This is causing tuition to rise and quality to decrease across the nation.
Since 1980, states have cut more and more funding to the public
universities in their states. Cutting funding from the state level has
caused universities to fund on their own much more than previous to
1980.
As costs continue to rise, we will see more and more auditorium styled
classrooms at universities. The professors will become more and more
likely to not be tenured.
Parents and students expect world class living facilities, universities feel
the pressure to supply this.
The graduation rate in 2002, six year rate, at four year universities was
only 54%.
Page 15 of the text states that universities are actually bringing in more
money now, but putting less of their revenue towards the classroom.
Studies show that direct expenses for instruction represent less than a
quarter of the total spending by public universities.
By using the graduate students, they are reducing the amount of tuition
that the graduate student teacher pays for their classes.
The cost to educate a graduate student, according to the text, costs four
times the amount of the cost to educate an undergraduate student. This
leads to taking more to fund those graduate students that are teaching
the undergraduate courses.
Categories for pay scales: administration and staff, athletic coaches, business
school professors, medical faculty, law professors, academic professors.
Medical Faculty: 2,296 people in this field made a collective $680 million.
Business school faculty, more than 350 of these faculty were makings over
$200,000 a piece.
The operating budget for the University of California in 2008 was $19
million, and half of this went to compensation.
Case studies
At UC Santa Crus, 84 fewer course offerings are being offered, yet class
sizes have increased by 33%.
Problems such as those listed in the case studies have increased the
numbers of online course offerings, less personal attention from
professors toward the students, and less student motivation.
The more tuition prices are raised, the more students feel that they are
only in college to receive high paying jobs upon graduation, as opposed
to just receiving an education.
Study time has been reduced, yet test grades have been raised. Many
surveys are also finding that students are spending less time preparing
for classes, exams, and overall study time, and thats one of the largest
reasons that the students at these institutions arent complaining.
While not all doctoral graduates want to teach, this has been a trend
throughout American history that many times, those with their PhDs
would like to teach in their field. Instead of hiring the students
graduating, the same issues arises that they are filling these positions
with graduate students.
PhD recipients are spending more time on the job market, becoming less
and less hirable as times goes on, when in actuality, they are leaving
the institutions prepared to teach.
With many of the new professors at institutions not being tenured, the
colleges and universities are able to pay less, with less qualified
professors teaching.
In this system, there are tends to be much more faculty doing what they
can to secure jobs outside of the university system, putting the
university system in more of a hole than previous years.
With the lower paid instructors, there are also some of tenure track,
tenured, or non tenure track professors.
The teachers ineligible for tenure also have very small amounts of
academic freedom.
Chapter 4 summarized
With the issues mentioned in the previous slide, many assume that the
higher money being put out in payroll is the reason for the higher
amounts of tuition, but according to the text, what has really become a
motivating factor is the fact that the university is having to rely on so
many outside factors.
The text shows how if public universities and the classes offered there
are publically, fully funded, while the cost is high on the front end, the
results it creates are much higher than the cost upfront.
The academic labor system has hurt the overall morale and attitude
from the faculty to the top of the university, ultimately hurting students
the worst in the end result.
Growth by Committee
As universities continue to grow, they are also taking more on than ever
before, by fully funding medical centers, research laboratories, venture
capital enterprises, and community service centers.
What this means is that this group of workers are taking away from the
classrooms, the non-tenured faculty, and worst of all, the students.
Chapter 6:
The University as Hedge Fund
Although most people dont realize it, universities are involved in the
world of investments and are affected by the stock markets rising and
falling.
This system works welluntil the investments falter and money is lost.
Even though they had just lost a lot of money, universities continued to
offer large compensation packages to those who were responsible for
the lost investments.
Is it a bank or a college?
Chapter 7:
The High Cost of Research
Corruption in research
There should be equal support for teachers who focus on teaching and
teachers who focus on research.
Chapter 8:
Technology to the Rescue?
Todays students want to do many things at the same time (study, text,
listen to music, Snapchat, surf the Internet). Is that really good for
them?
Hidden Costs
There are many hidden costs in offering online courses, including the extensive
labor involved in developing the course and overhead costs.
These expenses are rarely presented in the proposals for developing the courses.
New technologies can draw money away from a universitys instructional mission
in direct and indirect ways.
So why is online instruction often seen as the answer to the rising costs of higher
education?
These same corporations are, in turn, making a lot of money selling the
software and equipment to the universities.
Chapter 9:
Making All Higher Education Free
The federal government is now spending $35 million on Pell grants and
$104 billion on student loans each year.
In addition, the government offers tax breaks and deductions for tuition,
which would stop if education were free.
Much of the federal financial support for higher education ends up going
to fund private institutions.
The biggest reason that students drop out of school is because they
cannot afford to continue.
We need to give teachers the tools and respect they need to be effective.
This includes recognizing that standardized tests affect what students learn
and how teachers teach.
When teachers must teach to the test, they must teach in a rote fashion that
disregards their passion for teaching and limits their ability to reach and
nurture the whole student.
Students must be taught, not only rote facts, but how to develop
empathetic understanding through studying the humanities.
The left side of the brain focuses on lifeless facts from an impersonal
perspective, while the right side relates to the emotional side of living.
When students only work the left side of their brain, they cannot make
decisions or moral judgments and do not develop their intuition,
emotion, or unconscious beliefs.
Conclusion
There are many aspects of higher education that are unknown to the public,
including the mysteries of funding formulas, why tuition keeps rising as educational
quality keeps falling, and how universities are shortchanging studentsand the
publicby using public funds to subsidize research that serves largely to benefit the
corporations that fund them. Students pay for quality education, but are taught by
graduate assistants or other untrained teachers, while the expert professors are
busy in the research lab. Yet the students dont complain, because the university is
spending their money building glitzy dorms, student centers, sports stadiums, and
other amenities.