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Old August 23rd, 2011 #81
P.E.
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Join Date: May 2010
Posts: 1,826
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I can think of few majors worth it today, if one must go waste a few years in college in attempts to move from living in apartments and working shit jobs, to working a more standard amount of hours (either for yourself or a company) and owning a home.

Maybe accounting/cpa if you have the stomach for it. Even that is a 5-year task now (you need the credit hours of a masters in many states last I looked). I'd still question the time/money value if one has to consider taking out loans though.

I thought by now there'd be a glut of those, but I guess I was wrong. They're still pretty high in demand. Who knows what that will be like in 5 years time. There's a lot of lawyers that are going back to school to pick up a CPA because they realized becoming a lawyer wasn't as hot of an idea as their dimwit American parents (read robotized regurgitators of standardized common thought) told them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LindaLou View Post
because I chose Nursing to be able to some day help my own people and my own race!! That is why I became a Nurse. I and many other white racial students in my Nursing program paid a huge price to be able to accomplish our goals. To provide the best health care possible for our own race.
Let's hope an all-white country is created before you have to bathe and wipe the asses of rancid niggers and rich old bossy Jews in our lovely multikulti society.

Oh wait, the CNA's do all the work while the RN's play farmville . Least that's how my RN relative makes it sound at the nursing home she works.

Last edited by P.E.; August 23rd, 2011 at 01:32 PM.
 
Old August 24th, 2011 #82
Armstrong
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The idea of indoctrination in ideas known to be false is covered in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion......it is obvious some of the social conditioning are those false ideas.

False education is covered in
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Old September 9th, 2011 #83
Mike Parker
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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September/October 2011

Administrators Ate My Tuition

Want to get college costs in line? Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks.

By Benjamin Ginsberg

No statistic about higher education commands more attention—and anxiety—among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only “cigarettes and other tobacco products” have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids’ educations better—to say nothing of three times better.

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

Apparently, as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources—that is, on paying faculty. They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources. A comprehensive study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010 reported that between 1998 and 2008, America’s private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent while increasing spending on administration and staff support by 36 percent. Parents who wonder why college tuition is so high and why it increases so much each year may be less than pleased to learn that their sons and daughters will have an opportunity to interact with more administrators and staffers— but not more professors. Well, you can’t have everything.

Of course, universities have always employed administrators. When I was a graduate student in the 1960s and a young professor in the 1970s, however, top administrators were generally drawn from the faculty, and even midlevel managerial tasks were directed by faculty members. These moonlighting academics typically occupied administrative slots on a part-time or temporary basis and planned in due course to return to full-time teaching and research. Whatever their individual faults and gifts, faculty administrators seldom had to be reminded that the purpose of a university was the promotion of education and research, and their own short-term managerial endeavors tended not to distract them from their long-term academic commitments.

Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school. If there is any hope of getting higher education costs in line, and improving its quality—and I think there is, though the hour is late—it begins with taking a pair of shears to the overgrown administrative bureaucracy.

Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.

Today, administrators and staffers safely outnumber full-time faculty members on campus. In 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 fulltime faculty members or full-time equivalents. In the same year, America’s colleges and universities employed more than 190,000 individuals classified by the federal government as “executive, administrative and managerial employees.” Another 566,405 college and university employees were classified as “other professional.” This category includes IT specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admissions officers, development officers, alumni relations officials, human resources staffers, editors and writers for school publications, attorneys, and a slew of others. These “other professionals” are not administrators, but they work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.

Before they employed an army of professional staffers, administrators were forced to rely on the cooperation of the faculty to carry out tasks ranging from admissions to planning. An administration that lost the confidence of the faculty might find itself unable to function. Today, ranks of staffers form a bulwark of administrative power in the contemporary university. These administrative staffers do not work for or, in many cases, even share information with the faculty. They help make the administration, in the language of political science, “relatively autonomous,” marginalizing the faculty.

While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses. They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time period.

Administrators are not only well staffed, they are also well paid. Vice presidents at the University of Maryland, for example, earn well over $200,000, and deans earn nearly as much. Both groups saw their salaries increase as much as 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, a period of financial retrenchment and sharp tuition increases at the university. The University of Maryland at College Park—which employs six vice presidents, six associate vice presidents, five assistant vice presidents, six assistants to the president, and six assistants to the vice presidents—has long been noted for its bloated and extortionate bureaucracy, but it actually does not seem to be much of an exception. Administrative salaries are on the rise everywhere in the nation. By 2007, the median salary paid to the president of a doctoral degree-granting institution was $325,000. Eighty-one presidents earned more than $500,000, and twelve earned over $1 million. Presidents, at least, might perform important services for their schools. Somewhat more difficult to explain is the fact that by 2010 even some of the ubiquitous and largely interchangeable deanlets and deanlings earned six-figure salaries.

