Category Archives: In the media…

“Is College Too Easy?”

Posted on May 22, 2012 by | 4 Comments

A loyal reader sent me a link to this Washington Post article, “Is college too easy? As study time falls, debate rises.”   Here’s a very long quote:

Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them with athletics, clubs and climbing walls on campuses that increasingly resemble resorts.

Academic leaders counter that students are as busy as ever but that their attention is consumed in part by jobs they take to help make ends meet.

Consider George Mason, Virginia’s largest public university and a microcosm of modern academia. Some students care for dependents. Many commute to class. Seventy percent of seniors hold off-campus jobs. George Mason students spend 14 hours, on average, in weekly study, close to the national average.

“It’s not enough,” said Peter Stearns, the George Mason provost. “And it’s a figure that troubles us, not only at Mason but in higher education generally.”

The university has responded by launching an honors college and an undergraduate research initiative in recent years — driven, Stearns said, by “the need to create a more challenging undergraduate environment.”

Tradition suggests that college students should invest two hours in study for every hour of classes. The reality — that students miss that goal by half — emerged from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a research tool for colleges that examines the modern student in unprecedented detail.

I guess I have two thoughts for now.  First, I don’t know if college has gotten easier or not, but the attitude about keeping students in college has changed dramatically in the last 25 or so years.  When I was in college back in the 1980s, the way college success was presented to students was not everyone will be able to succeed.  In fact, at many universities, it was a badge of pride that a lot of students failed out.  But nowadays, one of the marks of success of a university is its retention/graduation rates:  that is, one of the problems that EMU has it’s retention/graduation rates aren’t as high as they should be.

Second, I’m not sure these guidelines of studying two hours for every hour of class-time have ever been completely true, and I think that at least some of this concern about students not studying enough is just classic “the kids today just aren’t as good as we were when we were kids” thinking.

None of this to say that maybe it is true that college is “too easy” in an effort to appeal to more students, to retain more students, etc.

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Posted in Academics, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

“Fiscal study: Michigan athletics are self-reliant; MSU is close”

Posted on May 19, 2012 by | 18 Comments

I meant to post this the other day but it got lost in my in-box:  a loyal reader sent “Fiscal study: Michigan athletics are self-reliant; MSU is close,” from the Freep.com web site.  It’s not surprising news, really.  The University of Michigan makes about $10 million a year from its athletic program, which puts it in the same league as places like Ohio State, Texas, Florida, and Alabama for making money off of athletics.  Michigan State is basically a break-even proposition.  But that’s about it, and all of the other state of Michigan schools– including EMU, of course– lose a ton of money.

Nothing particularly new, though here’s a fun fact:  as I understand the article, no Big Ten athletic program received more than 10% in its revenues from university subsides.  In other words, EMU (and I would wager to say the same is true for all of the MAC programs) spends significantly more on sports than Big Ten universities, both as a percentage and in real dollars.

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Posted in In the media..., Sports

“What does $1 Trillion in Student Debt Really Mean? Maybe Not That Much”

Posted on May 17, 2012 by | 2 Comments

And now the other side of the student loan debt crisis currently in the news– or maybe not a crisis:  ”What does $1 Trillion in Student Debt Really Mean?  Maybe Not That Much,” from CHE.  Unfortunately, it’s behind the paywall.  Here’s a long quote though:

A trillion is a big, round number. It has some shock value. But what does crossing the $1-trillion mark really tell us?

For one thing, that more people are going to college—and graduate school. The sum is an estimate of all outstanding education debt: private and federal student loans for undergraduates, parents, and graduate and professional-school students. And greater educational attainment is a goal the Obama administration and many nonprofit groups are pushing.

At the same time, in the wake of severe state budget cuts, tuition is rising, and students and their families are footing a larger share of the bill. A greater percentage of bachelor’s-degree recipients have borrowed, and the average amount of debt per borrower has also risen. About two-thirds of graduates of public and private nonprofit colleges have loans, with the borrowers’ average debt about $25,000, according to the most recent analysis, of the Class of 2010, by the Project on Student Debt. (The average debt for the Class of 2004 was under $19,000, according to the federal government, which counts somewhat differently.)

