If you’ve read this blog for more than a few months, then you know where I come down on the College Rankings issue. It’s crap, and I don’t like it. You can read the full, venomous fury in the Previous Posts list below.

For now, here’s one rankings list that is based on tuition costs alone, which I mostly trust because I can’t see how they could tweak and warp basic numbers. U.S. News and World Report has a simple list of the 10 Most Expensive Public Medical Schools for In-State Students. It’s not at all what I would have expected.

1. Oregon Health and Science University
2. University of Pittsburgh
3. University of Minnesota
4. Medical University of South Carolina
5. University of Virginia
6. University of Illinois
7. University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—New Brunswick (Johnson)
8. Michigan State University (College of Osteopathic Medicine)
9. University of California—Davis
10.University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—Stratford

Previous College Rankings Posts (the short list):

Hone Your Inner B.S. Detector
Beware the College Rankings Machine
New System For Ranking Colleges
College Rankings
Acceptance

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: UC Davis water tower)

What has risen 400% in 25 years? Not housing prices in San Francisco, but that’s an excellent guess. Nope, it’s college tuition. That one-liner factoid takes me out at the knees and makes me want to hurl.

Phenomenal amounts of money are spent, borrowed, and paid back over lifetimes for higher education. At some point, one hopes, the college students will become educated enough to figure out when the price of education is just too damned much.

Since that hasn’t happened yet, two professors were interviewed on NPR recently so they could explain WHY college costs so much. It turns out that any and all tuition payers (students, parents) are at the sticky bottom of any given school’s list of people to impress or keep happy. The violent rage I’m feeling makes me warm inside.

Economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University and Stephen Trachtenberg of George Washington University tell NPR host Neal Conan what in the hell is going on with college costs.

You can read listen to the story (30 min.) or you can read the transcript in its entirety here.

Excerpt from the transcript:

CONAN: I wanted to ask, you wrote an op-ed for CNN.com, “Why Does College Cost So Much,” you argued essentially that colleges have absolutely no incentive to reduce costs.

VEDDER: That’s right. Now, there are a few exceptions to that. The for-profit higher education sector is certainly a clear exception, but by and large, most colleges do not get rewards. The presidents of the universities, the senior officials, the key faculty do not get rewarded by being efficient, by teaching more students for the same amount of money or whatever, by using buildings efficiently, six, seven days a week, et cetera. There’s no incentive in that for them.
So there’s no great compulsion to reduce costs, and yet spending more money often has rewards. It can help improve your rankings in the magazine rankings that go on by magazines like US News or Forbes. And it is actually beneficial to colleges, or at least it’s perceived to be beneficial to colleges, to spend more money: nicer facilities for students so you attract more students, better students, whatever, lower teaching loads for faculty so that they’re happy and content and not likely to cause a lot of problems.
So the job of a university president is to raise a lot of money, tons of money, and distribute it, and not too much attention is placed on lowering the cost to the consumer.

CONAN: In fact you argue that the consumer, the student and then the student’s parents, but they come last in a list that includes, you mentioned the faculty, key faculty members are bribed with lower teaching loads. You mentioned alumni, who are in a sense are bribed to make donations to the school through successful sports programs and other things like that, and trustees.

VEDDER: Yes, I think that’s right. Remember, colleges and universities don’t have the profit motive that compels people in the traditional private sector to cut costs, be efficient, try to get more bang for the buck, as it were. So that is sort of lacking. It’s a nonprofit sector, and there’s a lot of third-party payments, that is government money and also private, philanthropic money, that comes into universities that reduces the need to depend utterly, solely on the consumer to foot the bills, to pay the freight, as it were.

Related Posts:

How To Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt
Watching America’s Higher Education Creams Go Down In Flames
College Tuition: Save Or Borrow?
Ways To Kick The Ass Of Student Loan Debt
International Students Bring $18.8 Billion To U.S. Economy
I Live In A Van Down By Duke University
College Or Gambling?
The Cost of College and the Three-Year Degree Option
Streamlined and Fuel-Efficient Three-Year Degrees
Economy Makes Being an RA Seem Like a Good Idea
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: new Stanford University library)

Mr. Casey Wiley, lecturer at Penn State University, wrote an excellent piece about the current Sandusky situation at Penn State, with the emphasis on the wonderful things that come out of PSU (i.e., not just high-profile coaches on trial for the unthinkable), and how he and his students have been affected by the Sandusky situation. Wiley comes at the problem trying to figure out what it means to be at Penn State and how to go about finding the amazingness that is still Penn State.

