When you point this out to the salesperson, he says, “No, in ‘real’ terms, it’s the same price as last year because the Car Price Index increased by 5%.”

So, no matter how much the cost of the goods and services bought by IHEs increases, the HEPI neutralizes it, allowing the institutions to claim “with a straight face” that the cost of higher education really hasn’t increased that much. On the other hand, if the IHE’s funding doesn’t keep pace with the HEPI, it can claim that it’s losing purchasing power. And how does the IHE close this gap between revenues and “need”? If you said, “raise tuition,” go to the head of the class.

The Consumer Price Index is the appropriate deflator for calculating what students and parents pay, after adjusting for the effects of inflation. When adjusted by the SAME index (to allow an apples-to-apples comparison), the cost of tuition has FAR OUTPACED consumer purchasing power.

The HEPI has absolutely no place in determining the “true” cost of colleges and universities to parents and students.

Thank you vceross for providing an optimistic point of view and showing the opportunity that we have before us. I think that this discussion in itself is a great step towards progress. 

I’d like to share my point of view first before I elaborate. I am a STEM graduate student in an R1 university. I have the opportunity to earn a good living in the private sector, but I have decided to take a large sum of loans in order to pursue elite education so that I may one day get the chance to join the ranks of professors of higher education. I frequent this website extensively and understand the challenges involved in pursuing a tenure track or an academic career. I believe, however, that the quality of research and teaching that is performed within this country is invaluable. 

Jim Bishop, I understand your point of view. Many professors have wasted my time in courses that cost me $44 dollars per day. I have toiled with many friends through courses from professors that we believe taught us nothing and only hold tenure because they are lucky enough to be in a lucrative research field. However, I have many peers that have been inspired by professors, deans, and administrators that toil for the good of higher education and   by proxi, the good of society. 

I would like to ask you again what is the point of “higher education”? I personally do not believe it is to provide the means for students to make a living. I personally do not believe it is to increase the GDP for the nation. It might do so by coincidence, but I believe the goal of higher education is to improve the society in which we live in. I believe that the professors in sociology do this by pointing out to us the prejudices in our society and help shed light on how to see the value in other human beings unfamiliar to us. I believe that the professors in philosophy improve society by showing us how to critically think about important issues like abortion and immigration. 

I understand the concern, however, of the importance of making a living.  I will have to pay back over $50,000 in loans on an academic salary if I achieve my goals. Believe me, I am exploring all the options available to me. I would like to ask everyone though, what is the real value of higher education?

Here is an idea towards a solution I’d like to share. The discussion has largely been from people asking for more revenue potential from a college degree or from people defending the value of higher education and advanced research. Why not consider them separately? 

threejs just mentioned this above. ”many trades pay way better than many degrees.” It reminds of the community colleges that provide training in order to work the pipettes and equipment for biotech firms. Why do we need to publicly fund people to make a good living? If citizens can fund trade education that will result in adequate jobs that provide for a family, is that not enough? On the flip side, why should the public fund higher education in economics or business in order for some people to make a large personal salary? Is that a good investment in public money? I do not pretend to say that it is a simple question, but I’d like to bring it up anyways. 

To end my post, I’d like to sincerely thank the administrators, professors, and public for thoughtfully discussing these topics. I understand the limited time that everyone has under these tough conditions. You are all truly going above and beyond your duties and it gives me hope that this crisis will turn into a great opportunity like vceross says. 

Thank you. I sincerely wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors. Remember that your efforts give us students hope and motivation to do great things. 

That is interesting to hear. The conventional wisdom is that people with engineering degrees come out ready to work, and can get jobs easily.

Study without thought is vain: thought without study is dangerous. Stop wasting your time with just job hunt, if you are looking for a job for more than a year just realize that you need to change job you can get degree in few months from High Speed Universities search it online and you will be amazed

Dear god Jim. You have no clue what you are talking about. Professors work long hours. And to get to be a professor is incredibly competitive. Typically they work for 15 to 20 years at starvation wages before making much of anything. A very few make really good salaries. But I know brilliant, highly qualified professors in sciences, with tenure, who make in the $80K range. And many of them are the best, most active teachers.

Consider, Jim, how contemptuous you are regarding those making the often incredible sacrifices necessary to be an educator or researcher.

I can only presume that you may have had a bad experience, or are just taking out your frustrations with life online.

I agree that because of budget cutbacks the student to professor ratio has become far too high. And yes, some professors get through who are, as the English say, “donuts”. But the majority have worked incredibly hard to get where they are.

Yes, some are arrogant jerks, that’s true. But mostly what some see as arrogance is a degree of irritation with a people who are uninterested in learning, but want to tell the professor “where its at”.

