Ordinary Scandalous Student Debt

Ordinary Scandalous Student Debt

A Personal Finance column in today's Los Angeles Times has one of the clearer sagas I've read of how a college student can get caught in a debt trap. The key line: " some students who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan." They end up paying credit-card style interest on what they had assumed would be federal loans.President-elect...

Different Version of the Same Duncan Story

Different Version of the Same Duncan Story

Also from the Chronicle, but a very different tonehttp://chronicle.com/daily/2008/12/8770n.htmWednesday, December 17, 2008Obama Praises His Education-Secretary Choice for Relying on Data to Improve SchoolsBy PAUL BASKENWashingtonPresident-elect Barack Obama said on Tuesday he values his choice for education secretary, Arne Duncan, for his dogged determination to use data to drive...

New Secretary of Education

New Secretary of Education

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reported President-Elect Obama's pick for Education as neutral at best for higher ed. Critics cited in the piece I post below call the nominee, Arne Duncan, a kind of corporate choice. It is true that higher ed's managers are pretty much out of ideas, and cling to myths I've described elsewhere. Here's the not-so-encouraging report, pasted below.Optimism...

Good News Bad News

Good News Bad News

The bad news in higher ed is always the same: some person with great power showing they understand nothing about higher education funding.At a conference sponsored by the Higher Education Government Relations Conference called "Making the Case," the chancellor of Ohio's Board of Regents said that colleges can do more with less today because the Wright Brothers "created their flying...

National Disaster

National Disaster

The best summary of the very serious results of the report, Measuring Up 2008 is in Inside Higher Ed. More on this report soon:The states performed best on preparation and completion, worst on affordability (49 F’s) and learning (all incompletes). Highlights are below:Preparation: 6 A’s (Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont), 18 B’s, 21 C’s, 5 D’s,...

Burn the Funding Model

Burn the Funding Model

Harvard's endowment losses joined other endowment losses in the New York Times today. The endowment lost 22% of its value in the last 4 months, or $8 billion. It could be quite a bit more than that, the article suggests. The breakdown of holdings is incomplete, and it would be amazing if only 11 percent of the endowment has been in private equity, as the article states. Their...

Costs of Privatization

Costs of Privatization

Here's a nice compilation of some recent studies that show that privatized medical care adds costs rather than reduces them. It stands to reason if you think about the costs of marketing (as much as 25% of for-profit university budgets) and the cost of profits, which go in varying but usually high degrees to investors and not to operations. But reason hasn't been a big part...

Endowment Toxins

Endowment Toxins

I've been writing to my budget pals for a few months about when the toxic waste is going to surface in university endowments. It's only just beginning - in the form of the shadow of the holes in the crap investments thrown by operating cuts and now hiring freezes. Cornell announced a couple of weeks ago, the Chronicle of Higher Ed is starting to keep a list, which includes at...

Numbers: Majority Vs. Top

Numbers: Majority Vs. Top

We're starting to get the negative numbers for pension and endowment funds that pay for faculty and staff retirement and also support education. The University of California's pension fund fell from $6.7 billion to $5.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2008. Cornell University reported a hiring freeze in response to endowment drops and state funding cuts. Meanwhile, the...

Colleges Told to Get In Line

Colleges Told to Get In Line

The Obama campaign never bar0cked the higher ed agenda: its programs for increasing student aid and research funding have been modest. Even the apparent big ticket item -- doubling scientific research in 10 years -- is if you do the math pretty much what we had under Clinton and Bush Junior. (Money doubles every 10 years at a little over 7% annual compounded increases, which...

Adjunct Exploitation Hurts Students!!

Adjunct Exploitation Hurts Students!!

It may seem like common sense that when you cut teaching staff, you hurt students. The cuts can take various forms. You can reduce the number of teachers and increase class size. Most public colleges and universities have done this, and learning has occurred in more large lectures and become more passive - or so you'd think we could all agree.Another strategy is to change the...

Debate on Higher Ed Failure Rates

Debate on Higher Ed Failure Rates

Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on Mark Schneider's critique of the American university's graduation rates, especially in the context of our higher spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. The core claim:Even though the U.S. spends more of its gross domestic product on higher education than do other countries, and contains many of the world’s best universities, the...

Culture Wars Continue

Culture Wars Continue

The McCain/Palin campaign is a constant reminder that the culture wars live on. They are running against the Weather Underground circa 1969 - The Sixties remains the Right's primal scene, ground zero, bete noir, take your pick. To set themselves up as warriors against the terrorist 1960s they attacked Obama's occasional paths-crossing with Bill Ayers, a Weather leader back in...

More on the Public-Private Difference

More on the Public-Private Difference

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education published the results of a job satisfaction study. It shows a sag in satisfaction in mid-career, but overall very positive reviews for jobs in academia. 71 percent of faculty members give high marks to collaborative governance on their campuses; 68 percent of tenured professors agree their colleges support a strong teaching environment;...

Selling Admissions on the Open Market

Selling Admissions on the Open Market

I've caught up with a truly shocking story that was broken last fall by UCLA's student paper the Daily Bruin. Since the university is one of my main areas of research I like to assume I'm not naive, but this piece took my breath away. It has the elements of deep corruption, and not just of aberration - large donations followed by admissions to super-competitive programs for OK-to-good...

Adjunct World

Adjunct World

One of the most moving and graphic tales of adjunct life appeared in today's Inside Higher Ed. By graphic I mean a mixture of descriptions of impossible teaching loads, terrible hours, unpayable debt, non-healthcare, and summer unemployment pay. But in the midst of it he says this:Some have asked why I continued to teach as a part-timer if things were so tough, and to be honest,...

