Scathing Le Mond article on the history & sorry state of US higher education

Parents Forum
1

<p>This article may elicit some Franco-bashing, but in the least it shows how part of the rest of the world views our hyper-competitive higher-education system as it now exists. Certainly, there is some truth to these views when the lens is pulled back.
<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2007/09/08university%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://mondediplo.com/2007/09/08university&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>some excepts</p>

<p>tag line & title

[quote]
Bar the rich and America’s campuses would empty.<br>
Education for sale in the land of the free

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<p>
[quote]
The largest fundraising campaigns are at the universities that already have the most. Selectivity does not increase the quality of the higher education sector as a whole, but ensures that nearly unlimited resources flow to a small elite, an informal US version of the French grandes écoles. To the confusion of American political culture, US higher education now embodies a contradiction in which “going to college”, the most legitimate equaliser in society, is structured around worsening inequality.

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<p>Privati(z)ation

[quote]
In reality, the economics of privatisation are absurd. For the University of California to replace the state funding it has lost since 2001, it would need an endowment of $25bn overnight, the size of Harvard’s 400 year-old endowment (5). The only viable course has been to replace public money with student fee increases. At the University of California, fees have doubled since 2001. Were the university to make up the gap between current funding and their 2001 budget, increased at the rate of personal income growth, student fees would need to double again, to about $15,000 a year. Most public universities try to hold back private money for projects of special status or potential returns. This creates gated communities of academic excellence surrounded by general facilities that decline slowly enough for the public to pay no attention. For all but the most elite students, privatisation has meant pay more, get less.

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<p>
[quote]
Privatisation’s financial failures have been matched by social ones. Privatisation encourages universities to spend money to compete for the affluent students who can pay high fees. It increases existing class divisions under which poor students are more likely to attend poor schools. It increases student debt: 75% of US families have to borrow money to send their children to college. It reduces the numbers entering public service careers because their lower salaries cannot cover the servicing of education debt. It moves education money into non-educational activities, like marketing and improved facilities, to attract the paying student-client: a 400% increase in fees and campus residence costs between 1975 and 1995 netted schools a 32% increase in expenditures per student (6).

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<p>Concluding paragraph

[quote]
These now yield to the weaknesses: the dependence of continued quality on private wealth, narrow investment, sharp stratification, costly competition and the concentration of resources at the top. This shift has been a victory for the right, for the vision of high-quality university education for the whole society has been largely abandoned. The only solution is to reinvent the university’s egalitarian vision of the uses of knowledge. But this reinvention seems more likely to come from the public than from the university.

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2

<p>Maybe this link works without signing in:</p>

<p><a href="http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:vqi_uqmnRpIJ:mondediplo.com/2007/09/08university+Education+for+sale+in+the+land+of+the+free&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:vqi_uqmnRpIJ:mondediplo.com/2007/09/08university+Education+for+sale+in+the+land+of+the+free&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

3

<p>Weenie, thanks for the link. Christopher Newfield, who penned the piece, is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He wrote -Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 - (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, March 2004) and has a work in progress entitled - Middle Class Bound: Business and the Making of the American University 1970-2000 -, (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, forthcoming Winter 2006).</p>

<p><a href="http://www.english.ucsb.edu/people-detail.asp?PersonID=32%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.english.ucsb.edu/people-detail.asp?PersonID=32&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

4

<p>And France does not operate a stratified system of higher ed where a couple of schools control most good careers?</p>

5

<p>From the New York Times Archives:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Higher Learning In France Clings To Its Old Ways</p>

<p>May 12, 2006, Friday
By ELAINE SCIOLINO (NYT); Foreign Desk</p>

<p>There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no student-run newspaper, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system. The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays.

