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A college degree is a lousy investment

So your point is you were wrong say the auto industry would close without auto loans.
 
Why don’t colleges just stop offering impractical majors like religion or all tribble classes
 
LOL. Not like religion isn't important or anything.
 
PhDeac said:
So your point is you were wrong say the auto industry would close without auto loans.
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No. Some will close, some stay operational same as colleges. Honda wouldn't close. Buick probably would. The difference is that there are a lot more colleges than auto lines. So every Buick closing equates to 100 colleges.
 
palmab03 said:
Why don’t colleges just stop offering impractical majors like religion or all tribble classes
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Over the past 10 years medical schools have become enamored with students that have non-science majors. They love religion and Tribble majors.
 
Aww Moonz is upset that his right wing propaganda is still being rejected.

I knew the numbers before I said that, the quote was the last 10 years medical schools have become enamored with humanities students. So apparently 3% of all medical students, and a 6% higher acceptance rate that when controlled for overall number of applicants is not really significant, equals being enamored with mostly useless majors. Especially since one of the most important things is how well you do in specific science classes, basically required pre requisites and that gpa, which wow aren’t humanities classes.
 
Louis Gossett Jr said:
Aww Moonz is upset that his right wing propaganda is still being rejected.

I knew the numbers before I said that, the quote was the last 10 years medical schools have become enamored with humanities students. So apparently 3% of all medical students, and a 6% higher acceptance rate that when controlled for overall number of applicants is not really significant, equals being enamored with mostly useless majors. Especially since one of the most important things is how well you do in specific science classes, basically required pre requisites and that gpa, which wow aren’t humanities classes.
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This is hard skew. IMO, the "smart" play is to Major in garbage so you can focus on the hard science classes. I think most of the high quality candidates know this, and do so. Students who aren't savvy to the up stream admissions process aren't going to know that Duke Med doesn't care that you majored in a waste of time.
 
The promise of free public college by candidates is putting downward pressure on private school tuition
https://www.yahoo.com/news/2020-free-college-promises-may-100000781.html

The article's last sentence shows the changing mentality
“I don’t see any reality in which it’s fair to charge $60,000 a year to go to school,” he said. “It’s crazy to me.”
 
(Bloomberg) -- New York touted its free college tuition program as a first-of-its-kind plan that would eliminate the burden of student loans. But the zero-dollar price tag came at a cost: It tore a hole in the finances of Clarkson University, an upstate private college of more than 4,300 students.
In 2017, right as high-school seniors were preparing to declare where they’d enroll in the fall, New York officials said they would eliminate tuition for thousands of students at the state’s public universities. More than 100 prospective students changed their minds to instead enroll in public schools, according to Clarkson estimates.
“The timing was really tough,” said Anthony Collins, president of the university, which is located near the Canadian border. The shift deprived the college of $47,950 in tuition and fees those students each would have paid in the 2017-18 school year. “For four years, it creates a financial strain.”
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There's a private school with about as many total students as Wake back in the 90s that I've never heard of until now that has tuition and fees near $50K. Clarkson University has a 68% acceptance rate. Almost $50K a year.
 
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He’s a former university president! (At a university nobody has ever heard of)

His questions are overall pretty good. Most of them are actually being answered and others are old questions that should have been asked a long time ago.
 
Here are my answers:

Price, cost, and competition

1. Tuition consistently rises faster than inflation—why? Does tuition increase because costs are up, or are costs up because universities can increase prices?

Supply and demand

2. Could we possibly slow our cost growth? Should we plot a scenario with five years of flat tuition?

Stuff costs money. It typically costs more money year after year. Tariffs don’t help. Colleges and university have a lot of construction costs.

3. Funding models vary widely based on family income. Is the student-debt crisis as bad as journalists claim? Will there be new pathways for students with limited financial resources?

This is an income inequality issue. Address that and this won’t be as much of a problem.

4. Every college needs to understand its positioning within the higher-education ecosystem, but critics argue that most schools are content to compete with “identical mediocrity but better gyms.” For what, with whom, and on what dimensions should our institution compete?

