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Education The Almighty Buck News

Your State University Doesn't Want You 551

theodp writes "According to a new survey of college admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed, the admissions strategy judged most important is the recruitment of more out-of-state and international students, who can pay significantly more at public institutions. Ten percent of those surveyed also reported admitting full-pay students with lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants, and a majority of schools either use or plan to use controversial commission-paid agents to recruit foreign students (commission-based recruitment is barred in the U.S.). 'This isn't about globalization or increased educational diversity,' asserts USC's Jerome A. Lucido. 'They need the money.' So, should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"
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Your State University Doesn't Want You

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  • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:16AM (#37491076)

    Considering how much tuition has increased at my local state schools over the last decade or so, I'm not sure they want *anyone*. I really feel sorry for kids today. It wasn't that long ago that I went to college. And tuition has almost tripled at my old school since then (while incomes have barely budged). If I had to do it over again today, there is no way I would have been able to afford it without crippling student loan debt. Sadly this rise has happened in a time when it has become almost essential to get a college degree if you want any kind of decent job.

    There was an excellent article [nytimes.com] on this a couple of years ago in the NY Times.

    • Costs of education? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gr8Apes ( 679165 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:26AM (#37491210)

      The cost of education really has sky-rocketed. Perhaps a study or two needs to be done on the real cost of education, because to hear tell, the educators aren't getting big raises, and this even occurs at schools with no need for capital expansion. So where is all this additional money going?

      Perhaps state funded schools should need to justify every increase in their tuition, and certainly business projects, such as stadiums and sports teams, should be excised out of the report (ie, they need to be self-funding)

      • by afidel ( 530433 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:34AM (#37491320)
        Largely for state schools it's coming from reduced income from the states general budget. Somewhere along the line we bought into both "everyone needs a college degree" and "government shouldn't do anything" and so we have an entire generation that is going to be saddled by mountains of debt just to be able to get a job. It's kind of the company store all over but at a macro level instead of just in small towns.
        • by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @10:00AM (#37491790)
          You are dead on right. In Texas, the legislature has been eating away at state support for higher education after eliminating caps on state university tuition. The legislature said with a straight face that this would not increase tuition, but it doubled over the last decade. The Texas GOP views higher education as "liberal brainwashing", so I expect the GOP controlled government to continue down this path.
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            It often IS Liberal Brainwashing. I had a professor that would stop teaching to non-sequitur into other shit. Statistics, wine consumption per country, what does this show ... shows correlation between consumption of wine and reduced heart disease. WRONG BITCH: ALCOHOL, 'CAUSE I SAID SO. We argued he was wrong...

            Yeah, bad teacher. Bad teacher continues, starts talking about marriage ... and goes into a tirade about gay marriage, and how it's wrong, starts talking about sex with animals. One day he s

            • by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @11:16AM (#37492916)

              I saw plenty of professors who wore their politics on their sleeves.

              The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint. They are willing to DEBATE you on it and give you equal time. They are willing to concede that you have good points and acknowledge them, they are willing to moderate their own positions and take your points on board when you bring up something they hadn't previously considered or that is argued well. I turned in several papers that argued completely contrary to the views I knew the professor held, and STILL got high grades because I argued my points well.

              The "conservative" professors, meanwhile, were generally hidebound dogmatic fools who were only interested in "showing up" their colleagues, indoctrinating minds into seig-heil follower mentality, and if you didn't just spew back the hate and bile they passed out in classroom, you wouldn't get a passing grade. I watched three of these assholes tear into some of my classmates after they "found out" that the classmates were officers in the university Gay-Straight Student Alliance.

              So... in all due respect, FUCK them. I've seen the true colors of the "Republicans." No thank you.

            • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @11:48AM (#37493336) Homepage Journal

              It's not that education draws more liberals so much that education turns off conservatives—not in principle, but in practice. As far as I can tell, the conservative movement in the U.S. (in the bastardized incarnation that is the Republican party) largely consists of two groups of people: people who are fiscally conservative, and people who are socially conservative.

              Socially conservative people have two choices: attend a socially conservative school (mostly religious schools) or attend a public school.

