Interesting commentary on the realities of public vs private universities

Parents Forum
1

<p>I found this post comparing public and private higher-ed over on Kevin Drum's Mother Jones blog to be quite interesting. The central point that the guest poster makes is that public universities can no longer afford the small, professor-led seminar classes where the most valuable learning takes place, the students write far fewer papers (and receive less valuable feedback), and their critical thinking skills are underdeveloped as a result:</p>

<p>Public</a> vs. Private Universities: A Reply From the Trenches | Mother Jones</p>

<p>I don't have a sense of how accurate a portrayal this is, but I found it food for thought. Comments?</p>

2

<p>Not every private school is Harvard or Stanford either nor can many people get into them or their peers. Many of the other privates are equally $$ challenged.</p>

3

<p>I can understand how public schools can be financially challenged, given state aid cuts and all. For the life of me I cannot understand how a private can charge upwards of $50K yet be unable to pay its (mostly moderately paid) professors to teach classes. </p>

<p>In our school district, they report spending around $15K per student. It seems to be sufficient to hire enough teachers, many with advanced degree.</p>

4

<p>Not all private colleges are Ivies and not all publics are in the UC system.</p>

<p>There is probably a multi-way tradeoff between total enrollment, research intensity, funding, and emphasis on teaching. The impact of this tradeoff will vary on an individual basis depending on each student’s needs. For what it’s worth, I can’t do the math justifying $50k+ in spending per student.</p>

<p>Mr Drum doesn’t prove that “the result of less money spent on real teaching must, over time, be less learning” because he doesn’t show that the money will be used in a manner that encourages learning. But even if we buy that, there is a limit to how much society can afford to spend on education. We need to find ways to innovate and get more for less. That’s reality.</p>

5

<p>I think the commentary cited in post #1 is just profoundly misinformed. Here’s an example:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>This is just pure baloney. Of course there are “no discussion sections and no teaching assistants” in “most upper-level courses” at Michigan. That’s because most upper-level courses are relatively small and taught by professors who lead their own discussions and do their own grading. And yes, they DO assign papers, contrary to the fiction posted in the article.</p>

<p>Fact of the matter is, there are more large (50+ students) classes at Cornell (18.2%) than at Michigan (16.8%), according to both schools’ most recent common data sets. And if you throw in all classes of 40+ students–the level at which it becomes difficult to hold a meaningful discussion–Cornell is even more heavily tilted toward large classes (23.4% of classes are 40+ at Cornell, while 20.7% are 40+ at Michigan). </p>

<p>Granted, Cornell is on the high end of class sizes for a private university. But this isn’t just a public v. private thing. Some public universities have extremely high percentages of large classes, e.g., UCSD (34% of classes have 50+ students); others are much lower, e.g., UNC-Chapel Hill (13% of classes have 50+ students, same as Stanford and MIT, and only slightly more than Princeton with 11%). At William & Mary the percentage of large (50+) classes is 8%-- the same as Harvard and Dartmouth, and lower than Cornell, Princeton, Penn, and Brown. You can’t lump all privates together and you can’t lump all publics together.</p>

6

<p>

</p>

<p>The horror! The horror!</p>

<p>Dire straits it must be when a school can no longer afford indentured servants. Seriously, the world of academia must reach its bottom when people start to complain that classes are no longer taught by amateurs masquerading as teachers. </p>

<p>Is the alternative of having professors teach classes and take full responsibility for their duties really that … horrible?</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Why would that be surprising? Except for its membership in the Ivy League, Cornell has all the attributes of a large public school.</p>

7

<p>

</p>

<p>Looks like a lot of broad brush generalizations that don’t hold, as there is considerable variation from department to department and course to course within a department in terms of class size and the use of TAs.</p>

8

<p>

</p>

<p>I thought Cornell was public - one of the land-grant universities - and in the Ivy League no?</p>

9

<p>

</p>

<p>I understood the implication to be that the upper level classes were still pretty large, and that the distinction was between having smaller discussion sections in addition to the larger lectures vs not.</p>

<p>But on the broader point, sounds like there is a lot of skepticism about the claims made in the article, and I’m in no position to defend them. I will point out that it was not Kevin Drum himself making these assertions (in fact, he had a prior post making almost the exact opposite point), but one of his readers, whose comments he reposted.</p>

<p>Finally, the author of the piece concludes that it’s the students at LACs that are actually getting the benefit of the most professor-taught, small-class learning, and I think that’s largely true. Whether that’s worth $50+K/year is a point that’s been debated plenty elsewhere on these boards.</p>

10

<p>Holy moly!</p>

<p>Cornell is not public. Some of its schools receive some public funding from New York State in return for reduced tuition rates at those schools for New York residents. Its board is not politically appointed, and public subsidies make up a tiny portion of its operating budget – even tinier than the tiny portion public subsidies represent at Michigan, Berkeley, and UVa. Also, at about 14,000 undergraduates Cornell’s college is much smaller than the colleges at all but the smallest public research universities – roughly the same undergraduate size as the University of North Dakota and the University of Hawaii. But most of those small public flagships have far fewer graduate students than Cornell. (Not Hawaii, though – it’s almost exactly the same size.) The University of Michigan is twice as big as Cornell.</p>

<p>Not that there’s anything wrong with being public . . . except for what this article is discussing (which sounds wrong), and the current fiasco at UVa (a politically appointed university board is a bad idea).</p>

