The President’s appeal for accessible higher education at the University of Michigan (a higher cost school than Mason), deserves a reasoned response and discussion. The goals are splendid, but without being defensive, there are also problems attached. I hope we can give the issues wide airing.
I was pleased that the President acknowledged that the decline in state funding was a key cause of rising tuitions at public institutions, though he might have lingered on the subject a bit longer.
On the minus-potential side, one hopes that a result of his appeal is not an additional set of federal reporting requirements, which have already gone up and actually, if modestly, driven up our costs in keeping pace. Reporting mandates on certificate programs and job placement results (notoriously hard to keep track of) already press the boundaries of the desirable.
What about costs themselves? How can we keep costs down?
Once we recover from the state cuts, a few targets seem clearly achievable: we ought to be able to keep salary increases to inflationary levels (again, ideally after a recuperation period in which years of little or no gain are addressed, at least in part). Same for utilities and maintenance.
I know faculty would love to see better caps on the salaries of upper administrators, and if more competent people applied for the jobs and some recent precedents were bravely challenged, we might make some progress here — though the results in terms of overall budgets might not be as impressive as some imagine.
Two key cost drivers need more subtle attention. Student demands and needs for additional services, from entertainment to counseling, play a significant role in increased staffing. Maybe this culture might be constrained, but it’s not up to universities alone. Information technology costs are even more problematic: needs grow steadily, and expenses in this area routinely exceed overall inflation — not easy to deal with in terms of real educational needs and student expectations alike. Worth noting also, the current areas of educational focus, notably STEM, are actually more expensive than education in general.
Then there’s research. Perhaps more universities should be discouraged from research. On the other hand, research and teaching combinations, at their best, help students. And the nation presumably needs research even apart from this. Yet research jacks up costs, for federal or other indirects never fully cover the burden of buildings, administration and so on.
On faculty: perhaps more public institutions should simply sit back and let well-endowed privates steal their most visible professors, rather than contributing to salary gains by competing. But it’s hard to avoid some effort at competition, and in many cases, students at the publics would suffer in the process. Or maybe we can reconsider tenure — to have it cover a period of a faculty career but not persist indefinitely, so that the costs of older faculty could be contained. This would be painful but might be worth discussing.
Many outsiders, of course, hope that much of this discussion might be bypassed by dramatic innovation, such as more distance learning or some other method of radically increasing class size per professor. All indications to date, however, suggest that good distance learning, while beneficial in many ways, does not easily cut university budgets. And when budgets are cut — as the abysmal retention rates at the for-profits suggest — learning dramatically suffers.
So let’s talk about the components of cost. They’re not all equally inflexible, but education is labor-intensive, and it’s not easy to imagine dramatic changes that won’t affect the quality of the outcomes. I think we should welcome reasonable accessibility tests and work to meet the challenge — particularly if existing sources of support could at least be stabilized. But the operative word is reasonable, which is where realistic, if not sympathetic, understanding — not wishful rhetoric — is essential.
I don’t want to mention certain department at GMU (CS) that have no concern for students who are also working full time. How can anyone expect professors with limited professional experiences to prepare a student for a profession? Professors without real job experiences have no idea what employers are looking for and how to prepare students for real jobs. These professors may know how to research, but are either incapable or unwilling to teach. For your school to meet Mr. Obama’s expectations to prepare students for real jobs, start hiring professionals to teach and stop giving free passes to faculties just because they do research.
The above comment seems to be more a rant about a particular department than any real objective understanding of academia or a professors role. Do we need to be careful with how we prepare students for jobs? Absolutely. Is there a problem with overhead costs? Absolutely. Nonetheless, the idea that somehow George Mason needs to start hiring professionals to teach is one that seems misinformed of the general role of education. Simply put, we have degree inflation and the “college premium” of the 1980s seems to be diminishing causing a backlash. The only way to make degree inflation be less prevalent is to restrict the admission process. If doing so, students will miss out on not only the social benefits of college but any personal benefits. Professors do understand job trends but to say this is the main benefit of an education misses a great deal. I have no idea why one would believe that the CS department would somehow be unable to meet expectations of computer oriented jobs and the above comment seems to provide little answers. The department may have one of the most difficult jobs due to the increased nature of education, but I very highly fail to believe that professors are unable to work with students or unaware of the difficult of full time jobs. Furthermore, one only has to look at the increased literature and commentary by professors on the changing role of academia to understand that academics are actively debating how best to move forward.
To say that a professor has no real world experience is at best a diatribe. I have no idea what the overall point of the above comment is, but I would suggest presenting actually solutions rather than rants against professors of a department. I agree that one of the main things that PhD students and future professors should have better access to is teacher training. George Mason is actively attempting to increase tenure roles to professors based on their teaching. We definitely have room to expand in this regard. Yet, with state budget cuts the role of maintaining faculty is limited. Nonetheless, a professors role is also to increase research to the general knowledge of humanity. Teaching is but a portion of a professor’s role. To ask a research university to stop conducting research seems ludicrous.
I hope that your problem with the CS department is solved, but at the same time, I urge that we stop using popular talking points to discuss academia. There is a lot of room for improvement, but at the same time, the university cannot solve the job market.