              If they attend a public school, they tend to become less socially conservative. The very nature of a melting pot institution of higher learning inherently increases tolerance because it exposes you to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. Being in an environment where you encounter people who are different from you makes it harder to dehumanize people who disagree with you. This has nothing to do with the teachers or the institution, and everything to do with the fact that it is a microcosm of the world rather than a homogeneous group.

              If they attend a homogeneous private school, their conservative ideologies may be reinforced (depending on the university), in which case they will continue to see public education as a hotbed of liberalism, and if they decide to become teachers, they will generally choose to teach at similarly homogeneous schools.

              Thus, socially conservative people tend to either learn tolerance or segregate themselves, which is why you rarely see social conservatives teaching in public higher education.

              The other big group in the Republican party are the fiscally conservative. These people presumably have at least a passing understanding of economics (at least enough to know that you don't spend every penny you have coming in), which means that they won't put up with a job that pays them peanuts, working long hours to teach a bunch of kids who don't really want to be there. And the "new conservatives"—the folks who are fiscally conservative because they became rich and now want to keep that money rather than supporting the social programs that helped them get there—have an attitude that doesn't exactly match up with a desire to help others by teaching. You won't see any of those sorts of people in higher education, private or otherwise.

              So it's really no surprise that there are few conservatives (of either type) in public education. Want more conservatives in public education? Tell your conservative bureaucrats to triple higher ed salaries so that they can compete with private enterprise and private homogeneous schools. Until you do that, conservative views cannot possibly balance out the liberal voices in higher ed, precisely because the liberals—those who care more about others than their own well being— are the only ones who will take the job... that and people who aren't smart enough to get a job doing something else... and some people who are both....

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            In "Liberal" CA, state funding has dropped from 90%ish to less than 50% in less than 20 years (at least here at cal poly). So it's not just texas.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          You don't need a college degree to get a job, although we as a society have done a very good job of convincing young people otherwise. I make a very decent salary for a 30-something with only partial-college education. what I have that makes me worthwhile to employers is half a decade of professional experience, and nearly two decades of non-professional experience, in my field of choice, as well as experience dealing with the type of people (Both clients and colleagues) that I am likely to interact with. I

        • No, the cost of education is increasing.

          If it were just the withdrawal of state funding (which is true) then state schools tuition would be rising faster then private schools. Which is not true.

          Fun with numbers! Education inflation numbers, broken down by public, private, teacher pay, buildings, etc.
          http://www.commonfund.org/CommonfundInstitute/HEPI/Pages/default.aspx [commonfund.org]

          I think there are 3 reasons:

          Productivity: Productive of professors have been rising slower than the average employee. The same professor teach

        • by Rolgar ( 556636 )

          To some degree, it was an extension of the housing bubble. Because loan rates were low, the schools could sell you on the fact that your future salary would offset your higher costs of attending. Federally subsidized loans allowed schools to increase tuition to pull a higher percentage of that loan money from the government, and now that it's drying up, education will probably go through the same shake down that housing has been going through.

          I wonder if this is the case in Kansas as far as acceptance. We h

      • by nedlohs ( 1335013 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:44AM (#37491494)

        It's amazing, you make it easy for people to get money to pay for some specific thing and the price of that thing skyrockets for no apparent reason.

        It's not like this has happened with other things, say handing out home loans like candy causing house prices to shoot up.

        And the additional money goes to the administators, after all they are the ones who are clearly doing all the work to increase the institution's revenue. And of course to those stadiums you mentioned, since that helps the administrators perform better at the dick measuring conferences.

        • by sandytaru ( 1158959 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:50AM (#37491586) Journal
          My state university has all these beautiful new buildings that are half empty because they can't afford the faculty to put into them.
        • It's amazing, you make it easy for people to get money to pay for some specific thing and the price of that thing skyrockets for no apparent reason.

          Also amazing: When you slash state funding by massive levels, the institutions now have to find revenue elsewhere. Can't imagine who they'd bilk for extra dollars...

          • Obviously, but that clearly isn't the sole cause of increases in education costs which were occurring during the boom years and also at private institutions.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by ironjaw33 ( 1645357 )

              Obviously, but that clearly isn't the sole cause of increases in education costs which were occurring during the boom years and also at private institutions.