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<p>Perhaps LeMonde is just now getting around to responding to this NYTimes scathing report on the state of higher education in France. It isn't a pretty picture.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, I can't seem to access it without a Select subscription. I remember the article from when it was published, though, and I thought it was very interesting.</p>

<p>Not to say we don't have problems, but the French example does not inspire.</p>

6

<p>This article was not about bashing. The article laments the passing of a great era in funding in US higher education. I am sure Mini has more to say about the topic.</p>

7

<p>padad, spot on, as the Brits say - "Higher education 'market' warning", a 2004 article by Robert Reich for the BBC news makes an interesting counterpoint to the Newfield article:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Number one, the system of higher education in the United States is by most measures enormously successful. It is a good system right now. It is a system that attracts students, both undergraduates and graduate students from all over the world, it's a system that in terms of research, facilities, capital expenditures, the quality of faculty, continues to be by many accounts the best in the world. My concern is about the direction that it is heading in, particularly the public part of that - its set of institutions.</p>

<p>Eighty per cent of American students in higher education attend a public university - that is a university that is sponsored and financed, at least in part, by the state. Many of you, over here, when you think about American universities you have a tendency to think about Harvard or Yale or Stanford or MIT - all wonderful universities - and I've had occasion to attend them and also teach at, at least, one of those prestigious universities. But again 80% of American students and 80% - at least 80% - of the research that goes on, the faculty appointments, are in the public sector.</p>

<p>But public sector in the United States is still in, as I've said, a quite healthy condition. But what is being lost, and certainly in danger of being lost, arguably being lost, is a public mission with regard to the higher education system in the United States - both the private and the public sector...

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<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3564531.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3564531.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

8

<p>Regarding "privatisation's financial failures...": That is what makes Hillsdale College so great! This small college can complete with many elite colleges and accepts NO federal or state monies of any kind. With tuition hovering around $18.5K, it is proof that privatization can and does work in higher ed. My S is proof that it is not just for the wealthy.</p>

9

<p>Okay. The Le Monde article is not so much aimed at enlightening the French public as lobbying for more funding for American public institutions. </p>

<p>Midmo is right about Nanterre. My brother got his degree there in the 1960s and he had to run the gamut of drug dealers to get to his classes. Later on his wife worked as a top administrator in the library system which, as the article says, is open only ten hours a day and closed on sundays and holidays. She had TEN weeks paid vacation. She got bored after four, and asked if she could go back to work--there was plenty to occupy her. She was told no, because if she returned, her staff would have to cut short their own ten weeks vacation. So the library stayed closed. Oh, and those 480,000 volumes? A half-way decent college in the US probably has more.</p>

10

<p>Newfield is also the author of "Current Budget Trends and The Future of
the University of California"</p>

<p><a href="http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/reports/AC.Futures.Report.0107.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/reports/AC.Futures.Report.0107.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>From the article: "The US GI bill gave a whole generation free tertiary education – and the generation after that, which came of age in the 1960s, also benefited from free or cheap admission to colleges that stood in opposition to the system. That world has gone."</p>

<p>That world has gone and so has the song by The Mamas' & the Papas' "California Dreamin." Seems that Newfield would love to hear it again for his buddies at the UC system. </p>

<p>Having to live within your means is just so hard! Yet, that is what all the students and families have to do. If all fails, the are always options of larger classes, more indentured servitude, more frantic pursuit of research dollars at the expense of teaching duties, fewer guaranteed housing options. Whoops ... that's today's UC!</p>

11

<p>Except for the sarcasm, I agree with Xiggi. The addition of some limits and rationing to the UC and other state systems has lead to higher academic standards rather than near open enrollment, more effective fundraising, and more careful spending on administration and the like. Nothing wrong with that. Today the swing is to more spending so they have survived the tough early 2000 era and pruned some dead wood.</p>

12

<p>No opinion either way (I haven't read it through yet), but here is the NY Times article Midmo mentioned:</p>

<p>Higher Learning In France Clings To Its Old Ways
Published: May 12, 2006</p>

<p>There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no student-run newspaper, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.</p>

<p>The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only 30 of the library's 100 computers have Internet access.</p>