11

<p>Hybrid but essentially private but contracts with NY to provide some public colleges–such as ag school.</p>

12

<p>Cornell is, at its core, a private university. Within the university there are the endowed colleges and the contract colleges. The contract colleges are ILR, CALS, and Human Ecology. They are sometimes referred to as the state schools at Cornell and erroneously called SUNYs. They go back to the land-grant mission of the university.</p>

<p>Many land grant institutions are indeed the state flagship university, but not all. It is a little known fact that Yale was the original Connecticut land grant school, but lost out to UConn, then the Storrs Agricultural College.</p>

13

<p>Cornell has several colleges in the university that are part of the land grant and are SUNY schools – labor relations, a biology major, there’s the school of human ecology – I don’t remember them all clearly. Arts and Sciences and Engineering are private.</p>

<p>The kids do have some classes together, so going to a land grant college is still going to Cornell, but the discount is only available in particular majors and for NYS residents.</p>

<p>I find some of the comments here about TA’s a bit harsh having been one. But each is entitled to his/her own opinion.</p>

<p>Re wondering how privates can be in dire straights – it’s nothing like a high school. The physical plant is separate buildings which need heat, upkeep, refurbishing and rebuilding. A high school science lab or theater would never be sufficient for a college class.</p>

<p>A high school doesn’t maintain a department that may only graduate ten majors.</p>

<p>A high school does not need to provide an infirmary.</p>

<p>A high school doesn’t serve three meals a day.</p>

<p>A high school usually doesn’t have the athletic facilities of a college.</p>

<p>An elite private high school can be close to college tuition.</p>

<p>Our public HS costs $21K per student because we have a graduating class of under 100, so facilities are maintained for a small number of students.</p>

<p>My s’s private’s tuition was right up there with pricey privates and in fund raising drives we got notified that this astronomical tuition didn’t even cover the cost of his education and alumni contributions and endowment monies are needed to cover there rest.</p>

<p>Smaller class sizes means more professors.</p>

<p>The less prestigious publics are in a bit of bind justifying their tuition when publics are a reasonable alternative, and their alumni giving may be less and their endowments often substantially smaller.</p>

<p>PS I have no dog in this race. I got a great education at a public and kids did at privates.</p>

14

<p>Professors at large U’s such as UC are not interchangeable with profs at small LACs. Often the profs at non top LACs are the ones who didn’t get tenure at a large U. Who teaches better critical thinking?</p>

15

<p>Land grant schools at Cornell are part of SUNY? Holy moly indeed.</p>

16

<p>Just to be clear, the land grant schools at Cornell are NOT part of SUNY. SUNY administers the state appropriation, which is included in the SUNY budget. But SUNY has no substantive control over that money, and of course no control over the schools that receive it.</p>

17

<p>

</p>

<p>Even if this were true - do you have data to support your assertion? - the fact that tenure decisions rarely give much weight, if any, to teaching ability makes it meaningless. In fact, for an assistant professor to neglect her research in order to spend more time with undergraduates and preparing lessons might well reduce the chances of getting tenure. </p>

<p>Totally anecdotal: I was talking to a friend of my niece a couple of weeks ago. She’s a graduate student in rhetoric at a well-regarded flagship. She looks at her research and dissertation as a means to an end - a PhD that will qualify her to teach at a LAC, because her passion is teaching, and she believes that it’s at LACs that teaching passion and ability are recognized and rewarded. She’s currently a TA and says she’s much happier in the classroom than in the library.</p>

18

<p>A very good portion of classes at Michigan are fewer than 40 students. Things like intro Chem and Psych aren’t, but are those small classes anywhere?</p>

19

<p>

</p>

<p>Actually, over 70% of the classes at Michigan are fewer than 30 students. Roughly 80% of the classes are fewer than 40 students.</p>

<p>As to the question: yes, at some LACs there are are few if any large classes, even at the intro level. At my daughter’s LAC, Haverford, there are no classes with 100+ students, and only 2 classes with 50-99 students. Now I should be careful here; for all I know, the two classes with 50+ students could be intro Chem and intro Psych. But even if they are, these would be much smaller classes than you’d find at most research universities. At Cornell there’s an intro Psych class that regularly draws 1300 students.</p>

<p>The biggest difference is between LACs and research universities–not public v. private, CC lore notwithstanding. As the data show, private research universities like Stanford, MIT, and Cornell are much closer to the top public universities in the number of larger classes they offer (and in the number of large classes students actually take, since by definition large classes are “large” because many students actually take them) than these private universities are to LACs. </p>

<p>If you want small classes, go to a LAC. Don’t be duped into thinking you’ll spend most of your time in small classes at a major research university just because it’s private. Even at Princeton, students likely spend as much or more time in large (50+) classes as in small (<20) ones, as I think I’ve demonstrated in previous threads.</p>

20

<p>Well, one thing is sure, teaching people how to write and think critically and discussing material with them as an expert in that field and making connections across disciplines so that students can begin to appreciate how to solve complex problems is a very labor intensive endeavor. </p>

<p>And, you would hope, if you are coughing up 50K per year you are getting your money’s worth. If you are going public at far less per year you are going to get a lot less. You sort of get what you pay for. I have no doubt you get more individual attention at smaller schools. </p>

<p>Again, you get what you pay for.</p>