              +1. Ten years ago, my first year in a state funded university cost about $10k. State support was at about 20% of the school's operating budget. Today, it costs around $25k with state support at about 13%. So a drop in 7 percentage points in state funding equals a tuition increase of 2.5? Not only that, but the school has also increased total enrollment as well as the proportion of out of state and international students, which pay more than if you live in state.

        • Most state athletic programs make the institution money. Football in particular is such a moneymaker, it can subsidize other less prominent sports.
          • Most state athletic programs make the institution money. Football in particular is such a moneymaker, it can subsidize other less prominent sports.

            This isn't true. There are only about 12 or 13 football programs (D1, BCS) that make enough money to fund other athletic programs or put money back into their school's general fund. The majority of college sports funding comes from alumni-funded endowments with the remainder made up by athletic tuition fees.

    • by claus.wilke ( 51904 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:31AM (#37491276)

      It is important to mention that throughout the US, tuition has gone up at least partially in a response to declining state funding. If states are not willing to fund their state schools, then the state schools have little option other than operating just like the private schools.

      • That's a large part of it, another large part of it is that the folks running the schools are under a delusion that scholarships will cover the costs. Which isn't true. Most folks are saddled with large loans and those that aren't are typically progeny of rich parents.

        Also, the estimates for what parents can afford to pay to cover the cost, is a large part of the problem. There's no law that requires parents to pay, and yet it gets factored into financial aid calculations. Sometimes it means that people who

      • It's actually rather presumptuous for taxpayers to claim ownership of "state" universities these days. A professor from the University of Iowa told me the school only gets a little more than 10% of its funding from the state. "Public" education has been shrunk down to little more than a scholarship and student loan program, with the schools scrapping for full-tuition foreign students and research programs to stay alive.
    • by memnock ( 466995 )

      Bumper sticker:
      "If you think college is expensive, try ignorance."

      I agree that the cost has risen quite steeply. But I think a free-market person would argue that if the degree betters your chance of a higher income, then that shouldn't deter you. Of course, those people are probably done with the little debt they had when college was cheaper and are already rich. They don't realize what that debt is like, as you pointed out, crippling in some cases.

      OTOH, the kids could try to be more reasonable about what

      • Further, I don't know if a college degree is really necessary for a lot of "decent jobs". I know this being a tech site, folks are thinking more from the perspective of high tech industries requiring a lot technical training, but there are other jobs that pay well enough without a lot of school. UPS driver, plumber, firefighter. Having said that, the future of our economy seems to be heading in one of two directions jobs-wise: really technical, well-paying jobs that do require a good deal of school of which there don't seem to be a lot of, or a lot of menial, service jobs that don't pay as well. There'll still be plumbers and firefighters, but I picture big plumbing conglomerates that hire plumbers as contractors who will get crap pay compared to what they used to get when they were independent/proprietors.

        See, this is the thing I've realized after leaving college. Most of the people you meet doing various jobs DO NOT need to have slogged through Shakespeare, the Napoleonic Wars, Partial Differential Equations, etc...

        They only point in having a degree for a great many jobs is to prove that you can learn stuff. Now that everyone has a degree, you look like an idiot if you don't have one. So you have to spend a few years getting one, just to prove that you're OK. The system is completely crazy.

        To compare, here

        • You can't give people IQ tests (or similar) in the US to sort the ones who can hack it from those who can't. You can only give very narrowly-tailored exams regarding the subject of the job itself, which isn't much use when you're hiring apprentice bankers and want to know who will be a good branch manager in a few years. This is a result of Griggs v. Duke Power [wikipedia.org], which like many other civil rights decisions is a very noble attempt to rectify racism that ended up having enormous undesirable consequences for t
    • Between tuition hikes at private schools and public universities, and the concerted push to dismantle public education in the U.S. ever since the 1980s...well, there was a reason the U.S. started the public school system in the first place and decided to educate everybody instead of leaving such an institution wholly to the market. I fear the rich will have to rediscover the situation they were in with a massive uneducated population before they stop this downward spiral.

    • by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      I really feel sorry for kids today. It wasn't that long ago that I went to college. And tuition has almost tripled at my old school since then (while incomes have barely budged).

