<p>Well it sounds to me like the college needs to cut back since it is not doing well fiscally and maybe they need just one less professor. </p>
<p>It is not to hard to understand that when you expect more of the population to attend college, you get a lower standard of student.</p>
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<p>There is a distinction between producing enough biology graduates to advance the field and make new discoveries in medicine, etc. versus flooding the market with graduates who will likely either leave the field for better careers or do mostly low end lab technician jobs. The poor job and career prospects might also deter some students who really have a passion for biology research from majoring in it.</p>
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<p>How counter-cultural! Immediate monetary return is what drives our society. We have no use for education that advances the human condition in non-monetary ways or that carries forward the accumulated wisdom and experience of the past 3,000 years - unless there’s an immediate payback. Don’t major in literature, or art history, or anthropology, or philosophy, or language, or _________, because there won’t be dozens of recruiters slavering over you at the career fair. And don’t even think about college as preparation for leading a rewarding and fulfilling life of the mind - it’s all about how many toys you accumulate before you die.</p>
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<p>No, I’m afraid that logic does not apply. Increasing the size of the applicant pool by equalizing in-state and OOS tuition does not necessarily decrease the yield - in fact, it may actually increase it. What will surely decrease is the admissions rate, but the directional impact on the yield is unclear. In fact, you admitted this yourself - by decreasing the cost of OOS tuition, you encourage better OOS students to apply, and if admitted, they may choose to come because of the lower cost, hence, increasing the yield of the admitted OOS students. </p>
<p>Now, I also agree, like you said, that equalizing tuitions will decrease the attractiveness (and hence the yield) of in-state students. But the total effect over both instate and OOS students is unclear and is ultimately an empirical question. I strongly suspect that the overall effect would be to improve (and probably quite strongly) the quality of the student body, for while you may be decreasing the attractiveness of the school to the 5 million people in Colorado, you are increasing its attractiveness to the other 295 million Americans who are not in Colorado, along with potentially millions more foreign students.</p>
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<p>Except for the problem that the one professor in question is tenured and is therefore effectively unfireable, as all tenured professors are. And indeed, one could argue that the professor in question is utilizing tenure for precisely the reason that it was implemented in the first place - to advance provocative ideas without fear of repercussions.</p>
<p>Now, if you want to argue that perhaps UColorado - and other state universities as well - should simply abolish tenure entirely, that’s a whole 'nother conversation.</p>
<p>Mods…can these two threads be merged?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1188266-why-does-state-tuition-exist-all-one-state-university-prof-asks.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1188266-why-does-state-tuition-exist-all-one-state-university-prof-asks.html</a></p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a good idea for state tuition/fees/books to cost more than full Pell and a student loan…so about $11k total. That allows most kids to at least commute to their local school using work study and a summer job to pay for the other costs.</p>
<p>sakky, where do you suggest that the in-state students go when they can’t even afford their own state school?</p>
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<p>I agree. Moreover, they’re leaving the field for better paying careers when they can, but not because the market is flooded with too many new biology graduates. Labs are filling up the spots by hiring and recruiting those outside of the country who are willing to work more for less money, while the high achieving, capable U.S. grads who can make the most difference to the research field are finding the career of “making new discoveries in medicine” financially unappealing.</p>
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<p>But the state may be receiving that return on investment apart from whatever tuition subsidies may or may not exist for future instate students. For example, the city of Boulder, CO is a leading center of sci/tech research employment, almost certainly due to the presence of the university. The university surely generates significant tax revenues through the ancillary business activity that its students and graduates produce. The university also serves to draw top minds from around the world to reside in Colorado at least temporarily, and some will probably stay permanently.</p>
<p>Let’s see … assuming that academic potential is equally spread across the entire US population, and that an instate student is ten times more likely to apply to CU than to an OOS public, and that admission will be based on academic potential (however you want to define it) then CU would become overwhelmingly OOS … unless of course tuition was raised high enough to discourage students from NY, CA, IL, TX, etc. from applying, in which case lots of CO kids would be financially excluded from CU. Sure hope academically gifted kids in CO are concentrated in high income families!</p>
<p>BTW, if the goal is a more competitive applicant pool, why not open CU to the 4.7 billion persons that reside outside the US? I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the CU Chancellor explains to the Governor that “we only admitted 65 residents from CO this year because the remainder of freshman slots were taken by better qualified applicants.”</p>
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<p>These are my thoughts. Flawed or not I really have just gotten bored of it and will just leave this as is. If nothing else there certainly is a leap there and the logic deciding that leveling the tuitions will increase selectivity is not obvious, whether it is correct or not. </p>
<p>I also realize I made a lot of assumptions about opposing forces balancing out and coming to a net-0. If you don’t make these the only conclusion you can come up with is that there’s no way to tell what will happen. This is not rigorous at all but it’s the best I can do.</p>
<p>Let me make some assumptions:</p>
<p>-The average OOS applicant is of higher “quality” (This is the goal)
-The average IS applicant is of lower “quality” (This is an unintended consequence)
-More OOS applicants and fewer IS applicants, leading to more applicants overall (we both agree to this I think)
-At current the average OOS and IS applicant is about the same “quality” (Just have to make it so)</p>
<p>I also made some assumptions about how one thing will effect another</p>
<p>From this I will conclude that the average applicant overall is of higher “quality”</p>
<p>-The school admits every student above a certain threshold “quality”.</p>
<p>i. Assume the school admits at the same rate as before.
