Category: higher education

That Siren for Harvard Undergrads…Wall Street

The link is here, hat tip to a Harvard alumna. Ezra Klein’s meme is that Wall Street firms recapitulate the Ivy League application process mentality providing comfort zone and graduate skills all while…wait there’s more…paying the big bucks.

Money quote:

So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The issue isn’t that so many of their well-educated students want to go to Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It’s that so many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can make.

Publics in Distress

America’s big public research universities are having a tough time of it lately, and it’s not just in their athletic programs. Fundamentally, they are being squeezed by the Great Recession hitting state budgets and parents’ tuition savings accounts at the same time.  Whether sequestration happens or not, Federal R&D is likely to trend downwards for some time, and this will have an enormous effect on the economic engine of research that Vannevar Bush envisioned, and subsequently architected,  mid-20th century.

Fundraising is being hurt, not only because of some very high profile PR disasters, but also simply because donors are holding on to their money in times of uncertainty. While the elite privates can count on enormous endowments to carry them through, the publics are, to a large extent (and with some notable exceptions) much more dependent on state support and tuition.

What to do? Who is the lender of last resort for America’s public research universities?

Increasingly the answer to that question is either out of state or overseas. Out of state students pay “full freight” or even premium rates and their recruitment potentially can subsidize the publics as they are being squeezed within their states. Of course, without growth, those are classroom seats that are no longer available for in state students. Which brings up the question of the core purpose of public education: to provide quality higher education for in state students. Or is it: to conduct excellent sponsored research? Or some mixture of both?

We live in very interesting times.

The State of the American University

Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books reviews eight serious books on the current state of US higher education here.

Money quote:

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

Nevertheless, aspirants from the entire world still gravitate here. Why? I’d like to think it’s because US colleges still offer a combination of the potential for real upward mobility along with the ability to chart one’s own curricular course.

James Piereson’s piece on Higher Education in The New Criterion

It’s here and well worth reading.

Money quote:

Hacker and Dreifus reserve their strongest criticisms for a handful of elite institutions—the “Golden Dozen” as they call them—that set the tone (unjustifiably in their opinion) for higher education as a whole. The list is familiar: the eight Ivy League institutions, plus Duke, Stanford, Williams, and Amherst. They are the prestigious schools that all ambitious students hope to attend, even though only a small fraction of them can hope to win admission. The existence of this elite stratum of institutions seems to violate the authors’ sense of democratic fairness. In their view, these schools are overrated and do not merit the hallowed reputations they have been assigned.

Mason and the National Capital Area

The Washington DC area is an odd duck in some ways. Incredibly dynamic, well-educated, well-to-do, and….split over multiple governmental jurisdictions as well as the Potomac River. Although one could certainly argue that New York’s metropolitan area does share some similar traits (it’s often called the Tri-State area), I’d argue that the history of the two places combined with their core businesses make for apples and oranges comparisons.

Part of the history of the Washington DC area (if we exclude Baltimore) is that the historically older institutions of higher education are 1) small (relative to say the big Ivy League schools) and 2) private.

The two state publics, University of Maryland at College Park and George Mason, are quite large, but relative to the other major public research universities, not yet dominating the city’s culture the way University of Texas or Ohio State do for Austin and Columbus respectively.

Thus, unlike many other major US cities, DC isn’t dominated by a single institution (or even two) the way for example Boston, Chicago and San Francisco are.

Another way of putting this notion is that, projecting into the future, the DC area is still up for grabs.

Thinking this way, I see two key points: first, the derivative of growth (writ large) is more important than size. Second, past-decisions put real constraints on the future.

Anyone who has visited Mason over the last several years can’t help but notice how rapid the growth has been. It’s singular frankly.

But more important is that Mason is still young enough, that key decisions (and opportunities) remain for the future. In other words, Mason isn’t constrained for its future growth and has the opportunity to become what UofM is to Ann Arbor, what UCSD is to San Diego.

That’s an exciting future, especially in the Nation’s Capital.

Peter Stearns on public and private higher ed here in Virginia

Mason’s Provost, Peter Stearns,  has a very interesting blogpost on the increasingly ambiguous boundary between public and private institutions here.

The key point is that private non-profit institutions are often viewed as tremendous assets by states (Harvard immediately jumps to mind). Note that in Massachusetts, the flagship public, UMass Amherst, has often struggled.

We certainly live in interesting times….

The College Tuition Crisis according the Stanley Fish–Not

Here’s the link from today’s NY Times on-line. So what’s my take? Well, for one, I’m very proud to work at a very affordable public university. But I do recognize that in the current economic environment, colleges have to raise tuition (and this is particularly true for public institutions) if they want to continue to deliver a quality product (and avoid, to use Fish’s term, academic malpractice).

But there’s a larger issue–the competitiveness of US institutions of higher education is a key national security asset of this country. We need to recognize that, especially as we go through the process of seriously discussing what government should do.

Andrew Sullivan on TED

I find myself disagreeing with Andrew on much of what he writes about these days, but I think he and others on to something about the future of higher education in his blog post here. In essence, TED represents the future of higher ed.  Along with MIT’s Open Course Ware. But this can’t be all of it. You can’t acquire a deep knowledge of quantum mechanics from a few “carefully curated” lectures–even if those are given by geniuses.

Accreditation of Universities in the United States

For an institution of higher education to actually give real degrees (not the fake one’s that are supposedly available for sale on the Internet), in the United States, it must be accredited. Accreditation is a long complex process whereby regional organizations sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Education review and site visit the university and eventually make a decision whether to re-accredit…or not. Our accrediting organization is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).

Accreditation is very process-driven. From learning goals, to rubrics, all the way to evaluation of the terminal degrees for teaching faculty the institution must provide evidence that higher education is actually being provided to students according to well-defined standards. This evidence-based approach, is critical to maintaining the quality of a U.S. college diploma both in terms of international standards, but also in the context of how a degree adds value over the course of a career to an individual graduate.
But there are concerns. One is that the process is regional. The standards in one part of the U.S. may vary significantly from those in another region. Another is that, over time, the process of accreditation can assume an ever increasing portion of an institution’s collective efforts, displacing energies that perhaps ought to have been expended on education itself. These latter concerns have produced a lively debate (for an example look here).
In any case, George Mason, is now deeply into the accreditation process. It’s a good time to, both look hard at the University, but also to think about what accreditation actually means.
Jim