I have a hard time believing this. I teach at a community college in Minnesota. Our state funding per student has been halved in the last 20 years. Salaries are not exorbitant. We went almost 5 years without a pay raise. We aren't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills have to be paid. The money isn't coming from the state. There's really only one way to raise the needed money and that is tuition increases.
I wonder how it can be determined that tuition wouldn't have increased as much as it has in the absence of eussidized loans. Would salaries be even lower than what they are? Would administration not have increased as much?
When an 18-year old can take on tens of thousands in loans with mostly no strings attached (well, no bankruptcy) so that they can attend a big college which is little more than a summer camp with some classes thrown in, you've got a problem.
I'm a phd student at a state school. As a graduate student I am allowed to take on up to 240k(!). I love learning and I enjoy school, but anyone who has been in academia for any length of time at all and doesn't realize it's largely a scam with good intentions which is designed to pass money around baffles me.
Any education reform that doesn't cut back on loans and rethink how we do it is broken. The amount of money that gets poured into my school combined with the incompetence I've seen at so many levels is astounding.
The education system in America is largely broken. Many high schools are worthless because it's expected everyone's going to go to college and take remedial classes in order to get a piece of paper which they probably won't use for their job and they'll spend the rest of their 20s and 30s paying off.
The fact that Colorado cut per student spending by $7.8k and tuition went up by $7.7k is pretty convincing. Complex economic models that make unsupported assumptions about the cause and effect of increased availability of loans, much less so.
I suppose we could also add sports to the reason of rising student tuition. Students are paying more for education to pay the salaries of sport staff and the other supporting costs.
When Football coaches earn more than any of the other faculty there is a serious problem.
My sons high school and every other high school in my county has spent more on sports facilities than on any other aspect of education. Football stadiums, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, several football fields, a parking lot the size of a football field for band marching practice, At least 3 massive indoor gyms, wight rooms. Everything is watered and manicured all year around and I would say about 30 - 40 % of the schools students actually use these facilities.
I wonder why my property taxes are 14k a year.
This just carries on to post secondary education but instead of property taxes it's student tuition that is paying for it.
The paper even admits that it probably exaggerates the effects of grants and loans since their model doesn't incorporate private and public schools with different funding characteristics or competition[1].
100%, and we have seen it in other areas. Remember the housing bubble caused by anyone and everyone being able to get loans for insane amounts of money that could never be paid back? Same thing.
When lots of money is loaned out with artificially low rates (because they are not able to be discharged and are backed by the gov.) this is exactly what happens.
Generally, anytime the federal government aims the money fire hose at something the price goes up. You remove the cost of a thing from the thing and demand naturally increases.
See it everywhere from student loans to housing to health insurance. When people don't feel the cost of something, they have no reason to say no to a price increase.
A pet peeve of mine is when an article displays data to bolster an argument but then cites the source to something extraordinarily large and generic (e.g. "SOURCE: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION") which makes actually finding the primary data nearly impossible.
Missing from the title: ...at public schools. Which, if you've been following the amount of funding cut from state schools at all, hopefully isn't too surprising.
Agreed, after the Great Recession state funding to universities (and K-12, colleges) dropped dramatically. Arizona leads the way with almost a -50% drop in funding, of course tuition goes up by almost 90% [1]. The article has this data from 2000-2014 but most of the damage was 2008-present.
Tuition is rising at San Jose State to: get us "great partnership deals" on new equipment like expensive teleconference TVs or smartboards that are rarely used.
I have had CS professors who struggle to get their computers on the projector because of old worn-out bulbs while math professors get rooms with smartboards they don't even use, and similar.
Tuition rises because of bogus costs and needs that aren't needs at all or because of overspending on poorly used/misused equipment that is sorely mismanaged.
I could ramble on and on about problems I've seen first-hand, but rising tuition is a serious issue not only because of costs being higher but also because schools are just plain casually misusing/abusing the money in the first place, some even carelessly.
For any endeavor, including education, if we shift the source of funding from democratic government to private individuals, then those needing funding will shift their focus from pleasing the public to pleasing wealthy parties.
