Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[marshwiggle]

* Limit college to folks who show they will benefit from attending at the time of enrollment.  Reducing the college going population to who will make good use of the resources and has demonstrated an interest as well as some ability in college would do a lot to make the resources stretch.  Changing how college is funded would help as long as we look carefully at how our first-world peers deal with the problems of pick at most two from (a) cheap/free, (b) open to all who wish to try, and (c) high quality.  College shouldn't be only for those with money, but we do need to ensure that those without personal money are in good positions to make use of the courses being taught this term instead of working more-than-full-time jobs while having substantial care-taking duties.

Some of this was a bit difficult in syntactic terms so I am not sure exactly what you are suggesting.  I didn't follow the "problem of pick" bit, but maybe that's just my bad.

The problem is that you can have any two of the three things, but not all three together.

• If you have a program that's free or even cheap and open to everyone, then it can't be high quality.
• If you have a program that's free or even cheap and it's high quality, then you can't have it open to everyone who wants it.
• If you have a program that's open to everyone and high quality, it definitely can't be cheap.

[Wahoo Redux]

* Modify college standard practices based on the current known population.  Why is four years of more-than-the-minimum-full-time attendance (12 credits per semester for financial aid, but averaging at least 15 credits per term is required to graduate in four years for a 120 credit degree) standard when so many 18 year olds start as part-time students and intend to stay that way because of their complicated lives?  Changing the expected curriculum to accommodate multiple standard paths through various degrees would help a lot.  Building on the general education elimination, having people spend their intro time in areas where they have declared a major, perhaps as shadowing/observations/internships/co-ops, would both help people make good decisions earlier and give relevant experience as well as formal classroom experience.

Perhaps. It is a little hard to comment with only a brief, vague description such as this.  Your idea sounds a bit like job prep, which again is not the concept of college I would endorse.  The internship is already a fairly standard college experience as is, so I am not sure what you are proposing that isn't already provided.

* Purposely examining current institutions and their missions for consolidation/closing/updating/additional targeted support instead of just letting whoever ran out of money first close would be a good way to ensure we are serving all the students.  There is a place for some of the institutions that will give in-person education in far flung places or have their mission as serving those who aren't well served by huge institutions that rely on good-enough prepared students.  We definitely don't need all the ones we have and some should have been closed years ago to free up students, faculty, and resources to where they would do more good.

Yeah, okay.  Again, perhaps. 

Who would do this evaluating? 

How would you do this?

Are you in favor of the government closing private colleges or simply starving colleges of student aid money if they don't meet certain standards? 

That's a lot of red tape, government intervention, and government oversight.  And you are taking opportunities away from people.  Is that what you want?

If you want to close state schools, how do you tell state tax-payers that you are, say, closing a small STEM school in SW Wisconsin across the bridge from Dubuque because it is not needed in a state peppered with satellite campuses?  Such a move would kill the little town where said university is located.  But it really is a redundant school anyway, and not highly regarded, particularly considering that the huge, powerful, world-renowned UW-Madison is just an hour away. 

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Surprisingly, both sides in this thread fail to mention that many options in question already exist elsewhere in the world.
So, one can evaluate benefits/drawbacks of different options simply by looking into real-life equivalents.

The problem is that you can have any two of the three things, but not all three together.

• If you have a program that's free or even cheap and open to everyone, then it can't be high quality.
• If you have a program that's free or even cheap and it's high quality, then you can't have it open to everyone who wants it.
• If you have a program that's open to everyone and high quality, it definitely can't be cheap.

While for any given institution this trilemma is valid, this is not the case for a country-wide education system.
Quite a few countries have two sets of institutions:

• high-quality selective elite schools (still free or extremely cheap to attend)
• non-selective mass universities

While in many respects such system sustains stratification, it still offers an option of high-quality education for poorer students.
Given that dormitories and canteens are normally heavily subsidised (and not treated as cash cows), living expenses are way less of a burden as well.

How would you do this?

Are you in favor of the government closing private colleges or simply starving colleges of student aid money if they don't meet certain standards? 

That's a lot of red tape, government intervention, and government oversight.  And you are taking opportunities away from people.  Is that what you want?

I am not aware of any other country where noticeable fraction of the student body is educated by private non-profit institutions (particularly, by anything resembling SLAC). I am yet to see evidence that they provide some special value relative to the other institution types (particularly, if one removes effects of rich families scions mingling with each other).
Moreover, letting them die hardly qualifies as a red tape.

