Please discuss the current state of the U.S. education system here. Thanks in advance.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
My post copied from the Comey thread:
Can I reverse this question a moment? Student debt is skyrocketing, yet colleges are paying professors to do research rather than teach day in and day out. Why shouldn't we socialize higher education as well?
As an actual college professor I find this hilarious. Schools provide trivial funding, if that, for research. Schools only provide a variably sized start up package so that the professor can get his lab up and running, a tiny bit of money to attend conferences, and usually a space for an office and lab. Professors are expected to actively pursue NSF and NIH grants to fund there own research, and if they can't...pay for it out of pocket. On top of that, many high profile positions actually REQUIRE grant money for the professor to survive, only paying out half salary with the other half being expected to come from grants.
For many professors, we spent a large chunk of our time endlessly applying for grants, which is a huge laborious process with tons of bureacratic red tape to get through not to mention the huge time sink that is writing the grant itself. Often this ends up as wasted effort, since continual cuts to grant-funding agencies against rising costs of research and competition means that 80% of grants get rejected. To give you a sense, between various job tasks, I regulary put in 12+ hours a day 7 days a week, only a small proportion of which is actually reflected in my salary.
Once/if we get a grant, as much as half of our grant money goes to University overhead. The whole lump sum in general goes straight to the school, which often makes money out of the interest.
And high profile research can often be a major selling point in public media, which can get more students interested in attending your school, and get more alumni excited enough to donate. I know my University loved the free media attention by the new fossil dolphin I published on last year. And a strong research program allows you to involve undergrads into your work, so they get hands on experience in science.
A strong research program also attracts good grad students, which in turn provide good TA's. Which can be paid far far more less than a professor to teach a lab.
At any rate, Faculty salaries really are not behind the increase cost of tuition, and like many professions may be stagnating in some parts of the country. If you want to point a finger at increasing student loan debt and tuition, look major infrastructure developments (especially those related to athletics, ballooning administration staff (and for the higher ups there salaries), and our society's overwhelming treatment of College as high school 2.0, and pushing many folks towards higher education where other avenues might be better for them.
So to summarize:
Schools for the most part DON'T pay for instructors to do research, and in fact may underpay research profs
Schools rake in a lot of money from research grants, both directly (Overhead) and indirectly (prestige, reduced costs for grad student TAs)
Many if not most researchers end up paying for at least some research costs out of there pocket.
Faculty support for research doesn't have anything to do with increasing student debt OR tuition.
RALLY FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION - BOSTON, MA
RALLY OR PROTEST
Rally OR protest; it's up to you!
MMCJawa is right on the money in regards to higher ed and this statement "our society's overwhelming treatment of College as high school 2.0, and pushing many folks towards higher education where other avenues might be better for them."
I'm in (lower) education and I see this every single day. How many liberal arts degrees do we need in this country? How many welders? Or machinists?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm not sure what there is to "discuss."
State aid to education generally and higher education in particular is down in nominal terms, while of course inflation generally raises costs. The extra dollars need to be found somewhere, and the usual answer is "tuition." (This is a long-term trend but I didn't see a need to dig up the historical data.)
The bulk of the increases are not in faculty salaries, but in administrator salaries. Administrators are not only getting higher raises on an annual basis, but they are also growing in number in proportion to the student body (administration and staff now outnumber teaching faculty).
Tenure-eligible faculty, the sort that Grey_Mage decried as "colleges are paying professors to do research rather than teach" are a vanishing breed. Today fewer 1/3 of the teaching faculty are tenure-eligible; fully half are "adjunct" faculty, normally teaching a few classes per semester for several different colleges, and often on food stamps and other forms of public assistance.
The professors who do research as a major part of their job are almost always cash cows for the university. Cal-Berkeley, for example, takes up to 57% of every research grant it receives as "indirect costs." This means, for example, that if professor I. Q. High applies to NSF for $100,000 for a new widget, NSF actually needs to give him more than $200,000 ($232,558). And, yes, a standard expense on grant proposals is "release time"; he could ask for, say, half of his salary to enable the university to hire someone to teach half of his classes.... but, of course, if he's pulling down $200,000 per year, that means that his "release time" item will actually generate $238,558 for the university. This makes research-active professors a very profitable activity for the university, because they generate money to supplement tuition dollars.
So, yeah, I hear this "overpaid professor who never teaches" rant a lot, especially from self-proclaimed conservatives. Usually it says more about the person who gives the rant, saying that he or she has no idea how US education actually works.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
MMCJawa is right on the money in regards to higher ed and this statement "our society's overwhelming treatment of College as high school 2.0, and pushing many folks towards higher education where other avenues might be better for them."