      I echo the feeling but in my case the fees have increased by an infinite multiple. From zero to £9,000 (US $14,000) per year. Really, I don't think that degree/non-degree salary differentials make it worth while in the UK.

    • Sadly this rise has happened in a time when it has become almost essential to get a college degree if you want any kind of decent job.

      Actually, this has been so detrimental to higher education that employers are beginning to rethink the value of a bachelor's degree. It is a simple matter of economics: people are going to college in order to get a "one decent job" coupon, and they will seek the least-effort path through college to receive that coupon. Slowly but surely managers are realizing that a college degree may not actually reflect the work ethic, education, or intelligence that people ascribe to it.

      The new coupon for a decen

  • Alright! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AngryDeuce ( 2205124 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:16AM (#37491084)
    Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!
    • Re:Alright! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:27AM (#37491216)

      Capitalism, Fuck Yeah!

      This comment for the most customer unfocused industry in the country? The whole point was that the gaming the government funding, which is not capitalism. More pure capitalism would actually fix a lot of the problems state schools are having. Of course it would create a lot more... (University of Phoenix anyone?)

      • This is only a perversion of capitalism if a) the out of state funding over-compensates for the in-state taxpayer funding the schools receive (which is becoming more of an issue as many have pointed out) and b) if the school actually admits out of state students with lower qualifications than in-state ones (it has yet to be proven, the only "evidence" is an anonymous survey). The fix for both of these issues is just a little bit more transparency; expose how much extra revenue is derived from out-of-state

      • More pure capitalism would actually fix a lot of the problems state schools are having.

        Like what? University of California (among others) is pretty capitalized these days, selling off bonds to finance new projects. Then, of course, they have to pay that back at interest. It can't be good for anyone; if they could get appropriate state funding instead then the drive for constant expansion wouldn't plague their plans for the future.

        There's a PBS Frontline about it on Netflix.

  • Pennsylvania has got to be a forerunner in all of this. The state run/subsidized colleges seem to have a heavy preference to those with a fatter check. Then again, why shouldn't they be? Those same kids are also eligible for more grants and by adding minorities and foreign students to their undergraduate portfolio the college can get additional state and federal funding. At the same time the "higher" tuition those kids pay for a heavily paid for by some group other than the actual student.
    • Re:Easy money (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PingSpike ( 947548 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:28AM (#37491238)

      Well, the answer to "Why shouldn't they be?" is because they are supported by the state they reside in under the premise they will support the local populace first. Essentially they are getting the benefits of being a state school while shirking the inherent responsibilities that come with that.

      • The problem being that less and less of the state funding is coming in. Hence the need to recruit higher (monetary) value students. Pulling random numbers out of my butt, lets pretend that it costs a given uni 40 million dollars a year to operate. Ten years ago, that university got 20 million a year from the state. With half it's funding coming from the state, only 20 million had to come from tuition, grants, or endowments. Now the state is only giving them 5 million. That means to maintain they must r

        • Actually, percentage-wise your numbers are pretty much spot on. State funding now hovers around 10-15% in many state schools, and it used to be 50% or more (maybe not 10 years ago, but certainly 20-30 years ago).

      • I'm not familiar enough with PSU to have much to comment on them. But around here the state schools have been told for the last decade to behave more like a private business. The consequence has largely been for the number of spaces available for residents to decrease and an increasing number of spaces to open up for those from out of state.

        Ultimately, those that aren't interested in paying taxes are fucking us all over, at some point the lack of education in the US is going to hurt us. That doesn't necessa

  • Conflating facts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:19AM (#37491116)

    It's a purposeful distortion to ask if rank-and-file *employees* should get a pension after a lifetime of service, simply because one single administrator (uni pres) has a huge paycheck. That's like asking if the front desk secretary should be allowed to have a cigarette break because the Goldman Sachs CEO is already out playing golf.

    • by jdgeorge ( 18767 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @10:00AM (#37491796)

      Parent is insightfully addressing the misleading question in the summary:

      "should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"

      This appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine the idea of providing a pension system to state employees without providing any evidence that those employees haven't earned that pension.

      This rhetorical attempt to represent the compensation of a university *president* as justification for reduce compensation for the majority of university employees is logically fallacious, and seems like an attack on those employees simply because they work for a state or a state education system..

