There is a new post on the Economist site (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/higher-education-0) that discusses new research on how universities spend their endowments when times are hard, and when times are good. Essentially, they “hoard” as much as possible, no matter what. The article summarizes the paper better than I can here. I also recommend looking at the paper.
For anyone interested in how much money these endowments bring in as investment vehicles can go to Are Trustees Too Focused On Investments to the Detriment of the Educational Mission?
I did add a comment but there isn’t anything new in it. Here it is.
“As a former professor, I can personally attest, not to cuts in funding, but to something far worse: the attitude of top administrators that this paper makes implies.
Once one realizes that the part of the university that is not a hedge fund, is, in many cases, a business that unscrupulously caters to naive “customers” (once quaintly called “students”) giving them what they “want” and making them believe that they are getting what they “need”.
If anyone doesn’t think that the attitude of administrators doesn’t filter directly to the educational mission, they can read “A Tale Out of School – A Case Study in Higher Education” on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com It describes – with supporting documents – how adinistrators pressure faculty to ignore cheating and dumb down courses.
My detailed story and the above referenced paper should be enough to see what has happened to higher education in America. To paraphrase John Hutchins, the famous president at Chicago – it has let money guide it, and, thus lost its soul.”
When I first started college in 1967, the first thing we were told was that the first year would be hard, in order to weed out the students who “weren’t college material.” We were told that in this manner, those who returned the 2nd year would be the “serious students” who would have the potential to graduate. We didn’t get study sheets for exams, we were told that we were responsible for ALL of the information, both from the lecture AND from the book.
I took a hiatus after my first year and returned to college in 1970. Imagine my amazement upon my return when I was in history class and the professor handed out a “study sheet” for the exam, politely implying that the study sheet basically had all of the exam questions on it (and the actual exam proved that it did.)
It was then that I realized that college education had basically degenerated such that any person who had the ability to memorize material could get his or her piece of paper (worthless though it might be). The colleges at that point had started putting he emphasis on MONEY instead of education.
In all fairness, it should be noted that the government funds for colleges had been tied to graduating a certain proportion of minorities, and this may have had a very significant influence on the instruction and testing methodologies. It’s also important to note that along about this time, ‘multiple choice’ test questions were being used more and more, and “discussion questions” pretty well evaporated from the tests. So every student who had any knowledge of how to guess his way through a multiple choice test had a better than average chance of passing the test with a modicum of effort.
More recently employers started demanding college degrees and then our president jumped on the ‘college education bandwagon’. Parents and students drank that slop. All the while, the colleges were basically salivating and rubbing their hands together with glee, because they realized that they could jack up the prices as high as they wanted, because now they had that “one critical thing” that everyone wanted and needed to “get ahead” in our world. And people still believed they could get ahead, because the boomers had done it.
Alas, we have never had an economy that could employ a fully college-educated work force. And I don’t foresee that happening in the future, because by and large we are evolving into a service economy. We are going to have a large proportion of service jobs that will never require a college education, and all of the degree holders, no matter what school they graduate from, are going to encounter stiff competition for the limited college-level jobs. Employers will be picky and select the best and brightest for those select jobs, and the average students will be left out in the cold, working jobs below their educational level, struggling to pay off loans throughout a miserable life of indentured servitude.
The toll that this stress takes on the lives of these graduates will be phenomenal, not to mention the depression and loss of self-esteem they will suffer from working at jobs well below their qualified level. And our economy will be a big loser too, because money they could have spent on goods and services will be spent on loan payments.
Meanwhile our congress sits frittering away their time kowtowing to big corporations who have bought and paid for their elections. It’s a truly sad state of affairs.
Thanks for your comment. It puts a face to the changes that started in higher education at that time. I am adding a new post with a link to it.