I also wanted to add something on the job market. Employers have stated that college has been unable to teach their employees job skills: http://chronicle.com/article/Employers-Say-College/130013/
However, lets take a look at the job market growth: http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm#education
We see that Employers are simply looking for post-secondary higher education in most jobs that students with Bachelors degree hope to pursue—although jobs requiring Associates degrees are a little ahead. Job training, which seems to be what would happen if professionals are told to teach, seem to be the least available. Simply put, people need to be able to adapt to jobs and most jobs are generally obsolete in technology oriented sectors within five years. While businesses are quick to lament that they are not getting the people they need out of college, they have also removed their own on the job training and placed the emphasis on universities and community colleges.
A general push to STEM seems to be good. I read a recent statistic saying that STEM tends have higher critical thinking growth than other majors, although many criticized the methodology. Yet, I also fear that a general push to STEM would lead a problem that we see in the UK. The UK has pushed for STEM oriented jobs, but these degrees have become increasingly worthless. We hear a lot of rhetoric of humanities degrees being worthless, but STEM degrees are only valuable due to their rarity. A broad push may flood the market and cause backlash in departments moving the balance the other way as humanities degrees become rare.
The single biggest thing employers want are critical thinking skills: https://secure.aacu.org/source/Orders/index.cfm?section=unknown&task=3&CATEGORY=LEAP&PRODUCT_TYPE=SALES&SKU=LEAPVIS&DESCRIPTION=&FindSpec=&continue=1&SEARCH_TYPE=%29
Yes, all professors can improve in teaching critical thinking, but we do not necessarily have jobs that want professionals teaching them. Professionals can very easily train students out of high school to do a specific task but they do not. Also, few choose this option because it limits future potential. With the average American changing jobs constantly, we do not have a society in which people are willing to stick to a corporate skill set. Instead, they want to be broadly able to think and reason.
Furthermore, this completely ignores the general case most often stated by academics that we need a well educated populace for political purposes and intrinsic benefits. I would be interested in Dr. Stearns take on the issue.
Calling the student’s comment a rant and a diatribe is not helpful. “Jobs” is not merely a “popular talking point.” State universities have a responsibility to prepare students for the marketplace. Taking refuge behind research is not an excuse in a professional program. Remedies are needed. So is an objective assessment and a balanced approach.
Stuart:
Perhaps “rant” was too strong of a word. I do, however, stick to the idea that the statement “Professors without real job experiences have no idea what employers are looking for and how to prepare students for real jobs. These professors may know how to research, but are either incapable or unwilling to teach.” is a diatribe.
There was actually another comment I posted but seems to not have been approved. I accidentally posted in a different post by accident and the system seems to have marked it as a spam (I had misconstructed some words on it anyway so it is good that I get another chance to state them).
I couldn’t agree with you more that a state university has a responsibility to help students reach the marketplace. My idea that “jobs are a talking point” details my view of when universities are solely blamed for the loss of training. I agree that universities could definitely do a better job and welcome such suggestions. I do not believe that “job training” at least in its traditional sense, which seems to be to prepare a person for a particular task, is the best choice.
A report by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools states that employers do not believe that students are prepared for the marketplace: http://chronicle.com/article/Employers-Say-College/130013/
At the same time, the majority of employers want to have a broad-based education rather than job specific training (although the margin is growing small). Employers seem to want critical thinking abilities. Here is a report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities that represents similar findings: https://secure.aacu.org/source/Orders/index.cfm?section=unknown&task=3&CATEGORY=LEAP&PRODUCT_TYPE=SALES&SKU=LEAPVIS&DESCRIPTION=&FindSpec=&continue=1&SEARCH_TYPE=%29
Employers do seem to want college educated students. The issue of degree inflation being no small part of this. Yet, employers have also forced universities to do the jobs that they themselves used to do in the 1980s. Associates degrees have made up for a lot of this job training. I agree with President Obama on a greater focus of these colleges, but this is another topic. I do not know if these community colleges help students reach the goals they themselves set out to do, although they do tend to help the marketplace. A great overview of community college students and their thoughts on professors is done by Rebecca Cox: http://www.amazon.com/College-Fear-Factor-Professors-Misunderstand/dp/0674060164/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329060106&sr=8-1
For the future, employers, or at least the market-place, is pushing towards associates and masters degree: http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm#education
Bachelors students seem to be stuck in a limbo. Furthermore, few jobs are offering on the job training. Employers, although lamenting educational outcomes, seem to still value degrees. Richard Riley, had at one point stated that the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 may not have existed in 2004: http://www.mpiweb.org/Archive?id=13558
As a result, I disagree with the statement that we need a push towards job training, at least in the way that I understand Mr. Toaha’s statement. I think the greater push should be towards strengthening the critical thinking skills that colleges have traditionally emphasized. Also, we need to bump up majors across the board to emphasize the critical thinking skills employers have asked for, with a special focus on business and health departments. As we see, most students major in these fields for jobs but show little gain in developing the critical thinking skills that employers need: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2013970569_collegelearning19.html
I would be interested in Dr. Stearns and your reply on the matter. I look forward to reading them.