      I expect better. Yes, even from Slashdot.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:21AM (#37491154)

    Our funding in Wisconsin was slashed by our governor. Our pay has been slashed for the last 4 years. Enrollment is down, which means money for supplies is trickling down to zero. So when we go to China (a new program instituted this year) to import foreign students, we're doing it to stay solvent.

    Who should be mad? I would say the taxpayers of the state, but they get what they pay for. Even though they have paid into the system their whole lives, they would rather save a few bucks in taxes each year than have access to cheap, amazing education in their state.

    • by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:30AM (#37491262)
      Education is a future benefit. Food is a current benefit. Some people are having to make that kind of choice now.
      • This is what food stamps and Pell grants are for.

        • This is what food stamps and Pell grants are for.

          If a person may makes enough to afford food or college, but not both, they would not qualify for food stamps. Starving is not a choice. Food stamps are also under attack from republicans, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) who is pushing cuts to the program.

          As for Pell Grants, they help but don't pay for all expenses. They are also under attack from republicans, such as house budget chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) who is pushing cuts to the program.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you don't have enough money for food, you aren't going to pay taxes. You qualify for full tax exemption (my full time working mother-in-law is in this exact situation). So no, no one has to make that choice right now.

    • "Enrollment is down"

      What the hell is Wisconsin doing wrong? Every school I've looked at has growing enrollment. It's the natural thing in a recession: the opportunity cost of attending school far lower when you don't have a job to quit in the first place.

    • Actually, most of them DONT get what they pay for, and that's the point. Everyone across the country pays taxes on the universities while few actually get to attend. And if they do attend they have to spend so much to do so that they or their families are hit with 10's of 1000's of dollars of debt they will likely be repaying for the next 30 years.
  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:23AM (#37491172)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This was happening at the university I went to back when I was in it.

  • by G-Man ( 79561 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:25AM (#37491198)

    "What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.

    Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."

    http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/585302/201109191844/By-The-Way-We-Teach-A-Little-Too.htm [investors.com]

    • Same thing has occured in my own local public school system. They have a ratio of .78 administrators per teacher and a staff of 18 lobbyists!

      More recently they wanted to spend 135 million on a new administraton building to consolidate mulitple office spaces while students are being taught in 20 year old trailers. All this in the second wealthist county in the nation.

    • by j-beda ( 85386 )

      "What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.

      Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."

      http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/585302/201109191844/By-The-Way-We-Teach-A-Little-Too.htm [investors.com]

      That seems strange - somehow even though the number of managers only went up by a factor of about 3 (from 2400 to 8100) the manager-student ratio when down by a factor of 31? (from 62-to-1 for 2-to-1 ?) Are there really half as many managers at UC as there are students? And yet there are more tenure-track faculty than managers by their numbers - shouldn't the teacher-student ratio be (if only marginally) larger than the manager-student ratio?

  • by LordNacho ( 1909280 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:27AM (#37491214)

    You'd have thought the lower tuition fees for in-state kids was due to a public purse of some sort, so that the institution doesn't get less for their own kids. It's crazy to set up an incentive to get out-of-state kids for a state school.

    • In many states public universities are banned from charging tuition to in-state students. This is ostensibly because the state funds the teacher's salaries. But of course, they can still charge it for out of state students, so there is a huge incentive to recruit them in order to increase income. They prefer doing this to controlling costs.

      • Actually, the set up at my uni was this: High performing students from in-state high schools get free tuition. Not as high performing students paid in-state rates, which were significantly cheaper than the out-of-state rate. Unfortunately, the admissions process became so selective at the flagship school that every in-state student accepted was "high performing" - the average SAT score is now well over 1200, and the average GPA is 3.75. So the free tuition rider had to go, because the university was goi
  • That's academia at it's finest. They will take the state and federal funds but put preference on the out-of-state or international students. And then they look down their nose at anyone that's not "enlightened" by their institutions. They push policies that ensure their power and authority and deride the unwashed masses who havent yet lost their common sense.
  • So, should employees of a public university where the President's annual compensation exceeds $1 million receive a full state-funded pension for educating 16,000+ out-of-state students?"

    I'm sure a lot of people are going to be cool with this.