If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

Three main explanations are often adduced for the sharp growth in the number of university administrators over the past thirty years. One is that there have been new sorts of demands for administrative services that require more managers per student or faculty member than was true in the past. Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago. Of course, it might also be said that during this same time period, whole new fields of teaching and research opened in such areas as computer science, genetics, chemical biology, and physics. Other new research and teaching fields opened because of ongoing changes in the world economy and international order. And yet, faculty growth between 1975 and 2005 simply kept pace with growth in enrollments and substantially lagged behind administrative and staff growth. When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research.

A second common explanation given for the expansion of administration in recent years is the growing need to respond to mandates and record-keeping demands from federal and state governments as well as numerous licensure and accreditation bodies. It is certainly true that large numbers of administrators spend a good deal of time preparing reports and collecting data for these and other agencies. But as burdensome as this paperwork blizzard might be, it is not clear that it explains the growth in administrative personnel that we have observed. Often, affirmative action reporting is cited as the most time consuming of the various governmental mandates. As the economist Barbara Bergmann has pointed out, however, across the nation only a handful of administrators and staffers are employed in this endeavor.

More generally, we would expect that if administrative growth were mainly a response to external mandates, growth should be greater at state schools, which are more exposed to government obligations, than at private institutions, which are freer to manage their own affairs in their own way. Yet, when we examine the data, precisely the opposite seems to be the case. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of administrators and managers employed by public institutions increased by 66 percent. During the same time period, the number of administrators employed by private colleges and universities grew by 135 percent (see Table 4). These numbers seem inconsistent with the idea that external mandates have been the forces driving administrative growth at America’s institutions of higher education.

A third explanation has to do with the conduct of the faculty. Many faculty members, it is often said, regard administrative activities as obnoxious chores and are content to allow these to be undertaken by others. While there is some truth to this, it is certainly not the whole story. Often enough, I have observed that professors who are willing to perform administrative tasks lose interest when they find that the committees, councils, and assemblies through which the faculty nominally acts have lost much if not all their power to administrators.

If growth-driven demand, governmental mandates, and faculty preferences are not sufficient explanations for administrative expansion, an alternative explanation might be found in the nature of university bureaucracies themselves. In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance.

The number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is not enough work to keep all of them busy. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. This includes endless rounds of meetings, mostly with other administrators, often consisting of reports from and plans for other meetings. For example, at a recent “president’s staff meeting” at an Ohio community college, eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings. At a gathering of the “Process Management Steering Committee” of a Midwestern community college, virtually the entire meeting was devoted to planning subsequent meetings by process management teams, including the “search committee training team,” the “faculty advising and mentoring team,” and the “culture team,” which was said to be meeting with “renewed energy.” The culture team was apparently also close to making a recommendation on the composition of a “Culture Committee.” Since culture is a notoriously abstruse issue, this committee may need to meet for years, if not decades, to unravel its complexities.

When they face particularly challenging problems, academic administrators sometimes find that ordinary meetings in campus offices do not allow them the freedom from distraction they require. To allow them to focus fully and without interruption, administrators sometimes find it necessary to schedule off-campus administrative retreats where they can work without fear that the day-to-day concerns of the campus will disturb their deliberations. Sometimes these retreats include athletic and role-playing activities that are supposed to help improve the staff’s spirit of camaraderie and ability to function as a team. For example, at a 2007 professional development retreat, Michigan Tech staffers broke into teams and spent several hours building furniture from pieces of cardboard and duct tape. Many staff retreats also include presentations by professional speakers who appear to specialize in psychobabble. Topics at recent retreats included “Do You Want to Succeed?” “Reflective Resensitizing,” and “Waking Up the Inner World.” In all likelihood, the administrators and staffers privileged to attend these important talks spent the next several weeks reporting on them at meetings with colleagues who had been deprived of the opportunity to learn firsthand how to make certain that their inner worlds remained on alert.

Administrative budgets frequently include travel funds, on the theory that conference participation will hone administrators’ skills and provide them with new information and ideas that will ultimately serve their school’s interests. We can be absolutely certain that this would be the only reason administrators would even consider dragging themselves to Maui during the winter for a series of workshops sponsored by the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Given the expense and hardship usually occasioned by travel to Hawaii, it is entirely appropriate for colleges to foot this sort of bill.

Another ubiquitous make-work exercise is the formation of a “strategic plan.” Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. This is typically a lengthy document— some are 100 pages long or more—that purports to articulate the school’s mission, its leadership’s vision of the future, and the various steps that are needed to achieve the school’s goals. The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs.

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts and sciences strategic plan in the last fifteen years. No one can remember much about any of these plans, but another one is currently in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America’s colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the ongoing growth of administrative power.

There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as a class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?—more administration.

