Coronavirus exposes unnecessary, inflated costs of higher education

Colleges and universities across the nation have closed their doors, sent students home and transitioned to online classes during the coronavirus public health emergency. The adjustment was swift and relatively smooth, exposing an uncomfortable reality for the higher education business: Students can continue to get an education without lazy river waterparks, vegan culinary options, or “sex week” events that have become the “college experience.”

Higher education’s response to the coronavirus has exposed the fact that the system needs to be reformed and refocused to serve its original purpose: educating. As students and their parents adjust to learning online, they no doubt will question why they are paying $30,000 to $70,000 for their degrees. The answer is obvious, and the solution is simple. No, it isn’t forgiving the student loans and making college free, it’s cutting the fat and starving the beast.

As we’ve covered extensively at Campus Reform, universities are charging students exorbitant rates to subsidize events, amenities and services that do little to advance their educations, such as “diversity officers” and their $175,088 median salaries, or $10 million multicultural centers.

While the next generation is often criticized for its victimhood mentality, in this case, these young adults are, in fact, the victims of a broken system. In a modern economy where a college degree is a prerequisite for many jobs, students are left with little choice when it comes to signing up for decades of student loan payments just to have a shot at getting a job interview.

The way higher education has quickly transitioned to online learning may serve as a catalyst for making the necessary changes to bring the cost of a higher degree down by trimming the unnecessary line items and getting back to the goal: educating. That means hiring fewer non-academic administrators, building fewer amusement park-like attractions, and making sure the biology students working towards med school aren’t forced to first take courses such as “feminist history” and “angry white male studies.” There’s a reason tuition rates have gone up 163 percent since 1988, and it’s not that the cost of educating has increased. It’s the result of bloated university budgets.

In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of loan-strapped students will be introduced to online education for the first time. Many will wonder why they didn’t meet sooner. Gen Z and millennials have been ready for remote learning and working for years — in fact, they prefer it. They are tech natives fully accustomed to online communication. In a recent poll, 72 percent of college students said they’d prefer a job working remotely as opposed to going into the office.

The coronavirus could spark the change we need to bring down the cost of higher education. People are opening their eyes to the unnecessary extras and we’re already seeing students demand that their universities cancel student fees and other tuition costs. This new view of tuition bills could spur demand and subsequent supply for more affordable, online options as alternatives to traditional four-year, on-campus programs. As we all should have learned in Econ 101, choice drives prices down.

I’m not arguing to do away with college campuses and classroom learning — there are plenty of benefits to the traditional college experience. But students deserve more options when it comes to higher education, and they deserve to get an education at a reasonable cost.

The impact of coronavirus will certainly remain long after the epidemic passes. Our rattled nation will transition to addressing lessons learned and making changes. I believe we can come out stronger and better, and reforming our broken higher education system can be a silver lining.

SOURCE 





Make American Colleges Grade Again!

With all the disruption of academic life and finances by Covid-19 (see my last three epistles), colleges are almost certainly going to need what the late Clayton Christensen called “disruptive innovation” this fall. The problem: with budgets almost certainly severely constrained (despite the Feds dropping some money out of airplanes, or the equivalent, over college campuses), how can you improve the educational product to attract students and serve society without spending money?

Enter Grace Greason, a writer for the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Political Review and I suspect a Harvard undergraduate. In a wonderful article (providing the source for this post’s headline), Grace showed how debilitating grade inflation is at our nation’s leading universities. Grades below A- are a rarity at many schools, making it difficult for employers and others to distinguished between superb students and slackers.

While grade inflation is slightly less substantial at less selective admissions schools attended by the bulk of American college students, it is even a bigger problem there, especially for the best and brightest of their students. I have taught or attended several highly selective universities and liberal arts colleges, and my own experience is that the very best (top one or two %) of students at my mid-quality state school are as good as the average student attending highly selective schools like Harvard or Yale—and generally better than Harvard and Yale slackers getting 3.5 grade point averages without doing much work. Yet these very high quality individuals at schools like mine are hurt by grade inflation—4.0 GPA students are numerous—too many for the best to stand out to graduate schools and top-flight employers doing hiring.

But the biggest problem is that grade inflation is probably the largest single reason that today’s students on average spend more time partying than studying, reading, writing papers, etc. We greatly underutilize vital human resources. Time Use Survey and other data show the typical college student who spent 40 hours weekly on academic work in the middle of the 20th century spends about one-third less (27 hours) today. Students work less hard than their parents are working to send them to school. Working 40 hours a week on academics might net a student a 3.8 GPA instead of a 3.6 earned with normal study behavior—not enough better to justify 13 hours weekly more studying when partying or video-game opportunities loom. This leads to disappointment and worse among employers, generating high “underemployment” of recent college grads.

Grade inflation has been happening for many decades, but the big surge began around 1970, I think probably largely because of two phenomena. First and most important, student evaluations of professors became popular and meaningful, and professors thought (correctly) they could buy some degree of popularity by giving high grades. Second, some believe there was some raising of grades to reduce the possibility that students would be drafted during the Vietnam War, although personally I did not sense that factor at the time.