[marshwiggle]

I am not aware of any other country where noticeable fraction of the student body is educated by private non-profit institutions (particularly, by anything resembling SLAC). I am yet to see evidence that they provide some special value relative to the other institution types (particularly, if one removes effects of rich families scions mingling with each other).

This raises a point that I haven't heard anyone adress in regard to preserving "traditional" US higher ed.

If the system was developed around expensive private institutions catering to the sons of rich white men and only serving a tiny fraction of the population, why are people so convinced that the kind of education those provided is the best model for what is needed from public institutions serving a much bigger portion  of the population consisting of students who are socioeconomically and ethnically diverse and where the majority are now women?

[Hibush]

I am not aware of any other country where noticeable fraction of the student body is educated by private non-profit institutions (particularly, by anything resembling SLAC). I am yet to see evidence that they provide some special value relative to the other institution types (particularly, if one removes effects of rich families scions mingling with each other).

This raises a point that I haven't heard anyone adress in regard to preserving "traditional" US higher ed.

If the system was developed around expensive private institutions catering to the sons of rich white men and only serving a tiny fraction of the population, why are people so convinced that the kind of education those provided is the best model for what is needed from public institutions serving a much bigger portion  of the population consisting of students who are socioeconomically and ethnically diverse and where the majority are now women?

The same could be asked about those LACs that were founded on the frontier by civic leaders who valued education as necessary for continued economic (and spiritual) growth but the territorial government lacked the capacity to support secondary education. (We forget how young much of the country is. Ohio was the western frontier in the 1820s.)

With statehood and substantial maturation of society, the conditions that drove those schools founding is completely absent and has been for a long time. Those are not competitive advantages today.

[polly_mer]

I came here to post: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/06/colleges-announce-room-and-board-refund-plans-students-are-asking-more


Let's just address the jobs versus education question again. Someone on a recent thread was annoyed because they never explicitly equated engineering with a welding certificate.  However, that's one concrete example of the fallacy of asserting that only a liberal arts education or a good general education with a healthy dollop of humanities for everyone is doing something fabulous to prepare people for a changing life after college.

Engineering, nursing, and K-12 teaching are professional programs that usually only check the box on general education and often have almost no free electives.  However, those folks tend to do fine in changing fields after college, although the discussions in many areas are what to do about the current fact that five years out from their degrees, people with degrees in those fields are often doing something else and creating an ongoing shortage.

While one may sigh heavily about business degrees, if those folks don't have a solid K-12 education, then there's no point in assuming that one or two general education courses will make any difference in their views.  The time to enforce a broad education is during the years at the K-12 level when that's most people's full-time focus, not a few weeks as part of a complicated life. 

Doing remediation at college is an extremely inefficient use of resources, especially if one wants the broad outcome of doing research on a problem to come to a relevant conclusion instead of just voicing the expected response like "environmental protections are always worth the money"*.  Even if you want people to always voice the expected opinion, the time to inculcate that response is in early elementary when students are more receptive and have many fewer contradictory life experiences.

As my colleagues have chimed in for recent posts, only the US has the huge general education requirements in post-secondary education.  The UK is not some hell hole because their university students don't have general education requirements and even goes to the extent of having medical doctors be an undergraduate degree that one can enter straight from secondary school.  Most of Europe doesn't have general education and in fact differentiates between specializing in a major that could be, but is not limited to, a liberal arts field and having a one-specific-job training curriculum.

Even in the US, internships are important because the flexibility one needs in life and a good middle-class job are seldom learned in a formal classroom setting.  That's especially true if the formal classroom setting is so far removed from daily life as to be unrecognizable, even to the point of having to explicitly state why a certain skill is relevant outside the classroom because few students will make that connection on their own.  I laugh every time I encounter one of those very tenuous connections because it's so clear that someone was told that was important, but it's really a theoretical connection.

I will again point out the difficulties that graduate degree holders in some fields face as they try to get a job other than college teacher.  To the extent that those difficulties are something other than intellectual/emotional specific to the individual, that's supporting evidence for the weakness in the argument that a broad general education is setting people up for job and life success more than taking a specific undergraduate professional major and then deciding later to change career fields.  If major doesn't matter because most individuals won't be working in that major field anyway, then an engineering major is just as good as an English major for future life and we have evidence that it's possible an engineering major is better because then one definitely has math and computer skills.

*As a side note, people who voice that opinion are generally exposing their ignorance about the actual trade-offs involved and what the science indicates about levels of effect.  More than one law is held up in the relevant courses as being based on something other than the science related to the effects and the technological means to even just measure a level of substance, let alone differentiate between that level and 1000 times more.