-The average admitted student is better than before.
-The yield of OOS is unclear because the price decrease and the increase in standards are in conflict. For simplicity I will assume this means it balances and is the same as before.
-The yield of all IS students decreases. Both the higher price and higher admission standards discourage them.</p>
<p>Because the yield overall decreased but the number of students admitted increases we will say it balanced out and there aren’t too many or too few students enrolling.</p>
<p>The average enrolling student is about the same as before because the while the school is getting a lower quality student compared to who they admitted before the average admitted student was of higher quality. So say it balances.</p>
<p>ii. Assume the school admits at a lower rate as before
-The average admitted student is of even higher quality as in i, thus the yield will be lower than in case i.
-Fewer students are admitted</p>
<p>This is similar to case i, except we now have fewer admitted people. Thus, we have an imbalance, there will be too few enrollees. </p>
<p>The approproiate case must be case i, where we conclude the average student will be the same, the admit rate will remain constant, number admitted will increase, the yield will decrease.</p>
<p>But the state may be receiving that return on investment apart from whatever tuition subsidies may or may not exist for future instate students. For example, the city of Boulder, CO is a leading center of sci/tech research employment, almost certainly due to the presence of the university. The university surely generates significant tax revenues through the ancillary business activity that its students and graduates produce. The university also serves to draw top minds from around the world to reside in Colorado at least temporarily, and some will probably stay permanently.</p>
<p>The university “surely” generates tax revenues? Some will “probably” stay permenantly?</p>
<p>A lot of assumptions here. But even so, at most, you are making the case for STEM types to get tutiion breaks.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, the now-high cost of a university education, and the economic environment of austerity that accumulated debt (personal / household, corporate, and government) is forcing means that being able to disregard job, career, and cost consideration in choosing a university education is now a luxury affordable only by those from very wealthy families. For the student, it is not about accumulating toys, but about staying out of debt and the unemployment line. For the state governments, it is not about anything other than the immediate need of trying to make the budgets balance.</p>
<p>This is a rather unfortunate situation, since widespread knowledge of many subjects is generally a good thing for both individuals and society as a whole. But can the economic environment of austerity allow students and families, state governments, or private universities without gigantic endowments to afford it now?</p>
<p>what’s that saying about being a jack-of-all-trades…???</p>
<p>In my experience, literature majors have (relatively) very good job prospects; they just don’t pay as well (initially) as engineering or accounting majors. People who can write a decent English sentence with facility are in great demand, even in technical fields, and especially in business.</p>
<p>I don’t see why it is in the state’s interest to look for the “highest quality” student body. I do see it as in the state’s interest to educate as many low-income students as they can, so as eliminate the cycle of poverty, and extend opportunities to all.</p>
<p>I’d like to see more art history and music history majors. We can get plenty of engineers from India and China.</p>
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<p>Actually, I think that the counterargument includes the most assumptions of all - and quite ridiculous ones at that. Is it reasonable to assume that a university generates absolutely and precisely zero tax revenue at all? That is to say, not a single university employee is paying state taxes? That university faculty and students have spawned not even a single tax-generating business? Or, that not even a single OOS or foreign student has ever decided to stay in the state of Colorado after they graduated?</p>
<p>Now, we can argue about how large the magnitude of the benefit is, or whether the benefit is worth its cost. But to assume that the benefit is exactly and precisely zero is ludicrous.</p>
<p>I’m so tired of these dorky, closed minded STEM people who see little value in humanities.</p>
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<p>Which is why I said that this is ultimately an empirical question: you simply cannot assume a priori that all forces will balance out. </p>