Student Loan Problems in Community Colleges

Student Loan Problems in Community Colleges

The New York Times has had good coverage of problems in the student loan industry - to put it politely. They have a good new piece on how some major banks are cutting back on loans to community college students, who are generally the least-well-off economically and who amount to 40% of the country's college students. The banks seem to be segmenting the student loan market, with...

A View From Missouri

A View From Missouri

In a speech last week, University of Missouri President Gary Forsee cited some all-too-familiar stats about the decline of public funding for Missouri higher ed. Missouri is 47th out of 50 in per-capita spending on higher education, in part because the share of the U of M budget that comes from the state has fallen from over 60% to 30% in the last eight years.Missouri's growth...

Alternative Giving

Alternative Giving

Harvard alum Carroll Bogert has an excellent op-ed in the New York Times about what to do with Harvard's big endowment besides make it even bigger. She notes that The university’s endowment stands at $35 billion and is likely to hit $100 billion in a decade. At an annual growth rate of 13.3 percent — the average since inception, and regularly exceeded in recent years — Harvard...

Slow, Silent Impoverishment

Slow, Silent Impoverishment

Some of the best recent defenses of public higher education have come from the business press, in the form of attacks on the huge and growing resource gap between even the strongest publics and the top privates. The powerful 2007 essay, "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League," was published by Business Week, and begins with a wicked dig at vanity dorms at Princeton and goes...

Talking Points

Talking Points

About a month ago I went to Sacramento with a group of University of California faculty to try to offer legislators a faculty perspective on the need...

Nice Moment of State Gov Insight

Nice Moment of State Gov Insight

Here's a good example of a state governor - Ohio's - facing down a budget deficit and maintaining state funding for higher ed next year, along with his long-term plans. Here in California we should be so lucky.The key quotation:[Gov. Strickland] did not recommend any cuts in the nearly $2.38-billion that colleges are receiving from the state this year, an amount that represents...

Hard Times for the Evil Twin

Hard Times for the Evil Twin

Who is our evil twin here in academia? The media?They too are in the business of putting together and distributing information, so they are our twin. They lack our analytical standards and put out all sorts of nonsense, plus are rich and drive out real knowledge with their fake kind, so they are evil.Or so it often seems when a member of the university community watches ten...

US High School Grad Rate More Like 70%

US High School Grad Rate More Like 70%

The New York Times had a good piece about states cooking their graduation books. See the sample stats at left. California, self-described world headquarters...

Columns by UC's New President

Columns by UC's New President

Mark Yudof has been nominated to move from being the head of the University of Texas system to the presidency of the University of California system....

Knowledge and Hackwork

Knowledge and Hackwork

Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the Bush II Presidential Library controversy. The facility at Southern Methodist will have three parts, including a policy center that aims to "celebrate" the president and his record.The obvious problems include:knowledge being produced on a university campus without the normal safeguards of peer reviewknowledge that will be received...

Private Giving 2007

Private Giving 2007

The Council for Aid to Education has released its figures for higher education philanthropy in 2007. Overall donations were up 6.3 percent, which is close to the annual average for the last ten years. The Chronicle of Higher Education story also offered what have become standard comments about the skew in private giving towards the very top.Large donations to the nation's wealthiest...

Problems with Private Partnerships

Problems with Private Partnerships

Student loans produced a lot of stories about conflicts of interest last year, and some mild clean-up activity. One pattern there was kickbacks - gifts...

Martin Amis Vs. Professors Everywhere

Martin Amis Vs. Professors Everywhere

The Times of London - of all papers - had a good piece by Alexi Mostrous on Martin Amis's 80,000 pounds a year from the U of Manchester, in exchange...

The Endowment Boom: A sign of Illness?

The Endowment Boom: A sign of Illness?

Inside Higher Ed has a report on university endowment growth last year. If you follow this topic the data won't surprise you. The rich got richer faster - Harvard and Yale, the two biggest, grew 23 percent and 28 percent respectively. The report includes a table showing that the smaller you are, the slower you grow, which of course is a familiar rule to those of us living in...

Cost Problems

Cost Problems

Everybody hates the incessantly rising costs of medical care. Commenting on the latest inflation numbers, the economist Dean Baker puts the cost of higher education in the same category.The major forces pushing the rate of inflation higher continue to be medical care and education. Medical care costs rose by 0.3 percent in December. They have risen at a 5.1 percent annual rate...

Education for the Few

Education for the Few

Business Week has published a piece with an excellent array of accessible statistics on the inequality boom in higher ed. It has a good first line too: "It's only fitting that Whitman College, Princeton's new student residence, is named for eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, because it's a billionaire's mansion in the form of a dorm."The "Ivy League plus" educates 1 percent of university...

Family Income in Medical School

Family Income in Medical School

The American Association of Medical Colleges has published a study on "Diversity of U.S. Medical Students by Family Income" which shows that the majority of med students come from the top fifth of the population by family income. In addition, this number is actually growing, in spite of much official concern. The report concludes this way:A real concern is a possible increase...

Ditching the Majority

Ditching the Majority

No group helps itself by always favoring its fortunate few - or by using them as the index of its condition. College language and literature departments are a case in point. The Modern Languages Association devoted some discussion at its convention this year to the plight of the adjunct faculty member. When the plight of adjuncts initially surfaced ten or fifteen years ago,...