[spork]

Nebraska Christian College will close:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/04/06/nebraska-christian-college-closing.

Its acquisition by Hope International University in California didn't succeed. Nor could it have, in my opinion.

[Wahoo Redux]

Oh Polly, see, this is when I have a hard time reading your responses, even though I want to...

However, that's one concrete example of the fallacy of asserting that only a liberal arts education or a good general education with a healthy dollop of humanities for everyone is doing something fabulous to prepare people for a changing life after college.

Your frustration comes through as hyperbole. 

You want better K-12?  Great.  Figure out how to do that.  I see no reason not to have both better K-12 and better higher ed.   

We have to make the commitment to pay for it all, however, and that always chaps people's hides.  We want excellence in education, we just want it really cheap. 

And sure, other countries lack the remediation and lib arts core and they are not "hell holes" or whatever (yet more frustrated hyperbole)----figure out how to recalibrate ALL education in the US based on a model that now supports, say, 3 million British college students at 240 colleges after a millennium of developing their higher ed landscape without the inequalities of a massive, young frontier / immigrant nation with the tremendous shame and burden of our racist past...

Go ahead, Polly, figure it out.

As for the "fabulous" effect of a lib arts education, I've been planning my College of Underwriting for when after the Plague is over.

Underwriting is mostly just plugging numbers into a computer program.  All the calculations are predetermined by actuarial science, so in a way a well trained monkey could be an underwriter, but insurance corporations still want a thinking human intellect somewhere in the equation. 

Theoretically the underwriter should be able to tell the salesperson that, no, the risk is too great, or no, you've promised them too much or, no, you were down-sold on the premium so sorry, you do not get a commission because I as the mighty underwriter have determined that this contract is not solid business---but you can guess how often that happens with these aggressive, macho corporate insurance salespeople (anyone ever seen Glenngarry Glen Ross?).

Companies would like to have underwriters with a college degree but can't always find these people.  Companies also like underwriters who have worked as analysts or at least processors and, at best case scenarios, have also worked as administrative reps in customer service. 

So what kind of education should this person have now that we have eliminated all this annoying box checking?

I conceive of a single 2 month academic calendar followed by a 3 month internship.

The quarter would consist of 6 hours of class-time 5X a week (the credit hours designation is unimportant now) with the understanding that students would do an additional 10 hours of studying on their own time and working PT for the corporation to gain a little hands-on skill.

Students would receive a modest stipend for attending free college (all of this is paid for by the insurance industry with government support because this is very cheap college education) and housing in well equipped dormitories actually located in the insurance company headquarters and meals comped in the cafeteria----we are living, breathing, and eating insurance at this point.  Not only are we educating underwriters, we are giving students important professional context and contacts and, of course, molding them into fabulous working machines.

Topics covered during coursework:
* Essentials of grammar, syntax, and sentence structure
* Business letter writing, report writing, and email etiquette
* Visual rhetoric and PowerPoint presentation / best forensic speech practices
-----you'd need someone like me, but the doctorate or even a master's would be superfluous; actually a college degree would be superfluous as long as the instructor could pass a simple grammar and formatting text.

* Basic insurance law & fraud
-----taught by a "professional fellow," probably one of the JDs who works in the corporation's legal division

* Basic H.R., best management practices, accounting and P.R.
-----a seminar team-taught by various executives from each of these offices (more professional contacts!)

* A practicum on insurance analysis & underwriting
-----obviously writing a few contracts and then shadowing the professionals.

Really, that is all one needs to make a great worker bee in the insurance industry.  Actually, our underwriters are now a bit over-qualified to plug numbers into a computer, so we've done a great job of educating them and they are poised to climb the corporate ladder if they so choose. 

Each industry, from computer programming to waste management, would have their own micro-colleges.  Sorry, you engineers and future doctors and advertising people will still need the bachelor's degree but we've shed that annoying lib arts core so you'll only need to attend something like 2 years, all on the government's dime, and the resources for your education will be EXCELLENT!  Many of your classes will be taught by eager, well-qualified volunteers, BTW.

We will also have reinstated the normal college system for you future school teachers.

After an underwriting bachelor's is conferred, the underwriter will do a 2 to 3 month paid internship, and the best companies (MetLife and the like) will require that their underwriters spend time as analysts before grasping the brass ring that they spent an entire 5 months being educated for. The most ambitious could attend night classes in finance and business management to get a second bachelor's to train the next generation of executives.

