<p>"Over the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen dramatically. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, rising more quickly than market goods or services and outstripping the growth in family incomes. In his new study, Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs (published by AEI's Future of American Education Project), Oklahoma State University professor Vance Fried finds that this dramatic rise in college tuition costs is due to the ways in which traditional colleges and universities organize and allocate resources, and not due to lavish university facilities and extra student services."</p>
<p>“not due to lavish university facilities and extra student services”</p>
<p>Well this is obvious. I wouldn’t assume that just because tuition is going up everywhere that colleges across the US are suddenly looking twice as amazing.</p>
<p>People decide where to go to college partially based on what they can do there. If you take away the extracurriculars, you take away networking and recreational opportunities. I think a lot of people would be ****ed about that.</p>
<p>Not necessarily true. Due to the outrageous workload at my college, administration goes out of its way to provide excellent mental health resources, far better than most universities. There is also a brand new performing arts building currently being built which was quite a few years in the making before they found the money for such a project. And as ^ pointed out, extracurriculars are important to students, graduate programs, employers, etc. I’d be more interested in a study showing how efficiently money is used in public universities vs private colleges.</p>
<p>I like extracurricular activities, but I don’t see why they should be supported with tuition dollars.</p>
<p>The quote I gave was just an introduction lol. His suggestions are:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Eliminate or separately fund research and public service</p></li>
<li><p>Optimize class size</p></li>
<li><p>Eliminate or consolidate low-enrollment programs</p></li>
<li><p>Eliminate administrator bloat</p></li>
<li><p>Downsize extracurricular student activity programs</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If you eliminated research, you’d lose basically the entire point of a university.</p>
<p>Universities for thousands of years have had a dual role: teaching current knowledge and advancing cutting-edge research. The two work together symbiotically. Splitting them apart makes no sense at all.</p>
<p>Let me make sure I get this straight. His ideal colleges offers only 9 general-purpose majors for 3,200 students, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 38:1. Class sizes and teaching load aside, I am not sure that taking the specialization out of college is such a great idea. For example, his hypothetical college teaches only a general engineering program. Does he advocate that all engineering students should go to graduate school to specialize?</p>
That’s what it seems like. This guy has lost all credibility. Does he not know anything about engineering???<br>
There’s a reason why engineering firms want people who have specific engineering majors- not just a “broad-based engineering degree.”</p>
<p>
My school doesn’t pay for ec’s with tuition money- we have an activities fee for that (which nets a $2.5 million budget for all student activities (excluding varsity sports).</p>
<p>"If you eliminated research, you’d lose basically the entire point of a university.</p>
<p>Universities for thousands of years have had a dual role: teaching current knowledge and advancing cutting-edge research. The two work together symbiotically. Splitting them apart makes no sense at all"</p>
<p>I don’t think the proposal is to eliminate research, just to change its funding. For one thing, research funded by things like NSF grants aren’t part of the same budget and would continue. And the state/institution could always fund research through means other than tuition.</p>
<p>“My school doesn’t pay for ec’s with tuition money- we have an activities fee for that (which nets a $2.5 million budget for all student activities (excluding varsity sports).”</p>
<p>Is that activities fee required for all full-time students along with tuition? If so, it might as well be tuition.</p>
<p>Anyhow, this is an extreme idea. Eliminating different engineering programs, for example, might be a bit too much. But some of the core premise has potential (I think).</p>
The core premise is to abolish specialized degrees: you’d major in “science and technology” instead of math or physics, “behavioral sciences” instead of economics or psychology, and “business” instead of accounting or marketing. General degrees already exist and they never caught on. They’d basically turn college into a glorified high school. (His ideal college is actually pretty much how high school works in other countries: students take gen ed classes as well as some more advanced classes in a broad area of specialization. College then is used to study a single major in depth, with no more exploration.)</p>
<p>“The core premise is to abolish specialized degrees: you’d major in “science and technology” instead of math or physics, “behavioral sciences” instead of economics or psychology, and “business” instead of accounting or marketing. General degrees already exist and they never caught on. They’d basically turn college into a glorified high school. (His ideal college is actually pretty much how high school works in other countries: students take gen ed classes as well as some more advanced classes in a broad area of specialization. College then is used to study a single major in depth, with no more exploration.)”</p>
<p>The core premise involves five different ideas, which I listed above. You’ve criticized an extreme version of one of them.</p>
<p>Instruction is where he proposes to realize almost half of his savings, and eliminating specialized majors is precisely how he wants to accomplish that. I’d say this qualifies as the core premise.</p>