<p>Indeed, from a purely intuitive standpoint, they almost certainly won’t. Again, only 5 million people live in Colorado, compared to 295 million people in the rest of the United States and however many additional millions of foreign students you may want to add to the analysis. And let’s face it - Colorado has no hammerlock on student talent; surely there are plenty of talented students in other states who would have liked to attend UColorado but who can’t afford OOS tuition. Granted, an increase in in-state tuition will result in a loss of some talented instate students, but given the small in-state population vs. the far larger out-of-state population (5 million vs. 295 million, or a ratio of 1:59) it would seem that the balance would tend to shift towards an increase in quality.</p>
<p>Furthermore, we also have to capture 2nd-order effects. Any perceived increase in the quality and selectivity of UColorado - even if illusory - would serve to increase overall yields, both instate and out of state. For example, if UColorado developed a reputation for competing heavily for the best student talent across the nation, then that would increase the attractiveness of UColorado for even the in-state students whose admission would signal that they were strong enough to withstand a national admissions pool. {By the same vein, Harvard students enjoy the prestige and self-validation of knowing that they surmounted a worldwide admissions pool.} Let’s face it - right now, UColorado, just like most other flagship state universities - is often times denigrated and dismissed as a ‘safety school’ by the better students in Colorado who attend only because they aren’t admitted to another school that they really want. In the future, perhaps that won’t be so.</p>
<p>Life is also not about how quickly you find a good job right out of college. My niece, BA English Lit/MA American Studies, both from state flagships, went through a couple of years of low-end jobs. But her basic intelligence, her ability to think through serious issues, and he ability to express herself in speech and writing enabled her to develop one of those low-end jobs (as a receptionist) into a management job in a field that has nothing remotely to do with English literature or American studies, and she has a very bright future. And she’s a much more interesting person that your typical engineering or computer science grad whose idea of cultural enlightenment is Dancing with the Stars.</p>
<p>(Hey, if you STEM types get to stereotype, then so do I!)</p>
<p>Hey. a STEM person who doesn’t see value in humanities really isn’t all that smart after all, no matter how many 5s they have on math and science APs or if they won Intel or participated on math Olympiad. I would be ashamed if my kids turned out so dorky, uncultured, and, quite frankly, dumb. I was a math major and see tons of value in humanities.</p>
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<p>I agree that, under the current proposal, the majority of CU students might indeed be OOS, and your tone indicates that you consider that to a bad outcome. </p>
<p>Now let’s consider the darker implications of what you’ve just said. What you’re really saying is that many Colorado high school students would simply not be good enough to be admitted if forced to compete against a national admissions pool. In particular, Colorado students are simply less qualified than the students who would be applying from NY, TX, IL, FL, or the like…but nevertheless deserve to be admitted to CU anyway. And you likewise feel that they deserve to be admitted. </p>
<p>If that is what you believe, that is your right, but I frankly have little sympathy towards that position. After all, what you’re effectively saying is that Colorado students who don’t work very hard, who have less talent, who are generally less qualified should nevertheless continue to be admitted to a strong university over other students who are more qualified. That’s a rather cynical and nihilistic of viewing your instate constituency, is it not? Whatever happened to the principle of meritocracy? </p>
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<p>And indeed I proposed precisely that. After all, if the students in Colorado were truly qualified, then they should have nothing to fear from international competition, right? Or are you saying that they’re not really that qualified? </p>
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<p>Then consider the political gaucheness of the conversations that must be occurring right now. Right now, the CU Chancellor probably has to explain to the Governor that: “The truth is, the people of Colorado can’t really compete against the best minds from the rest of the country, much less from the rest of the world, and so we had to admit thousands of applicants who were actually worse than their OOS and foreign counterparts.” Surely you would agree that that doesn’t exactly flatter the people of Colorado.</p>