Clarion Call: Educational Luddites Unite! Save the Buggy-whip Manufacturers!
Michael Strong, of The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy writes:
I am a great believer in academic freedom and as culturally liberal as almost anyone in universities. But the more distance I gain from academic life, the more I am struck by the extent to which academic opinion is obsolete.
For example, Peter McLaren, an education professor at UCLA, described one of his education courses (in 2003) this way:
“We begin by examining the intrinsically exploitative nature of capitalist society, using some introductory texts and essays by Bertell Ollman, and then tackle the difficult task of reading of Capital, Volume 1, and the labor theory of value. We look at this issue from the perspective [of a] number of Marxist orientations and I try to present the case that capitalism can’t be reformed and still remain capitalism.”
I am at first saddened, and then disgusted, at the extent to which McLaren is wasting his students’ time.
The twentieth century was a violent and tragic century because in its early years both the left and the right deserted classical liberalism. We can be optimistic about a twenty-first century if market-based democracies spread around the world. Although there are still serious challenges in launching successful market economies in many nations, we need to work together to help those nations succeed in growing market economies.
McLaren is not helping this cause…Continue reading on the Pope Center >>
Dr. Vedder’s Report to the U.S. House
Click HERE to read the full report of Dr. Richard Veddar, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity to the U.S. House of Representatives. In the report, Dr. Vedder explains:
- The law of unintended consequences has led to higher education outcomes far
different than intended as federal student assistance has expanded over the past 35 years. - The proposal to end the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program and
replace it with direct federal student lending will have negative consequences on students quite
independent of the alleged financial consequences to the federal government. - The proposal to sharply expand the Pell Grant program by making it an
entitlement offered to far more students than presently, with larger sized grants, is fiscally
irresponsible.
Download and read the complete report on the full report, HERE (.pdf).
Schwarzenegger May Terminate Student Aid Program
Eric Bailey and Patrick McGreevy of The LA Times explain today some of the effects of the California Governor’s proposed budget cuts, including:
…How could things get worse in California, where voter rejection of a series of budget measures Tuesday has left public higher education planning for deep budget cuts? Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, could go after the state’s student aid program — and the Los Angeles Times reported that is a serious possibility. According to the newspaper, the governor is considering a plan to eliminate new CalGrants. Over a year, 77,000 new grants would be awarded, at a total cost of $180 million. As students currently on CalGrants graduate, the program could be phased out, with even larger savings…Continue reading on The LA Times >>
Is Academia Weird, or What?
Jay Shalin, at The John William Pope Center, writes:
I returned to school in my early forties, filled with enthusiasm and driven by the sense of urgency that comes with having one last chance at success in life. Though I was a lifelong bookworm, my first attempts at higher education had failed due to a lack of purpose. After twenty-plus years of wallowing in aimless underemployment, purpose found me. I wanted the good life that comes with having a good job, and it was obvious I wasn’t going to get one without an education.
Although I had recently gained an interest in computers, my initial goal was almost exclusively employment. I figured I could make a quick, year-round sprint to get a two-year degree in 16 months. But after just the first few classes, I knew I wanted more than just a few technical skills and some paper credentials. I wanted the knowledge and the mental training. I even wanted the effort: I actually wanted to battle my way through difficult math problems, spend long hours in the computer lab, and write lengthy papers about the great ideas of Western civilization.
I got the long hours, the two-year technical degree, and more—I had no idea what I was in for the academic world. After a nine-year odyssey through a variety of institutions of higher learning (and various full- and part-time jobs), I obtained an A.A. in information systems from Ocean County College (a two-year community college in New Jersey), a B.S. in computer science from Richard Stockton College (a small public liberal arts school, also in Jersey), and an M.A. in economics from the University of Delaware. In retrospect (and in a whimsical mood), it now seems an adventure worthy of a Ulysses, a Gulliver, a Frodo.
I was isolated more by my conservative outlook than by my age, and sometimes the campus had the feel of a hostile landscape filled with sinister traps and bogeymen. Little tiny people tried to tie me down, powerful giants toyed with me as if I were their plaything, and sirens beckoned with ill intent (Okay, I exaggerate slightly). And always I had to trudge on toward the goal, despite the increasing weight of my endeavors.
