Your State University Doesn't Want You 551
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the unless-you're-good-at-the-football dept.
from the unless-you're-good-at-the-football dept.
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?"
As a university professor: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Someone has to pay for all those managers... (Score:5, Interesting)
"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]
Costs of education? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:Capitalism - make your own (Score:5, Interesting)
BAN Int'l students without real financial aid (Score:2, Interesting)
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 get in with fraudulent resumes that list MCSE, A+ certification etc. and good programming skills, and when they fix PCs of faculty members, all they know how to use is doublemyspeed.com and mycleanPC.com and call it a day. Then they get back to their workstation to play WoW or voice-chatting with their friends either in Hindi or Mandarin.
The office where I worked (in the university medical center) have unfortunately picked up one of these TFK's (Trust Fund Kid) from China, his work slows everyone down. Finally we have a golden opportunity to fire this asshole due to a budget cut caused by someone else's far more superior (originally an undergrad student worker) converting to full time.
Seriously, domestic undergrads works far more efficient and show more enthusiasm compare to these international grad who just want to get a degree and pick up a white chick + green card along the way,
Re:Costs of education? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Costs of education? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you complaining that education exposes people to different points of view? Don't you find it interesting for example how a lifetime of delving into statistics can shape a persons worldview? Don't you find that relevant into shaping your own?
My professor would stop teaching and start going on a tirade against political views that didn't match up with his. Eventually he was forcefully removed... after very, very little. Note that this was high school, Statistics and Probability, and it took 2 months. The guy was a college professor as well; we hired him on to teach an advanced class. "Distance Learning" between two schools, a waste of high tech--I can see uses, but in our case it was combining a class size of 9 with a class size of 10; if you had 3 classes of 3 4 and 4 I'd say yes, we need this to offer the subject effectively. It took two people to run the class, to combine two classes ... waste.
In any case, that was an extreme case. The class was sorely lacking in any valuable education in Statistics and Probability, and was basically a platform for political bullshit. Still, even worse is instructors who try to "expose you to their view" -- because you get 3 months of having piles of material taught to you, which are carefully selected to reflect and support a single political view, and demonize another. They're either wasting your time or carefully controlling the information flow to subtly insert ideals into your head.
The place for this shit is in a class or forum where you specifically sit down to examine varied viewpoints--it's called "Philosophy," but we've chosen to only label mental vacations as "Philosophy" in education. I am all for a full, doubly-biased philosophy forum. Start with an unbiased examination (right...), comparing things, advantages, disadvantages, what he said, what she said ... then present material by liberal crazies and conservative nutjobs, presented by said nutjobs... and swap, presented by people who think this shit is bullshit. Let them rave, let them rant, let them foam at the mouth. You will be tested on this; I don't care what you believe, as long as you can bullshit your way through it.
I don't want to deal with politics platform teachers. Teach me math and computers and shut up. There's a class for all this other shit, roll it into gen-ed requirements.