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Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

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Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#51

Post by zeynel1 »

wake_up_sticky wrote: post #38
zeynel1 wrote: post #5

i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century any bureaucracy must -grow- continually…

Actually, I think that the Catholic church is the oldest existing bureaucracy.

the same occurred to me as well thats why i qualified by saying that education divided itself into secular and religious education - as i read in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school --currently the church operates the worlds largest non-governmental school system-- so it would be very hard to separate catholic church and education

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#52

Post by crystalis »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #46
jbooth wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the number 3 was arbitrary, but let's say.. 2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated. 3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.

Why are people voting up this idiot? Is it time for yet-another "this isn't reddit" admonishment?

Yes.

This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#53

Post by ars »

harry wrote: post #49
baddspellar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it. If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees." ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp English Major…

I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations. The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going o…

I bet you have some tremendous selection bias going on.

I bet they only looked at the english majors who still had a job in the field after many years. If you include all the english majors, including the failed ones who work in a different field then the numbers might make more sense.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#54

Post by jessriedel »

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities.

The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...

State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge.

The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.)

Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#56

Post by chadmalik »

harry wrote: post #25
neilc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of t…

This is true, the chancellor/president position really does the full time baby kissing for a University. It's hard to say that's not worth a half mil.

Actually, there are plenty of competent administrators who would probably work for ~ $150K plus benefits (no free house).

Having administration who are paid like landed gentry while professors and grad students are paid peanuts and students have to engage huge amounts of debt relative to their expected future earnings IS THE PROBLEM.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#57

Post by rnfein »

I have not read the book the article references. However, in reference to what Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus call the "immorality" of using adjunct professors, the article's author does not address the fact that there are potentially very good reasons why the use of adjuncts is increasing.

In engineering, for example, adjunct professors may come from industry and provide students with perspective and experience full-time professors may not provide.

Adjunct professors may choose to teach as adjuncts because they have a passion and a talent for teaching they want to pursue without the pressures of publication. Many full-time professors may readily admit that the pressures of producing academic work causes the quality of their teaching to decrease. Perhaps this is one reason Yale offers its professors time so that both the quality of teaching and research remains high.

Some departments opt to hire adjunct professors because its set of full-time professors does not have the expertise to offer a course in a particular area of the field. While this may seem more applicable to technical fields, any department that opts to do this can provide students with more diversity and variety in course offerings over an academic year and over a student's academic career.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#58

Post by nphase »

My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises.

This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble).

He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree.

His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements.

If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#59

Post by noname123 »

harry wrote: post #22
philk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair point, but he's probably focusing on the arts and soft sciences because those degrees are the most overpriced for the value they deliver. To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.

The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning. From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop. To put it into other…

This is very true. Most young male engineering grads like to gloat the fact that they make a lot more than their humanities counterparts (perhaps to make up for the misery and lack of female companionship during their undergrad?)

But the reality is that if you graduated with a humanities/social science degree from a ivy league or sub-ivy school, you are bound to do pretty well. As opposed to their state school counterparts, English majors from Harvard have the academic clout to get into a top law/med school which will put them with far greater earning power over engineers in 10 years.

But if you are a true-minded humanities major, you might even become a true humanitarian for a couple of years; maybe travel abroad to a Peace Corps or get a masters at a International Studies program. Then only later, you get on the fast-track to a management program at some Fortune 500 to manage some engineers.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#60

Post by mattmcknight »

harry wrote: post #49
baddspellar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it. If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees." ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp English Major…

I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations. The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going o…

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