The Universities in Trouble - The New York Review of Books
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Saved by 10 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-04-24
- Kendahl0 on 2009-07-17 - Tags no_tag
- Rgcorley on 2009-07-16 - Tags Education; , GCL; , leadership; , class
- Spud84 on 2009-07-16 - Tags education
- Arieswym on 2009-05-13 - Tags print
- Ibbertelsen on 2009-05-04 - Tags universities , education
Public Sticky notes
At many private colleges there is pressure to enroll more students who can pay at least a substantial fraction of full tuition and fees, and fewer who depend heavily on financial aid.
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To make up for the decline in public money, tuition rates at public universities have been climbing even faster than at private institutions—a trend likely to accelerate, at least in the short run.
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On the revenue side, some selective institutions (those that receive more applications than they accept) are increasing the number of undergraduate students they admit, in order to collect additional tuition to help close the budget gap. Colleges that normally attract many more qualified applicants than they accept may be able to enlarge the entering class without jeopardizing their academic standards—though deans and presidents fret that if their school becomes even marginally less selective, its standing in the (absurdly) important US News and World Report rankings is bound to slip.
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Moreover, such a strategy stretches the capacity of existing dormitories, classrooms, and advisers at just the time when more and more students, facing a contracting job market and longer odds against getting into and paying for graduate school, are turning to the career and counseling services for help.[6] To respond by building more dorms or hiring more counselors (not to mention more faculty) would, of course, defeat the purpose of taking in more students in the first place.
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In cases where state law mandates maximum class sizes, students find themselves shut out of courses they want or need. And at almost all institutions—public and private, two-year and four-year—reliance on part-time (adjunct) faculty who work for low wages and few or no benefits is increasing.
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In short, the financial crisis not only is threatening the livelihood of faculty and staff but is also degrading the experience of students. And despite the big hit on the big endowments, the further you go down the hierarchy of prestige, the worse the effects.
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For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one.
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At the University of Michigan, for example—just completing a $4 billion capital campaign—there is periodic talk of "going private," which, supporters say, would allow it to hike up the discounted tuition rate for Michigan residents and thereby compensate for the loss of public funds.
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But the public–private partnership that did much to democratize American higher education has been coming apart. In 1976, federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 72 percent of the average cost of attending a four-year state institution; by 2003, Pell grants covered only 38 percent of the cost. Meanwhile, financial aid administered by the states is being allocated more and more on the basis of "merit" rather than need—meaning that scholarships are going increasingly to high-achieving students from high-income families, leaving deserving students from low-income families without the means to pay for college.
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Two years later one leading authority pointed out that "the college-going rates of the highest-socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels."[12] In short, bright and focused kids from poor families are going to college at the same rate as unfocused or low-scoring kids from families much better off.
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in the aggregate, younger Americans are less well educated than their elders.
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academically promising students from low-income families who apply to selective colleges should get "a thumb on the scale" in the admissions competition—an advantage comparable to what alumni children, athletes, and minority candidates already enjoy. Proposals of this sort were responses to the fact that at most selective colleges, enrollment of low-income students has been extremely small and getting smaller—and this at a time of unprecedented accumulation of institutional wealth
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Too many students are unable to continue their education beyond high school, and of those who do, too many find themselves in underfunded and overcrowded colleges.
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No doubt, much of the relative decline in America's college-educated population can be attributed to poor preparation by K–12 schools, especially in inner-city and rural communities, and to social pathologies that leave young people—including, disproportionately, minorities—unready for, or uninterested in, higher education. But a great many gifted and motivated young people are excluded from college for no other reason than their inability to pay, and we have failed seriously to confront the problem.
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And while the idea of a three-year BA is picking up support in the United States, educators in other nations are moving in the opposite direction: Hong Kong, for instance, is expanding university education from three years to four in order to make room for compulsory humanities courses on the model of American universities such as Columbia and Chicago.
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I was reminded that we have in this country a highly stratified system of education in which "merit" is the ubiquitous slogan but disparity of opportunity is often the reality.
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John Adams put it succinctly some 225 years ago: "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it."
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Public Comment