Down a rabbit hole.

A nice summary of the problem with for-profit colleges:

Exacerbating matters is that just when a college degree is becoming the basic credential for entry into the middle class, billions of taxpayer dollars are being diverted to a questionable and expensive new player on the higher education scene: for-profit, investor-owned colleges. These institutions, with heavy investments in marketing, have enjoyed explosive growth. They also made enormous profits for their shareholders, with stock prices outperforming the S&P by about 400 percentage points for the last two years.

Of course, as we’ve learned from the banking industry, what’s good for investors may not be good for the average American. That is certainly the case with the for-profits. Their startling growth has come at great cost to their students, taxpayers and public colleges.

Students who attend for-profits pay about seven times more than students attending a publicly-run community college. For-profits are masters at tapping government programs, such as Pell Grants and subsidized student loans, to help students pay their bills. While they educate about 9% of Americans, they receive 21% of Pell money and federally subsidized student loans.

So federal money that could be helping real colleges stave off huge cuts is being diverted to students enrolled in online ventures of questionable effectiveness. That money, in turn, is going into the pockets of the rich. In terms of improving the quality of higher education or even just promoting economic recovery, it might as well have gone down a rabbit hole

Why do I feel like a Peruvian who just had his water system privatized?

Early films of New York City on YouTube.

I hate to argue with the fine folks at Open Culture (via Gawker), but at least some of these films have been available on the Library of Congress web site pretty much forever as I have been using them in class for years. I think what’s new is that they weren’t on YouTube or iTunes U where they are much more accessible.

The one above, however, is new to me, and when you think about how old it is you should be thoroughly amazed.

I only wish he had named names.

“[For-profit colleges] serve a purpose and some do a good job, but there’s obviously an incredible number of bad actors and I would like to shut them down.”

- Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota), at yesterday’s Senate hearing on for-profit colleges.

While you might discount this because you think that Franken is a left-wing nut, even the senior Republican on the committee acknowledged that there were “bad actors” in the for-profit college industry. When’s the last time you heard anybody mention a “bad actor” among community colleges?

Best Presidential Grave?: Chester Arthur.

This is a picture from my trip to New York last week:

The grave is in a cemetery in Albany and barely marked other than by the flags. Indeed, if you’d like to be buried near Chester Arthur’s final resting place there were signs up saying that there was space available.

Emperor Norton.

Did I mention that I’m in San Francisco? My new favorite Californian is Emperor Norton. From the Encyclopedia of San Francisco:

To today’s San Franciscan, the name “Emperor Norton” conjures up images of a colorful, but homeless street person, accompanied by a couple of dogs, who ordered bridges to be built and governments dissolved; an insane man revered by the San Franciscans of the late 19th Century. His story is far more complex than most San Franciscans know.

The real Emperor – Joshua Abraham Norton – is one of contradictions and myths. He was rational man who could speak about any intelligently about politics and science, was a great chess player, and was quite inventive, but believed he was the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. He issued proclamations, collected taxes, attended sessions of government, rode free on public transit, had free tickets to theater, and sold his own currency; but lived day to day as a pauper in raggedy clothes. He was a successful businessman who lost a fortune as the result of a business deal gone badly and ultimately lived off the kindness of San Franciscans, but owned no dogs and was never homeless.

The number of people who appear to be living on the streets of this city today, by the way, is quite extraordinary.

The world must be coming to an end.

I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Ohio University higher education expert Richard Vedder about absolutely anything. I now agree with Richard Vedder about something:

We could move to reduce the impact of student evaluations, or even eliminate them. One reason for their existence—to convey knowledge to students about professor—is usually met separately by other means, such as the RateMyProfessors.com Web site. Alternatively, colleges could by mandate or the use of financial incentives encourage faculty to become more rigorous in their grading. If state subsidies started to vary inversely in size with grade-point averages, state schools would quickly reduce grade inflation. In any case, we need more research into WHY students today are working less. But I would bet a few bucks that grade inflation and student evaluations are part of the answer.

Perhaps if I ever recover from the shock, I’ll offer to buy him a beer some time. Hopefully, it will be paid for out of the financial incentives my university gives me for maintaining rigorous standards in my classes. Now if that happens I’ll know the world is coming to an end.

They needed to do a study to figure this out?

From Inside Higher Ed:

Freshmen who have many of their courses taught by adjuncts are less likely than other students to return as sophomores, according to a new study looking at six four-year colleges and universities in a state system. Further, the nature of the impact of adjunct instruction varies by institution type and the type of adjunct used, the study finds. And in some cases, students taking courses from full-time, non-tenure track instructors or from adjuncts well supported by their institutions do better than those taught by other kinds of adjuncts.