Here are some tidbits; the entire article can be found at EDU in Review:

Three weeks before the allegations broke en masse, on some sunny fall morning, I asked my mostly freshman composition students to write about what it means to be at Penn State. No, that wasn’t right, I said. I thought about it more. I’m an outsider here, I told them. I’ve been teaching at Penn State for two years. I grew up in upstate New York, and I have no family members who attended the university. This may be the case at other major universities, I continued, but hyperbole aside students here seem to express — in the most real and basic sense of the word — Love for the school. Students have feelings for it, a heavy devotion. I said this in all seriousness.

In short: What is this feeling of being at Penn State? Or of being Penn State?

My students smiled — they got it, this strange, maybe naïve philosophy: Penn State-ology, or whatever silly thing one might call it. My students wrote, but in the end, they couldn’t articulate what this Penn State feeling was. Football? Paterno? Tradition? My dad went here? And my grandpa? The social scene? The library and old buildings? In short: Penn State just was. And it was good. I wasn’t satisfied, but I couldn’t articulate why. My students watched me. Like most days, roughly a third of them in this 24 person class wore an article of clothing with big PSU lettering sewn or ironed to it.

… I’m not sure what the students can learn from this horrible situation – long and short term – but I remember saying to them in class and out that week, that while they have every right to feel ashamed, confused, angry with Penn State and its leadership, or lack thereof, maybe the silver lining here, if there is one, is that the students, the community, me, we can all be reminded that Penn State is not a so-so school with a big football program; it is a strong school, now with a tainted football program and hierarchy. And because of that, the entire school is tainted. But the school doesn’t stop teaching and researching and discovering and learning. This school is built on ideas, and the advancement of ideas, I told them. And I believe that.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: Brian Cover)

Let’s all watch me try to navigate this post. It’s about sex and Trojans and Mormons and how well 141 universities assist their undergrads in traversing the seas of collegiate sex. The odds of me crashing and burning into a twisted pile of political incorrectness and offending everyone on my way down are as excellent as a bloated road-kill raccoon is to finally pop in July–one hard wave of heat moving up from the asphalt and nothing will smell good ever again.

I usually have no qualms about the possibility of offending the sensibilities of other humans, but today it seems as if I should run.

First off, I’m not Mormon. But I do have Mormons in my family. I love them and they love me and there are no issues between myself and the Mormon contingent of my family tree. Aside from the fact that I always forget who I’m with and continue to cuss like a drunken sailor whenever I visit them and I never ever go to church while they continue to pray for my unquestionably hell-bound soul and respect my request to not be recruited, we’re all good.

The Trojan condom company (possibly more famous than the Mormons) puts out an annual survey ranking the sexual health of undergraduate colleges and universities. Rankings are based on sexual health resources and support available to students on campus, from pamphlets to condoms to someone to talk to.

Out of 141 schools ranked in 2011, Brigham Young University came in 140th. This either means BYU is a cesspool of STD-sharing Mormon youth, or those Mormon kids are living cleaner than the rest of us and are abstaining, thereby severely reducing the need for condoms, counselors, and antibiotics at the student health center.

I’m sticking with the abstinence and not-a-cesspool theory. While not on board with the Mormons and their beliefs, I have to say they’re super serious about innocent perfection and clean living. No alcohol, no smoking, no premarital sex. They don’t even allow caffeine, for crying out loud (it’s near the top of my Why I’m Not a Mormon list).

Further Reading:

Columbia University Tops the Trojan® Sexual Health Report Card Rankings for the Second Year in a Row

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The one thing no one tells new parents: Maybe don’t start shoveling aside the gargantuan pile of cash your kid will need for college. The one thing people never fail to ask new parents, after Girl or boy? and What’s its name?: How’s that college fund going? The You poor bastards is implied.

Any yahoo walking around advising parents to not start amassing gold bullion runs the risk of being smacked upside the head for sheer stupidity. However, one such individual (the only one I have ever heard of) does exactly that. Financial planner to new parents, Kristin Harad, explains to spanking new parental units that the college fund is about four down on the list of financial priorities.

Three items must be dealt with prior to starting the college fund:

Emergency Fund (enough to cover 6 months’ worth of expenses)
Retirement Fund (student loans exist, retirement loans do not)
Household Budget Under Control (spending less than you make)

Further Reading and Previous Posts:

You’re A Parent, Now Plan
Ways To Kick the Ass of Student Loan Debt
How To Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt
Tax Breaks for Higher Education
Fall 2011 Facebook App for Financial Aid
College Grads and Student Loan Debt
Number-Crunching the Effects of Student Loans
Calculating Potential
Adventures in Education: Paying for College

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: college fund)

That is not my back. But I totally get why someone would tattoo that on their back. Sexy nerdery? Hells to the yes.