For example, there was a new park being designed in NY. Lacking traditional public funding, they sought private funding. As a result, instead of a design that serves the public, the park is designed according to the desires of a wealthy donor.[0] In higher education, instead of making progress and giving more and more people a better education, as prior generations did, we are going the wrong way (AFAIK). I believe it's fundamentally undemocratic, which is an American ideal much more than small government, which is a partisan ideology.
To me, the adherence to ideology (in this case, smaller government) over practical good results (educating people and opportunity), always is a terrible idea and can lead to dangerous results.
The free market allocates goods to those willing and able to pay most for them. That's efficient for many things such as soda and cars, but undesirable for basic human needs and societal goods such as education and healthcare, which we don't want to deny to people because they are poor. Funding by the public (via taxes) is a good solution for some things.
[0] That was the story as I read it maybe 1-2 years ago; it's possible the situation changed since then.
I don't see how your comment is relevant to the topic. This isn't a public vs private debate. If anything it's a debate between federal loans and state appropriations, or an issue of administrative mismanagement.
There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an automatic reaction to pour public money on problems. Public institutions can be irrational actors that cator to narrow interests just as private ones can. The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.
You can also see this in aspects of the university that are supported by research funds instead of tuition. States slashed their support under the assumption that the Federal government would pick up the tab with faculty writing more grants.
In 2004 or so, right after I started college, the state of Texas repealed their laws that capped tuition at public universities at a very low amount. After that, tuition at my university, UT Dallas, utterly skyrocketed. It rose far more than the other public universities: we very quickly became one of the most expensive public universities in the state, possibly the most expensive, and on par with private universities.
I was insulated from that because I had a scholarship, but if I didn't, I might have had to drop out.
So, if the article is to be believed, the tuition costs were already high, but hidden by financing them through taxes, and now they are coming out for all to see by explicitly stating them as tuition costs and putting them on those who consumes the service instead of distributing them between all taxpayers.
If so, then despite the obvious negative impact on students, I think by itself such restructuring is a good thing - if the costs are hidden, they'd never be discussed and evaluated and subjected to both public and market scrutiny. If nobody knows how much tuition really costs, it's virtually impossible to have meaningful discussion about it. If the public thinks tuition should be subsidized, these subsidies should be out there in the open, so the public knows how much it costs per student, and experiences it openly, not has to dig it up from the piles of budget allocations.
One question, though, is if it was state financing drop that causes tuition to raise in public schools, wouldn't that effect be much less in private schools? So far I don't think the data confirms this.
It's worth asking what drove the states to cut aid. Some states have certainly had lower tax revenues than expected. But some states (probably) felt safe moving the funding problem onto loans and/or sources such as lottery proceeds.
Illinois it's been a pension time bomb building for 30 years. "Luxuries" like higher education are way down the line from legally mandated payments to retires teachers and policemen
Certainly part of it is the ideological belief in reducing the size of government, and one party's dogmatic adherence to never increasing any tax, only reducing them. We get what we pay for.
As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of professional careers.
I think college is a great experience, and I do hope for a day where everyone can experience higher education in their life, but the basic mechanisms of college are NOT necessary to work in a professional field. It is only our culture that prevents it from happening.
The nucleus of this problem is our obsession with pedigree. We want everything to be awesome and perfect and follow a neat little narrative where we all end up rich and famous and successful because we attended the right schools and worked with other people who attended the right schools. But life is never that clear cut, and this narrative ignores the reality that most of your ability to do a job is learned on that job. I didn't know a lick of ColdFusion or even more than a few lines of JavaScript when I graduated college, and within just a few months I could handle anything my employer threw at me.
A good amount of that success was because of my education, but most of it was because they were willing to take on the risk of someone that had to learn and grow, instead of insisting on a ColdFusion expert that could have done everything from day one.
College is great, but it's not for everyone. My GI Bill-aided grandfather didn't need the college he dropped out of to teach him how to run a successful restaurant and support a family. And most of us understand that a lot of what we get tested on from the age of 5 is bullshit.