The stress on fund-raising has enabled more than a few university presidents to acquire luxurious offices, lavish residences, and an assortment of perks in addition to princely salaries. Some enjoy the services of a chauffeur when they commute to work and a household staff when they entertain or even relax at home. These and many other perquisites are usually defended by administrators as needed to carry out their social duties and, particularly, to impress their schools’ wealthy benefactors. Yet no study has ever proved that presidents who arrive at fundraising events in chauffeur-driven limousines are more likely to succeed in their capital campaign goals or in any other endeavor than their counterparts who drive their own cars or come by taxi or, for that matter, by subway. I have personally known university presidents who were outstanding fund-raisers but, nevertheless, lived frugally and always traveled as cheaply as possible. Among college officials, though, the spendthrifts seem to outnumber the penny pinchers.

College presidents are usually the guiltiest parties, since they are in the best position to authorize expenditures, and many are more than happy to use school funds to burnish their own images. One recent case in point is that of Benjamin Ladner, the former president of American University in Washington, D.C. Soon after arriving on the campus in 1994, Ladner and his wife, who dubbed herself AU’s “first lady,” declared that the president’s official residence was inadequate and had the university build an expensive new house, which included a waterfall and pond behind the patio, a few blocks from the campus. They outfitted the house with expensive furnishings, china, and stemware. At university expense, the Ladners employed a chauffeur, a cook, a social secretary, and numerous other personal staff members. They hosted gala events to which they invited prominent Washington figures. They traveled abroad frequently, generally charging their first-class tickets to the university.

Matters came to a head in March 2005, when an anonymous whistleblower wrote to the board of trustees accusing the Ladners of “severe expense account violations.” An extensive audit subsequently revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable spending, some personal but most associated with President Ladner’s frenetic image-polishing efforts. Over the previous several years, the Ladners had charged the university for $6,000 in club dues, $54,000 in drivers’ costs, $220,000 in chefs’ services, $44,000 for alcohol, and $100,000 in services from their social secretary.

After months of bruising battles within the AU board, Ladner’s contract was terminated—though he and the first lady received a generous severance package. While Ladner mingled with the rich and famous at the school’s expense, faculty members had to settle for miserly annual salary increases and students saw their tuitions rise markedly every year.

The expansion of college and university administration has not been coupled with the development of adequate mechanisms of oversight and supervision, particularly for senior managers. University boards, which technically oversee the administrations, are generally not well prepared for the task. One recent study found that 40 percent of university trustees said they were not prepared for the job and 42 percent indicated that they spent less than five hours a month on board business. Many trustees serve because of loyalty to their school and say they have “faith” in its administration. They do not go out of their way to look for problems, and administrators are generally able to satisfy trustees with the rosy pictures of college life presented at weekend board meetings.

Moreover, university boards do not have the same legal responsibilities borne by corporate boards. Most federal regulations establishing management standards for private-sector firms, such as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, do not apply to nonprofit entities, and state regulation of university administration is spotty. At the same time, while schools have developed many internal rules and standards applying to the conduct of faculty members and students, few if any have established standards governing administrative conduct or established oversight mechanisms. For the most part, senior administrators police themselves.

The result of this lack of supervision is that a number of college and university administrators have, in recent years, succumbed to the temptation to engage in corrupt practices. In 2008, for example, the director of Tufts University’s Office of Student Activities, Josephine Nealley, was indicted on three counts of larceny for embezzling more than $300,000 in student activities funds. She allegedly transferred the money to her personal bank accounts and used it for purchases and trips. While acting on an anonymous tip regarding Nealley’s activities, university auditors uncovered a second, apparently unrelated case of embezzlement. Raymond Rodriguez, a budget officer, allegedly stole more than $600,000 from the university, which he spent on trips and luxury goods. Rodriguez was indicted on two counts of larceny for his alleged thefts. Both Nealley and Rodriguez entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to prison terms.

In a similar vein, the president of the University of Tennessee was forced to resign when an audit revealed that he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in university funds on personal trips, entertainment, and purchases. The president’s travel at university expense allegedly included trips to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was said to have a “personal involvement” with the president of another school.

Often, frauds go unnoticed for years because the perpetrators are the accountants and financial officers responsible for fiscal oversight. When fraudulent conduct is discovered, university officials often prefer to allow the perpetrators to resign or retire quietly rather than risk a public brouhaha that might upset donors and lead to questions about the quality of the school’s leadership. Many professors can point to cases at their own school when crooked administrators were allowed to leave quietly, sometimes even without being compelled to make restitution for their offenses.

When fraud is exposed and restitution demanded, the sums can be considerable. In January 2008, Roy Johnson, chancellor of Alabama’s community college system, pled guilty to bribery and was required to forfeit the $18 million he admitted receiving in direct and indirect benefits from companies doing business with the colleges he oversaw. As the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case observed, “Taxpayers must wonder how many more Alabama students could have been educated had money not been wasted on fraud.”

