News, humor, advice, and opinion on education and career, graduate school and college degrees.
Subscribe to Educated Nation
Let’s hope it never actually comes to this.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Again with the slapping. This time it’s for the jackasses in charge of higher education in this country. If you still feel they (the schools, the loan people, and the government) aren’t lacking in smarts and high-moral-ground-standing cojones, then please read this excerpt from WSJ’s Journal Editorial Report.
It’s a conversation between Paul Gigot, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and Dan Henninger regarding the cost of college, who’s in charge of making it cost so damn much, and the three-year-degree option. It’s buried three conversations down in the transcripts, so I’m posting the conversation in its entirety.
Also, when I tried to narrow it down to just the really good, informative chunks, ninety-nine percent of the conversation made my slapping hand twitch, so I figured it needed to be posted in complete form. Not long, not boring, and full of jaw-clenching tidbits about the Orwellian state of higher education. (Spoiler alert: They’re all bastards.)
Gigot: It’s a trend that most parents are keeping an anxious eye on: the skyrocketing cost of a college education. According to a new report by the College Board, those costs continued to rise last year despite a 2.1% decline in the Consumer Price Index. Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5%, while prices at private colleges rose 4.4%. Add room and board, and the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college is now more than $15,000 a year. At private colleges, the price tag is $35,000. The sticker shock has led some, including Tennessee senator and former education secretary Lamar Alexander, to push for a three-year degree program at the college level.
We’re back with Dan Henninger and Steve Moore. And also joining us, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy Taste Page editor, Naomi Schaefer Riley.
Naomi, why do college costs keep rising even if the price level doesn’t for everyone else?
Ms. Riley: Well, it’s a third-party-payer system. I mean basically what you have is, colleges know they can keep raising the price, and they know that the government, through financial aid programs and various grants that they give to universities, both public and private, is basically going to pick up the difference. Unfortunately, for middle-class parents, it doesn’t always work out that way. They’re not picking up all of the difference for them, but colleges keep raising the sticker price.
Gigot: Because there’s income limits on who gets the subsidies, but the subsidies are vast–I mean, the Pell Grants, direct grants for people. There are basically subsidized loans, and then there are subsidies for saving for school too, which is how a lot of middle-class parents help. Are you saying there’s a kind of chasing-your-tail quality here? The tuition goes up, subsidies follow, and then the people say, tuition can go up again, and then subsidies have to go up again?
Ms. Riley: That’s absolutely true. And then in addition to that, you also get a kind of arms race among the colleges. I mean, you get a situation where, first of all, it turns out that parents think the college is better if they raise a price. So if you see a $50,000 cost on college–which by the way, happened this year.
Gigot: Where is that?
Ms. Riley: Middlebury College. It costs $50,000 for tuition, room and board.
Gigot: In Vermont.
Ms. Riley: Yes, for this year. Vermont, you know, a very high-cost-of-living state. And, you know, but parents see that sticker price, and they assume, “Oh that must be a great college education.” So, you know, it’s–all of the wrong incentives are in place. And then colleges are spending money on things like landscaping and fancy food programs and Wi-Fi in the bathrooms and, you know, it’s really hard to sort of figure out where the quality is.
Gigot: I have a hard time imagining. I barely used a PC, Dan.
Henninger: Well, you know, it’s going to get worse, Paul. The College Board just reported that private loans last year for college dropped by 50%, while the public federally subsidized loans rose 15%. Now, we also know that the Congress has taken–is going to disadvantage the private loan program, which means that the federal program is–
Gigot: They’re going to put it out of business.
Henninger: They’re going to put it out of business, right, which means that basically colleges are going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. You will never get countervailing price pressure under those circumstances.
Gigot: All right, Steve, is this going to lead to you want to go send your kids to college for only three years?
Moore: Well, you know, Paul, I have an 18- and 16-year-old. I’m listening to these prices that Naomi’s talking about and I’m going to need a big fat pay raise, or else my kids are going to be with me another four years, which is a nightmare.
