Higher Education

[dai bread]

I like on-line shopping. The links lead me to all sorts of places and things, and if, like Amazon.com, they have preview and audition tracks, I can spend hours trying different versions.

[Haggis@wk]

American Amnesia: Young people in this country are failing civics, which is a crisis for the nation.

For the past ten years, our research team at Stanford has interviewed broad cross-sections of American youth about what U. S. citizenship means to them. Here is one high school student's reply, not atypical: "We just had (American citizenship) the other day in history. I forget what it was." Another student told us that "being American is not really special….I don’t find being an American citizen very important." Another replied, "I don’t want to belong to any country. It just feels like you are obligated to this country. I don’t like the whole thing of citizen...I don’t like that whole thing. It’s like, citizen, no citizen; it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen...it’s stupid to me."

[piqaboo]

Hmm - sounds like they need some comparative civics work: here are your rights in Britain, here are your rights in Venezuela, ditto China, ditto Iran, ditto America. All clear now?

The Altoid wondered why I said she could go to highschool in Taiwan but not in China.
(tho by then, it may be moot.)

[Haggis@wk]

An End To Federally Subsidized Student Loans?

Without all that cheap money, it will be much harder to sustain high costs.

This might be a real boon to 'Toids parents and their peers

[Schmeelkie]

An End To Federally Subsidized Student Loans?

Without all that cheap money, it will be much harder to sustain high costs.

This might be a real boon to 'Toids parents and their peers

At first I thought this would be a bad idea - now colleges would have to pony up more money so students with financial need could come to college. But then, I thought, so what will the college's think - drop tuition so they don't have to pay so much per student. And also, be more discriminating about the students you accept! Having students show that they are motivated and will use the opportunities available, and not use the time to live off mom & Dad's money, party, etc., would be a great boon, especially to public schools that tend to be less discriminating. Fewer, but higher quality students would have great benefits to any institution of higher ed!

[Haggis@wk]

http://blog.american.com/2011/07/chart- ... on-bubble/

something that cannot go on forever, won't

[Haggis@wk]

depressing

http://www.thebestcolleges.org/higher_education_bubble/

[Schmeelkie]

Very interesting, Haggis. but I do have a bone to pick with the following,

Do we think there' s a solution? Yes. And the first step is to start assigning economic value to specific degrees so that students can make wise decisions about the debt that they take on for education.

For a decent sized minority, the job they're shooting for is not necessarily directly related to their major. I've known pre-med students who actually major in English, communications majors who go into health research, etc. I can see that a metric like this could help, but it might be difficult to interpret for some...
Also, I'd guess maybe 1/2 of college students either don't know what they're going to major in, or change their minds 2, 3, 4 times over the first 2-3 years. Maybe these folks would be convinced not to start college right away if they saw the numbers. But, then, a lot of these folks are going to college to party with their friends...
And I can't see schools pro-rating tuition - $10,000/year for English majors, $30,000 for Engineering majors...you'd get folks signing up as English majors and taking a lot of engineering courses.
I don't have a good solution to this...

[Giant Communist Robot]

I know a bunch of lawyers that were history and economics majors

[Haggis@wk]

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UNC-Wilmington Professor Tells It Like It Is.

The genesis of the problem in our universities is the “democratization” of education and the easy availability of student loans, “Affordable education,” November 7. The nation is thus saddled with a trillion dollars in student loan debt ready to follow the housing bubble.

The floodgates have been opened wide to campus admission with faculty responding by adding courses and programs that do not prepare students in the important basic areas, especially, in the hard sciences and mathematics. Accordingly, students do not seek truly academic knowledge and skills but are just satisfied with a diploma, which is used by potential employees as a selection tool.

Administrators cater to such business model irrespective of how soft academic programs expand exponentially with the more solid academic curricula not being supported and even eliminated. Students are thus shackled with bogus degrees that lead nowhere. The state subsidizes students and so the increase in the number of students results in higher tuition costs for all. . . . The failure of K-12 education is finally creeping and crippling our entire university system. Too bad.

[Giant Communist Robot]

I don't know about any of that. What I see is during times of recession one of the first things cut is education, which will surely hurt us in the longer run.

[piqaboo]

I've seen some of that. California has 3 state systems. Jr college, CSU system, and UC system. Used to be you couldnt get into UC if you needed remedial classes, and most certainly they were not available at a UC. Now they are - things like pre-freshman math and english. Sad.

[Haggis@wk]

I don't know about any of that. What I see is during times of recession one of the first things cut is education, which will surely hurt us in the longer run.

Only if there was value in the education being cut. As far as I can tell the only careers degrees in "Music Therapy" and "Fine Arts" prepare you for are all in the food services industry.

There are some truly worthless degrees and too many young people are suckered into college when they shouldn't be.


The Value Gap: Americans Increasingly Question The Cost Of Going To College.

“The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down. In the last decade alone, tuition rates at public colleges and universities, which enroll about 80 percent of American students, rose by an average of 5.6 percentage points above inflation every year. . . . College presidents seem tone-deaf to those concerns. In a companion survey conducted with The Chronicle, three-fourths of college leaders said the system was providing a good or excellent value.”

[Shapley]

It strikes me that, if you go deeply in debt in order to get a degree in Economics, you should automatically fail...

[Giant Communist Robot]

Only if there was value in the education being cut.

Actually, I didn't have college in mind when I wrote that.

[Haggis@wk]

Actually, I didn't have college in mind when I wrote that.

Fair enough, can you give some example of cuts in education "which will surely hurt us in the longer run."?

[Schmeelkie]

It strikes me that, if you go deeply in debt in order to get a degree in Economics, you should automatically fail...

ooo - shouldn't tell my husband that = $45,000 in loans to get through his Econ PhD. I came out of grad school with no debt, but that's because in the sciences they pay you to go to grad school - in Econ, the admit everyone and then weed them out. I like the science way better - only admit those that can be paid via research or teaching assistanships.

[Haggis@wk]

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Coming Higher Ed Revolution:

In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations — shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T’s “Ma Bell” system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade — often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.

The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced — keeping many people out of the market — and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms — with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.

If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications. It could significantly increase the international competitiveness of American workers in a world in which we need higher skills and productivity to compete. It could sharply improve the employability of those on the bottom rungs of America’s income ladder, giving them the tools they need to move up. And it could do much to restore the American Dream for those who have begun to believe that opportunity in this country is disappearing. In other words, such a change could hardly come too soon.

I think 'Toid and other younger "members" here will face a much more fair and anxious to please higher educational environment by the time they start shopping for college. I suspect we are going to witness a change in how education is sold.

[jamiebk]

UC system is considering a proposal where they would stop charging tuition...How does school get paid for you ask? They propose charging students 5% of their post-graduate income over a 10 year period. really???

[Haggis@wk]

UC system is considering a proposal where they would stop charging tuition...How does school get paid for you ask? They propose charging students 5% of their post-graduate income over a 10 year period. really???

You're making that up!!!!!!!! PLEASE tell me you are making that up!!!