The priorities of the hyper-administrative university emerge most clearly during times of economic crisis, when managers are forced to make choices among spending options. Thanks to the sharp economic downturn that followed America’s 2008 financial crisis, almost every institution, even Harvard, America’s wealthiest school, has been compelled to make substantial cuts in its expenditures. What cuts did university administrations choose to make during these hard times?

A tiny number of schools took the opportunity to confront years of administrative and staff bloat and moved to cut costs by shedding unneeded administrators and their brigades of staffers. The most notable example is the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, which in February 2009 addressed a $100 million budget deficit by eliminating fifteen “leadership positions,” along with 450 staff jobs, among other cuts. The dean also emphasized that faculty would not be affected by the planned budget cuts. Chicago’s message was clear: administrators and staffers were less important than teaching, research, and—since this involved a medical school—patient care; if the budget had to be cut, it would be done by thinning the school’s administrative ranks, not by reducing its core efforts.

Unfortunately, few if any other colleges and universities copied the Chicago model. Facing budgetary problems, many schools eliminated academic programs and announced across-the-board salary and hiring freezes, which meant that vacant staff and faculty positions, including the positions of many adjunct professors, would remain unfilled until the severity of the crisis eased.

Perverse administrative priorities were even more in evidence at a number of schools that actually raised administrative salaries or opted to spend more money on administrative services while cutting expenditures on teaching and research in the face of budget deficits. For example, in January 2009, facing $19 million in budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Florida Atlantic University awarded raises of 10 percent or more to top administrators, including the school’s president. In a similar vein, in February 2009, the president of the University of Vermont defended the bonuses paid to the school’s twenty-one top administrators against the backdrop of layoffs, job freezes, and program cuts at the university. The university president, Daniel Fogel, asserted that administrative bonuses were based on the principles of “extra pay for extra duties” and “pay for performance.” The president rejected a faculty member’s assertion that paying bonuses to administrators when the school faced an enormous budget deficit seemed similar to the sort of greed recently manifested by the corporate executives who paid themselves bonuses with government bailout money. Fogel said he shared the outrage of those upset at corporate greed, but maintained there was a “world of difference” between the UVM administrative bonuses and bonuses paid to corporate executives. He did not specify what that world might be.

In the meantime the president of Washington State University, Elson Floyd, accepted a $125,000 pay raise, bringing his 2009 salary to $725,000 per year, soon after announcing that financial circumstances required the school to freeze hiring. At another university that had just announced a large budget deficit and mandated salary and hiring freezes, the outgoing president was feted by the board of trustees at a gala 350-person dinner, to which trustees, senior administrators, alumni, donors, and other notables—but no students or faculty—were invited. The dinner, which might as well have been held on the promenade deck of the Titanic, featured musical performances, videos, and a lounge area with hundreds of Chinese newspapers and a tea set to recognize the president’s many trips to China. (No wonder university spending was frozen.) Later, this same university placed restrictions on the use of copy paper by graduate students. Maybe the Chinese newspapers should have been recycled.

On any given campus, the only institution with the actual power to halt the onward march of the all-administrative university is the board of trustees or regents— which, as we’ve seen, tend to be unprepared or disinclined to make waves. But they need to do so if their institutions are to be saved from sinking into the expanding swamp of administrative mediocrity.

To begin with, trustees interested in trimming administrative fat should compare their own school’s ratio of managers and staffers per hundred students to the national mean, which is currently an already inflated nine for private schools and eight for public colleges. If the national mean is nine administrators per hundred students at private colleges, why does Vanderbilt need sixty-four? Why does Rochester need forty and Johns Hopkins thirty-one? Management-minded administrators claim to believe in benchmarking, so they should not object to being benchmarked in this way.

The right kind of media coverage would embolden boards to ask the right questions. In particular, the various publications that rate and rank colleges—U.S. News is the most influential—should take account of administrative bloat in their ratings. After all, a high administrator-to-student ratio means that the school is diverting funds from academic programs to support an overgrown bureaucracy. I am certain that if Vanderbilt or Duke or Hopkins or Rochester or Emory or any of the other most administratively top-heavy schools lost a few notches in the U.S. News rankings because of their particularly egregious administrative bloat, their boards would be forced to act.

But given the general fattening of administrative ranks in recent years, even schools with average administrator-to-student ratios could stand to see major cuts in their administrative staffs and budgets. This could help not only to fill budget holes but, more importantly, to begin a healthy shift in the balance of bureaucratic power within universities. A 10 percent cut in the staff and management ranks would save millions of dollars but would have no effect whatsoever on the operations of most campuses. The deanlets would never be missed; their absence from campus would go unnoticed. A 20 percent or larger cut would begin to be noticed and would have the beneficial effect of substantially reducing administrative power and the ongoing diversion of scarce funds into unproductive channels.

