Category Archives: Academics

I wish MSM would report the whole story about student loans

Obama was out and about yesterday talking about the problem of student loan debt and the need for colleges/universities to keep costs down.  There were numerous reports on all this; this piece from NPR, “Negotiating The College Funding Labyrinth,” is pretty typical.

I don’t disagree with a lot of what’s here.  College does cost too much, students are borrowing too much, and there is a lack of transparency regarding the cost of higher education, particularly at private institutions where it is common for students to negotiate what they pay based on how much they can afford.  This is all a problem.

However, there are two things that are always always always left out of these stories.  First, the reason why college costs so much– or at least the reasons why public institutions cost so much– is because the government (mostly at the state-level) has stopped funding higher education.  Imagine the difference it would make if the feds kicked in a few billion dollars into public higher ed in this country:  for a tenth of what we’re spending on the military, I think we could have a system in the US where attending college was virtually free.

Second, student loan debt is too high in part because too many students borrow more money than they need because the loans are easily available and young people don’t necessarily think long and hard about the implications of paying back loans.  And I say this based on experience:  in my MFA program, I took out student loans, much of which I used to pay legitimate expenses of course, but much of which I used to do things like buy speakers for my stereo.  Of course, I still have those speakers, so maybe it was a worthwhile investment.

 

Absurd “academic publishing racket” is past its sell-by date

I saw this in a couple of different places over the weekend, but this post from boing-boing sums it up, “Absurd ‘academic publishing racket’ is past its sell-by date.”  Now, it’s more complicated than boing-boing writer Cory Doctorow is claiming here, but I think his last paragraph is provocative:

Of course, to pursue this line, you’d have to confront the fact that academics are sharecroppers to their employers, and that the works they’ve published, posted to their websites, licensed for anthologies, etc, aren’t theirs, which would have a lot of fallout beyond mere academic publishing circles. But it’s still provocative to consider the possibility that the journals (and their enormous, conlgomerated parent companies) might owe something like 40 years’ worth of the entire planet’s GDP to a bunch of cash-strapped universities.

 

“What We Can Learn from First-Generation College Students”

From ideas.time.com comes “What We Can Learn from First-Generation College Students.”  I think this is pretty spot-on, but I also think that it applies to a lot of “underprepared” students (and maybe their parents even went to college), and I think what’s key is to actually get the students to recognize these things in themselves.

“Killing the Story”

This is a little off-topic from the usual EMUTalk.org fare, but I thought it was quite interesting myself and thought others out there– especially those of us who are interested in things like research, observations, “truth” versus “truthiness” versus “fiction” in our academic lives.  From the IHE blog Library Babel Fish comes “Killing the Story.”  Here are the first couple paragraphs:

When I listened to Mike Daisy’s monologue on This American Life about the Foxconn factory where Apple iPads are made, I thought about assigning the podcast to students in a research class I’m teaching. It struck me that it would be a good way to consider the environmental and social issues that we tend to ignore when we think about the technology tools we use every day, tools that are essential for research. I also thought it would be valuable to discuss how we might evaluate the validity of information that comes infused with emotion and art by contrasting Daisy’s monologue with the material that followed, in which other thoughtful people complicated the issue: those factory jobs, with their long hours and unsafe conditions, are nevertheless raising many people’s standard of living significantly. How do we make ethical decisions about such complex issues?

As it turned out, I didn’t assign it – and was relieved I hadn’t when Twitter lit up with the news that This American Life was retracting the story, having found many of the things Daisy claimed to have heard or witnessed to be false. Listening to the most recent episode of This American Life, in which reporter Rob Schmitz uncovered the falsehoods in Daisy’s story and Ira Glass grilled the storyteller about his behavior, was pretty excruciating and reminded me of Oprah’s public shaming of James Frey after his “memoir” was debunked as exaggerations and lies.

By the way, that excerpt contains the links to the This American Life episodes.  I listened to the most recent one where they “retracted” the original story, and it was one of the most compelling and gripping things I’ve heard on the radio (well, in my case, in the form of a podcast) in a long long time.

 

“Why is the GOP Suddenly Turning Against College?”

A loyal EMUTalk.org reader sent me this article, “Why is the GOP Suddenly Turning Against College?” I think it first appeared in The Atlantic, though this link is from Yahoo! Finance.  I think this is kind of the “thesis paragraph:”

Paul Krugman argues that Republicans prefer tax cuts to education for political reasons: Their goal to preserve upper-class prosperity comes at the expense of heightened middle-class insecurity. While this is probably true, I think there is more to it. Today, Republicans are turning their backs on higher education because of two historical trends. One is globalization. The other is the anti-tax revolution.

And the punchline in the piece for me is “imagine if the American political system was controlled by the wealthy.”  Heh.  Imagine indeed.

Anyway, read this if you can– some interesting points.

 

TED Ed on YouTube

As CHE reports, TED now has a YouTube page specifically targeted to educators. I don’t know if that’s really all that necessary since it’s easy enough to come across cool TED talk videos right on their regular web site, but I guess it’s a good thing.

