Tag Archives: tuition

Choosing a College 2

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In hindsight my “Choosing a College 1” post was among the more ridiculous I’ve written this year.  

Here’s the comment I kept expecting someone to write, “What planet are you living on Byrnes? Do you really think ANY 17-19 year old in the country will choose their college based on the thoughtfulness of the general education program? That’s not even as important as the school’s colors, whether the cafeteria serves frozen yogurt, and whether the dorms get high speed internet and cable television.” 

Thank you for being so apathetic. 

Thanks to that apathy, I’m going to make another maybe even more ridiculous suggestion for choosing a college: choose one you can afford.

I’m going to go even farther and suggest the student and their family start thinking about how they’re going to afford to send their future children/grandchildren to college.

From today’s newspaper the headline reads “Rising Tuition, Credit Crunch Threaten Affordability of Higher Education”. Here are the first two sentences: A new study on American higher education gave all but one state a failing grade on affordability, and warned that college could soon be out of reach for most Americans. The biennial study by the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gave 49 states an F for affordability, up from 43 two years ago. California passed with a C because of its community college system.

The author went on to say if current trends continue, in 25 years, college will be out of reach for most families.

When it comes to college decision making, people seemingly assume you get what you pay for. Sometimes that’s true, but not always. I received an excellent education (some may dispute that) at a large public institution that was one-third the price of most small private ones. 

I work at an expensive, smallish private institution that likes to tell anyone that will listen that we provide a much better education than the larger, less expensive publics. The argument is go to the large public school if you like being thought of as a number in large classes taught by overextended graduate teaching assistants.

Most of my classes were taught by exceptional scholars. I learned early on to take initiative and knock on their doors during office hours. By doing so I made the humungous college much smaller. They’d stop typing (yeah I’m old) their next book and we’d talk about the course content or the paper I was working on. Interestingly, few of my students come to office hours. 

I had some brilliant graduate teaching assistants who were inspiring beginning teachers. I remember one who got pissed at us for not being prepared for a discussion. After ripping us in ways we deserved, he walked out. We were stunned and way more prepared for the next discussion.  The TA’s taught “discussion sections” of 25 students. Yes, the lecture was 400, but there were also 16 sections that met weekly. 

I learned as much outside of class as in because our student body was incredibly diverse and our campus drew a steady stream of fascinating speakers including national and world leaders. Every night, somewhere on campus, there was an interesting documentary or lecture. Then there were the world class libraries where most of my learning took place.

In another recent newspaper article on college affordability, a family said they were going to take out loans to pay their child’s $41,000 college tuition. I’d like to ask them why. I’d suspect they’d say because it’s an investment in his/her future. 

There are at least three problems with this line of thinking.

1) As I’ve tried to illustrate, tuition and the quality of the educational opportunities provided aren’t perfectly correlated.

2) Stretching financially inevitably leads to unnecessary stress.  College expenses are similar to home construction expenses, there are always unanticipated hidden costs. For example, once I assigned an extra book mid-semester. It was available on Amazon.com for $10, but a few students said they couldn’t afford it. I like to think of myself as compassionate, but I had a hard time processing those objections in the context of our $30,000 tuition/room/board.  

3) The principle of compound interest makes building wealth relatively easy if young people start saving early. But increasingly, young people are graduating from their expensive colleges in serious debt, thus sacrificing the compound interest window.

I don’t understand why more people don’t strategize on how to get through college debt free.

I know, I know that’s not the American way, with our negative savings rate. Live in the present, spend freely. Don’t worry about future debt.

In the end, maybe someone will bail you out.

Choosing a College 1

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My daughter, known as A or 16, is beginning her college search. This is the first of several posts on how to choose a college. I do not want to make A’s decision for her, I simply want to share one insider’s perspective and stimulate her thinking.

Suggestion one: compare and contrast general education programs and choose a school with a thematic, interdisciplinary oriented general education program. Ask yourself, “Is the logic of the general education program self apparent and engaging?” And ask people at the college, “Does the sum of the general education sequence equal more than the individual parts?”

Five, six winters ago, two friends and I headed to a telemarking ski clinic. Free the heel, free the mind.

Friend one is a doc, a general practitioner. Friend two is a scientist who leads Washington State’s response team whenever there’s an oil spill or other type of accident that has serious ecological consequences. His team works with the groups responsible for the accident to restore the damaged area to it’s original state.

On the way home, One reflected on the limits of his medical education. Specifically, he wish he had learned how to run a business since that had proven to be the most difficult aspect of creating a thriving clinic. Two regretted being dependent upon an anthropologist who helped his team interact more thoughtfully with native groups every time their land was threatened by oil spills and other accidents. He wished there had been a little anthropology somewhere within his doctoral science program.

Now I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. Some of my colleagues, let’s call them the “militant liberal artists” believe strongly that academics must reject any and all references to business model thinking. If you were to ask them, doesn’t a faculty that charges $100 to $200k for four years have some responsibility to equip graduates with skills that will enable them to earn a livable wage, they’d say, not really.  They’d point out that the economy is in constant flux and the purpose of a liberal education is to think deeply about the human condition, to question the status quo, to develop self understanding, to self actualize. Let the job market take care of itself and let technical colleges focus on marketable skills.

Economics department and business school faculty tend to think very differently about the purposes of higher education which can make for depressing faculty meetings. The business model folks, let’s call them “the utilitarians”, tend to think about higher education as an investment that should pay tangible dividends including a good job, health care, and material well being.

One philosopher of ed captures the different orientations of the “militant liberal artists” and the “utilitarians” by distinguishing between “education for being” and “education for having.” Getting faculty with wildly contrasting orientations to agree on general education requirements is exceedingly difficult because the MLA’s (pun intended) believe literature, art, music, religion, history, philosophy, and languages are most important while the U’s emphasize math, the sciences, economics, and business.

In large part, that philosophical divide explains why so many general education programs lack coherence and fail to inspire. Most people don’t understand that they are compromises. Keep some modicum of faculty peace, take one of these, two of those, and one of these. Students mindlessly check off each requirement as they go and the sum rarely equals more than the parts.

When it comes to undergraduate education, I’m more MLA in orientation; when it comes to graduate education, I’m more sympathetic to the U’s.  

A higher education is not a mutual fund; consequently, I’m not terribly concerned with whether undergraduate students and their families feel they receive an adequate monetary return for their investment. In my view, the more important question is whether graduates have sufficient interdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and sensibilities to make a positive difference in their communities. 

What would happen if the MLA’s and the U’s made nice and designed a general education program in response to One’s and Two’s questions: How does one provide quality medical care in an economically viable way? And how does one protect ecologically sensitive environments in culturally sensitive ways? The answer to one is by melding science and business, and to two, by melding science, humanities, and social science content.

The gen ed status quo requires students to take eight separate requirements in five, six different areas, but in those programs faculty typically don’t even read one another’s syllabi so students are left to themselves to connect dots between courses.

So A, if your goal is to graduate with the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities to improve the actual quality of life of people, seek a school with a thoughtfully designed, engaging, thematic, interdisciplinary general education program.