With fewer deanlets to command, senior administrators would be compelled to turn once again to the faculty for administrative support. Such a change would result in better programs and less unchecked power for presidents and provosts. Faculty who work part-time or for part of their careers as administrators tend to ask questions, use judgment, and interfere with arbitrary presidential and provostial decision making. Senior full-time administrators might resent the interference, but the university would benefit from the result. Moreover, with fewer administrators to pay and send to conferences and retreats, more resources might be available for educational programs and student support, the actual items for which parents, donors, and funding agencies think they are paying.

Benjamin Ginsberg is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. This article is adapted with permission from The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, by Benjamin Ginsberg, published by Oxford University Press, 2011.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/mag...all&print=true
 
Old September 9th, 2011 #84
Mike Parker
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
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Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out


Sarah Weinstein, a Boston University graduate, manages a bar and volunteers.

By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: August 31, 2011

WHEN Stephanie Kelly, a 2009 graduate of the University of Florida, looked for a job in her chosen field, advertising, she found few prospects and even fewer takers. So now she has two jobs: as a part-time “senior secretary” at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and a freelance gig writing for Elfster.com, a “secret Santa” Web site.

But is Ms. Kelly stressed out about the lack of a career path she spent four years preparing for? Not at all. Instead, she has come to appreciate her life. “I can cook and write at my own pace,” she said. “I kind of like that about my life.”

Likewise, Amy Klein, who graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in English literature, couldn’t find a job in publishing. At one point, she had applied for an editorial-assistant job at Gourmet magazine. Less than two weeks later, Condé Nast shut down that 68- year-old magazine. “So much for that job application,” said Ms. Klein, now 26.

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide. But weighed against a dreary day job, music suddenly held considerable appeal. So last spring, she sublet her room in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and toured the country in an old Chevy minivan.

“I’m fulfilling my artistic goals,” Ms. Klein said.

Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.

And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses — sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.

“We did everything we were supposed to,” said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. “What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?” said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.

Some of Ms. Morales’s classmates have found themselves on welfare. “You don’t expect someone who just spent four years in Ivy League schools to be on food stamps,” said Ms. Morales, who estimates that a half-dozen of her friends are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A few are even helping younger graduates figure out how to apply. “We are passing on these traditions on how to work in the adult world as working poor,” Ms. Morales said.

But then there are people like Ms. Kelly and Ms. Klein, who are more laissez-faire. With the job market still bleak, their motto might as well be: “No career? No prospects? No worries!” (Well, at least for the time being.)

After all, much of the situation is out of their control, as victims of bad timing. Ms. Klein contrasted her Harvard classmates with the ones of her older sister, who graduated from Harvard seven years earlier. Those graduates, she said, were career-obsessed and, helped along by a strong economy, aggressively pursued high-powered jobs right after graduation.

By comparison, Ms. Klein said her classmates seemed resigned to waiting for the economic tides to turn. “Plenty of people work in bookstores and work in low-end administrative jobs, even though they have a Harvard degree,” she said. “They are thinking more in terms of creating their own kinds of life that interests them, rather than following a conventional idea of success and job security.”

The numbers are not encouraging. About 14 percent of those who graduated from college between 2006 and 2010 are looking for full-time jobs, either because they are unemployed or have only part-time jobs, according to a survey of 571 recent college graduates released in May by the Heldrich Center at Rutgers.

And then there is the slice of graduates effectively underemployed, using a college degree for positions that don’t require one or barely scraping by, working in call centers, bars or art-supply stores.

“They are a postponed generation,” said Cliff Zukin, an author of the Heldrich Center study. He noted that recent graduates seemed to be living with parents longer and taking longer to become financially secure. The journey on the life path, for many, is essentially stalled.

The Heldrich survey also found that the portion of graduates who described their first job as a “career” fell from 30 percent, if they graduated before the 2008 economic downturn (in 2006 and 2007), to 22 percent, if they graduated after the downturn (in 2009 and 2010).

In an ominous sign, those figures didn’t change much for second jobs, Dr. Zukin added, suggesting that recent graduates were stumbling from field to field. Indeed, Till Marco von Wachter, an economics professor at Columbia University who has studied the impact of recessions on young workers, said the effect on earnings took about a decade to fade.

MEANWHILE, modest jobs mean modest lives. Benjamin Shore, 23, graduated from the University of Maryland last year with a business degree and planned to go into consulting. Instead, he moved back into his parents’ house in Cherry Hill, N.J., and spent his days browsing for jobs online.

But when his parents started charging him $500 a month for rent, he moved into a windowless room in a Baltimore row house and took a $12-an-hour job at a Baltimore call center, making calls for a university, encouraging prospects to go back to school. “There’s no point in being diplomatic: it is horrible,” Mr. Shore said.