This is a great question, but I think most schools have figured this out. The critics are largely full of shit here unless they’re criticizing the idea that all schools need to have some sort of general education. That’s a different question though.

Learning and assessment

5. What is quality, and how should it be measured? Are our programs rigorous enough? Are our students learning enough? Should we care about (and seek to measure somehow) their development outside the classroom?

Leave it up to the professionals. We don’t need more bureaucracy from some high education standardized testing (aside from the LSAT, MCAT, GRE, etc)

6. If we were building from scratch, would we make almost every program the same four-year duration? If not, how would we know how long each program should be? Should we unbundle how our credentials work—making them less clumpy by giving a credential at the end of each year, or at some other more-frequent interval?

This is a great question. Community colleges have figured much of this out with stackable credentials and certificate programs that could require 15, 30, or 60 credit hours.

Technology and the disruption of place

7. We are witnessing the emergence of high-quality, low-cost ways of learning online. How should we think about hybrid curricular options—that is, the mixing of new forms of pedagogy with old—that might be available to us? How will this affect the residential model?

Colleges are already doing this except maybe small privates. But then that goes back to #4. The colleges that aren’t doing it don’t think it’s their position in the higher ed ecosystem.

8. Will most extant institutions survive the coming ed-tech disruptions in roughly their current form? Which types of schools are most vulnerable? What opportunities emerge for us?

Good question overall but the disruptions won’t be from ed-tech. Distance learning isn’t anything new and it hasn’t supplanted anybody put their competitors yet.

Demography and geography

9. Given the likelihood of more demand for education from mid-career students, fed by the ongoing technological disruption of the workforce, will the expanded supply of mid-career education come mostly from existing elite schools, existing non-elite schools, non-schools becoming schools, or newly created schools?

C’mon man. Mid-career students aren’t going to go to elite schools. They’re going to CC and public universities.

10. Educational supply is concentrated in the North, but a disproportionate share of the growth in the college-ready student population is in the South. How will this geographic misalignment shake out, and are there implications for us or our primary competitors?

This is a very old problem. Unfortunately, industry bestows way too much prestige on Ivy League educations which gives northerners an advantage. The universities themselves can’t really address that issue aside from casting wide nets which they already do.

Human capital inside the university

11. Should we have more differentiated types of faculty roles? In particular, should we create new tracks for faculty members who are able to harness technology to teach hundreds or thousands of students—both residential and remote? Should these roles be tenured? Should the potential compensation be higher?

This is already happening. Plenty of departments have a few faculty who specialize in huge online courses. If they’re Instructor lines, they aren’t tenured, but there’s a pay ladder and some job security. 

12. Beyond the faculty, are there any functional roles that we are missing, or in which we are underinvesting or overinvesting? How have our student-teacher and student-administrator ratios changed in the past two decades—and how do we measure the benefits? How do our ratios compare with those of our main competitors?

Good question. Much of this administrative bloat is haphazard.

13. How much of the president’s time should be spent articulating a vision or strategy, versus directing the university’s operations, versus fundraising?

Good question, but I think it comes down to the president’s strengths and why they were hired in the first place. Some are basically just highly paid lobbyists. Others are pitch men and women. A few are still faculty themselves.

Public institutions should be asking candidates some additional questions:

The university and the state

14. If the state’s community colleges could be folded into our system, would you want them? Why or why not?

Some states if not most already do this.

15. State regulators now often refer to the transition into college as “grade 13.” Is this a good thing?

No. But people have continued to need more and more education to thrive in society since the dawn of time.

16. How should the university balance advancing the educational attainment of the state’s current residents against addressing the state’s long-term workforce needs?

Good question, but why can’t the state’s current residents address the long-term workforce needs?

17. Setting aside “more money” and “more predictability” around state funding, what should a university system want from governors and state legislatures?

Good question. I think “more respect” would be on that list, especially from non-flagship institutions who are less represented in the legislature.
 
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