This is, of course, no slam against the intelligence and teaching abilities of adjuncts. The last sentence about support from their institutions strongly indicates that it’s the time and attention that instructors put into the course that matters most. If you’re teaching six courses on three campuses, you don’t have time to care. If you don’t have a real office in which to hold office hours, students having problems have trouble finding you.

There’s something else here that is indicative of what I think is the problem of the future:

At all but one of the institutions studied, the average freshman had more than 50 percent of credits earned from courses taught by an adjunct instructor of one of the three kinds identified. Students with typical (for their institutions) use of adjunct instructors would see between a 10 and 30 percent decrease in their odds of coming back as freshmen, compared to students taught by those on the tenure track, the authors note.

I think I’ll start calling this the “I’m paying $20,000/year for what exactly?” problem. Of course, it’s not the students who are going to be asking that question as tuition costs skyrocket, it’s the parents. As my child is only two years away from college, I’m making a note to ask about instruction by contingent faculty at every on-campus visit.

Higher education bubble?

Since I found it through RYS, I didn’t realize that this article was by that Glenn Reynolds until I got to the end. Despite our political differences, I have some sympathy with this argument:

It’s a story of an industry that may sound familiar.

The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they’re buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn’t…

[B]ubbles burst when people catch on, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven’t collapsed yet, but they’re looking shakier — kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

What makes it worse is that all the proceeds from these loans are being dispersed unequally. Private lenders, university presidents and football coaches get theirs, faculty still get contingent contracts furloughs.

What stops me from panicking though is the absence of two forces that made the real estate bubble so bad: Home equity loans and flippers. And as Reynolds points out elsewhere, you can still trade down for a cheaper college education, which is one key reason my school has been booming lately.

This argument, however, gets no sympathy from me at all:

My question is whether traditional academic institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether — as Anya Kamenetz suggests in her new book, “DIY U”* — the real pioneering will be in online education and the work of “edupunks” who are more interested in finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing interests.

I’m betting on the latter. Industries seldom reform themselves, and real competition usually comes from the outside.

Apples and oranges, Glenn. Apples and oranges. Actually, it’s more like apples and rotten oranges. A college education and an online degree are not substitutes for one another. The online degree is an inferior good. Not only that, it’s an inferior good that’s actually more expensive! If I remember this program well enough, it’s on average four times as expensive as a public college.

Furthermore, I bet if the price of private college ever went down, they wouldn’t be private anymore because the investment wouldn’t be profitable enough for their shareholders. Fund a lot more capacity at America’s community colleges, like Washington Monthly has been suggesting lately, and the online college degree industry would disappear overnight.

If there really is an education bubble, it’s the online, for-profit colleges that are going to burst first.

* If someone sends me a review copy of DIY U I promise I’ll read it and write about it in this space, but I still refuse to enrich the author and publisher of book with a title that stupid.

Apparently Tim Pawlenty thinks he’s Alice Cooper.

I know I’m way way late to the party here, but Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was on the Daily Show last week. I’ve certainly seen politicians look stupider in that forum, but this (transcript via Inside Higher Ed) is still pretty bad:

“Do you really think in 20 years somebody’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about econ 101 or Spanish 101?” Pawlenty asked Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.”

“Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like it?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”

Um…yes on the backpack and no on the iCollege. Because being in the classroom is the only way anyone can be sure that students are actually learn anything. But that’s not what’s novel about this. Every edu-crat is convinced that online courses are the future. it’s the blatant pandering here that surprises me.

Leaving aside his use of the word keister, it’s pretty clear that he thinks that online education is the Republican pitch to the college age crowd. Professors are boring! Stay in bed! Save money too! Who cares if you don’t actually learn anything? If you watch the video itself, you’ll see that Pawlenty wants to set up Academia as the man that his hip Republican outsider cred will destroy on your behalf. It’s like he wants to destroy the University of Minnesota in order to save it.

Elect this guy President and school really will be out forever.

This is why you should join the AAUP.

From AAUP General Secretary Gary Rhoades:

The AAUP supports Senator Harkin’s Keep Our Educators Working Act, now being considered by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Education jobs are essential to our economic, social, and political health and to our vitality as a nation. But we must emphasize the importance of including postsecondary educators in measures to support the work of teachers and other vital public service employees. Colleges and universities are major employers in communities across the country, and are currently not renewing the appointments of contingent faculty members and not replacing tenured and tenure-track faculty members by the thousands. Neglecting college and university employment will undermine local economic recovery. Moreover, the current human capacity of colleges and universities cannot accommodate the growing numbers of students, particularly when we are simultaneously working to increase engagement with students and promote student success. To exclude postsecondary educators from this legislation would be to renege on the promise of quality postsecondary education for large numbers of students, and to undermine the vitality of our knowledge-based economy, society, and democracy.

More here, including how you can help.