“I have a college education that I feel like I am wasting by being there,” he added. “I am supposed to do something interesting, something with my brain.” For a while, Mr. Shore ran LongevityDrugstore.com, an online drug retailer that he started, but it went nowhere. To stretch his pay check, he made beans and rice at home and drove slowly to save gas. Eventually he quit, got work as a dock hand and is now thinking of becoming a doctor.

Perhaps not surprisingly, volunteering has become a popular outlet for a generation that seeks meaning in its work. Sarah Weinstein, 25, a 2008 graduate of Boston University, manages a bar in Austin because she couldn’t find an advertising job. In her spare time, she volunteers, doing media relations for Austin Pets Alive, an animal rescue shelter.

“It’d be nice to make more money,” Ms. Weinstein said, but “I prefer it this way so that I have the extra time to spend volunteering and pursuing other things.” Volunteering, however, goes only so far. After three years without an advertising job, she is now applying to graduate school to freshen up her résumé.

Meanwhile, people forced out of the rat race are re-evaluating their values and looking elsewhere for satisfaction. “They have to revise their ideas of what they are looking for,” said Kenneth Jedding, author of “Higher Education: On Life, Landing a Job, and Everything Else They Didn’t Teach You in College.”

For Geo Wyeth, 27, who graduated from Yale in 2007, that means adopting a do-it-yourself approach to his career. After college, he worked at an Apple Store in New York as a salesclerk and trainer, while furthering his music career in an experimental rock band. He has observed, he said, a shift among his peers away from the corporate track and toward a more artistic mentality.

“You have to make opportunities happen for yourself, and I think a lot of my classmates weren’t thinking in that way,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of setting up your own lemonade stand.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fa...MaZ3hAV5cCtDTA
 
Old September 12th, 2011 #85
Hunter Morrow
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The average 2010 college graduate has more than 24,000 dollars of student loan debt.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/22/pf/c...debt/index.htm

Since paying the onerous tuition and interest leaves students with little to no money, they also go deeply into credit card debt. The average 2010 college graduate has 41 percent more credit card debt than the average citizen, with 20 percent owing 7,000 dollars or more!

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2...prison-instead

Right now college is a poor investment. The U3 unemployment rate for 16-25 year olds is at a level not seen since the Great Depression. 4 years of earning money down the toilet to have about 30,000 dollars in debt.

This is possibly even the best case scenario. Far fewer than 50 percent of college entrants graduate with a bachelor's degree in 6 years.

There are plenty of people who go to college for 3 years, rack up 5, 10, 20+ thousand dollars in student loans and credit card debt, and then they drop out.

So they wasted 3 years of earning money to go deep into debt at high interest, in the worst job market in 80 years!

What a racket!
 
Old September 12th, 2011 #86
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Also, the article on people going to private high schools and then getting 6 figures into debt to the Federal government to get a degree in Economics oR MBA is absolutely insane. Before the credit cards, the rent, the food, the car payments, they are already on the hook for 100 grand, which due to interest payments will be 200 grand.

So between private high school and debt all of these geniuses, these future Captains of Industry, will sink a quarter million dollars to become businessmen and economists.

Why didn't they outright purchase a home and a 50 to 100 acre farm? Why didn't they start their own business with 200, 300 grand? Are you kidding me? And these are the really smart businessmen and economists.

 
Old September 12th, 2011 #87
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I had just read that more than 70 percent of high school students go on to attend some form of college.

This just doesn't make much sense. The most predictive date for college success are tests that measure general intelligence like the SAT and ACT, and I would say IQ tests as well.

120 IQ or better, or the the 70th percentile or so of intelligence is what is needed to generally succeed in college. So the idea that 70 percent of high school students should go to college is just nuts.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...ion-rate_N.htm

This 2009 study says that college students graduate from a 4 year university in 6 years 53 percent of the time. What is the 4 year rate, and what is the percentage of people who just don't graduate at all?

College is awfully expensive to go in as a coin flip of not getting a degree after racking up 3, 4, 5 or 6 years of onerous federal loan debt.
 
Old December 30th, 2011 #88
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As the great Frank Zappa once said: "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library".
 
Old January 3rd, 2012 #89
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Parker View Post
Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out


Sarah Weinstein, a Boston University graduate, manages a bar and volunteers.


Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.

And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses — sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fa...MaZ3hAV5cCtDTA
And I've lived through two periods like this. I'm 43. Meanwhile, suckers like the above with their overall measley but nonetheless gross taxes bail out jew bankers on behalf of a bent ruling elite.
Jobs?
Careers?
Education?
Welcome to the age of McJobs.
 
Old January 5th, 2012 #90
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I'm going to college at the moment. What a joke. What an absolutely overly-expensive venture. 120k TO GO TO COLLEGE? I'm going to be in debt for the rest of my life. I swear to God, the Jews that run this school are out of hand.
 