By the way, I completely missed the TEDxEMU thing.  Anybody go?  Any reactions?

“College Completion,” a CHE special report

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting series of articles and infographics called “College Completion.”  Given some of the conversation we’ve had here and around EMU in general about graduation rates, this is definitely worth the browsing.

There are some problems with the claims being made here and EMU doesn’t even exist in the CHE’s info graphic, but still, some interesting observations.  I’ll note two for now.  In the article “Students Who Don’t Count,” Sara Lipka reports, claims: “Of the five million students who started college in the fall of 2009, 2.4 million of them didn’t fit the federal definition” of what the U.S. Department of Education counts as a college student in terms of graduation rates.  ”Transfers, part-timers, and students who take a break and re-enroll either later or elsewhere—even if they graduate—don’t count.”  She highlights a number of these “non-traditional” students who fall through the cracks at the end, and a lot of those students look a heck of a lot like EMU students.

Oh, and because Obama was a transfer student, he wouldn’t have counted as a college graduate according to the way feds count graduation rates.

The other thing that I thought was pretty interesting was the opening paragraphs of the article “To Raise Completion Rates, States Dig Deeper for Data.”  Let me quote at length:

The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system allows students to apply for enrollment until the Friday before classes began. But then administrators at one college looked at what happened to those students and discovered a pattern: Students who enrolled closer to the start of the semester didn’t do as well as those who had signed up earlier.

As a result of that finding, the college required new students to apply at least 10 days before the start of the semester, and similar efforts are being studied at other institutions in the statewide system.

The change in policy is meant to save the students and the institutions from wasting time and money on courses that are more likely to lead to failure, says Leslie K. Mercer, associate vice chancellor for policy and planning at the statewide system, which collects extensive information on the roughly 280,000 students enrolled in credit-bearing courses.

While a relatively minor decision, that sort of change can make a big difference in helping colleges to ensure student success. And it’s an example of the kinds of policies that are possible only when states and systems track and analyze the academic performance of individual students.

I see this first hand at EMU almost every semester.  In my classes, there is almost always a direct relation between student success and when students enroll:  the earlier the enrollment, the more likely they will do well in class.  And students who register at the last moment and/or after a class begins are the most likely to drop or fail my classes.

To me, this is an example of the kind of minor change EMU could make if the administration was really interested in graduation rates instead of enrollment/tuition money.  I am willing to bet a doughnut that if we had a policy similar to this one in Minnesota, we’d see an uptick in graduation rates.  But we’d also see a downtick in numbers, both in terms of enrollment and money.  After all, those students who register for classes and then fail still pay tuition.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

 

Check out the Adjunct Project

The problems of non-tenure-track teaching in higher education in the U.S. (and there are many:  both problems and non-tenure-track teachers) has been circulated and discussed in many different formats over the years, but here’s a new one to me:  The Adjunct Project, which is now a full-blown web site/blog, began as a shared Google spreadsheet where adjunct instructors from all over the country started posted some of the details about their jobs for points of comparison.  It’s a little tricky to sort through the spreadsheet, but once you get the hang of it, you can see the similarities and differences of part-time work at universities all over the place.

I don’t think this is going to do much to solve the problem, but anything that makes the issue visible is probably a good thing.

Oh, and there is an article in The Chronicle about all this, “A Simple Spreadsheet Strikes a Nerve Among Adjuncts.”

“Duncan, Biden talk affordability”

In the most recent Eastern Echo comes “Duncan, Biden Talk Affordability.”  Basically, it’s a report about some kind of teleconference Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Vice President Joseph Biden building on Obama’s education speech.  Here’s a quote:

“I want to commend the leadership of Eastern Michigan University for keeping costs down and putting students first, and fortunately, I hear stories like that all over the country,” Duncan said referring to EMU’s 0-0-0 initiative and its 2011-12 academic year 3.65 tuition increase.

“If universities are doing creative things [to keep costs down], we want to not just recognize it, but incentivize it.”

For universities such as EMU that try to make college affordable, Biden said they might qualify for the White House’s incentive plan called the “Race to the Top: College Affordability and Completion.” Through this “fair formula” plan, the administration said $1 billion would be allocated to institutions that keep costs low.

You know, one way the Obama administration could have “incentivized” universities doing creative things was to have the president give a high-profile, national speech at such a university.  I mean instead of that school with the good football team.

And while a billion here and a billion there eventually adds up to real money, the fact is $1 billion as an incentive to all of higher education isn’t really much, especially if it is spread about the hundreds of colleges and universities in this country.

EMU-Flint to close?

An alert reader emailed me to let me know that EMU-Flint is set to close at the end of this semester.  I don’t know this person’s sources, so maybe someone else can confirm that.  And I frankly didn’t know there was an EMU-Flint, but it apparently operates through continuing education on the campus of Mott Community College.