I'm in (lower) education and I see this every single day. How many liberal arts degrees do we need in this country? How many welders? Or machinists?
More liberal arts degrees than welders and machinists, I'm afraid. More people need to read the manuals on the welding robots and 3D printers (which requires literacy and critical thinking) than actually do the welding.
As the old joke has it, the 21st century machine shop will have a dozen robots, a dog, and a man. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the robots.
This makes be boiling angry:
@Ambrosia This is a genuine question so please don't get angry. Why does it make you angry? Public schools are mostly state/local funded...
PS: I'm not necessarily for school choice...
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
@Ambrosia This is a genuine question so please don't get angry. Why does it make you angry? Public schools are mostly state/local funded...
Seriously?
First, just because 49% or less of already-inadequate funding comes from a different pile doesn't mean that cutting the budget further is a good idea. But beyond that, the Fed has substantially different funding priorities than the states and LEA's, and the cuts will fall disproportionately on the wrong people.
In particular, I draw your attention to Title I funding, which explicitly supports schools and programs with a high percentage of low-income students. These are the students that need educational funding the most, but they are also the ones hardest hit by the traditional property tax base that funds most school districts nationwide. The low income parents tend to live in low-value housing, which in turn means low property tax revenues, which means underfunded schools. Since supplemental funding at the state level tends to get directed to the people with political pull (e.g. high income districts), low income districts get little to nothing from the local township or from the state. This is a problem. Title I is supposed to mitigate that, but Trump is slashing Title I.
Other programs that are primarily supported by Federal money include after-school programs for 1.6 million mostly-poor kids, class-size reduction money that is mostly directed to underfunded schools (since those are the ones that can't get enough teachers in rooms), and so forth.
Basically, this is a classic Trump budget where he gives lots of money to his cronies (the people who own the for-profit schools and are hoping for "choice") and stiffs the people with actual unment needs.
I know all about Title 1 man...I'm a school administrator at a 78% low SES school. We also are the #7 school in the state for test scores.
If I lost every penny of Title 1 money tomorrow(We get about 130k/year), I think we'd feel it in test scores a little, but we wouldn't drop very far.
@Pan I tend to agree with you that the "for profit" model rankles me a little, but if the schools are performing and the students are learning I don't see the harm.
So, just to throw a few numbers at you (very rough budgetary numbers) my school's total population is around 500. The state budgets around 8k for each student (it's actually different in different LEAs but like I said, rough) So, my total school's operational budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million a year. I get about 130k in Title 1, with a low ses population of 78% of the school. That's roughly 3% of the budget.
Title 1 is very very very overrated for what it actually does. (Which isn't much)
I watch Last Week Tonight faithfully, I saw the episode on Charter Schools. Some are bad, some are good the data reflects that.
Edit: Oliver does bring up a good point regarding regulating/overseeing charter schools. They should be subject to the same exact state stipulations and requirements that public schools are subject to.
|
@Pan I tend to agree with you that the "for profit" model rankles me a little, but if the schools are performing and the students are learning I don't see the harm.
I agree, but right now we have the Fox guarding the hen house. There needs to be a way to administer school choice without conflict of interest.
We really could ditch the first two years of college. You had 12 years of "enrichement" and "general education" in k-12.
You go to college to learn SOMETHING. Not anything
Courses I didn't need to take again but had to pay for in college
phys ed (archery and tennis)
English: 101 readin
English: 102writin
social studies (magic and religion)
american history
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, just to throw a few numbers at you (very rough budgetary numbers) my school's total population is around 500. The state budgets around 8k for each student (it's actually different in different LEAs but like I said, rough) So, my total school's operational budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million a year. I get about 130k in Title 1, with a low ses population of 78% of the school. That's roughly 3% of the budget.
Title 1 is very very very overrated for what it actually does. (Which isn't much)
It's nice that you have a relatively large population school to look after. Where school choice really kicks public schools in the gonads are 1A districts who also have a special needs population. Where you could pare down, that school becomes dangerously close to insolvency.
What is truly unfair is that charter schools can choose to not accept students based on basically whatever criteria they choose, including academic strength, handicap, religion, or gender. If you want public funding you should not be permitted selective admissions beyond zip code. And even that should be as wide as every square foot of each public school district their area intercepts.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We really could ditch the first two years of college. You had 12 years of "enrichement" and "general education" in k-12.