Old January 5th, 2012 #91
Hugh
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cliff Chambers View Post
I'm going to college at the moment. What a joke. What an absolutely overly-expensive venture. 120k TO GO TO COLLEGE? I'm going to be in debt for the rest of my life. I swear to God, the Jews that run this school are out of hand.
You could just as easily, for less than a quarter of that amount, stay home, study for a degree by correspondence, with night classes for the more difficult subjects.

If you can stay at home and not work whilst studying, you can either finish the degree in half the time, do several more majors, or do two degrees simultaneously.

Contrary to college PR, employers don't care what college you went to. All they care about is that you have a clean financial and criminal record, most critical in their eyes is that you have experience, references, what you can actually do, how much you will cost them, and how much profit you will bring them.
Meaningless qualifications are marketing, communication, HR etc.

The people who always have jobs are those in the trades, those in medical fields, and financial Services such as bookkeeping. In IT N + for networking will get you a job far quicker than the higher qualifications. Comptia have excellent courses in the field.
Its simple. The higher the qualification, the fewer the positions.

Rather have several lower level qualifications, and get a job easily, then once your foot is in the door, work towards what you want, than get a high qualification that won't get you a job, and end up as a bankrupt bartender.

EMT's and firemen are guaranteed work, as are tradesmen, bookkeepers etc. Open your own company in something like management services, which means whatever you want it to mean, so you don't have gaps on your CV, and it shows you have some initiative. People who run bottle stores and filling stations earn more than most doctors.

If you study within the medical or financial fields, you will always have a job, and can then at your leisure study whatever interests you.

No matter what job you do, you will need a thorough understanding of bookkeeping, and if you want to run your own business or get to mid to senior management level, you will need accounting, a major if at all possible.

People with those qualifications and experience can always get decent work, and work anywhere in the world.

You are clearly paying three to four times what you need to be paying, which will increase to six or more times when interest kicks in, not only on your student loans, but on interest you pay on other purchases you have to make on credit, as a result of paying off your student loans.

I would advise you leave that college, take the courses by correspondence, or if you can't, change qualifications so that you can do it by correspondence, major in hard subjects such as accounting etc.

If you want a job, join your local church, residents association, belong to Rotary and Lions, and whatever professional associations exist for what you want to do.
Become known within the industry.
Most bosses belong to professional associations so they can meet prospective employees through them. Bosses meet each other and the local politicians at Rotary and church, especially within larger cities.
That's why some people glide through life. Become one of those who do so.

If you have time available, become a volunteer fireman or EMT, those two are invaluable on any CV.

You'll find in life you get work, and everything else, through personal contacts and references, not through applications.
It is who you know, and who knows you that matters.

Joining professional/trade organisations, and Rotary and similar organisations is the most important career making move you will ever make.
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Last edited by Hugh; January 5th, 2012 at 05:51 PM.
 
Old January 5th, 2012 #92
Cliff Chambers
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh View Post
You could just as easily, for less than a quarter of that amount, stay home, study for a degree by correspondence, with night classes for the more difficult subjects.

If you can stay at home and not work whilst studying, you can either finish the degree in half the time, do several more majors, or do two degrees simultaneously.

Contrary to college PR, employers don't care what college you went to. All they care about is that you have a clean financial and criminal record, most critical in their eyes is that you have experience, references, what you can actually do, how much you will cost them, and how much profit you will bring them.
Meaningless qualifications are marketing, communication, HR etc.

The people who always have jobs are those in the trades, those in medical fields, and financial Services such as bookkeeping. In IT N + for networking will get you a job far quicker than the higher qualifications. Comptia have excellent courses in the field.
Its simple. The higher the qualification, the fewer the positions.

Rather have several lower level qualifications, and get a job easily, then once your foot is in the door, work towards what you want, than get a high qualification that won't get you a job, and end up as a bankrupt bartender.

EMT's and firemen are guaranteed work, as are tradesmen, bookkeepers etc. Open your own company in something like management services, which means whatever you want it to mean, so you don't have gaps on your CV, and it shows you have some initiative. People who run bottle stores and filling stations earn more than most doctors.

If you study within the medical or financial fields, you will always have a job, and can then at your leisure study whatever interests you.

No matter what job you do, you will need a thorough understanding of bookkeeping, and if you want to run your own business or get to mid to senior management level, you will need accounting, a major if at all possible.

People with those qualifications and experience can always get decent work, and work anywhere in the world.

You are clearly paying three to four times what you need to be paying, which will increase to six or more times when interest kicks in, not only on your student loans, but on interest you pay on other purchases you have to make on credit, as a result of paying off your student loans.

I would advise you leave that college, take the courses by correspondence, or if you can't, change qualifications so that you can do it by correspondence, major in hard subjects such as accounting etc.