It all works out, Polly, and you would be even happier to know that, now that we have closed our massive, over-inflated colleges with their esoteric research interests that no one is really interested in in the first place, we have a lot more money for K-12.

Worker bees of the world unite!  Hyperbole rules!!

[marshwiggle]

Each industry, from computer programming to waste management, would have their own micro-colleges.  Sorry, you engineers and future doctors and advertising people will still need the bachelor's degree but we've shed that annoying lib arts core so you'll only need to attend something like 2 years, all on the government's dime, and the resources for your education will be EXCELLENT!

Places without all of the US "lib arts core" have 4 year degrees for computer programming, engineering, etc. (Actually, in a lot of STEM fields it's unavoidable because of all of the prerequisites. )  The issue is probably more about depth versus breadth.

Anyone able to comment on the number of discipline-specific courses in the US with a "lib arts core" versus elsewhere without?

[polly_mer]

Nebraska Christian College had only 140 students at its recent peak enrollment.  If that sounds absurd, then go check out https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-smallest-colleges-in-the-united-states where there are many institutions listed at approximately that size.  40% of US institutions have fewer than 1000 students.  Maybe Wahoo just doesn't know what representative of the US higher ed looks like (hint it's not the 130 R1s and 135 R2s).

When I go look at NCC specifically, there's a clear split between on campus undergrad majors (all ministry focused) and online (the typical majors one finds everywhere and still only four)  They have far more master degree programs, but surely that must be the result of the merger.

The faculty listing is clearly aligned with the on-campus offerings, not the liberal arts, and there are only a handful of full-time faculty listed. 

<on review> Ah, Wahoo, still refusing to believe the distinction between having real prerequisites that take years of focused study and a certificate program for one job.  Try reading https://www.degreequery.com/what-is-the-difference-between-an-associates-degree-in-engineering-and-a-bachelors-degree-in-engineering/ and see if the distinction becomes clearer.

If not, then read up on why Associate of Applied Sciences seldom transfers somewhere to be on track to complete a bachelor's degree while an Associate of Arts or Science in any field usually counts a fair portion towards a bachelor's degree, even if only for the general education value.

You're not convincing me that I'm wrong by doubling down on providing exactly the misconception I stated was problematic.

I'm not even going to touch the K-12 foolishness that is clearly more about faculty jobs than providing an excellent education for all Americans who wish to participate.

[Wahoo Redux]

<on review> Ah, Wahoo, still refusing to believe the distinction between having real prerequisites that take years of focused study and a certificate program for one job.  Try reading https://www.degreequery.com/what-is-the-difference-between-an-associates-degree-in-engineering-and-a-bachelors-degree-in-engineering/ and see if the distinction becomes clearer.

If not, then read up on why Associate of Applied Sciences seldom transfers somewhere to be on track to complete a bachelor's degree while an Associate of Arts or Science in any field usually counts a fair portion towards a bachelor's degree, even if only for the general education value.

You're not convincing me that I'm wrong by doubling down on providing exactly the misconception I stated was problematic.

I'm not even going to touch the K-12 foolishness that is clearly more about faculty jobs than providing an excellent education for all Americans who wish to participate.

Not sure what you think you've proven here or what you think I didn't already know. 

Methinks the "K-12 foolishness" is a cop out.

[Wahoo Redux]

I am not aware of any other country where noticeable fraction of the student body is educated by private non-profit institutions (particularly, by anything resembling SLAC). I am yet to see evidence that they provide some special value relative to the other institution types (particularly, if one removes effects of rich families scions mingling with each other).
Moreover, letting them die hardly qualifies as a red tape.

Reread.  "letting them die" was not what Polly was suggesting.

[marshwiggle]

You want better K-12?  Great.  Figure out how to do that.  I see no reason not to have both better K-12 and better higher ed.   

Two things to vastly improve K-12 education:

• Eliminate "social promotion"; kids don't advance until they're academically capable.
• Stream early in high school. Have paths to move between streams, but like the item above, don't pretend students are capable when they're not.

One of the best ways to make teaching more productive is to narrow the range of ability in each class.  Whether one is teaching bright students or struggling ones, the job will be easier if the class is pretty uniform. The only reason to throw everyone in together is to create the fiction that all students of the same age are at the same level academically. Some students could get through the required curriculum in 10 years; others would need 14, but if we actually didn't let them gradaute until they really had completed it, they'd be much better off.

[sylvie]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

[marshwiggle]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.