You go to college to learn SOMETHING. Not anything
Courses I didn't need to take again but had to pay for in college
phys ed (archery and tennis)
English: 101 readin
English: 102writinsocial studies (magic and religion)
american history
What you are really saying is that we should encourage and promote an Associate of Engineering degree, and then call engineers tradespeople. Which I'm totally cool with. The problem is in the US we publicly take a dump all over tradespeople. Parents are disappointed when their kids go into a trade instead of getting a "real" degree. I don't think the engineers of the US are going to be keen on losing that status, and I don't think we are going to solve the plight of tradespeople either. So, until one or the other budges, you are left with the bachelor's degree which means an expectation of a rounded rather than targeted education.
We really could ditch the first two years of college. You had 12 years of "enrichement" and "general education" in k-12.
You go to college to learn SOMETHING. Not anything
Courses I didn't need to take again but had to pay for in college
phys ed (archery and tennis)
English: 101 readin
English: 102writinsocial studies (magic and religion)
american historyNot to reopen the debate about the value of "liberal arts classes" - I know your opinion on the subject, but in many disciplines it's just not possible to start out by taking a full semester's load of core material. You need the general foundation classes before you can build on them. You can't get through Calc I, Calc II and Diff Eq in one semester - each builds on the others.
By your later years, you've got enough foundation you can take multiple specialized classes. So you get your liberal arts requirements out of the way in your first years.
Also, nearly everyone can use more writing courses, especially the sciencey/engineering types.
To take your example however, for most practical applications you don't have to understand how to do special (trigonometric, logarithmic) integrations, you just need to know "what" integrals and differentials are. Calculus 1+2 could easily be condensed into "application based calculus" and be perfectly adequate for 75%+ of engineers. (If you really felt it was super important you could squeeze in sums and series into "application based diff eq" for engineers or "discrete math" for programmers.) Teach them to use the tools rather than the theory. If a TI 89 can do it why do they need to be able to do it by hand?
Not really arguing with you, just saying I think there *is* some room to condense coursework. Also, strong agree on the writing courses.
but in many disciplines it's just not possible to start out by taking a full semester's load of core material. You need the general foundation classes before you can build on them. You can't get through Calc I, Calc II and Diff Eq in one semester - each builds on the others.
No, but he could take calc I and stats and whatever else math majors need (economics, physics,) . You're telling me you can't fit 16-21 credits of something relevant per semester without build up?
Or the math major's life is bad enough i don't care what he takes he doesn't need to pay a grand to copy trite "insights" into Siddhartha off of the internet.
*ow ow ow kidding the sliderules hurt ow ow ow...*
Part of my hostility to the liberal arts was that they got in the way of taking courses I wanted to. The sheer number of requirements left what was supposed to be a focused education with all the point of a bowling ball.
Also, nearly everyone can use more writing courses, especially the sciencey/engineering types.
If it hasn't sunk in in 12 years it's not sinking in in year 13 along with the alcohol. Not everyone is Virginia Woolf.
I can't defend Phys Ed (none of the school I have been at/associated with had that as a requirement for most majors). I also personally never had to take a history class, although I did take a few Social studies classes.
But English is an absolutely critical class for way too many disciplines. I've graded way way way too many crappy lab reports and and research reports not to understand how important that class is for students.
My big concern for undergraduate education can basically be summed up by the following.
First, Far too many kids just are not leaving high school with an adequate body of knowledge for many intro and second year college courses. This means that as an instructor I often have to dedicate some amount of time hashing over how to read a graph, or what a hypothesis is. Funding cuts, uneven resource allotment, overworked teachers, and different school standards across different parts of the country are to blame for this.
Secondly, far too many students enter college solely because that is the "thing to do", with only a nebulous idea of any path forward. They rack up student debt and take up resources only to fail out, or graduate with a degree they will never use. College should be about educating oneself and setting yourself onto a future career path. It shouldn't be an excuse to just go to some parties and escape the parents. This is a cultural problem that I am not completely sure how to fix, although better support for trade schools or specialized educational programs would help, and free tuition and strong government support for community colleges would also improve things.
But English is an absolutely critical class for way too many disciplines. I've graded way way way too many crappy lab reports and and research reports not to understand how important that class is for students.
But those students had or were probably taking Freshmen english and literature. Those classes don't seem to be getting you what you want.
This means that as an instructor I often have to dedicate some amount of time hashing over how to read a graph, or what a hypothesis is. Funding cuts, uneven resource allotment, overworked teachers, and different school standards across different parts of the country are to blame for this.
You could get more time for that if the future biologists weren't learning the meaning of blue drapes. You'd also have an easier time doing that if the freshman who wants to learn about the meaning of blue drapes isn't taking up room in the classroom because they have to meet a biology requirement.
Secondly, far too many students enter college solely because that is the "thing to do", with only a nebulous idea of any path forward. They rack up student debt and take up resources only to fail out, or graduate with a degree they will never use.
Right, it's not highschool its...
*looks at first year of college* Its exactly highschool. How do you want to tell people it's NOT highschool 2.0 when it is highschool 2.0?
College should be about educating oneself and setting yourself onto a future career path.
It's not though. It's more highschool, along with "don't worry, you'll get to the real classes in graduate school!"
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If its okay to tell doctors how much they can charge or be reimbursed, why not do the same to professors and college administrators?
1) you don't die from not getting into english lit.
2) New york state just announced free 4 year tuition at state schools. 15 minutes later they required that textbooks be in PDF , because there was NO reason for people to keep paying outrageous amounts for small print run textbooks when a kindle costs less than a single biology book.
"wait wait wait.. we need to pay HOW Much for books? Oh no. that was one thing when you were ripping off college students...."
So, just to throw a few numbers at you (very rough budgetary numbers) my school's total population is around 500. The state budgets around 8k for each student (it's actually different in different LEAs but like I said, rough) So, my total school's operational budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million a year. I get about 130k in Title 1, with a low ses population of 78% of the school. That's roughly 3% of the budget.
Title 1 is very very very overrated for what it actually does. (Which isn't much)
It's nice that you have a relatively large population school to look after. Where school choice really kicks public schools in the gonads are 1A districts who also have a special needs population. Where you could pare down, that school becomes dangerously close to insolvency.
What is truly unfair is that charter schools can choose to not accept students based on basically whatever criteria they choose, including academic strength, handicap, religion, or gender. If you want public funding you should not be permitted selective admissions beyond zip code. And even that should be as wide as every square foot of each public school district their area intercepts.
I don't really disagree with you. Except to point out that I am unaware of any charter that admits on the basis of religion (I'm like 99.9% sure that isn't a thing). If Charters want to focus on "Students with Disabilities" and select for those that's fine with me, but if they want to exclude them I'm not OK with that. I'm also more in favor of charters that don't follow school zoning. Example: The charters in my area (actually about 50' away since I live in a very rural area) have a bus depot that parents drop the kids off at a couple central locations and busses bring the kids to school.
It's nice that you have a relatively large population school to look after. Where school choice really kicks public schools in the gonads are 1A districts who also have a special needs population. Where you could pare down, that school becomes dangerously close to insolvency.
What is truly unfair is that charter schools can choose to not accept students based on basically whatever criteria they choose, including academic strength, handicap, religion, or gender. If you want public funding you should not be permitted selective admissions beyond zip code. And even that should be as wide as every square foot of each public school district their area intercepts.
Zipcode is the most selective of admissions man, the absolute most selective.
So, saying no selective admissions and then saying except zipcodes is ALOT like saying "Title 1 budget cutting is gonna gut funding for lower ed." like, it's kinda true but not really.
It means they can't be anymore selective than the public schools at least.
Yeah, I deleted that entire post because I realized that I misread his entire post...
In the state I live in, the way charters operate is in two ways
1) They can have a Locally Given charter meaning they are zoned for the entire district. Example: District XYZ's school board approves Charter ABC and that allows students from the entire XYZ district to attend ABC Academy.
2) They can have a State Granted charter, meaning they are zoned for the entire state. Example: The State School board approves Charter School 123's charter and that allows students from the entire state to attend 123 Academy.
Either way, they cannot really restrict themselves to like one small area (IE the really rich neighborhood). At least, that's the way it is supposed to work, I'm sure somewhere in America someone is working on getting around that...
Err. Charter Schools are public schools. They don't have any "admission"
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
If its okay to tell doctors how much they can charge or be reimbursed, why not do the same to professors and college administrators?1) you don't die from not getting into english lit.
We all know all doctors only deal with patients who have life or death health issues, yeah.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If its okay to tell doctors how much they can charge or be reimbursed, why not do the same to professors and college administrators?1) you don't die from not getting into english lit.
2) New york state just announced free 4 year tuition at state schools. 15 minutes later they required that textbooks be in PDF , because there was NO reason for people to keep paying outrageous amounts for small print run textbooks when a kindle costs less than a single biology book.
"wait wait wait.. we need to pay HOW Much for books?Oh no. that was one thing when you were ripping off college students...."
the memories.....
First Charter School Teacher Strike in U.S. History Set to Begin This Week
*sigh*
I knew you had something to do with that...
First Charter School Teacher Strike in U.S. History Set to Begin This Week
I'm kinda surprised it took this long...
It was called off.
Cross Post!
A Principal Is Accused of Being a Communist, Rattling a Brooklyn School
From earlier last month, but posting now because La Principessa posted some pictures from a rally in Bloomberg's defense yesterday.