I’m not the only one who finds equations beautiful and hot and right on the line between ethereal and solid; Wired Science waxes poetic about nine equations we all should keep close to our hearts.

Previous Posts:

American Math
Math Is Hard!
Nature By Numbers
The Hotness of Geek Barbie
You Can Kiss My Math Because Smart Girls Are Hot
Smart Girls Are Hot

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Science Professor (aka as Female Science Professor) over at Scientopia gave a reader some advice about whether or not it’s okay to date a senior colleague. Academia is a complex and many-layered animal with insane demands to make of any academic hoping for tenure. Dating an academic colleague with one’s the tenure vote still to come is a risky move, people. I’m with Female Science Professor on this one: my vote wouldn’t be altered by the colleague-dating situation, but it very well could be for others on the panel.

Does it suck hugely to have to walk away from possible love in order to attain one’s dream? Absolutely. But anyone who has already decided to pursue the nearly impossible tenure track has already announced loudly and with a barbaric yawp that they are more than willing to offer up their firstborn, their kidney, their hand, their mother, and several years of happiness to the tenure gods for even a smidgen of a sliver of a chance.

Humans are animals, and will do anything to survive and continue the species: food, sex (love), and survival, that’s all we need and are instinctively hell-bent of the pursuit of those goals. As far as I’ve seen, only tenure can veer an otherwise intelligent human animal away from food, sex and survival. (Wo)man up and realize how much you really want tenure, what you’re willing to give up for said dream, and walk the hell away from love until you’ve nailed down tenure.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(Rockefeller University)

Tomorrow is the Nov. 5th SAT, which I can guarantee is freaking the crap right out of teenagers across the nation. Poor bastards. When I took the Rite of Passage for American High School Students (standardized tests written by pain-in-the-ass adults whose heads are shoved so far up their exit ramps that they can no longer navigate reality), I must say I had a rather cavalier attitude about the whole thing. Almost twelve years of public school had made me quite the badass standardized test taker; I was unconcerned.

Most students don’t have that attitude. To them I advise chilling the eff out, this is not the end of the world. I promise. Shite of a much higher magnitude will befall you in the course of your lifetime, I can guarantee it. So quit your whining and suck it up, kiddos. You walk right in there with your #2 pencils and kick some standardized ass! Or don’t, and head for your 5th choice school. No biggie.

Need some advice on SATs and ACTs and how they may affect your future matriculation plans? Allen Grove is a font of information about college admissions. Here are four of his bits of wisdom:

Low SAT or ACT Scores? These Colleges Don’t Require the Tests
What ACT Scores Do You Need to Get Into College?
Are My SAT Scores Good Enough?
Low ACT Scores? What Now?

Further Reading (my cranky attitude toward standardized tests in general):

Secret SAT Scores
Colbert’s Wickedly True Take on the SATs
Testing Season Begins
An Excellent Argument for Abolishing the SAT
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
Awesome Parent
The SAT Is Not Good
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
January 23rd SAT Results
Calculating Potential
Kaplan SAT Prep Tools on Facebook

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: panic)

Further Reading:

Literacy: We’ve Still Got It
Another New and Exciting Way To Be Driven Over the Edge By Technology
New Essay Writing Apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch
Is Technology Just A Tool?
CourseSmart Research Reveals College Students Lerve Their Digital Devices
Michael Wesch: TED Talk On Media and Teaching Students to Become Knowledge-Able

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Pamela Yellen over at the Huffington Post gives advice on How to Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt. I’ve read dozens of articles on this topic over the years and none have irked me and impressed me with their proposals and solutions the way Yellen’s article has.

Her main piece of advice is to flat out not head off to college at all “unless or until you can afford it.” Not the standard higher education version of the American Dream. Usually everyone’s telling young adults to do whatever they and their parents can in order to acquire a college diploma, regardless of how many decades beyond graduation both parties will be swimming in debt.

Whether you agree with her or not, it’s interesting stuff to think about:

Four Paths to a Debt-Free College Education
1. Save it first.
2. Postpone it.
3. Do it smarter.
4. Skip it altogether.

Further Reading:

Ways to Kick the Ass of Student Loan Debt
Number-Crunching the Effects of Student Loans
Adventures in Education: Paying for College
The Economy and Higher Education
No One Likes a Recession
Calculating Potential
Investing in Students’ Futures
Extremely Useful Guidance for the Newly Salaried
Fall 2011 Facebook App for Financial Aid
College Grads and Student Loan Debt
Arne Duncan: Direct Student Loans
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington