dagblog - Comments for "Hurry Hurry Hurry...Get you red hot degrees here ! Guaranteed to make you rich !"

Reminds me of the way

DF — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 02:36:06 +0000

Reminds me of the way Christopher Hitchens describes modern notions of religion as a "celestial tyranny" with creepy, panoptical capabilities. Yet people many people claim to find this idea comforting. Methinks there be a connection here.

Of course private college and

tmccarthy0 — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:52:31 +0000

In reply to Ah, sorry to be a grouch,

Of course private college and universities have long been in the business of building endowments, public colleges and universities are much less versed on the subjects. When I was teaching college in the early 1990's we were just beginning the steep decline in funding public higher education, and now these same public schools must become versed in fund raising quickly. It is difficult to make up for that, since we've changed so drastically how we think about funding higher ed. I fear for middle class and poor students who may opt out of a university education because it just becomes too expensive. But you are quite correct about taking charge of ones own education. It is a great point.

Ah, sorry to be a grouch,

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:53:53 +0000

In reply to "If you want to have the

Ah, sorry to be a grouch, Lulu, and sorry to misread you.

A short answer, for now, is that public colleges are simultaneously becoming more expensive and falling behind private schools in the amount they spend on instruction. So while there are still some good values to be had in public education, there aren't as many as there were twenty or thirty years ago; state legislators have been cutting budgets for decades, and you can't do that forever. Eventually, it shows up in the quality of instruction, or in the tuition bill, or both. Signs are that it's a bit of the first and a lot of the second.

The other key point is that students can get a good education at a public college, but there's more responsibility on them to go and get it. You can still get a world-class education at state schools, but the student has to know how to get the most out of that education. A student who doesn't take charge of her or his own education can become just a number, or waste a lot of effort in the party culture.

"If you want to have the

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:35:38 +0000

In reply to Lulu, I specifically said

"If you want to have the argument about whether private schools give a better education than public schools, then you'll have to argue with someone besides me, because I'm not arguing anything different."

Doctor, you seem to have taken offense at my request. I was not picking an argument, I was hoping to get an informed opinion from a teacher regarding an opinion I got from a couple of bright students. I was assuming that the education one could expect to get at a good private school was about what one would get at a good public school. It didn't occur to me that I would be out of line mentioning public schools and I did specifically ask if you would address my question in the blog you said you might post in the future and which in the same sentence you mentioned public schools.

I can't say anything about

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:30:19 +0000

In reply to I'm intrigued by this because

I can't say anything about Juniata College. I don't know anything about it.

You and your daughter can do research into various schools, and if you want some general tips about the college search process, feel free to e-mail me.

What I would not be swayed by is the local enthusiasm for a school. When a school is an extremely big deal locally, and completely unknown everywhere else, I consider that a warning sign. (Not a final verdict, but a big red flag.)

I'm intrigued by this because

Donal — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:18:34 +0000

In reply to Lulu, I specifically said

I'm intrigued by this because we have one daughter about to start looking at colleges. The big school I had never heard of until I got to central PA was Juniata College. Local T-Shirts read, "Harvard - the Juniata of the North" and such. We go there for the area eliminations of the national spelling bee, but I don't know much about it.

Lulu, I specifically said

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:31:09 +0000

In reply to If and when you blog on the

Lulu, I specifically said private colleges. If you want to have the argument about whether private schools give a better education than public schools, then you'll have to argue with someone besides me, because I'm not arguing anything different. My comment's got nothing to do with Texas Tech, or Tarrant County Junior College, or any of the public universities that I've been involved with myself. It's about the distinction between the famous private schools, the less famous private schools, and the really obscure private schools, all of which charge the same prices.

I was trying to stick to prestige questions, but I did slip and disparage the quality of certain institutions, which out of professional courtesy I will not name. But let's say this: among the highly expensive schools out there, there are some that are not only not famous, but deeply deserve not to be famous. Those schools very often provide less education than the local public universities do, but at Ivy League prices. Actually, at higher prices than the Ivy League, because those schools charge full sticker price.

Every area has a few local private colleges which are very expensive and considered very big deals in that particular area code, and are largely unknown outside it. These schools are most easily identified by people moving to a place for the first time, and encountering the local reverence for a completely unknown school (or, often, the sense that this unknown school is as good, or better, than another local college which really *is* a big deal).

My private nickname for those schools are "Faber colleges" after the school in Animal House. (Before that I called them "Golden retriever" schools, because they're about breeding and not brains.) These schools charge as much as Yale does, have very very little money for financial aid (to the extent that the need for tuition money undermines the quality of the student body), and run their educational programs on a much lower budget than the famous schools do, in ways that cut into the qualities of facilities and instruction. On the other hand, those schools tend to have nice buildings and very pretty lawns. They put a lot of tuition toward looking like a college, and not so much into actually teaching the students. A good private univeristy spends on an impressive campus *and* invests in its academic program. A good public university skimps on the grounds and spends on its academic program. A lame private university spends its money on the flashy campus, but not on the academic program.

What Faber colleges sell is not education but social exclusivity: affluent locals consider going there a big deal, and it's a class marker. It helps you make connections in the local area. Now, certainly the Ivy League schools and other excellent private schools are selling social prestige, too, but they do actually offer a good education with it. Going to Princeton looks good, but also is good. Taking classes with a Nobel Prize winner will actually teach you something. Going to State gives you the education without the prestige (although states keep cutting the education budgets at those schools). But a Faber college is too often a second- or third-rate education with first-rate groundskeeping. And yes, I think that is pretty lame.

(If you want to see someone else point a finger at a Faber college, Rick Bass's story "Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses," from his collection The Watch, does name one. Of course, I myself don't know anything about that specific college and have no idea how fair or accurate Bass's narrator is being.)

If and when you blog on the

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:05:00 +0000

In reply to That article in the Chronicle

If and when you blog on the narrowing price gap between private and public schools would you also address the following point you made above.

"Princeton and Yale cost about the same as a medium-quality private college, and even about the same as a pretty lame one."

I understand the name-recognition difference and the value of having a degree from a prestigious school over that of another but is the education actually better? The terms "medium quality" and "pretty lame" jump out to me. My question comes from a conversation a few years ago which included several recent graduates with Masters degrees. One said that when she went to a very small school she had professors as instructors and they were much better than the instructors she had when she transfered to a major research institution. Another young woman who was in graduate school at Texas Tech, now an M.D, said she strongly agreed. Her statement was that when she went to TCJC [Tarrant County Junior College] she had PHD's for instructors and they were very good. "Now", she said, "students at Tech have me for a teacher."
No one argued for the greater quality of the teaching at a major university.

To me the whole point is that

cmaukonen — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:44:41 +0000

In reply to Hurry Hurry Hurry...Get you red hot degrees here ! Guaranteed to make you rich !

To me the whole point is that cheating would not be as wide spread or necessary if there was not the equivalency between ones grades, major and whether or not one is pulling in the minimum wage flipping burgers. And as I understand it there are more than a few Masters and PHDs that are doing just that these days.

That article in the Chronicle

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:20:14 +0000

In reply to Hurry Hurry Hurry...Get you red hot degrees here ! Guaranteed to make you rich !

That article in the Chronicle is appalling, cmaukonen. And cheating is a major problem.

I am going to quibble with one small point:

The cheating that goes on in Colleges and Univeristies especially the Ivy Leagues and the rich kids that attend them.

The paper mill writer does specify that he writes for "lazy rich kids." But he never said Ivy League, let alone say that his customers were especially Ivy Leaguers. The rich kids= Ivy Leaguers equation is easy, and actually wrong. There aren't only rich students at those places. And kids at less prestigious private universities are actually *less* economically diverse.

The basic deal in American higher education is that private colleges and universities are all priced more or less alike, with an annual price hovering around 50 grand. Public colleges and universities are priced lower, at least for in-state students, but the gap between the public school prices and the private college prices gets narrower every year, as the public prices rise faster than the private ones do. (I've been meaning to blog about this.)

Two points about this. First, the most prestigious of those private schools are not more expensive than the less prestigious. Princeton and Yale cost about the same as a medium-quality private college, and even about the same as a pretty lame one. All of the colleges and universities in Greater Boston, except UMass/Boston, charge more or less the same tuition, even though Harvard and MIT are world-famous and the rest aren't really. The rich and famous schools don't charge more.

Second, the rich and famous schools, with more money to spend on financial aid, actually cost less to attend in practice. They can take more poor kids, and help more lower-middle-class kids, then their less elite but equally pricey peers. So not only is the sticker price for Harvard pretty close to the sticker price for Tufts (two subway stops away), but it heavily discounts that sticker price and Tufts can't afford to discount it much at all.

When you're running one of those expensive but not rich private universities, you've just got to take more kids whose parents can pay their full boat. So while I wouldn't deny the existence of lazy rich kids in the Ivy Leagues, they're actually everywhere in our private universities, and perversely more common outside the Ivies than inside.