<p>“Instruction is where he proposes to realize almost half of his savings, and eliminating specialized majors is precisely how he wants to accomplish that. I’d say this qualifies as the core premise.”</p>
<p>Increasing class size is a factor too and eliminating specialized majors doesn’t mean getting rid of all engineering specializations. It may just mean eliminating extremely low-enrollment majors, which probably applies only to the most specialized areas of engineering.</p>
<p>I don’t see this as a binary choice. Rejecting the extreme of having one single “engineering science” program doesn’t mean choosing what we have now. Something in the middle makes the most sense.</p>
<p>Did you actually read past the introduction?</p>
<p>I think colleges are already following the “soft” version of his advice in their institutional context. Under-enrolled programs get closed or reduced in size all the time. Most colleges have big intro lectures instead of multiple sections of 20 students each, in line with what he suggests. The recent financial crisis prompted colleges to make cuts in research, administration and student life.</p>
<p>There’s not much to be gained until you take his advice to the extreme - and he spends most of his paper explaining what an extreme case might look like. </p>
<p>The consolidated engineering/science/social science/humanities/business/etc programs are his suggestion, not mine. He does that to achieve an average class size of 50 students. Okay, maybe 50 students per class is a bit extreme. Currently we are at what - maybe 20 students per class? Let’s only raise that to 30 instead of 50. </p>
<p>According to his chart, going from an average class size of 20 to 30 would save us about $2,000 in instructional cost per student per year. Significant? Maybe. Significant enough that you are willing to cut 1/3 of all classes to accomplish that? How would you go about doing that? Would you eliminate half of all majors? (the “under-enrolled” half, of course!) Would you ask all departments to cut half of their upper-level courses? However you decide to implement it, the impact of this decision would be HUGE.</p>
<p>Yep, I read the whole thing. The relevant section is on page 14 of the pdf (9 of the paper).</p>
<p>*Much of the severely undersubscribed course problem comes from offering too many majors. A college has classes that few students want because they are necessary in order to offer a major that few students want. Significant cost savings can be realized by eliminating or consolidating low enrollment majors. This consolidation can also increase education quality. </p>
<p>A major that has enough students to get average class sizes of 50 is ten times cheaper to offer than a major that only has enough students to get average class size of 5. Low demand majors are a serious cost problem for private bachelor‟s colleges. As colleges grow in size, the problem lessens but does not disappear. Even large public research universities have major problems with undersubscribed courses due to numerous low-demand graduate programs.*</p>
<p>I don’t think most good engineering schools would need to cut core specializations. I know my school has many upper-div classes well above 50 in ME, in many cases well above 100. Only the more obscure technical electives are smaller.</p>
<p>I would favor charging students more for more expensive courses as another option.</p>
<p>“There’s not much to be gained until you take his advice to the extreme”</p>
<p>Much of his advice is theoretically linear. Every incremental step leads to incremental savings. The extreme example is made to get his paper into the headlines and also as a thought experiment.</p>
<p>You’re right that many schools do these things. Good for them.</p>
What about average colleges and non-engineering disciplines? I’ll take the University of New Hampshire with an enrollment of 12,000 students as an example of an average state university. (I chose UNH in particular because they publish detailed statistics about their student body.) If all programs with fewer than 50 majors per year were considered under-enrolled, then the following majors are in danger of getting cut:</p>
<ul>
<li>all sciences except biology</li>
<li>all engineering specialties except civil and mechanical</li>
<li>all foreign languages</li>
<li>all visual and performing arts</li>
<li>social work, health care management, athletic training, nutritional science, environmental science, economics</li>
</ul>
<p>The safe majors include: English, history, sociology, communications, family studies, animal science, and business administration. I guess you could make a supply and demand argument that English is really more important than electrical engineering or social work, but I have a feeling that the state university should probably keep some of those “under-enrolled” majors around anyway…?</p>
<p>If you go to 30, you would still cut all sciences except biology, all engineering specialties except civil and mechanical and all foreign languages. You could keep the journalism and music majors though! :)</p>
<p>^a smiley face at cutting everything important and keeping the fluff? I could argue that chemical, electrical, and industrial engineering are all more important (because of the training that encourages progress of humanity) than journalism and music. Same goes for the exploration of key sciences such as physics and chemistry.</p>
<p>The point is that none of these things should be cut, and setting a high and arbitrary major cutoff results in idiosyncratic results.</p>
<p>By the way, if you think journalism is “fluff,” try having a modern democratic society without a highly-informed citizenry. Hint: it doesn’t work.</p>
<p>Scientific research largely depends on public funding. That funding exists because most people understand the importance of said research.</p>
<p>Try having a society where people aren’t always receiving reports of the fruits of scientific research, aren’t being told how their money is improving knowledge. Think your funding would survive? Good luck…</p>