We started here, at the very bottom — diploma mills — and argued that these represent really the only form of efficiency pricing in higher education, since the desired endpoint of the transaction is completely obvious to both parties: an official-looking piece of paper testifying to a particular advanced degree, plus the provision of extremely minimal institutional support in the off-chance it will be needed (I have in mind things like plausible-sounding accreditation, and people at the other end of the line who know what to say if phone calls about the degree are placed). Since no collegiate experience of any kind is intended — since, indeed, money is changing hands precisely so that the purchaser can avoid even a whiff of collegiate experience — we do not have to worry about defining and then evaluating the university education for which we are charging the student.
Let’s kick it up a notch now, to very expensive online for-profit universities, objects of a good deal of tut-tutting lately. Here the desired endpoint is equally obvious: certification of a vocational skill for which people will employ you pretty much as soon as you get the degree.
Among the many scandalous features of the online for-profits is that although they do almost exactly what many community colleges do (provide certification for employers that the person holding their degree is able to do a particular job), they do it at a far, far higher price. Not only that, but community colleges have plenty of face to face courses, which are far superior to online.
Online is supposed to be all about cost savings, but the for-profits pretty much use only online and still soak you.
Plus they have insanely high dropout and loan repayment failure rates. And the whole gainful-employment-within-a-reasonable-period-of-time thing doesn’t look too good either.
I mean, think about it. For-profits desperately, sordidly, pounce on any enrollee with a pulse; once they’re got ’em, they’re gonna give everyone A’s to keep ’em. So employers have no idea, based on transcripts, whether people from for-profit schools can do a particular job.
At costs comparable to private liberal arts colleges, for-profit schools are – as you know if you’ve watched the news lately – a national disgrace.
… yesterday took extremely dangerous amounts of cyanide out of a lab there.
She brought them to her house and used some of the cyanide to kill herself.
She had just lost her job. She wrote various farewell entries on Facebook, including this moving one: “Today… my heart shattered, and I left my soul behind somewhere.”
Beyond the sadness of this story lies a good deal of worry from security agencies about how easy it was for Emily Staupe to lift so much deadly material from the lab.
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More reaction.
This concluding paragraph of a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, authors of a much-discussed new book about American universities, gets at something ol’ UD has pondered many a year.
There’s a significant disconnect, at universities ranging from the most rapaciously crass for-profit to the most hopelessly threadbare non-profit, between what people willingly pay for the education and the degree on offer and what, in many cases, the education and the degree are worth. Let me elaborate.
We’ll start here: By UD‘s reckoning, only diploma mills represent true higher ed efficiency pricing. Why?
Consider diploma mill costs first from the student’s perspective.
On the one hand, she’ll earn her diploma in seconds.
On the other, as countless ruined political and professional lives have made known to her, it’s a risky degree, subject at any moment to exposure.
Yet generations of diploma mill graduates have faked their way through white-collar lives without exposure… Statistically, she’s likely to get away with upping her public school or military salary by purchasing, with the press of a key, a pretend master’s …
What’s she willing to pay?
Well if the thing cost nothing, or cost $21.49 like a Popeil Pocket Fisherman, it would make her nervous. It would seem really obviously cheesy and bogus. In some part of her mind she’s working on believing in the authenticity of the degree in case she’s ever, you know, asked about it… It should cost a plausible amount so she can say, if cornered, I thought it was a legit university! I paid a huge sum!
Hm… hm…
Something in the low thousands? Hell, she might even be able to get her agency to spring for the tuition, or part of it… After all, the only reason she knows about the particular diploma mill she’s considering is that Sid two cubicles over got his promotion by getting the agency to pay for his diploma mill degree. One afternoon, over coffee, he told her about it…
Yes, the low thousands. Real universities charge in the thousands, don’t they? But it’d have to be really low thousands. She’s not made of money.
How about pricing from the perspective of the diploma mill?
Its only costs involve printing, posting, and – if it’s one of the diploma mill Ivies – the hiring of a guy with a cell phone to make up shit if potential employers call for references.
Plenty of people all over the world want its services. Its business is a raging success. It could probably charge two hundred dollars per degree and do nicely.
But it wants to make a huge profit. Who wouldn’t? And it’s peculiarly well-situated to do so. Low to vanishing overhead, a globeful of grasping morons.
And the beauty of it is that the diploma mill has to charge rather a lot in order to make the education look legit.
Plus keep in mind that huge numbers of its customers are rich people from Saudi Arabia and places like that… And tons of American employers subsidize employee education and don’t check out the universities employees say they’re attending…
So the diploma mill goes for a nice even number: One thousand dollars. Or if that sounds too arbitrary, as if the mill hasn’t done the complex math to match the complex intellectual apparatus it represents, make it, uh, $1,210. Something like that.
And indeed something like that — something that makes good sense to customer and provider — is what most diploma mills charge.
Whew. All this math has exhausted UD. She’ll write more later.
… opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Tom Eblen writes an advertisement for the next president of the University of Kentucky:
… Many Kentuckians are suspicious of new ideas and averse to change. They avoid risk for fear of failure or criticism. Ignorance and powerful vested interests often combine to keep the status quo.
