Several readers sound off:
From inside higher ed (at the community college level), there are several problems with college rankings. First, everyone already knows which is better than what. Four-year research institutions (Duke, Stanford) are better than four-year liberal arts schools, which are equal to or better than four-year state schools, which are better than two-year schools. Our school charges $100 a credit; Temple University charges roughly $800 a credit. Why? Because they can and we can’t. I highly doubt our school costing one-eighth the per year total will rank in the government rankings as “a better buy” than Temple or Drexel, much less the University of Pennsylvania.
Second, public tax support has collapsed over the last 40 years.
Technically (as in legally and constitutionally from the founding of the college), the state and the county are supposed to provide 66 percent of our operating budget, with the school providing the rest. Currently, public funds provide less than half that. Consequently, salaries and benefits have stagnated, forcing the school to rely more on adjuncts and forcing the young and the talented to look elsewhere. Tuition has gone up, shutting out the poorest students from public education.
If the federal government is going to rate us, what about forcing the states and counties to adhere to their obligations? How well can we do with one-third of the support we’ve been promised?
Also, be aware that 80 percent of our students come out of high school without the ability to read, write, or do math at grade level. Our Reading 1 is a third-grade reading level and has 15 percent of our students. Math 1 is basic fourth grade arithmetic – 20 percent of our students are in that. We have high numbers of poor students, immigrant students, and first-generation students, and increasing numbers of special education students, all of whom are expensive to educate and many of whom would not even have been in college 40 years ago when public funding was comparatively greater. Will all of that figure in?
The third factor is that politics and money go hand in hand. Is anyone seriously thinking Harvard won’t get an A? Princeton won’t be tops in everything? Is anyone really going to say Stanford or Duke should be $10K a year? Is anyone going to force the states to fully finance their obligations? The crisis in public pensions suggests not. And even if the whiff of possibility arose – especially for highly financed politically active “for profit” charters/colleges – we have the Indiana example of changing grades to help donors. So who is it really helping? What’s the play?
Another reader:
I understand that there are predatory administrators, that there are colleges offering terrible returns on investment, and that the whole system suffers from structural inequality. These are real concerns, especially for those in the worst situations. But rarely does the conversation turn to what education is supposed to achieve, or what its goals might actually be. Despite the great hubbub about educational reform, about new techniques of education, about technology in the classroom, the underlying thought remains the same: education is what we do in order to get money.
It beggars the modern imagination to think that someone might offer up some (or even all) of their material well-being in order to get an education which does not immediately result in more material well-being. A person considering getting a liberal education, particularly in a field without firm practical applications, is considered slightly daft – or is granted a pardon on account of already being rich. But this underscores the problem. Liberal education has become a luxury of the rich, rather than a prerequisite for free people living in a free society.
I don’t have a policy recommendation or a favored author (save maybe Plato) to tout. This problem is as large as the world and as complicated as people themselves. But I do think, before we start enumerating the virtues of our colleges and, thereby, driving a stake through the heart of “impractical” liberal education, that we should stop to consider what we hold highest.
Another’s two cents:
I’m an engineering professor. I have indeed seen colleges do unwise things with funds. I am a little bit concerned, though, about university ranking systems because they can drive unintended consequences. The proliferation of fancy sports facilities, for example, was in some measure a response to the US News rankings. Universities compete for students. Those that are highly ranked get more and better students, and they can justify higher tuition. If state support is going to disappear (as it pretty much has already in some states), we have to expect universities to market themselves and rankings to drive the marketing. I cannot predict how exactly, but I know this will not end well.
Update from a reader:
In regards to the person who seemingly works at the Community College of Philadelphia, where he/she commented that they charge $100 a credit whereas Temple University charges $800, simply because Temple can. C’mon, that’s an apples and oranges comparison. Temple is a university that can bestow graduate and doctoral degrees, is a world-class research center, has or at least had some of the top schools in the country for communications, education, art, has a medical center graduating nurses, NPs, PAs, doctors, and dentist. A law school that is ranked #2 for trial advocacy and #11 for international law. Provides on campus housing for 12,000 students, is the force behind the revitalization of North Philadelphia (it can be debated how much the local community benefits but it is vastly improving). As with other major institutions of learning it also provides for a whole range of extracurricular activities from sports programs to a radio station.
I’m not knocking CCs; a lot of student wisely choose them to knock out their core requirements at a lower cost. I doubt there is any noticeable difference between what you can learn from History 101 at Temple or at CCP. But TU (and other major institutions) charge that rate because they offer more than just History 101, they provide access to many more courses than one could get at a CC, access to top rate research centers, professors, in the case of TU campuses in Japan and Europe, to some extent connections (TU has over 250,000 alumni), sporting events, concerts, the social life, etc. etc.
Is it overpriced and is that price set simply to cover the cost of education? I don’t know. I do think universities have bloated their administrative staffs to unprecedented levels and that payroll expense is passed on to the student base. Probably more so at the Ivies than anywhere else, you’re paying to have that name and the connections and opportunities it provides on your resume. I think you can make the argument that there’s not much of a difference, scholastically, between a Princeton and TU, but to imply that a CC and a University are on the same level except for the course fees is a bit ridiculous.
(And full disclosure, yes, I am a TU grad, as is my wife and all 3 of her siblings. But I’m not arguing specifically for TU, you could replace the schools with University of RI and RICC and the argument stands.)
The Dish 