But look, this is a real issue. It’s going to cost now $200,000 to put a kid through college. You have to start asking yourself the question, “Look, I’ll give you a $200,000 check. Maybe that’s a better way to start your life than going to college.” But Naomi put her finger on the problem. The two areas–I was looking at the inflation rates in health care and education–both of those have booming costs. Education costs have gone triple the rate of inflation over the last decade. And it’s because the people who are getting the service aren’t the ones who are paying for it, and that leads to exploding costs.
Gigot: Naomi?
Ms. Riley: Yeah, I just want to say something about the three-year college costs. You know it’s funny, if you go back to the 1970s, which we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, a lot of colleges actually reduced the length of their semesters, and they said this was to save costs for parents. But of course, the semesters stayed shorter, so kids got less education overall. And the prices never went down. So I think you also have to kind of take these big ideas from schools about saving you money with a grain of salt.
Gigot: The likelihood is that they’d find a way to charge the same amount anyway, even if you only went for three years.
Ms. Riley: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
Henninger: But you get a year earlier to start work and pay back those loans.
Gigot: That would be the benefit. It’s an opportunity cost would be lower. But Dan, the government is going to–isn’t going to change any of this. If anything, they’re increasing the subsidies. they want to make Pell Grants an entitlement. Right now, it has to be passed with annual appropriation. They want to make it automatic.
Henninger: Yeah, and, you know, there is a social aspect to this as well. It’s pretty well proven that the payoff to a college education is higher lifetime earnings. The demand for college now is tremendous. People are just going to these colleges. Probably what we need is either online colleges or more colleges to meet the supply.
Gigot: But which college doesn’t necessarily help, does it?
Ms. Riley: No, no. There are a lot of studies that show, if you are a person who got into both Harvard and, say, the University of Arkansas, and you chose the University of Arkansas, your lifetime earnings would not be that much different. Of course one solution is just improving K-12 education.
Gigot: That would help enormously. And you might get higher returns on people who then don’t go to college or go to community colleges.
Ms. Riley: Yeah, the way it used to be.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
(image source *)
I’m a firm believer in the idea that if I don’t keep learning new stuff my brain will shrivel up and I will die. This may be misguided, but I’m not taking any chances. This list of 50 Awesome Ivy League Lectures All About the Future should keep me and my fear of brain-atrophy-and-subsequent-death calm for a while.
The lecture Jane Goodall gave at Harvard was wonderful. Of course, it made me feel like a big dumb galumphing human who’s wrecking the planet and not doing nearly enough to save the chimps, but it was still interesting and quite moving. Next up will either be The Future of the American University or Beyond Freakonomics: New Musings on the Economics of Everyday Life. Or possibly Fifty Years in Media: Changes in Journalism. It’s so hard to choose! It’s the same delicious quandary one encounters when trying to decide which book to read next. Or maybe that only happens to me.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would have a difficult time not clueing into the fact that I have negative feelings toward helicopter parents and their whacked-out Machiavellian ways. Is ‘Machiavellian’ too harsh? Then how about fu**ed-up, ruinously obsessive, and freakishly controlling?
It’s possible that I may have issues with parents who can’t seem to allow their children to (a) be themselves, and (b) have non-goal-oriented childhoods. The parents who die with the most Ivy-League-Degreed kid don’t win. That’s not even a category. Let it go. Kids should have only the job of growing into themselves; they are not here to make their parents look good.
Thankfully (as I’m this close to chucking the last vestige of professionalism right out the window) the end of the Helicopter-Parenting Era may be drawing to a close. Amy Benfer has written a gorgeously optimistic (and, yet, humorously sarcastic) article in Salon.com about the possible founder of the overly intense parenting trend, Lisa Belkin, and the new hands-off approach to raising whippersnappers:
Now Lisa Belkin certainly isn’t the only person responsible for the shameful way in which our discussion of parenting in the past decade has shifted to focus almost exclusively on the trials, tribulations, petty competitions and anxieties of a tiny group of very privileged families with children who seem to consider their individual child’s prospects of getting into the most exclusive schools more important than, say, ensuring an equitable access to education for this entire generation of children.