The elite schools have been somewhat embarrassed by the appearance of a lack of standards and accordingly have made some attempts to curb grade inflation, but those efforts typically failed after a number of years and they reverted back to the prevailing “high grades for all” standard. Part of the problem is schools don’t want to be out of line with their competitors. If the average GPA at Yale and Princeton is 3.90, but only 3.20 at Harvard, Harvard students and potential applicants might feel disadvantaged, and employers might shun their graduates. Just as in the Cold War, when neither the U.S. or the Soviet Union felt they could unilaterally disarm, necessitating arms agreements, so American universities unlikely will change their policies unilaterally.

There are two groups that probably could end grade inflation nationally: the regional accreditation organizations or the U.S. Department of Education. The seven regional accrediting agencies could agree on, say, a maximum permitted average GPA for all undergraduate students of 3.20 (I would prefer 2.8 or even 2.5, about what it was when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern), and perhaps we could gradually move to such a standard.

By making American colleges grade again, we can make American college students work again as well.

SOURCE 






Australia: When a mother accused parents of having “blood on their hands”, Samantha Maiden knew things had reached a new level of weird

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the debate on schools, kids, and COVID-19 in Australia descended into complete hysteria.

One minute the kids in my suburb were enjoying a few weeks of sunshine after smoke blanketed the city and closed the highway out to the beach.

The next, the coronavirus appeared on the horizon and parents seemed to divide into warring camps of those who wanted kids to stay at school and those calling for shutdowns.

Personally, it was only when I read a Facebook post from a mother accusing parents who wanted to send kids to school of having “blood on their hands” that it was clear things had got pretty weird.

Parents all over Australia are dealing with home schooling kids, and not all are loving it. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
Parents all over Australia are dealing with home schooling kids, and not all are loving it. Picture: Jake NowakowskiSource:News Corp Australia

Another highlight - my 10-year-old son getting bailed up by a woman pushing a pram down at the local park and asked if he was in a “family group” with the other 10-year-old child at the basketball court. Unhappy with the answer, she started photographing them.

Like most Australians, my family supports the measures to introduce social distancing and close state and international borders. The border closures are vital and need to stay in place.

The debate over when to reduce restrictions around schools, however, is a minefield.

Many parents still believe that children are silent carriers of COVID-19 and schools are “petri dishes” with students infecting teachers.

Some parents and teachers are happy to keep schools closed indefinitely if it “saves lives”. But does it?

Some of the nation’s top scientific minds advising Australia’s COVID-19 response concede we simply don’t know yet if school closures have had a big impact at all.

But the early evidence here in Australia and China is that students are not big spreaders to adult teachers in school.

That’s why the argument “why can I teach a classroom of 30 kids but not go to a pub with adults?” is not a particularly good argument. It is different, according to the scientists who study the coronavirus.

For years politicians have been urged to listen to the science on climate change, but teachers and parents who don’t want to return to classrooms won’t listen to the experts on COVID-19 and schools.

The official medical advice has never changed: schools remain safe to stay open.

What changed is some states buckled under the pressure of parents and teachers’ unions to close schools.

Many parents took that as a message that schools are unsafe. They promptly voted with their feet and kept kids at home.

In some states, education ministers have proposed to re-open schools “when the health advice changes”, despite the fact it never advised to shut schools in the first place.

Around about the same time my son was getting bailed up by the basketball police in mid-March, the deputy chief medical officer Paul Kelly gave a very simple explanation about what we know about COVID-19 and kids.

“We know from where the virus has broken out, very few kids get the illness,’’ he said.

“Those that get the illness are mainly mild, they don’t appear to be transmitted between children – in fact, it’s more likely that children will get it from their own parents and other people in their households. And closing schools, we know, does cause a major disruption to society and to families.”

Just four days later, schools around the country started to effectively shut down.

The idea of a sensible middle way, where you allow at-risk teachers to work from home and extend the same choice to families, was sacrificed on the altar of panic and fear.

So, don’t be fooled by the soothing tones of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s love letter to the nation’s teachers this week in his Facebook video.

The message was blunt: If supermarket workers, truck drivers and hospital cleaners can fight COVID-19 for the minimum wage by simply doing their day jobs, why are teachers still working from home?

The Prime Minister’s message was designed to get parents to ask more questions about why schools are closed.

Respecting teachers’ amazing work educating children and making the switch to distance learning should not preclude parents from questioning politicians’ decision to close schools.

Despite claims essential workers can send children to school if necessary, many parents I have spoken to say teachers actively discourage this. Certainly, this was also my experience.

But the real risk of the current arrangements is not inconvenience for parents but lifelong consequences for disadvantaged teenagers.

On the eve of a recession, some will leave school without even finishing high school and never return.

Others will be trapped at home with parents who may be struggling with unemployment, depression and substance abuse. These kids have a right to an education. They are safer at school.

As feared, many grandparents are being called on to help with homeschooling, just as authorities feared.

Just like the brawls over toilet paper in supermarket aisles, this is a debate that has sometimes seemed more driven by fear, emotion, and anxiety than science.

If you don’t want to send your kids to school, you remain free not to. But families who want their kids to return to classrooms should be offered the same choice.

SOURCE