She's also doing a presentation on Bloomberg's case as part of her union caucus' presentation at Left Forum.
She's also told me stories about Bloomberg's Park Slope school over the past couple of years. It even was mentioned as an example of the tide of yuppie gentrifier racism in New York in one of those articles calling out Hollaback's racist anti-street harassment video that I posted however many years ago that was.
|
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
|
Back when I taught freshmen astronomy at the university level, I was overjoyed when my students were actually capable of meeting the 4th grade standards of the time. It was rare, especially the math standards.
BNW has a point. If 12 years of English instruction hasn't produced competent writing (and in a lot of cases it hasn't), then why would we think that one more year of the exact same type of instruction will make a difference? If college freshmen can't write clearly that says to me that we should revisit how we teach writing to make it more effective.
I don't know how to fix tuition. I'm still in higher ed, as one of those administrators, although I wouldn't say I'm making huge bank. I'm well below the median income for my degree, for example. And it's not like my school can cut staff - we're small, and I'm already dean, registrar, and compliance officer.
Young Man Yells at Cloud: The Post
So as someone who was recently in college (originally for music education, switched to software engineering after two years but had to stop attending full-time after two and a half more years and start only taking one class per semester because money), I have a few complaints. I'll skip the complaints that are due to my screw-ups because that would be an ungodly large wall of text.
1) Arbitrary and unreasonable elective requirements: As part of my software engineering degree, I'm required to take a number of math, science, and technical electives in addition to the general ed requirements (see BNW's rant which I mostly agree with) and the degree-specific courses. Now the technical elective options were decent (basically all just specialized, and relevant courses like AI, robotics, etc.), the math options were alright but not entirely relevant unless paired with a specific and very specialized technical interest (I took game theory because it was basically linear algebra part 2), but the science electives were atrocious. As a music ed. major, I took Astronomy 1 as my science elective. As a software engineer, that wasn't an option. So what was my option? Surely something significantly more relevant to my degree. Nope, I took General Chemistry 1, which was basically AP chemistry from high school... a class I'd already taken. The other options weren't much better (optical physics, some mechanical engineering courses like statics and dynamics), so I'm left wondering what the purpose of me spending ~$1300 for that class (tuition and supplies) was.
2) Gen. Ed.: Feeding off of BNW's post upthread, while I'm a huge supporter of liberal arts education, I see no reason to force every student at a university to take the same courses they took in high school, as though they will somehow surely retain the information they didn't get before. The same confusion applies to non-liberal arts courses that can be covered under gen. ed. If it doesn't have to do with the career path my degree leads towards, what's the benefit to me? In regards to the argument earlier that engineers would be upset at being referred to as "tradespeople", I can assure you, so long as their jobs keep paying them the same amount, you'll hear no complaints.
|
Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.
Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.
Is the bolded a reference to something to which I'm not hip, or is it an attempt at an actually critique? Also the carrying a gun to a mall bit is a whole separate argument, one that's unfortunately apparently considered taboo on this site.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.
|
|
Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.Is the bolded a reference to something to which I'm not hip, or is it an attempt at an actually critique? Also the carrying a gun to a mall bit is a whole separate argument, one that's unfortunately apparently considered taboo on this site.
|
|
Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.Don't make me start in on you with Poland jokes.
But hey, you can't compare with us, we're a crazy planet where I got my M.A. and PhD in law for free. No, not "good grades got you a discount" free, not "Gorbacz is from an endangered minority" free, not "there was a lottery" free. I just didn't pay a dime for either, that's how we (t)roll.
Of course, there was something to be lost due to that - we didn't build an aircraft carrier. Again...
The US has a very vibrant and thriving scientific community, despite the best efforts from some folks in government. There is a reason many folks in Europe take US jobs...
There you go.Isn't "US education" an oxymoron, anyway? I mean, you guys don't know where North Korea is, you elect a baboon for president and you think carrying a gun to the mall keeps you safe. I'm sorry, but why even bother spending anything on education? Yeah, sure, you get an occasional Bill Gates or Antonin Scalia, but nos Hercules contra plures.Is the bolded a reference to something to which I'm not hip, or is it an attempt at an actually critique? Also the carrying a gun to a mall bit is a whole separate argument, one that's unfortunately apparently considered taboo on this site.
Haha ah, that was good for a nice chuckle. All-in-all, I'm content with not being able to point at countries on a map as being near the bottom of my priority list for how I gauge an education system's quality, depressing as it may be. I'm significantly more concerned with the lack of any kind of formal logic classes in general education, or the wasting of resources on mandating unnecessary coursework in secondary education and a compulsion to sink yet more money into unsuccessful athletics departments.