For the record, I have 2 masters degrees as does my wife. She has taught graduate level education course for two universities.

My point isn’t that Professors should be paid less.

My point is that teaching two classes a semester is not what any sane person should call a full time job.

My point is that having seperate Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Asian Studies, Womens Studies, Native American Studies is a waste of money. Most of these departments offer little of value and serve as nothing more than a base of power for campus political pressure groups.

The average university English Department could reduce its offering by 1/3 if they went back to a more traditional curriculum. If English professors taught 3 classes per quarter, and those classes had 50 or 60 students that would be a lot of students who could take English classes for less tuition. But a lot of professors decide to teach classes on their ineterst of the moment (romance novels as feminist literature) and so one of the classes they teach during a quarter may only serve 20 students. That’s where the waste comes in.

And as for professors not making that much money, Ward Churchill got a six figure income running an ethnic studies department even though his highest degree was an MA, and his writings were little more than paranoid ramblings. I wonder what Cornell West was payed by Harvard for handing out As to anyone who took his classes, while not writing any original work of his own in years.

Not as compared to today.

“At least I have the intelligence to admit when I don’t know something.”

Obviously not, everything you post here is proof of that.

Throughout the Cold War, US tech stayed about five years ahead of the USSR (except in a few narrow areas, like control theory and chemical lasers). A large part of this was the success of publicly funded research, the universities playing a critical role.

And they did that without gouging the students or the taxpayers like they are today.

Thanks for making my point.

At least in regard to the public institutions, they should exist to serve the students. — The Whistler

In their current format, universities serve the students, private enterprise, and themselves, i.e. society in general. Not too much wrong with them.

Maybe increasing incentives, i.e. more funding, for high quality output, cut funding to universities/staff that don’t perform.

Throughout the Cold War, US tech stayed about five years ahead of the USSR (except in a few narrow areas, like control theory and chemical lasers). A large part of this was the success of publicly funded research, the universities playing a critical role.

Modern business theory allocates too little importance to R&D, marketing is often considered at least as important. This is why the Pentagon pours so much money into universities, private enterprise does too little blue-sky research. If you read the tech articles, just about all the cool new tech initially comes from universities, then it often gets bought by private enterprise to be developed into a final product.

Walmart-type education may mean lower quality, and less cutting edge knowledge, since the professors aren’t involved in as much research.

Do you think the US will maintain its 10 year tech advantage over China by underfunding universities? (China is spending a crap-load of cash improving its universities.) Sure, some extremely wealthy Americans will save a bunch of cash in taxes, but at what long-term cost?

What do you mean? Prior to 1963, for example, the marginal tax-rate was 91%, even after that it was significantly higher than today. Back then it was the people who could afford it being gouged.

Thanks to all their tax-cuts, conservatives are now crying that education costs too much. The cost of tuition shot up about the same time Reagan was applying his magic. Correlation or causation?

I doubt you could prove that it is based upon any sort of efficiency criteria.

I really don’t understand what you’re getting at. The problem in the US is that the higher ed system has turned into a system to benefit the faculty and administration of the universities.

At least in regard to the public institutions, they should exist to serve the students.

Walmart makes more than Porshe. There’s room for a Porshe in higher education (Call it Harvard). However there will be plenty of opportunities for the industry to support the much greater numbers of students that don’t want/need/utilize/can afford an Harvard education.

You’d have to be a total moron to miss the fact that the more public money goes to education the more unaffordable it’s become.

Those who argue that we will have trouble if we return education more to free markets miss one huge point; there are few other industries out there whose cost has gone ahead of inflation so quickly. The only one I can think of is medicine, and it suffers the same problem as does education.

Government pays half the bills.

Stop the subsidies for student loans, and let banks decide whether an ethnic studies major who needs remedial English is going to be able to pay the loan back. I guarantee you that if this were done, you’d see students in school who actually belonged there (and about 30-40% less of them), and ethnic/gender studies departments would close.

Moreover, since those remedial students aren’t graduating anyways, you would see a net improvement in the economy when they go to the trade schools they should have been attending in the first place.

On the other hand the cost of education was quite low. My dad says he paid $35/semester for tuition at UND. It’

I’m pretty sure the employment prospects of an ethnic studies graduate are pretty limited. If not they certainly should be.

From what I’ve observed they seem to go in 5 directions:

1. The smartest go on to law school.

2. The dumbest go into teaching.

3. The laziest become activists.

4. And the most dishonest run the government in California.

5. and the rest become diversity consultants.

And I still think you’re Hannitized with a new name.

He does seem to have the same room temperature IQ and abrasive nature. If it is Hannitized, he must have gotten Spell Check! Heh.

My point isn’t just that American universities are overcharging students. Having earned 2 masters degrees and 2 teaching credentials in the last decade, I’ve spent enough money on tuition, books, and miscellaneous charges to have started a business.

As someone who’s paid out of pocket for close to 40 graduate courses (not units, courses), and as someone who’s wife has taught graduate level education courses, I’ve looked long and hard at how universities charge and spend money.

For one thing, universities deliberately charge people like me higher than necessary tuition so that they can give financial aid packages to someone else they deem worthy. A number of university president have actually bragged about this in the past. There’s also a whole lot of waste in having professors and students able to work up entire degrees where students are able to avoid the rigor of traditional curriculum. As I’ve noted previously, one can earn a degree in Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz without ever taking Shakespeare. One can earn university English department credits for watching soap operas. One can earn a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, a graduate program which cannot be defined other than it allows leftists to study whatever the hell they want.

It costs money to set up departments. Womens Studies, ethnic studies, and history of consciousness department aren’t fueled by the good intentions of the people who start them. These departments are fueled by money from tuition, contributions from alumni, and (in the case of state schools) money extracted from taxpayers.

In my opinion, the money used to fund a Womens Studies department is money wasted. The money used to fund a History of Consciousness department is wasted. The money used to fund a Black Studies department is wasted. The money used to fund an English class where students watch soap operas is wasted. The money used to fund Sociology classes where all students do is read political propaganda is wasted (My wife is a UC trained sociologist and is infuriated that real social science has been replaced by touchy-feely politics in our post modern sociology departments).

The waste of money to me is secondary to the waste of time. I grew up poor and was the first in my family to go to college, and it was a major hardship on my grandparents who helped me. I know there are literally tens of thousands of kids going to school from similar circumstances to mine. While many of them (and their relatives) are being ripped off by overpriced tuition, they are also being ripped off by being given a second or third rate education. Instead of being pushed mentally and intellectually, they’re being given agenda driven assignments by professors wedded to ridiculous post-modern and deconstructionist philosophies, and never being exposed to truly great ideas.

Please check out my blog posting below.

http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/entry/american_universities_abondon_classical_liberal_arts/

Professors aren’t school teachers so comparing them to school teachers is unfair. The school system is essentially just babysitting so both parents can work (I don’t doubt that, occasionally, those at schools might learn something though).

Since college professors aren’t expected to be babysitting they should be spending their time teaching. More should get done in the colleges rather than less.

Bringing up research raises a number of issues.

1) I think public universities should be primarily about education.

2) Much research is a bunch of make-work garbage. Obviously there are exceptions to this.

3) Why can’t research be done in the copious time off Professors get in the summer?

4) Most areas of specialty don’t have a large need for research. Schedules for people in the English department should hardly match the schedule a legitimate researcher has.

By and large Angry Vertebrate’s post is a university slacker (or wants to be) and doesn’t want to lose his free ride.

1. The average tenured professor only has to teach about 8 hours a week (compared with 35 hours a week for a high school teacher). There’s no reason why professors can’t be required to teach 3 or for classes a semester.

The average class length per week is 2-3 hours. Teaching 3 classes would be between 6-9 hours a week.

The first college I went to, Drury, required their teachers to have no less than 2 classes a day, with guaranteed 10 hours of office time for students who needed help. This basically worked out to a minimum of 20-30 hours per week of classtime and 10-15 hours of office time. Not a full work week, but certainly more efficient than one or two classes a week.

The only teachers not subject to these rules, that I was aware of, were art and phys ed teachers, who often were hired to come in twice a week to teach a single class. But those classes were more expensive to cover the costs.

Really now, the constant atempts to declare me of a lesser intellgence fall flat considering who i’m up against and what you people take for the truth.

At least I have the intelligence to admit when I don’t know something. Though I understand that if the majority of you did that, you’d admit little else.

I would have to research this further to find out what caused the increases. I do refuse to believe it is salaries and benefits. I worked at a state university and the pay is not great even for professors.

It would be nice to see some proof of the increases in ND higher education spending and how that tracks with tuition increases. You know as well as I do that conservatives will lie to bolster their arguments.

But I do appreciate the consistency in blaming “those other people” making too much money and your consistent advocacy for lowering everyone ELSE’S income.

While the $50K people resent the $80K people, the $20 million people are robbing you blind.

Hmmm, now who was it that said all my posts were rude and insulting?

So any data forthcoming? I’m curious now.

Wing Chun, I feel your wife’s pain, there is as academic at this uni researching “Homoeroticism in Early 20th Century Ballet”, I kid you not!

That does not surprise me in the least, which is one reason why I am so infuriated that families have been asked to take out 2nd and 3rd mortgages to pay for their kid’s college, at the risk the child might come out of college no better educated than they went in. I would say that easily could have happened to me at UC Santa Cruz, if I hadn’t had a mentor outside the university who wasn’t affraid to tell me what I wasn’t learning.

When my wife did her undergraduate work in sociology, she had to study wide breadth of humanities and social sciences. She had to take a whole year of the French Revolution. She had to read Marx, Russeau, Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Thomase Paine, René Descartes, James Madison and just about anyone who’s ideas influenced social science. She had to take statistics and psychology. When I show her now what passes for sociology, it embarasses her.

“That’s not what I studied,” She’d say. “I learned real sociology.”

I believe she feels that the flakiness of sociology diminishes the real hard work she did years ago.

By subsidizing student loans, we also allow colleges to raise tuition unnecessarily.
If colleges know the government will always subsidize tuition they’ll never stop raising tuition rates.

I agree with that too. Without government subsidies, colleges would have to make their tuition more affordable.

I pointed out that your rudeness detracts from whatever argument you make.

At least I have the intelligence to admit when I don’t know something. Though I understand that if the majority of you did that, you’d admit little else.

Maybe if you tried to make your point without alienating the reader someone might take you seriously.

And I still think you’re Hannitized with a new name.

If committee were to design a system for education and research to advance knowledge it would be hard to come up with one that was more inefficient, wasteful, ineffective, and above all, expensive. The money going into the system is far and above the value of the product coming out. The duplication of effort (effort is debatable) is astounding.

A couple of things are missing from this analysis:

1. By subsidizing student loans, we make it possible for a lot of people to go to college who never should attend. Fully 35% of incoming freshmen at the U. of Mn, for example, take remedial courses. If they were told to come back if and when they were ready for college level work (go to community college, son), the state would save hundreds of millions annually.

2. For some reason, even schools with declining enrollments seem to need ever more buildings and such. Curious–I think it has a lot to do with the issue #1.

3. Have you ever seen a university building with, say, vinyl siding from Menard’s?

Find out how much funding for North Dakota universities comes from taxation. Then look at the percentage of this support over the years. I’ll bet you’ll find that the percentage dropped. If your state has been run by republicans, it dropped a lot.

We’re facing the same kind of increases in California. Yes we have a Republican governor, but for the last two years he’s been nothing more than a rubber stamp for the socialist Democrats in the legislature. The entire state government is pretty much under the thumb of public sector unions. Teaches, nurses and prison guards run the state.

California’s rate of taxation is the highest in the nation, and the state actually takes significantly more money per capita than New York. A lot of that money can only be spent on education. So California probably has the largest educational money pot in the country.

But the UC and Cal State system are raising tuition again. So even in states with

You idiots don’t understand the purpose of universities, they are place of learning for everyone, and that includes the academics. Professors aren’t school teachers so comparing them to school teachers is unfair. The school system is essentially just babysitting so both parents can work (I don’t doubt that, occasionally, those at schools might learn something though). If academics were teaching full-time, they wouldn’t be up to date in their area of expertise and wouldn’t be conducting new research.

Professors shouldn’t be required to be babysitters. University students are expected to be able to continue learning when not supervised by a lecturer, therefore requiring fewer hours of staff time, whereas a teacher has to hang round to make sure no-one gets stabbed/robbed.

Also, as society gets more high-tech, the cost of research often goes up to. The downside is that they need more funding so that graduates leave with relevant qualifications.
(OK, I’ll admit that most of sociology seems to be a waste of money.)

The huge amount of research conducted by universities has a flow-on effect to industry too, Berkeley being a particularly good example. They are often heavily state/govt. funded because they give so much back to society (in terms of both education and research).

But to address the problem that some university staff aren’t very productive, some countries set performance requirements on all academics. This criteria even applies to the research output of professors too, to prevent the drop in output of some professors as soon as they were granted tenure.

Oh look! The brainstems have a new group to resent and demonize! “Those pointy-headed university people make too much money!” Reminds me of yesterday’s mob ignorance about auto workers.

Yes, the brainstems never met anyone who they didn’t want ot see paid less. Well, except for the top guys in the corporate worldd who they drop to their knees for and start slobbering.

It’s just an outrage a day here in conservative brainstem land!

PS. Public education costs rise because nobody wants to pay taxes top support them. I worked at a university for 5 years. My first year there was an election for governor. The Young Republicans put signs up all over campus warning that the democrat was going to raise tuition if elected.
So here we had these young brainstems against taxes who didn’t want to pay more tuition. I guess like most brainstems, they thought the university could run on AIR. IT WAS A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY. In Colorado under the republicans, the percentage of the operating budget coming from taxes had dropped dramatically to 8% by 2004 and the republican governor had a target of ZERO. THAT’S why costs increase. Short-sighted, greed, ignorant conservatives.