<p>The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many have no office. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day the campus is largely empty.</p>

<p>Sandwiched between a prison and an unemployment office just outside Paris, the university here is neither the best nor the worst place to study in this fairly wealthy country. Rather, it reflects the crisis of France's archaic state-owned university system: overcrowded, underfinanced, disorganized and resistant to the changes demanded by the outside world.</p>

<p>''In the United States, your university system is one of the drivers of American prosperity,'' said Claude All</p>

13

<p>Our Reed daughter attended Nanterre last semester. Her primary reaction was that Nanterre students don't have to work nearly as hard as Reedies; her Paris friends from other American schools reported the same experience. So when I saw "Scathing Le Mond article on the history & sorry state of US higher education" I was a bit startled, but with the subject being money, it made sense. Yes, some U.S. schools are disgustingly expensive, but students at French schools may be paying the price of their low (zero) cost. Yet again, moderation is due, but both extremes seem caught in their respective ideologies.</p>

14

<p>Somehow there was no mention of the huge amounts of money spent on financial aid. Somehow there was no mention of the very low cost and high quality of the State universities. Somehow there was no mention of our excellent and low cost community colleges.</p>

<p>I would say this thread belongs in the Parents Cafe or better, the recycle bin.</p>

15

<p>Americans are impressed by accents & and they love the romance of Harry Potter- Guard your expectations of overseas education is all I can say. Verify all claims before you pay the tuition and board the plane. The quality of Professor, education concern for student is very different from what you assume. Vacation and summer programs are one thing- think it out fully before you buy your ticket to " greater depth" of education!</p>

16

<p>Re Post #12: If I hadn't known this was about French higher ed, I could have sworn it described public k-12 education in much more than half of my State. (bare bones, and sandwiched between outdated & despairing)</p>

<p>Any country that neglects either end of the education spectrum puts its future in peril.</p>

<p>Like edad, I'm not sure why the emphasis of the writer is so much on one segment of <em>private</em> (btw) US education, when that represents a small portion of the whole picture. The upper end may reflect a lack of balance, but the rest of our country's institution's offer a contrasting range of opportunity that the "elites" supposedly do not. (For example, if the community college in your area lacks resources or quality instructors/courses, you can move elsewhere -- become employed & live in a room, even -- to attend one of the finer, more well-staffed community colleges. Can't do that when you're a dependent in the k-12 system, living with custodial adults.)</p>

17

<p>Re Epiphany's post 16: When I first read the NYTimes article, last year, I was struck by the parallels between the French higher ed system (students are assigned to the college nearest their residence) and the vast majority of public K-12 systems in the U.S. In fact, I referenced that article in a letter I wrote to our local paper in favor of school choice in the K-12 system.</p>

18

<p>I've long thought that the French k-12 system was superior to the American k-12 system but that when it came to higher ed, the US system was far superior.</p>

<p>You can choose not to attend your local U in France, though within certain limits, and only if you don't need to live at home. One of my nieces decided to attend university in Bordeaux instead of Paris. The majority of Americans, too, attend their local unis.</p>

19

<p>The article is not about French education. It discusses US colleges in different time periods. Why people use French education to refute the author? Is it the way teachers tell the kids how to analyze an article, how to argue? Some reactions here sound like the ones in a Republican and Democrat debate.</p>

<p>To me, the author has some good point about money in US college education.</p>

20

<p>why even discuss French education? Could it be because the article was published in Le Monde Diplomatique, albeit in English and also that it made a direct reference to the Grandes Ecoles--which are indeed the French equivalents of the most selective schools in the US but hardly representative of the French system of higher education any more than HYPSM are representative of American higher education.</p>

<p>
[quote]
The largest fundraising campaigns are at the universities that already have the most. Selectivity does not increase the quality of the higher education sector as a whole, but ensures that nearly unlimited resources flow to a small elite, an informal US version of the French grandes </p>