The way forward is not fixing education, it's fixing employment. We need employers willing to take risks with people who aren't perfect by default. To do this we need to encourage and maybe even subsidize paid apprenticeships. Real, paid work experience is better than any welfare or job retraining or $80k degree. It shows what you are worth and what you are capable of doing.
As Ronald Reagan said, on one of the few occasions that he actually managed to make a damn good point:
> As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of professional careers.
Blame Griggs vs. Duke Power Company[1], which is the reason employers are afraid to use proficiency tests in hiring (and hence are forced to rely on proxies like an applicant possessing a four-year degree).
The analysis here is pretty insipid. If primary sources of funding get cut, and your reaction is to go out on a capital projects spree, what do you expect to happen?
I went to a big state school where most classrooms weren't painted since 1969. Now there's a 50" tv ok every flat surface and, the dorms are very fancy, and the mystery meat and hamburger vending machine has been replaced with better food and 24x7 cafeterias.
This article fails to mention the exploding student population size.
Over time the per-student funding from states has gone down significantly. But that doesn't mean the state slashed funding for higher education! For University of Washington the budget from the state is almost entirely flat. Up about 3%.
Student Size: +100%
State Tax Revenue: +40%
State Higher Education Funding: +15%
What would you consider the "dominant factor" here? It's several factors. But I would not consider, and I quote, "a steady decrease in support for higher education on the part of state legislatures" to be the dominant factor. In fact, that statement is flat out wrong. The state legislature hasn't decreased support at all. They're providing more support than they were! The state, and the state's coffers, have no way to keep up with the growing number of students.
Nate Silver totally fails to note the enormous financial transfer from professors (all new professors are cheap adjuncts) to administrators. I know adjunct professors that are on food stamps. Academia is a hellhole and college administrators should be ashamed.
Often the administrators are former or current faculty themselves. I've seen a professor hold a position as head of the university technology department(a non-academic support role) and teach classes. VPs, Deans, department heads, leaders of various "Centers of Excellence", leaders of various initiatives, Provosts, and even Presidents can be former faculty.
The former professors just view their role as administrator as another step up the academic ladder. There's even a website poking fun at university titles:
This article is largely on point, but I get the feeling they are playing games with Tuition v. Total cost. At my state university Tuition is separate from dorm costs, so fancy dorms effect loan amounts but not "tuition".
Your comment makes an important point though: who will take care of people who are visually impaired or who need other accommodations?
The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.
I am kind of glad they spent that money to accommodate those students. Aren't you? That's not what is raising the cost of education.
EDIT: I did work on a mouse that provides haptic feedback including texture years ago, so I am aware that it is possible to provide braille like feedback over the web.
EDIT2: Many people have pointed out that MOOCs do add accessibility features. This is true, and good. I think the MOOCs are largely run by well meaning people.
Bootcamps in our industry are a fraud and I sure hope that such fraudulent activities aren't the answer to a classic college education.
And online courses don't work well, being effective only on adults that already have an education.
You can talk about disruption all you want, but there's no substitute for an old fashioned college education. And in many European countries this education is subsidised by the state.
Even in the US college would be affordable if you would cut the evil from its source and that would be college loans.
Is the cost related to regulatory compliance, or are they just being taken for a ride or failing to control costs? A brief search turns up ADA-compliant bathroom signs for under $20 each. It certainly doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should cost a ton.
That's right, but the missing element would be a set of widely-respected testing firms. An "A" from the "Harvard of test companies" might be as impressive as attending Harvard itself, which would benefit autodidacts.
The longer I've been on here, the more I've come to see "Disruption" mean "I truly have no idea how complex and regulated and culturally cemented an industry is, but I work in software and my only limit is imagination."
No educational system will ever supplant higher education as we know it today, as we have known it for hundreds of years. The only discussion here is about the degree of tweaks. When you grow up in a family of university administrators and scientists and faculty, and then work for a university as professional staff, you realize how laughable most outsiders' naive perspectives are, from the idea that a proper university can be run like a business (ha), or that people will rationally select a college that gives them the best bang for their buck (haha), or that educational complements like boot camps and MOOCS will ever replace what higher education offers (hahahahaha).