…Parenting trends do come and go. But it is genuinely shameful that over this past decade, women on both sides of the Mommy Wars — often self-identified feminist women — have allowed so many definitions of “good” parenting to become inextricably tied up with “affluence.” While all children need good food, healthcare, shelter and good schools, the helicopter parents, whoever the hell they were, allowed parenting to become a competition between children, in which your child’s well-being was directly proportionate to how much advantage he or she could score over the next kid. That, to me, is frankly immoral, and those are the kids I worry about. Hopefully they will grow up to be wiser — and kinder — than their own parents. More…
Now I can’t get that damn “Ding-dong the witch is dead” tune out of my day’s humming repertoire. I have Munchkin-fear, but it’s such a snappy little tune…
Previous Posts on High-Pressure Parenting (in Varying Degrees of Professionalism):
Acceptance
Awesome Parent
“Bursting the AP Bubble”
“College Panel Calls For Less Focus On SATs”
College Student Spy Cams
Find Your Happy Place
Media Frenzy Around High-Pressure College Admissions
Perpetual Perpetration
Play Doh-Smeared Credentials
Private College Counselors
Testing Season Begins
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Harvard’s science libraries are being mushed under one super-efficient “administrative umbrella,” Harvard College Library (HCL). By July the first four will have been assimilated: the Physics, Statistics, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Mathematics departmental libraries, with the remaining science libraries to follow suit later.
The administrative-types have assured everyone that the plans are strictly for the sake of efficiency and have nothing whatsoever to do with the $220-million deficit.
HCL spokeswoman Beth Brainard said the plans for consolidation were “not associated with the budget.”
Even before the financial crisis hit Harvard, library officials had been entertaining the idea of revamping the structure of the science libraries to create greater efficiency, she said.
The consolidation of services and collections across the science library services would facilitate interdisciplinary research and economize the purchasing, licensing, and processing of materials, according to Bloxham’s statement.
But Brainard did not deny the possibility of cost-reduction measures. Given the current fiscal picture, the merging of the science libraries under one administrative umbrella is likely part of a concerted effort to shave costs, according to two library staffers interviewed yesterday.
Library staff, who tend toward decent levels of intelligence, aren’t buying it and are mentally preparing themselves for possible layoffs. Sometimes ignorance, if not altogether blissful, would at least be several degrees less stressful.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
image: widener library
An article in The Boston Globe describes quite nicely how the admissions panels at Amherst College and Tufts University sit down and choose which student will be matriculating at their institutions. It’s not all numbers and robot-like perfection that the panels are searching for; a student’s whole picture is pondered.
All the successful applicants to Tufts and Amherst, two highly selective liberal arts colleges, boast impressive academic credentials, but so do most of their competitors. What they share is a spark that makes them stand out from the crowd, whether through singular talents and values, fierce determination in the face of hard circumstance, or force of personality.
For high school seniors aspiring to the nation’s top colleges and universities, the inner workings of admissions offices seem shrouded in mystery, a murky process that fuels endless angst and speculation. As students nervously await their decision letters, the two highly selective colleges invited a Globe reporter to observe admissions deliberations firsthand. The sessions reveal a complex, nuanced system that is at once analytical and intuitive, rigorous and forgiving, impartial and deeply personal.
The article goes into detail about what happens during the process—what the admissions panel sitting in the meeting room together go through to decide which 3,300 applicants out of 15,000 will be attending their school in the fall. It seems to be an excruciating process.
Here’s the cool advice blurb that was included in the article:
Like Dartmouth College, Amherst also has a need-blind admissions policy. Don’t they have enough good karma built up?
Posted by Alexa Harrington
image credit: Nancy Palmieri for The Boston Globe
Many smart, powers-that-be types in the realm of higher education are having an open-to-the-public conference on April 15th and 16th, 2009 to discuss building a better College Admissions mousetrap. It’s been somewhat biased and lacking over the past few decades or more, and it would be grand if they could make it a little spiffier.
One of the items on the agenda is standardized testing and the good, the bad, and the ugly wrenches it throws into the college admissions works. See? Happy Dance. Progress, forward thinking, and not putting everyone into boxes—all good stuff.