  • ...or read a table is complaining about higher education. Ohio State University doesn't have 16,000+ out of state students, it has 11,442 (according to the document the post links to). Foreign students are included in that number. There are 52,635 Ohioans, 11,442 non-Ohioans for a total enrollment of 64,077.

  • Across the country, state legislatures have been treating public higher education as a "splurge"; something that's nice to have but not really necessary. Welfare is a necessity, but public higher ed is not. Gotta love that logic.

    Public funding has been a declining percentage of the universities' budgets for a long time. In a few years, they won't be "public" at all.

  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:50AM (#37491584)

    Most IT workers should go to tech / trade schools and apprenticeships.

    And not forcing them to go 4 year (that trun out to be longer then 4 due to the high number of needed credits in the past you needed less)

    Also how does high level theory vs doing more hands on work help you be a better help desk or desktop guy? What is use is all that high level math? Some math is ok but some it of it is better for high level design that is way past what most IT workers do.

    Now for coding I can see lot's of math and theory (to a point) but going to far on theory is bad for coders.

    Networking, support, and admin needs to be on it's own track from the coding side of work. And even on the Networking, support, and admin side that can also be broken out a few of there own tracks aka big scale network setups vs admin + a smaller network setup.

    The filler classes are nice to a point but it has gone a little to far as the number of credits needed has gone up over the years. Now a better system is to cut them down and or make some IT classes just out side your main focus count as filler for the needed credits part.

    Ideal way is to have a 2 year mixed class room / apprenticeship system and no internship B.S. It should be a real payed (at least mini wage) apprenticeship like how electricians and plumbers systems are setup.

    Now keep the 4 year for the high level stuff (with a way to join midway if you did the 2 year mixed class room / apprenticeship in the past)

    • Nobody's forcing you to go to college, or to study IT while you're there.

    • by roothog ( 635998 )

      Most IT workers should go to tech / trade schools and apprenticeships.

      And not forcing them to go 4 year (that trun out to be longer then 4 due to the high number of needed credits in the past you needed less)

      It's worse than that. They graduate after 4 or 5 years without the right skill set and can't get a job, so they then apply for a Masters program and get even more education that's not useful to their career plan.

  • by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Friday September 23, 2011 @09:54AM (#37491664)
    Interesting atricle from The Economist, from 2004, about social/financial mobility in America. http://www.economist.com/node/3518560 [economist.com]
  • I see it simple. The student invests his personal time into his future and the state should help him doing so. Other form of investing something in the future of the inhabitants of a state are also helped, like tax exemptions etc. Lets say 10000 Students from you state studying will in you universities for 3 years each roughly corresponds to a 1.5 billion dollar investment of their personal lifetime ($50000/year). If they will earn twice as much money the next 30 years, they will get in total a return on t

  • Like any other state/national entity, states should apply max quotas of immigrants to who they admit from outside, who are all subsidized by the taxpayers in the state. There's both financial and educational (diversity, quality) benefits to admitting as many outsiders as the state can get, before the net effects exclude actual residents too from the net benefits.

  • Here in our university, in many departments, when they hire IT staff, they don't hire full time staff, instead they hire international grad students which is much cheaper ( about $1,600 a month , plus a tuition waiver, for 20 hours a week, and you get to call yourself a research assistant). These position especially attracts engineering, CS and business students from either India or China who otherwise cannot get a research/teaching assistantship from their home department because they sucks.

    These people ge

  • http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/education/15fifth.html?_r=2 [nytimes.com]
    http://consumerist.com/2011/09/private-colleges-starting-to-offer-four-year-degree-guarantees.html [consumerist.com]
    Some place have this now and it's due to stuff like.

    adviser hadn't erroneously told some one that a particular class would fulfill the math requirement. Unfortunately, for some reason the same class winter quarter was a different class that didn't fulfill the requirement, even though the fall and spring classes with the same course number did.

    Classes

  • Every state should offer completely free public education through a post-highschool degree. If you graduated a public school in the state/county, the state/county should offer you a degree path at a state/county college. That is an investment in all the people in the state/county, since its during college that people typically travel to where they'll start careers, which mostly serve the other people in the local area. The more and better the local college grads, the better life gets in the area, offering m

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