Total outstanding student-loan debt—even $1-trillion of it—may not have broad economic implications. It’s still too small a sum to derail the economy, at least for now, says Mark Kantrowitz.

And so forth, the article goes on about how college debt is good debt, how someone borrowing a reasonable amount for a reasonable degree is good, etc.  I mostly agree with this, but it of course doesn’t completely dismiss all the problems of college debt and for me even brings attention to different problems. For example, is it such a good idea that more people are attending college and graduate school and going into huge amounts of debt to pay those bills?  I dunno about that.

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Posted in Budgets, In the media..., Student Life

eReserves is legal (so says Georgia judge)

Posted on May 14, 2012 by | 1 Comment

eReserves is an electronic “reserve desk” that lots of university libraries (including EMU) use to make readings available for all kinds of things, though mostly for courses.  Instead of putting together a course pack, I tend to put everything up on eReserves, free for students and easier for me.  But for a long time now, there has been one potential problem:  is this legal?

Well, a long story short, as the CHE reports in “Long-Awaited Ruling in Copyright Case Mostly Favors Georgia State U.,” the answer is yes.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

A federal judge in Atlanta has handed down a long-awaited ruling in a lawsuit brought by three scholarly publishers against Georgia State University over its use of copyrighted material in electronic reserves. The ruling, delivered on Friday, looks mostly like a victory for the university, finding that only five of 99 alleged copyright infringements did in fact violate the plaintiffs’ copyrights.

“My initial reaction is, honestly, what a crushing defeat for the publishers,” said Brandon C. Butler, the director of public-policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries. Given how few claims the publishers won, “there’s a 95 percent success rate for the GSU fair-use policy.” The ruling suggests that Georgia State is “getting it almost entirely right” with its current copyright policy, he said.

 

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Posted in Academics, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

“Crushed by college debt: Massive loan bills hang over graduates, derail life plans”

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 10 Comments

From the Freep comes “Crushed by college debt:  Massive loan bills hang over graduates, derail life plans.”  It popped up in my EMU feed because it referenced a student here who has lots of debt:

However the political battles are resolved, it won’t change the future for millions of graduates, such as MoReno Taylor II, 29, of Lansing, who sees his $80,000 in loans for Eastern Michigan University coloring his life.

“It impacts you in every way. Job decisions, searching for a potential home,” he said. “Knowing that you have that debt hanging over your head is debilitating.”

I have to say the comments for this piece raise some interesting questions for me.  Perhaps I should know more about why students are borrowing so much money in the first place, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about here.  Besides that, I will freely admit that I grew up privileged enough that most of my college was paid for by my parents, and I also went to college in an era when tuition was a lot less.

Having said that, it seems to me there are some pretty simple ways to avoid that much debt.  For starters, if I was in a situation now where I had to pay for college out of my own pocket, I would certainly attend community college for a couple of years and get the gen ed stuff taken care of at half the price.  I certainly wouldn’t borrow to pay all the bills– that is, borrowing money to not live with the parents and to go to school full-time.  I’d probably live at home, work, attend part-time, etc.

And then there’s this quote at the end of the piece that makes me think:

Jessica Scott, 26, of Grand Haven graduated in 2009 from Central Michigan University with a degree in journalism and $60,000 in debt.

She’s working four part-time jobs, can’t afford health insurance and is living at home because she can’t make her debt payments and pay rent, too.

“It seems silly to think that myself, at 18 years old, made this kind of staggering financial decision,” she said. “I had no idea what I was getting into, or what it could possible lead to. When I graduated high school in 2004, taking out loans to pay for school is just what you did. There was an unspoken promise that you’ll graduate, find a great job and move on with your life. But as we know, that isn’t what happened.

“Now I’m left with a mountain of debt, a great deal of stress and the hopelessness that I’ll never get out from under this. This one financial decision, which took no time at all to make and a quick flip of a pen, will now define my future.”

It reminds me a little of the old days of students and credit cards.  This doesn’t seem to be as visible on campus as it once was and banks have tightened the rules on credit cards, but just a few years ago, there were tons of stories of young college kids who charged things willy-nilly and then got themselves forever in debt.  I’m not saying this is the same thing because it’s not, but at the same time, I wonder if part of the problem is it’s too easy to borrow too much money.