And while I spent most of my time as an undergraduate in technical classes, which are by nature insulated from political and cultural trends, I was still subjected on occasion to the standard fare offered by today’s academia: political harassment, blatant left-wing indoctrination, teachers with accents too thick to make themselves understood, acceptance of disruptive behavior and cheating, and so on.
Had I been less experienced, less focused, and less firm in my convictions, I could have fallen prey to the propaganda, bought into the unethical aspects of the system, or worked myself into such a state of resentment that dropping out might have seemed sensible…Continue reading on The John William Pope Center >>
David Moltz: For community colleges in the Golden State, things have gone from worse to worst.
In Inside Higher Ed News today:
For community colleges in the Golden State, things have gone from worse to worst.
The state’s 110 two-year institutions will lose about $825 million in funding over the next 13 months, said Scott Lay, president of the Community College League of California. He added that, of this large cut, $200 million will be trimmed in the next 45 days. This drastic funding cut comes thanks to the defeat of a series of budget proposals, on the ballot of Tuesday’s special election, which would have minimized cuts to public higher education and other state agencies.
“The last time community colleges saw funding like this was in 1982, before the Internet, the Americans With Disabilities Act and other costly measures,” Lay said.
Per-student funding will be reduced by around 11 percent, he said, forcing colleges around the state to turn away nearly 250,000 students in the coming year. Lay also noted that a “large number” of full- and part-time faculty members will be laid off because of these state cuts. Though he did not make an estimate for full-time faculty, he said he anticipated nearly 6,000 part-time faculty members will lose their jobs.
In one community college district struggling to plan Wednesday, there is hope that faculty layoffs may be avoided. Still, there is every expectation that courses will be slashed and students turned away in large numbers…Continue reading on InsideHigherEd.com >>
McKeon Introduces Veterans Educational Equity Act
California university president and local Vietnam veteran support Congressman’s effort to assist veterans pursuing higher education
Leading a coalition of California elected officials, Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) today introduced the Veterans Educational Equity Act. McKeon, the top Republican on the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, developed the legislation in response to reports that California veterans may be unfairly denied educational benefits under the post-9/11 GI Bill.
Under California law, public institutions of higher education may not charge tuition to in-state residents. The post-9/11 GI Bill calculates a veteran’s educational benefits based on the public tuition and fees charged to an in-state resident. Thus, in California, veterans receive no tuition benefit and are often only allowed to use a fraction of their fee allotment at a private institution of higher education.
“California’s prohibition on tuition was meant to hold college costs down, not unfairly drive them up for our state’s veterans,” said McKeon. “The Veterans Educational Equity Act ensures California’s brave soldiers can benefit from the full amount to which they are entitled under the post-9/11 GI Bill.”
Because California’s public institutions of higher education charge no tuition, their fees are often considerably higher than the amount of fees charged by private institutions that are permitted to levy a tuition cost. For example, based on the amount charged by public institutions to in-state residents, the Department of Veterans Affairs has determined the maximum tuition benefit to be $0, while the maximum fee benefit can equal up to $6,586.54.
For example, a California veteran attending Stanford University (with an approximate tuition cost of $37,000 and fees of $1,000) would receive no benefit to defray the cost of tuition and would only be able to access $1,000 in fee benefits to cover that portion of the cost.
Andrew K. Benton, president of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. and the former chairman of the American Council on Education said efforts to support the nation’s veterans in pursuit of higher education should be vigorously pursued:
“The Veterans Educational Equity Act is the kind of legislation that can have a far reaching impact on our veterans – a group of selfless men and women to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude.”
The Veterans Educational Equity Act permits California veterans to use up to the full $6,586.54 benefit to offset tuition and fees, similar to the benefits enjoyed by veterans in other states.
George Palermo, a U.S. Marine Vietnam veteran from Southern California says we can’t do enough for veterans who have served our country both home and abroad:
“California veterans should have the same access to money for education from the Post-9/11 GI Bill as veterans from the other 49 states. Congratulations and thank you to Congressman McKeon for authoring the Veteran’s Educational Equity Act to correct these inequities for California veterans.”
CU regents approve tuition increases
From Brittany Anas at Your Daily Camera Online:
University of Colorado regents this morning voted 8-1 to raise tuition by 3.9 percent for in-state students and 5 percent for non-residents.
[...]
Full-time, in-state students enrolled in CU’s College of Arts and Sciences on the Boulder campus now pay $5,922 a year in tuition. The adopted tuition model raises rates by $231 for those students.