While we're toiling away at our degrees, we often argue that it's just "a piece of paper." But that piece of paper matters. Unless you have a lot of paid work exprience, the inexperienced Ivy grad wins out to the mildly experienced community college grad almost every time. Yes, it's a shitty system but to change it you need to change global culture, maybe even human nature.
As far as boot camps go, they're a good idea but even if you pass one with flying colors and could make an iOS app with one hand and a Rails server with another, the perception is still that you're somehow less qualified than a college graduate. Again, it sucks, but a hiring manager is going to ask themselves whether they could get blamed more for hiring a college grad that turns out to suck at their job, or a boot camp graduate that turns out to suck at their job.
Honestly, if you really want to "disrupt" education, you're barking up the wrong tree. The best education is a good job. The best people to teach you how to do your job are the ones doing it with you. I firmly believe that the best way to provide good jobs and valuable skills is to heavily promote - and perhaps even subsidize - paid apprenticeships.
Nothing says "I am worth paying $X for this job" like a resume that says "I was paid $X for this job."
I know... I went to a school with a sticker price over 50k+, and never lived in a dorm that was built after the stock market crash in '29.
Wondered where all the money went, until I realized that six-figure salaries for deans and sub-deans and senior administrators and grand poobahs of diversity studies for every imaginable slicing and dicing of the student population doesn't come cheap, nor does effectively running a jobs program for the entire 100 mile radius, vastly overstaffing custodial and food service workers at hourly rates two or three times market rate in the area.
When I was applying to college in 2006, one of the big selling points at the University of Alabama was that the honors dorms had a lazy river.
I wonder if the "fancy" dorms are only a thing in non-city universities. It would make sense that building fancy, new dorms in a downtown area in a place like Boston or New York just wouldn't be worth it.
[+] [-] mwsherman|9 years ago|reply
I.e., more dollars chasing the same amount of education. A bit more explanation here: https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost...
[+] [-] yequalsx|9 years ago|reply
I wonder how it can be determined that tuition wouldn't have increased as much as it has in the absence of eussidized loans. Would salaries be even lower than what they are? Would administration not have increased as much?
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|9 years ago|reply
When an 18-year old can take on tens of thousands in loans with mostly no strings attached (well, no bankruptcy) so that they can attend a big college which is little more than a summer camp with some classes thrown in, you've got a problem.
I'm a phd student at a state school. As a graduate student I am allowed to take on up to 240k(!). I love learning and I enjoy school, but anyone who has been in academia for any length of time at all and doesn't realize it's largely a scam with good intentions which is designed to pass money around baffles me.
Any education reform that doesn't cut back on loans and rethink how we do it is broken. The amount of money that gets poured into my school combined with the incompetence I've seen at so many levels is astounding.
The education system in America is largely broken. Many high schools are worthless because it's expected everyone's going to go to college and take remedial classes in order to get a piece of paper which they probably won't use for their job and they'll spend the rest of their 20s and 30s paying off.
[+] [-] guelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|9 years ago|reply
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/ncaa/sports-at-any-cost
When Football coaches earn more than any of the other faculty there is a serious problem.
My sons high school and every other high school in my county has spent more on sports facilities than on any other aspect of education. Football stadiums, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, several football fields, a parking lot the size of a football field for band marching practice, At least 3 massive indoor gyms, wight rooms. Everything is watered and manicured all year around and I would say about 30 - 40 % of the schools students actually use these facilities.
I wonder why my property taxes are 14k a year.
This just carries on to post secondary education but instead of property taxes it's student tuition that is paying for it.
[+] [-] knucklesandwich|9 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13711.pdf
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
When lots of money is loaned out with artificially low rates (because they are not able to be discharged and are backed by the gov.) this is exactly what happens.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
See it everywhere from student loans to housing to health insurance. When people don't feel the cost of something, they have no reason to say no to a price increase.
[+] [-] starnixgod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] roywiggins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/pf/college/public-university...
[+] [-] donutz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spike021|9 years ago|reply
I have had CS professors who struggle to get their computers on the projector because of old worn-out bulbs while math professors get rooms with smartboards they don't even use, and similar.