Yes, that is true. There should be a clause in the federal student loan program that says that if the college has too high a loan default rate that it will no longer be eligible for student loans. And that college should also be required to pay back the federal government for those defaults. That will at least shut down lousy colleges that exploit the system.

Adding to this questionable value is the dumping of masses of for-profit graduates into the market place with nice pieces of paper but little to show for their time in “college”. Now, employers not only have to contend with the reality that public universities have long ago lowered standards to keep the tuition monies flowing in, but now there are a host of other institutions, apparently with degree-granting ability, whose graduates add to the confusion.

It’s getting harder and harder to determine who’s worth the interview, and for a while, I heard talk in the ivory tower of the PhD fading into the ranks of the Master’s Degree and a NEW degree being developed (post-PhD) that would REALLY separate the wheat from the chaff.  (yeah, right…)

Colleges are continuing tp price themselves out of the market for all but a few wealthy families, and those willing to enter into debt slavery to attend while the quality across the board continues to diminish in the name of greater numbers.

My prediction? But for a few of the solid, private/non-profits (Ivies come to mind), employers will dispense with looking for the degree specifically and begin to develop methods for evaluating who is trainable and then partner with (or develop) just-in-time training programs that will prepare their workforce for their specific needs. This sounds good for employers and seems nice if you are one of the people deemed “trainable”,… until you try to leave that enmployer and find that you are starting over again at the bottom of the heap.

In a way, things will have come full-circle, but it will be painful for all until we settle into the new reality.

And as soon as broke college grads can spend more on lobbying than the banks who fought for these onerous conditions, I am sure Congress will do the right thing…

In my indignation over the inappropriateness of using the HEPI to justify increases in IHE spending — and, more specifically, tuition increases – I’m afraid I got a little carried away, but my main point is the same.

The HEPI does, in fact, measure the cost of a typical market basket of goods and services bought by IHEs at specified points in time. A significant part of this market basket consists of employee compensation, which is influenced by those use the index.

Now, to the source of my indignation. My state is home to a major public university system which shall remain nameless. Several years ago, this system produced a very nice glossy brochure to justify its request for additional funds. One chart had a title to the effect of, “Adjusted for Inflation, Cost of [IHE] Has Not Increased.” Sure enough, there was a line chart illustrating this point. How could this be? Even though state support per FTES had decreased over the period covered by the chart, tuition had skyrocketed and, after adjusting for inflation as measured by the CPI, total funding per FTES had increased in many of the years on the chart.

I was told that spending had been adjusted by an index measuring the cost of goods and services that the system bought — the HEPI. Although this description was technically accurate, I’m sure it was news to the students and parents who had seen tuition more than double over the previous decade. 

Agreed. Three degrees here: BA at a rigid private institution, MA, MA, and ABD at public institutions (still trying to finish the PhD).  My undergraduate institution was very tough whereas my graduate training has been somewhat mediocre: in fact it seems that at my doctoral institution, likeability goes much farther than actual competence.  There is absolutely no comraderie among graduate students and intellectual disagreement is often impulsively characterized as “idiocy”.  But that may be more of a revelation about graduate school politics/culture/egos than the difference between attending an exclusive private institution and a public institution. All that I know when I was B student as an undergrad in a private university, I felt more intellectually challenged than as a grad student in a public university. And while I have studied under distinguished chairs at my doctoral institution (two were on my original committee), those I studied under as an undergrad were more approachable and genuinely concerned about my intellectual development as opposed to demanding unquestioning deference to their opinions. As a college teacher these days, I implore my students to question me as much as they can: I’m no good to them if I demand that they take my scholarly opinions as the final word.

@unemployed — it it is not just readers of the Chronicle who know the current problems with law schools. The numbers of people taking the LSATs are down. Applications are down. Of course, many people are still going because they do not know what else to do and because they genuinely want to go.

And it is not just corporations who are pushing STEM.

It seems that more and more students are looking at the value of education.   I know that the community colleges are swamped with students in our area.  Many students opt to go to community college and then transfer to OSU to save money.  They know the end result will be a degree from a reputable university.  I see more students becoming more pratical and giving up bells and whistles, including traditional campus life, to save money.  Additionally, it seems the emphasis now is for students to become more globally educated, both in and outside of the classroom, so that they can be more marketable to employers who are now looking for candidates that have experience interacting in the global market place.

It is going to cost my over $80,000 for my daughters degree.  That loan statistic is a joke.  Acadmics live in a fantasy land where cost doesn’t matter.  It is all about reputation.  Far too many think there is no price to pay for the education they deliver.