 

 

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Posted in Budgets, In the media..., Student Life

Once again, rarely about Emus

Posted on May 10, 2012 by | Leave a comment

A loyal reader sent me this fairly pathetic Emu-oriented article, “Man headed to trial in emu killing” from the South Bend Tribune. To quote:

A New Carlisle man testified Tuesday that he and a friend went to a Buchanan-area farm in late October to ride an emu after a night of drinking. Jack Keldsen went on to testify that his friend, Thomas Clark, killed the emu with a baseball bat and the two dumped the dead bird on a friend’s doorstep as a prank.

Keldsen was on the witness stand Tuesday during a preliminary hearing for Clark. Clark is charged with killing and/or torturing an animal and larceny over $200 and under $1,000. Keldsen pleaded guilty in March to attempted killing and/or torturing an animal and agreed to testify against Clark.

The whole thing kind of goes downhill from there. Ick.

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Posted in Emus (the bird), In the media...

More accidental dismissal news and a modest proposal to the admissions office

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 14 Comments

There’s a pretty good article in annarbor.com that goes into some more detail about the whole “you’re kicked out– not” email debacle of last weekend, “EMU reassessing dismissal practices after mistakenly sending notices to 7,700 students.”  The short version is that the cause appears to be (and this is a quote from EMU Director of Communications Walter Kraft) “some sort of operational issue” with this GradesFirst company.  Here’s another passage that really jumped out at me:

The 133 rightly dismissed students were sent additional emails and hard-copy letters confirming their dismissal.

EMU currently has a $15,000-per-year contract with the Alabama-based company.

“Their role is to help us get out communications like this and help us manage the list of people who would receive messages about their academic standing,” said Kraft, who added: “They contacted us fairy early as this was happening on Friday and apologized.”

The article also tries to address the “just how big of a deal was this” debate that has been going on here too, with some students calling the news “devastating” and others seeing it as an obvious mistake.  But really what gets me is this contract EMU has with GradesFirst.  A regular annarbor.com commentator who goes by “Cash” put it this way:

Just wondering….133 students were academically dismissed at the end of winter term, correct?

That couldn’t be handled internally? really?

You are paying $15,000 annually for someone to send out a couple hundred emails for the whole year?

Obviously the list of failing students came from your own internal system, not the vendor’s system.

So how hard is it to send out 133 emails?

Holy smokes.

Please let me know when this gets bid. I’d be glad to send out 133 emails twice per year for $15,000.

I couldn’t have put it any better myself.  And unless GradesFirst is empowered/allowed to go through EMU’s systems to find those 130 or so students who fail to make grades in the first place (I suppose that’s possible, but even if that is the case, how hard is that?), it does kind of sound like we’re paying some entity a lot of money to do something that one would assume would be the job of someone at EMU.

So, I’m with Cash on this:  if this really is the case, I’d like to know how I can get in on that action.  I think I’m qualified.  In my day-job and at the height of the busiest times of the fall and winter semester, it is not at all uncommon for me to receive and deal with 50 email messages a day.  As a program coordinator in my department for writing majors, I routinely send out messages via blind carbon copy or mailing lists to dozens of students at a time.  And since I actually also happen to be a faculty member at EMU who advises lots of students, it even would be kind of legit if I were to contact these students on behalf of the institution.  It’d certainly be better than some anonymous operation in Alabama, right?

So if there’s any way I could pick up this up as a side business, that’d be great.  If someone from the administration admissions wants to contact me at emutalk@gmail.com, I’d be happy to talk terms.

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Posted in Academics, Administrator Life, In the media..., Student Life

Oh Ypsi, Ypsi….

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 3 Comments

Well, this is kind of a bummer.  This morning I read in annarbor.com “Ypsilanti voters reject Water Street deb retirement milage and income tax,” and by a wide margin.  In my view, it’s a sad day because what it says is that voters in the city aren’t willing to invest in it.  Granted, I’m not crazy about raising taxes either, but given the situation the city is in, it’s difficult to see what other choice we have.  The “no taxes” crowd certainly don’t have an answer.