Tuition rises because of bogus costs and needs that aren't needs at all or because of overspending on poorly used/misused equipment that is sorely mismanaged.
I could ramble on and on about problems I've seen first-hand, but rising tuition is a serious issue not only because of costs being higher but also because schools are just plain casually misusing/abusing the money in the first place, some even carelessly.
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
For example, there was a new park being designed in NY. Lacking traditional public funding, they sought private funding. As a result, instead of a design that serves the public, the park is designed according to the desires of a wealthy donor.[0] In higher education, instead of making progress and giving more and more people a better education, as prior generations did, we are going the wrong way (AFAIK). I believe it's fundamentally undemocratic, which is an American ideal much more than small government, which is a partisan ideology.
To me, the adherence to ideology (in this case, smaller government) over practical good results (educating people and opportunity), always is a terrible idea and can lead to dangerous results.
The free market allocates goods to those willing and able to pay most for them. That's efficient for many things such as soda and cars, but undesirable for basic human needs and societal goods such as education and healthcare, which we don't want to deny to people because they are poor. Funding by the public (via taxes) is a good solution for some things.
[0] That was the story as I read it maybe 1-2 years ago; it's possible the situation changed since then.
EDIT: added sentence, reworded another
[+] [-] ende|9 years ago|reply
There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an automatic reaction to pour public money on problems. Public institutions can be irrational actors that cator to narrow interests just as private ones can. The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.
[+] [-] Fomite|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|9 years ago|reply
I was insulated from that because I had a scholarship, but if I didn't, I might have had to drop out.
[+] [-] smsm42|9 years ago|reply
If so, then despite the obvious negative impact on students, I think by itself such restructuring is a good thing - if the costs are hidden, they'd never be discussed and evaluated and subjected to both public and market scrutiny. If nobody knows how much tuition really costs, it's virtually impossible to have meaningful discussion about it. If the public thinks tuition should be subsidized, these subsidies should be out there in the open, so the public knows how much it costs per student, and experiences it openly, not has to dig it up from the piles of budget allocations.
One question, though, is if it was state financing drop that causes tuition to raise in public schools, wouldn't that effect be much less in private schools? So far I don't think the data confirms this.
[+] [-] squozzer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
I think college is a great experience, and I do hope for a day where everyone can experience higher education in their life, but the basic mechanisms of college are NOT necessary to work in a professional field. It is only our culture that prevents it from happening.
The nucleus of this problem is our obsession with pedigree. We want everything to be awesome and perfect and follow a neat little narrative where we all end up rich and famous and successful because we attended the right schools and worked with other people who attended the right schools. But life is never that clear cut, and this narrative ignores the reality that most of your ability to do a job is learned on that job. I didn't know a lick of ColdFusion or even more than a few lines of JavaScript when I graduated college, and within just a few months I could handle anything my employer threw at me.
A good amount of that success was because of my education, but most of it was because they were willing to take on the risk of someone that had to learn and grow, instead of insisting on a ColdFusion expert that could have done everything from day one.
College is great, but it's not for everyone. My GI Bill-aided grandfather didn't need the college he dropped out of to teach him how to run a successful restaurant and support a family. And most of us understand that a lot of what we get tested on from the age of 5 is bullshit.
The way forward is not fixing education, it's fixing employment. We need employers willing to take risks with people who aren't perfect by default. To do this we need to encourage and maybe even subsidize paid apprenticeships. Real, paid work experience is better than any welfare or job retraining or $80k degree. It shows what you are worth and what you are capable of doing.
As Ronald Reagan said, on one of the few occasions that he actually managed to make a damn good point:
"The best social program is a job."
[+] [-] zeveb|9 years ago|reply
Blame Griggs vs. Duke Power Company[1], which is the reason employers are afraid to use proficiency tests in hiring (and hence are forced to rely on proxies like an applicant possessing a four-year degree).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
I went to a big state school where most classrooms weren't painted since 1969. Now there's a 50" tv ok every flat surface and, the dorms are very fancy, and the mystery meat and hamburger vending machine has been replaced with better food and 24x7 cafeterias.
