Forgot something

Most colleges take money raised via government taxation. Taxpayers expect to know what their money is being spent on. That is what ENRON was about.

Can’t take the heat? Get out of the kitchen. It is not going to get any easier. Tenure is not a defense against taxpayers cutting off funding to those parts of higher-ed that they deem unproductive, unpleasant, and full of bull.

B.D., Graduate Student at MegaState U, at 6:35 am EDT on September 28, 2006

Hook, Line, and Sinker

Ha ha ha, eveningsun. You walked into B.D.’s trap hook, line, and sinker.

Bottom line: higher education = ivory tower.

If the public *really* knew what was going on inside higher education institutions (e.g., how resources are allocated, how deadwood fac/staff/pet projects are sustained, and how students are screwed in the process), they would be more up in arms about the fleecing of taxpayer dollars that’s going on in our colleges and universities.

And I *work in* and *study* higher education for a living!

AC, at 9:10 am EDT on September 28, 2006

OOF Problem in HE in South

John Lombardi asks about what consumer information we need to know.

NCLB’s parental disclosures of out-of-field teaching assignments would be a step in the right direction. Students and parents, especially in the community college system here in the South, deserve the right to know when their professors lack graduate work in the discipline they are teaching. They also have a right to know when administrators hire instructors without any graduate work, and more rarely, when administrators hire non-degreed faculty. The sad truth is that – at least for community colleges in the South – out-of-field teaching is the dirty secret of postsecondary education, one which the consumer, as well as the taxpayer, has the right to know about.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir. at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 10:50 am EDT on September 28, 2006

What does Enron have to do with this?

BD, I am a little curious. What was “Enron” about? Exactly how were Taxpayers deprived of some right to know where money was going. (Moreover, for the most part taxpayers have no constitutional right to know where their money goes and most of them don’t care or don’t have the concentration to absorb more than a few soundbites. Perhaps it is different in your country.)

As to the public’s views of higher education, let’s face facts: Everyone wants to go to college. Everyone wants to go to a prestigious college. While some people might grouse about a bad grade they got from a professor, a good American university education is what people will pay or cheat to get.

Larry, at 10:55 am EDT on September 28, 2006

Again: WTF, BD? Our graduation rates are public information. They’re reported to the legislature every year and become part of the public record. If Peterson’s or U.S. News and World Report or anyone else wants to publish them, they can get them easily enough. Has it ever occurred to you that they DON’T publish this information because their customers aren’t asking for it? Perhaps the market has already rendered its judgment on this and similar “problems.”

Ditto for “number of scientifically-rigorous surveys on graduates’ salaries, GPA-to-GRE comparative scores, etc.” Why should the college (or the taxpayers) have to go to the expense of conducting alumni-salary surveys? If people value that information, then Peterson’s or U.S. News and World Report is free to collect it and publish it themselves. Let the market work. It’s not like we’re keeping the data a secret; any time anyone wants to run the numbers and publish the results, they’re already free to do so. We don’t need a pseudo-conservative like Margaret Spellings to concoct a fake crisis in order to force colleges to reveal information they’re not hiding to begin with.

The fact that these statistics aren’t published right now suggests that the general public doesn’t particularly care about them. It’s only the big government types, eager to expand the federal reach, who think it’s a problem in the first place.

Another point: perhaps one reason higher education “consumers” don’t care that much about the statistics you mention is because, being intuitively conservative, they know that whatever benefit they personally get out of college depends far more on their own character and motivation than anything else. To think it depends on the college rather than the student, to put the responsibility for results on the institution instead of the individual, is typical muddied liberal thinking, B.D.

Eveningsun, Graduation Rates, etc. at Ordinary Public College, at 12:20 pm EDT on September 28, 2006

Perhaps we make the metrics-thing too difficult?

As a “consumer” of the higher education product — an educated student — I have my own metrics for how I measure your institution’s success.

Can you give me a person who can learn over the course of their life? Are they OK with ambiguity and paradox? Are your students capable of critical thinking while focusing on my organization’s mission? Are they capable of creativity and innovation? Do they have interpersonal and teaming skills.

Can your graduates add immediate value to my organization? Are they open to mentoring and coaching. Can your students speak the Queen’s English. Can they write in clear and understandable prose? Can they apply some basic algebra? Do they understand and appreciate how they can positively influence this Republic in which we live?

Too much to ask? What do you think?

Kevin, at 6:15 pm EDT on September 28, 2006

So, eveningsun, just to clarify: What you’re really saying is that America’s colleges and universities are high in calories and low in nutrition.

That’s exactly my point!

Colleges and universities are high in calories (tons of fluffy stuff) and low in actual nutrition (learning).

Yeah, but don’t you think since the public is actually paying for your salary that you (and not the private sector) should supply that information?

AC, at 10:30 am EDT on September 29, 2006

Limits to federal interest

The rationale for greater federal regulation of higher education is that taxpayers have a right to know how their money (financial aid) is being spent. What a slippery slope.

Perhaps the next shoe to drop will be holding students accountable for how they spend their financial aid dollars. Require them to show how they spend their loans. Require them to show receipts for books, tutors, lab fees. What are their grades? Are they attending class? Since money’s fungible, have them demonsrate it’s not being used to buy a car, an Ipod, espresso drinks.

ezwhite, at 1:05 pm EDT on September 29, 2006

Those things are indeed worth remembering, Don. And the reason they’re worth remembering is because all this additional information will not function only, or even primarily, to help consumers make rational choices in a free market. It will be used (and misused) as rhetorical ammunition by one or another side of the same old political arguments.

The problems we face are not rooted in a lack of information. They’re rooted in a genuine political disagreement, in a real lack of consensus about the fundamental purposes of higher education, about the proper level of state funding and oversight, about the status of the professoriate (proletarian labor pool? medieval guild?), etc.

Aside from providing jobs for researchers and adding yet another layer to higher ed administration, the provision of a lot of additional information will change absolutely nothing, except to the degree to which it informs (and misinforms) what is essentially a debate over values.

Also worth remembering is the fact that I don’t have any clients or patrons. I have students.

This distinction is important. The term “clients” implies that my relationship to my students is like that of a lawyer to a client. When a client pays a lawyer for representation in a lawsuit, the outcome of the case depends much more on the lawyer’s performance than on the client’s. Ditto for the term “patrons,” which implies that my relationship to my students is like that of a restaurateur to a diner. The quality of the dining experience depends far more on the performance of the restaurant personnel than on the diner’s own efforts.

But with professors and students things are obviously quite different. Educational outcomes depend largely on the student’s contribution to the process. Despite the politically charged connotations of your metaphors, many of the higher-ed problems we face are simply not functions of “our performances” as faculty and as colleges. They’re functions of the performances of students.

Consider some other examples of the misleading language used to describe what’s going on, in sentences that cast institutions as grammatical subjects even though it’s students who perform as real-world agents. It’s not that students choose to leave school early, it’s that colleges “fail to retain” such students. It’s not that students choose to (or have to) change their majors or drink themselves into sufficient oblivion to flunk out of school or work extra hours off campus and take lighter loads, it’s that colleges “fail to increase their four-year graduation rates.”

In such discourse, even though it’s the students who are lazy, or drunk, or consumed with sports, it’s the college that “fails.”

Spellings and her commissioners speak as if there’s no such thing as individual agency and responsibility, and as if problems rooted in individual choices can be solved by reforming institutions. And they front-load this fundamental premise into their language in a way that makes it very hard for the public to see how there can possibly be another side to the argument.

Eveningsun, Ordinary Public College, at 2:20 pm EDT on October 1, 2006