That’s how it is dealing with selfish, greed-driven brainstems. They don’t get it. However, I do enjoy seeing the young people driven to huge debt for their parents’ support for conservatism. It makes me smile.

Were you able to determine specifically how the funding for higher education has changed?

If I keep speaking in firm, clear tones I may get a direct answer.

Oh look! The brainstems have a new group to resent and demonize! “Those pointy-headed university people make too much money!” Reminds me of yesterday’s mob ignorance about auto workers. — Dino

Yep, I’ve noticed that too Dino. Multi-millionaire corporate types whose job consists of wet-lunches, “board meetings” (drinking), and golf, are heroes amongst the SAB “conservative” crowd. Those that inherited their wealth and live off return on investment, i.e. other peoples’ labor, are a favorite too, but actual people that work hard and are paid well, like auto workers and academics, they are the scum-of-the-earth to the SAB crowd.

Is it envy?

There is a myth on this site that professors work at universities since they cannot get “real” jobs. I’ve never had more job offers, without even applying for anything, since I returned to uni to do a PhD. My supervisor and others I work with are always liaising with private enterprise, and because our skills are in demand, our charge-out rates are very high. (My field is physics/engineering though, so unlike commerce, the arts, or sociology, it is actually useful to private enterprise.)

If these universities had to price their tuition at levels people could actually afford we wouldn’t see that growth (as the universities aren’t about to price themselves out of the market). — Rob

Not necessarily. Law of Supply and Demand implies that there is a price-point that maximizes revenue, and that may well be at a level that only 20% of the population can afford.

You’d have to be a total moron to miss the fact that the more public money goes to education the more unaffordable it’s become. — Whistler

Euro-socialist countries used to have no fees (some still do?), all tax-payer funded, and can be quite efficient too. There are too many factors for your over-simplified view to be universal.

You idiots don’t understand the purpose of universities, they are place of learning for everyone, and that includes the academics.

First indication that you’re full of shit. I learned long ago (not in an academic side show either) that when the first thing out of someones mouth when arguing a point is an insult or an arrogant derision, the rest of that persons comment should be taken as the empty, defensive rhetoric that it is.

I have a sister in academia. She tells a much different story from the vast wellsping of scholars pouring over the library at Alexandria in scuba suits or disrupting graves in Peru. She says that they party a lot, regard themselves as a superior species, and that NO ONE cheats in academia like the academics. And yes, they demand more priviledge and money every year for less and less in return…This is what our society has raised the bar to…

I have no doubt that there are exceptions among the faculty of schools, just like the wide spectrum of teaching talent in the system. But if you start an argument with “You idiots”, you’ve already lost any credibility with 90% of those of us with any sensibilities, a quality not available at your money-mill universities…

State funding? Well, in constant 2005, dollars, the funding for the U. of MN system is about constant since 1978. No cuts there!

http://www.academic.umn.edu/img/assets/17505/3-3.14%20StateTax6105.pdf

Notice, though, that the academics who put the report together like to emphasize something called “effort” in taxation. More or less, the first measure of “goodness” in their opinion is how dry they’re bleeding the taxpayer.

I would dare suggest that they also think it’s a good thing, if one can judge by the tuition increases, that they think it’s a good thing if their students and students’ families are bled dry, too. Because we allow remedial classes and spend tens of billions on ill-advised student loans, they get away with it.

In doing so, they perpetuate the false idea that it’s a good thing for the customer to be bled. Ouch.

“ethnics studies” is absolutely absurd.

I agree. These departments are largely created to pacify an angry group of activists, or reward individuals with their own departments.

Many universities require that a student take an ethnic studies or womens studies course to graduate, which creates most of the demand for the course. It would be interesting to see what the demand for those courses would be if students were not coerced into taking them.

I’m pretty sure the employment prospects of an ethnic studies graduate are pretty limited

They become “hip-hop intellectuals” like that stuttering idiot that comes on Fox news

By subsidizing student loans, we make it possible for a lot of people to go to college who never should attend.

By subsidizing student loans, we also allow colleges to raise tuition unnecessarily.

If colleges know the government will always subsidize tuition they’ll never stop raising tuition rates. Just like lenders who know they’ll be bailed out by the government will never stop making bad loans, and automakers who know they’ll get a government bailout will never adjust their business models to be, you know, profitable.

However, that doesn’t explain public institutions who by their nature depend on taxation to operate.

Sure it does. We’ve got a huge problem with higher education spending here in North Dakota. Our state-run universities have skyrocketing tuition, and it’s exactly because that tuition is subsidized.

If these universities had to price their tuition at levels people could actually afford we wouldn’t see that growth (as the universities aren’t about to price themselves out of the market).