<p>Most of the engineers I know end up in dead end jobs. They start out at relatively high salaries, and top out pretty quickly. Those who go beyond that are those who can write well, and present themselves well, and often find themselves competing for management positions with…ah…English majors. </p>
<p>At any rate, companies are off-shoring engineering- and tech-related jobs like mad. And with good reason. Larger talent pool, at less cost, and no whiners. You should see what living in Bangalore on $15-20k is like these days!</p>
<p>I don’t think eliminating in-state tuition is good policy. If every state U eliminated in-state tuition, then would all of their students suddenly become better? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>This is another one of those “rob Peter to pay Paul” ideas to improve your state or locality at the expense of others, e.g., offer reduced taxes to a company to relocate. The end result is bad for the taxpayers for both places.</p>
<p>OTOH, the taxpayers of Colorado certainly have more of a “right” to be serviced by UC-Boulder (I’ve never seen it referred to as CU) than do people from other states.</p>
<p>And making a revenue -neutral switch to to level tuition for everyone isn’t going to do anything about his pay issues, or build new buildings.</p>
<p>Oh, wait:</p>
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<p>If he truly wants to be at a school that charges what the market will bear, why doesn’t he find a new job at a private? Think maybe his tenure, pension, and other generous taxpayer-funded benefits have anything to do with it?</p>
<p>I notice he doesn’t suggest overhauling the administration and getting rid of the political hacks and friends/relatives of politicians making six figures+ for pushing paper that infest every public university.</p>
<p>“Surely you would agree that that doesn’t exactly flatter the people of Colorado.”</p>
<p>What flatters the people of Colorado is their commitment to serve the residents of Colorado. CU does this in a number of ways. It admits the state’s better students, it admits the highest quality OOS students it can (to both subsidize CU operations and as a comparator group), and they work toward making CU one of the “public Ivys.” </p>
<p>Meritocracy has its place. STEM has its place. “We take care of our own” has its place. I suggest that Princeton, MIT and state flagships, respectively, are reasonable examples of each.</p>
<p>By admitting Colorado state residents who wouldn’t have been admitted under a fair admissions policy? Is that what you call flattery of the people of Colorado? </p>
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<p>Not to be overly harsh, but the notion of ‘We take care of our own’ is necessary only because those people in question are simply not good enough to take care of themselves. After all, if Colorado students were really highly qualified, then they would have nothing to fear from a fair competition. </p>
<p>To be clear, I’m quite sure that Colorado has plenty of highly qualified students who can and do compete successfully for admissions to CU as they do to the top private schools such as HYPSM. These students clearly don’t need the admissions preference that CU provides. It is precisely the Colorado students who aren’t really that good who need that admissions preference the most - but also happen to be the least sympathetic of any admissions subclass.</p>
<p>But they don’t have such a ‘right’ even now. Currently only 30% of all CU applicants - the vast majority being in-state residents - are admitted. Hence the overwhelming majority of in-state applicants are rejected, without even counting all of the students who don’t even bother to apply to CU because they already know they would be rejected. {If you earned straight C’s in high school and terrible standardized scores, you know you won’t be admitted to CU.} State flagship university admissions are therefore not comparable to a public library or a public park for which taxpayer funding truly entails the right of universal access. Most Colorado state taxpayers are not accorded any right of access to CU, despite underwriting CU’s funding base.</p>
<p>The purpose of a state-funded university is primarily to serve the citizens of that state, not to be the most competitive or have the students with the highest test scores or be an “elite”. And with few exceptions, state schools are not “elite”.</p>
<p>And even among those few that do reach “elite” status are primarily serving their citizens. North Carolina law requires that 83% of spots at UNC-CH be filled with state residents. Yet it is a top-notch school that can compete with the HYPSMs of the world. </p>
<p>Why can’t CU duplicate the success of UNC? Perhaps it has less to do with IS or OOS, and more to do with the leadership of the school and the political climate.</p>
<p>Well, truth be told, his tenure, pension, and benefits are hardly exclusive to CU, but would very likely be portable towards whatever other school -public or private - might choose to hire him. Most university pensions are administered through TIAA-CREF ass portable accounts that follow you to whatever new academic employer you might work for. I am not aware of any additional tenure or taxpayer-funded benefits that CU provides to its faculty that aren’t comparatively provided by competitor schools. {If somebody would like to name some, say, that CU provides free ski memberships at Vail or Aspen to its faculty that peer schools do not provide, then by all means, let’s enumerate them.} </p>
<p>Besides, I also find the philosophy that anybody who disagrees with the policies of the particular system they are in should always just leave to be defeatist and cynical. Is it really so controversial to agitate for change from within the system? Should each and every American who disagrees with a particular government policy all simply leave the country? Is it really so outrageous for them to choose to remain in the country and work to change the system through the political process, or through social reform and advocacy?</p>
<p>The problem, imho, is that it is not fair when unionized staff at colleges will push for what the market will bear. It is much much easier for them to push for higher tuition and higher salaries than for the public to mount opposition. If the public does object, as in Wisconsin, they will get ugly.</p>
<p>Well, certainly there’s never any other way that anyone could make a living other than in publicly-traded corporations. @@ Again, this is a “who cares”? Is the sole goal in life to be a “top corporate job holder”? Anyone with any sophistication knows that there’s plenty of money to be had in private companies where your salary is not up for public disclosure.</p>
<p>That may indeed be the purpose of state-funded universities now. But it doesn’t have to always be that way, and indeed, wasn’t so in the past. For example, it was only a few decades ago when the purpose of practically every state flagship university in the South was to specifically serve only a specifically designated subset of its own citizens, namely its white citizens. </p>
<p>The upshot is that the purpose of state universities has dramatically changed in the past, and can surely change again.</p>
<p>Actually, college faculty - especially tenured faculty - are rarely if ever unionized. Heck, why would they need a union? They already have tenure, which renders them unfireable. They have contractually guaranteed job security for their entire careers. </p>
<p>Now, if you want to argue that academia should simply abolish tenure entirely, that’s a fair argument to make. But that probably falls outside the scope of this thread.</p>
<p>Sakky, you want to call it a professional association, fine. But when that group lobbies for more money, for more tuition, I call it as I see it. These groups have been at the forefront of demanding more money. They can couch it altruistically, but it is still more money for THEM.</p>
<p>Ironically enough, the University of Colorado itself fired a tenured faculty member in 2007. Of course, many will consider that case the exception that proves the rule.</p>
<p>At the rate things are going, most states will continue to de-fund their public universities, which will compensate by raising in- and out-of-state tuition and accepting a higher proportion of out-of-state applicants. My guess is that pretty soon all of the above arguments will become moot as most so-called ‘public’ universities no longer receive meaningful taxpayer funding. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but you can certainly read the writing on the Ivory Tower wall.</p>
<p>Alf, you may be correct that state’w will be reducing funding, but unless the state Us want to give back the land and buildings paid for by the state, they should still treat state residents and taxpayers with consideration. IMHO.</p>
<p>Univ of Colorado actually receives very little from the state. As do its students (LOL.) Nationally, Colorado is perpetually either 49th or 48th out of 50 in per-student spending on college level. Right down there with Mississippi. </p>
<p>And yes, there is unionized college faculty in Colorado. It was formed after an attempt to retroactively get rid of tenure at a popular campus. A lawsuit ensued, with appeals, all of which the campus lost.</p>