Your biggest distraction in this job will likely be UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters. These programs are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. They bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.
… [A]t UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.
… [Y]ou will face a sports scandal or several. You will constantly be at odds with rabid fans who think the university exists to support a sports franchise…
The provost of Texas Tech
suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.
More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…
Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.
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Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?
Some students and professors say Mississippi State shouldn’t cancel Thursday classes for a football game.
In the article’s comment thread, a fan complains:
I guess with all the academics on our campus there’s no surprise we’d get a nerd (or professor) or two to complain.
Background on University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, the lyingest good ol’ boy this side of anywhere.
… Not long after Pearl was hired, there came a day in 2008 when his wife reportedly got the day’s mail and there were two property-tax statements, not one. Yes, the coach owned another house in Knoxville where another woman lived. Whoops.
Of course, a divorce suit followed and a 25-year marriage was dashed because Bruce Pearl, aside from being a great motivational speaker and now a crowd favorite, was also a liar…
In Knoxville yesterday [the UT chancellor] said that once again Bruce would buy his way out of his latest lie…
University of Tennessee v. University of Kentucky: A race to below the bottom.
You’re about to be beatified.
I’ve always liked what you have to say about the nature of a real university education.
… [A university should create] a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes… [The student] profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal.” A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit. This then I would assign as the special fruit of the education furnished at a University, as contrasted with other places of teaching or modes of teaching. This is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students.
In the same chapter, you describe, similarly, the university’s cultivation of “a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind.”
The university student, having been introduced to the breadth and variety, the lights and shades, of human knowledge and experience, attains some distance from the particular set of beliefs and preferences she happens to have inherited from growing up in a certain family and in a certain social setting. Freedom here is freedom from unreflective prejudices and emotions that undermine your ability to be fair, to see things clearly. The student gains all of this from exposure to professors and others at the university who embody, in their teaching and their conversation and their daily behavior, a truth-seeking ethos.
I like “candid” as well. From Newman to Orwell to Hitchens, a primary mark of an educated person is the consistent statement of unvarnished truths.
… [E]ducation is a higher word [than instruction]; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour… Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.
Ultimately, what you enter into at a real liberal arts college is the drama of mind and spirit constantly being transformed by dispassionate engagement in thought.
This blog was born just as asynchronous (to use the pretentious word its advocates like) courses became the rage in American universities. University Diaries has chronicled the immense and ongoing public relations effort to make these cheesy offerings seem legit. Click on the category Poor White Trash for details.
Or just start with this detail, something that won’t surprise anyone who has thought even a little about the technology that has come to define America’s for-profit universities, and which even schools like Berkeley are considering.
…The researchers did everything from making students sign an e-mail course contract to placing personal phone calls to make sure they were on top of their class material, according to the study, which will be published in the International Journal of Management in Education in October. Students exposed to the strategies dropped out as frequently as those who were not, the authors said.
“We called them at home, sent them emails, quizzed them on the syllabus and made other efforts to try to engage them,” said Elke Leeds, an associate professor of information systems at Coles and one of six study authors, in a press release issued by the school…
And gee, nothing worked. Wonder why.
Wanna wait for the next round of studies on that one? Or wanna read the next paragraph?
Babe, you can’t even verify the identity of the person taking an online course. You can’t verify the identity of the professor giving the course. We’re in the twilight zone. Where are we? Who are we? Who took the midterm? Who gave the midterm?
Drift, drift, drift… I’m melting… Life is but a dream…
Okay so call the student! Put in a call! Place an actual personal phone call! Hellohello? Actual person? Here is another actual person. Come back! Why are you fading? Why are you dropping out….?….. Helloooo?… O tell me all about why you faded. I want to know all about why you faded…
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Do not stand at your phone and forever weep.
I am not there; I make no peep.
I am a thousand courses that blow.
I am the students who nothing know.
I’m the dumbass emoticon on your screen.
An eager mind unheard and unseen.
The nightmare end of a bookkeeper’s dream.
The evil spawn of a cost-cutting scheme.
We are the students who might have shone.
Think of everything we’ve missed!
We are not there. We don’t exist.
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Ooh la la!
Here’s another one. Business students at NYU love to hear him lecture on bankruptcy, but he may also know a lot about fraud.
… seems to be losing patience with big time university sports.
… Amateur college athletics is now an oxymoron in full bloom… There isn’t a not-for-profit bone left in its body except for the tax-exempt status it somehow continues to maintain with the IRS despite raking in billions of dollars through television contracts, ticket sales and merchandise sales…
Of course the NCAA itself needs to lose its tax exemption. The whole thing’s a laff riot.
I’d argue that university presidents and the people who run the biggest conferences have never been more openly greedy. Since the end of the last college football season, the dominant story in college sports has been to find a better conference deal and get more money. Your school gets $15 million for being on television? Try for $25 million.
Like many other observers, Michael Wilbon notes that though big time university athletes spend “more than 40 hours a week” working on their game, they make virtually no money — while, in some cases, enriching everyone around them.