Guess what? This shit costs more.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|9 years ago|reply
Over time the per-student funding from states has gone down significantly. But that doesn't mean the state slashed funding for higher education! For University of Washington the budget from the state is almost entirely flat. Up about 3%.
Student Size: +100% State Tax Revenue: +40% State Higher Education Funding: +15%
What would you consider the "dominant factor" here? It's several factors. But I would not consider, and I quote, "a steady decrease in support for higher education on the part of state legislatures" to be the dominant factor. In fact, that statement is flat out wrong. The state legislature hasn't decreased support at all. They're providing more support than they were! The state, and the state's coffers, have no way to keep up with the growing number of students.
http://f2.washington.edu/fm/financial-report-archive
(I did a little digging last night specific to the University of Washington. Numbers from memory and a little fuzzy. But within the ballpark.)
[+] [-] chrisbennet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asbestas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdhopeunique|9 years ago|reply
The former professors just view their role as administrator as another step up the academic ladder. There's even a website poking fun at university titles:
http://universitytitlegenerator.com/
[+] [-] rileymat2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patmcguire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkot|9 years ago|reply
I think education is ripe for disruption. We will see rise of bootcamps and online education. Also university in foreign country costs peanuts.
[+] [-] inputcoffee|9 years ago|reply
The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.
I am kind of glad they spent that money to accommodate those students. Aren't you? That's not what is raising the cost of education.
EDIT: I did work on a mouse that provides haptic feedback including texture years ago, so I am aware that it is possible to provide braille like feedback over the web.
EDIT2: Many people have pointed out that MOOCs do add accessibility features. This is true, and good. I think the MOOCs are largely run by well meaning people.
[+] [-] bad_user|9 years ago|reply
And online courses don't work well, being effective only on adults that already have an education.
You can talk about disruption all you want, but there's no substitute for an old fashioned college education. And in many European countries this education is subsidised by the state.
Even in the US college would be affordable if you would cut the evil from its source and that would be college loans.
[+] [-] _RPM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
No educational system will ever supplant higher education as we know it today, as we have known it for hundreds of years. The only discussion here is about the degree of tweaks. When you grow up in a family of university administrators and scientists and faculty, and then work for a university as professional staff, you realize how laughable most outsiders' naive perspectives are, from the idea that a proper university can be run like a business (ha), or that people will rationally select a college that gives them the best bang for their buck (haha), or that educational complements like boot camps and MOOCS will ever replace what higher education offers (hahahahaha).
While we're toiling away at our degrees, we often argue that it's just "a piece of paper." But that piece of paper matters. Unless you have a lot of paid work exprience, the inexperienced Ivy grad wins out to the mildly experienced community college grad almost every time. Yes, it's a shitty system but to change it you need to change global culture, maybe even human nature.
As far as boot camps go, they're a good idea but even if you pass one with flying colors and could make an iOS app with one hand and a Rails server with another, the perception is still that you're somehow less qualified than a college graduate. Again, it sucks, but a hiring manager is going to ask themselves whether they could get blamed more for hiring a college grad that turns out to suck at their job, or a boot camp graduate that turns out to suck at their job.
Honestly, if you really want to "disrupt" education, you're barking up the wrong tree. The best education is a good job. The best people to teach you how to do your job are the ones doing it with you. I firmly believe that the best way to provide good jobs and valuable skills is to heavily promote - and perhaps even subsidize - paid apprenticeships.
Nothing says "I am worth paying $X for this job" like a resume that says "I was paid $X for this job."
[+] [-] amyjess|9 years ago|reply
It wound up being an exploitative nightmare, and it eventually got shut down for it.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
Wondered where all the money went, until I realized that six-figure salaries for deans and sub-deans and senior administrators and grand poobahs of diversity studies for every imaginable slicing and dicing of the student population doesn't come cheap, nor does effectively running a jobs program for the entire 100 mile radius, vastly overstaffing custodial and food service workers at hourly rates two or three times market rate in the area.
[+] [-] analogwzrd|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if the "fancy" dorms are only a thing in non-city universities. It would make sense that building fancy, new dorms in a downtown area in a place like Boston or New York just wouldn't be worth it.