On April 15 and 16, 2009, Wake Forest University will host top admissions officers and leading researchers from Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, Ohio State, Princeton, Texas, Virginia, Yale and other universities along with the director of data research for U.S. News & World Report for the Rethinking Admissions conference. Participants will present papers and discuss the latest research on standardized testing, diversity, creativity, college ratings and how to evaluate success in college. The two-day event will be followed by a public lecture on April 21, featuring Robert Sternberg, Dean of Tufts University, who will report on Tuft’s experiment with essay questions as predictors of success in college.
Further Reading:
Beyond the SAT: Rethinking Admissions
The Impact of Dropping the SAT
Previous Posts:
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
“College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs”
The SAT Is Not Good
Wake Forest University Drops SAT Requirement
An Excellent Argument for Abolishing the SAT
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
Awesome Parent
Testing Season Begins
Posted by Alexa Harrington
The National Review Online has an illuminating article up pointing out the illogicality (and foolishness) of putting too much faith in the warped college rankings system. I’ve said about all I can say (using professional language) about the rankings, so I’ll hold back and let Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift from NRO speak wisely (and way more professionally) instead:
Some of the schools with higher rankings may truly have improved, but the most significant factor is that two of the Barron’s criteria — high-school grades and percentage of applicants accepted — don’t mean what they did a decade ago. Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.
Grade inflation, dubbed “high schools’ skeleton in the closet” by Lehigh University education professor Perry Zirkel, has been a creeping phenomenon for two decades.
Also, whereas college-bound students used to limit applications to a few top choices, it is not unusual for students today to apply to many more. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has reported that the percentage of high-school seniors who applied to four or more colleges increased by more than a quarter from 1996 to 2006 and now stands at over 60 percent….. when students in general submit more applications, colleges in general get to reject more applicants — making schools across the board more “selective” by the Barron’s criteria.
And that is why trusting the evil genius rankings machine is a mistake. Be aware of who’s in charge and make decisions accordingly.
Previous Posts, Venting Language Included:
Acceptance
College Rankings
Unigo.com
New System for Ranking Colleges
Posted by Alexa Harrington
For anyone requiring hard facts and tables full of reassuring data to quell their fears concerning college admissions and the probability of not getting in anywhere, I have the goods. Actually, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has the goods. I heart data; I find cold, hard facts to be extremely soothing.
According to the most recent data:
In 2007-08, there were 6,706 Title IV postsecondary institutions in the United States and other jurisdictions. Among these, 2,754 were classified as 4-year institutions, 2,191 were 2-year institutions, and the remaining 1,761 were less-than-2-year institutions (table1).
See? Plenty of schools to go around. As I’ve said before, there are only eight Ivy League schools, so not every high school student applying to college is going to get into one of those. But, odds are, everyone will get in somewhere.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
JPMorgan Chase is swooping in to save the student-loan-needing booties of international graduate students at Harvard. Citibank left Harvard and several other schools in the lurch this past fall when they announced they were terminating their arrangements with the schools, “citing the effects of the frozen credit markets.”
Because international students don’t tend to qualify for financial aid, they need to take out loans. And because they’re international students, applying for loans has a whole new level of red tape. The arrangement Citibank made eased that process along for the students by allowing them to apply for student loans without a cosigner (not typical for student loans).
When Harvard found out on October that Citibank was ditching their international grad students, the school had to run around madly trying to stretch financial assistance. The new arrangement they’ve made with JPMorgan Chase will hopefully relieve some of the stress.
It’s better for everyone if international students can find a way to go to school here. Right after 9/11, there was a big halt for student visas (I’m ranting on the inside). The University of Washington was a ghost town while international student were sent back home, waiting to hear whether they’d be able to finish their degrees in Seattle. Everyone benefits financially, culturally, and global-citizen-wise when campus populations are mixed. I know that JPMorgan Chase is pretty much just in it for the money, but they’ve still done a good thing.
Further Reading:
Citibank Cuts Loan Program for Harvard Grad Students
Citi Loan Program Ends Nationwide
Posted by Alexa Harrington