I suppose these issues are not related, but I can’t but help make the connection with the proposal that is floating around where EMU (along with DTE and Washtenaw County) would give loan incentives to employees who want to live in Ypsilanti.  A loyal reader sent me that article, but I’m also reminded of the piece in annabor.com from last week, “New program could offer EMU employees up to $10,000 to purchase homes in Ypsilanti.”   As is the case with the “no taxes” article, the comments here are negative both about EMU and Ypsilanti.

It’s depressing, really.  I mean, I don’t have any specific or deeply-felt personal loyalty to EMU or to Ypsilanti.  I work at EMU and it’s a fantastic job, but as my Dad told me many years ago, you can love your job but your job will never love you.  I live in Ypsi and have lived in the Normal Park neighborhood for 13 years now.  It’s a great neighborhood and I love living close enough to work to walk or ride my bike.  But I’m not really an “Ypsi proud” kind of guy, largely because even after living in Michigan for as long as I’ve lived anywhere else, I’m not really from here, and if I were buying a house right now– even with the EMU incentive– I’d probably buy in Ann Arbor.

That said, I grow weary of the bashing and even self-loathing of both EMU and Ypsilanti.  The comments on the annabor.com story on incentives to buy a house in Ypsilanti are quite disgusting, and it’s sad that a majority of Ypsilanti citizens would rather drive the city further into the ditch and/or into the hands of an emergency manager than to pitch in to pay the bills to keep the community going.  Sad indeed.

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Posted in Administrator Life, In the media..., Ypsilanti

How many students did we kick out (accidentally) last week?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Here’s a good reason as to why EMU needs to stay out in front the story about how many students we (or GradesFirst?) accidentally dismissed last Friday: in my EMU news feed tonight, there were links to two different stories about it all. The first was from The Republic of Columbus, Indiana, “Bad grade notifications sent to 7,700 Eastern Michigan University students; meant for 100.” The second story, from the UK’s Mail Online, “University accidentially Emails all 23,000 students ‘kicking them out for bad grades’” is inaccurate and makes the problem worse than it actually was.

It still is a bit of a mystery as to what went wrong, too.

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Posted in Blogosphere, College Fun, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

The online/open education revolution, or not

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 4 Comments

There’s been a lot in the news lately about online education and open education, which are two slightly different things.  Curt Bonk has a nice post that rounds up a lot of recent articles here; but I have been reading some slightly different things as of late.  I don’t know if there’s a clear connection between all these things or not, but I see at least a vague connection in my own mind:

So, what to make of all this?

For starters, I think that Blake (and others who would take this ala carte approach) are missing at least two of the points of university degrees in terms of both teaching and credentialing.  First, in order to know what classes to not take because they would be a waste of time, one has to have quite a bit more life and educational experience typical of people starting college degrees.  It’s really easy to take a course and then after the fact say “well, that was a waste of time.”  Not so easy before you take the class.

Academics debate the point and amount of general education all the time, as we did vigorously a few years ago at EMU.  But I think the prevailing wisdom is it’s a good educational experience for everyone with a college degree to have at least some introduction to other fields of study– that is, other than a “major” or a “minor”– and there are some basics that most colleges believe students ought to know something about:  writing, math, “the humanities,” and so forth.

As for all of these hyperbolic claims about the revolution of online education and how it is going to change all the rules: we’ve seen this sort of thing before.  Many years ago, I did some research on late 19th/early 20th century correspondence courses– you know, through snail mail.  Without going into details about all that now, there were a lot of people back then who thought that courses through the mail were going to bring education to the masses and largely replace conventional college degree programs.  That turned out not to be the case.  So I’m not saying that online and open education aren’t going to change the way universities work– and I’m all for that.  I’m just saying that I don’t think college degrees are going to become any less important anytime soon.

After all, even Shaq thinks it’s important!  After finishing his undergraduate degree and finishing an online MBA from the University of Phoenix, and now this doctorate.  Why?  I’m not questioning O’Neal’s intelligence or sincerity in pursing a degree, but it’s not like someone is (or isn’t ) going to hire him because of this degree, and he could have just studied and learned on his own.  But the reason for him seems to be similar to a lot of others:  besides having a credential, a college degree represents a personal goal and achievement that is significantly more tangible than participating in a free and relatively anonymous educational “experience.”

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Posted in Academics, College Fun, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life