The new tuition rate for incoming out-of-state students in the College of Arts and Sciences will be $26,675, which is $1,270 more than last year.
Tuition for new, non-resident students in the College of Engineering would increase by 6.5 percent….Continue reading on Your Daily Camera Online >>
What does a college degree cost?
In the News at InsideHigherEd.com today:
College tuition prices keep rising. State budgets are stagnant or shrinking. And policy makers, from President Obama on down, are increasingly calling for increases in the number of Americans who get some higher education or training.
Those factors have led more state legislators, trustees and others to argue that, to accomplish the latter goal given the former circumstances, colleges are going to have to lower what they spend to produce the average credential they award. But any discussion of lowering the “cost per degree” must start with a more fundamental question: What does a degree cost to produce now?
That question may be basic, but it is not simple, as a new report from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability makes clear…Continue reading on InsideHigherEd.com >>
Also read: White Paper from the Delta Cost Project: What does a college degree cost?
RMU Faculty Gives Up Raises to Boost Student Scholarships
From Robert Morris University:
The union that represents faculty at Robert Morris University has agreed to sacrifice more than half the annual raise professors were due under their collective bargaining agreement so the university can boost financial aid to students.
RMU faculty members were set to receive a 2.75 percent salary increase for the 2009-10 academic year. Now the Faculty Federation will forgo more than half that raise – approximately 1.45 percent of their base salary – to allow the university to shift an extra $180,000 into scholarship funds for new and returning students.
That’s on top of an additional $570,000 in financial aid the university expects to generate through a freeze on salaries for all non-faculty staff, including the president and senior administrators. RMU’s total pool of financial aid will be about $16 million in 2009-10. Ninety percent of RMU students receive some sort of financial aid…Continue reading on Robert Morris University >>
NJ Education Documentary to Premiere at Film Festival
The Cartel, a new feature-length documentary about the waste, fraud and mismanagement within New Jersey public schools, will premiere in Teaneck, NJ, on Saturday, May 30th. The screening is part of the Hoboken International Film Festival, New Jersey’s most prestigious platform for original, new cinema.
In The Cartel, first-time filmmaker and New Jersey resident Bob Bowdon begins with the financial side of the education issue — showing how the belief that teachers are underpaid has produced an endless march toward higher education budgets — while billions of dollars quietly disappear,
whistle-blowers are threatened or demoted, and over 80% of the money often never reaches the classroom.
Loaded with specific examples, the film shows:
- Cases of NJ public school janitors receiving six figure salaries
- A NJ public school district that pays six-figure salaries to over 400 administrators
- NJ public school board members indicted for taking bribes from contractors
- NJ public school superintendents getting over $400,000 dollars in compensation
- A NJ public high school spending $30 million on a football field despite the fact that 85% of its students are failing state proficiency tests
- A State Senator confirming that one billion dollars disappeared in NJ school construction funding without a single conviction, indictment or even arrest
- A former NJ teacher of the year who examined her school’s budget and uncovered phony salaries for people who did not exist. When she reported the fraudulent accounting, she was brought up on formal charges of insubordination.
The Cartel reveals how teachers’ unions make it virtually impossible to get rid of a bad teacher. The point is hard to dispute when entire counties, like Bergen County, can go ten years without firing a single tenured teacher, and some urban districts, like Newark, let go tenured teachers at a rate of less than one in 3,000. The film also shows how even those very few “worst of the worst” teachers who finally do get fired can often just move over to a neighboring town and start teaching again. That’s because the dismissal records are typically sealed as part of the union-negotiated termination settlements.
Amid all this, The Cartel puts a human face on the much higher price — the high school students who can’t read, the whole towns where dropouts outnumber graduates, and the real children’s futures being systematically undermined — all to protect adults’ jobs in a dysfunctional education bureaucracy.
The film also shows success stories — how school choice in its various forms creates a long-overdue performance accountability, and how some of the schools who have to compete for students, even in the worst urban areas, are producing miracles every day.
Bob Bowdon is a veteran television journalist including six years, from 2001-2006, as an anchor/reporter with Bloomberg Television. He also appears regularly on videos for Onion.com
The Hoboken International Film Festival’s world premiere of The Cartel will be at the Cedar Lane Cinemas in Teaneck, NJ, Saturday, May 30th, at 2pm. Tickets can be obtained online via the film’s website: www.thecartelmovie.com