If you want a job, join your local church, residents association, belong to Rotary and Lions, and whatever professional associations exist for what you want to do.
Become known within the industry.
Most bosses belong to professional associations so they can meet prospective employees through them. Bosses meet each other and the local politicians at Rotary and church, especially within larger cities.
That's why some people glide through life. Become one of those who do so.

If you have time available, become a volunteer fireman or EMT, those two are invaluable on any CV.

You'll find in life you get work, and everything else, through personal contacts and references, not through applications.
It is who you know, and who knows you that matters.

Joining professional/trade organisations, and Rotary and similar organisations is the most important career making move you will ever make.
Thing is, with Accounting, even if I did want to run my own business I suppose with the advent of the internet, I could just as quickly google what I want to know, or what I need help with. A lot of education is particularly meaningless now because everything one wants to know is just a click away. Or a program-designed-for-said-task away. I'm pretty good with book-keeping as it is already, you just gotta know how to analyze the money. I don't need a degree to tell me how to invest or spend...whatever, or economics. There's a retarded degree: economics. I mean, who cares about the marginal cost of something or the real GP. Okay, well maybe if you are Jewish then it does. As you said though, most of these qualifications are meaningless. I go to a private college and I could care less about the name at this point. I just know all this money I've poured into it probably won't pay off.

But out of curiosity, what's your occupation? Did you do those things to get where you have?
 
Old January 5th, 2012 #93
Rick Ronsavelle
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There's a retarded degree: economics. I mean, who cares about the marginal cost of something or the real GP. Okay, well maybe if you are Jewish then it does

Something marginal about that analysis.



just screams practical application
 
Old January 5th, 2012 #94
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Ronsavelle View Post
There's a retarded degree: economics. I mean, who cares about the marginal cost of something or the real GP. Okay, well maybe if you are Jewish then it does

Something marginal about that analysis.



just screams practical application
in my life i've known grade school dropouts-grade school dropouts-that went to work before the age of ten, ran their own businesses or worked for themselves, and were multimillionaires when a million dollars was worth a million dollars. the drawing above, i'm sure, is one of many that the fools in the government, corporations, banks and at the federal reserve study all day every day. what good does it do them? they couldn't find their asses with a road map and compass if their life depended on it.
pictures such as the one above look good in "theory" but, in reality, where i live, they don't count for much.
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Old January 6th, 2012 #95
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Old January 6th, 2012 #96
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the first question heard by the new hire, and recent college graduate on his first day on the job; "you remember everything you learned in college?"
"yes sir!", was his reply. to which his boss said, "well forget it. you won't be using it here. this is the real world."
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Old January 7th, 2012 #97
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One thing that helped me become Jew wise was this college situation. I am a young man in my 20s and at the age where people that I know are graduating college and marrying other college graduates.

Someone, either myself or another, will ask the freshly graduated newlyweds when they plan to have children of their own.

The answer is this, almost to the word, 90+ percent of the time...

"Oh, we are in so much debt that we couldn't possibly afford to have children."

Who wants the best and the brightest to have the biggest debt? Who wouldn't want these people to have children?
 
Old January 7th, 2012 #98
Hugh
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Quote:
I could just as quickly google what I want to know, or what I need help with
How will you know what you need to look up, or that you have found sufficient information?
It's complex, involving masses of laws and regulations.


Quote:
you just gotta know how to analyze the money.
You will not/should not get a position in management without accounting, nor if you run your own business will you be able to understand your own accounts, nor your tax returns, yet you will be legally liable for them.
A proper accounting/bookkeeping course will include law, taxation etc which you need to know.

Quote:
I mean, who cares about the marginal cost of something or the real GP.
Everyone involved with management, everyone who owns a business, the IRS, your bank/s and your bookkeeper/accountant.

Quote:
Okay, well maybe if you are Jewish then it does
That is the reason why Jews run things, and Whites work for them.
Jews take the trouble, take the time, and leave little to chance.
They also are not afraid to ask, and usually work in little groups, are all highly networked, and so collectively they always have the upper hand, and pull and push each other ahead.
When someone stands in their way, they combine to remove that person.

Quote:
what's your occupation? Did you do those things to get where you have?
I deal mostly with auditing and risk management.

I got my first degree through correspondence, half my second, and have several stand alone subjects.
Some subjects I've had to go to classes for.
Every job/position I've ever had has come through personal networks, and yes, I belong to a wide range of organisations.
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Old March 16th, 2012 #99
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Why Did Georgetown University Call Me Out?
by James Altucher

You can’t make this up. Georgetown University just put out a study called “The College Payoff” to explain why going to college pays off. I’m laughing so hard I can barely type. And then in the middle of this highly academic report they bashed me personally.

This is not going to be my usual post. My usual post contains something embarrassing about me which I turn into a life lesson. Like, “I abandoned my baby as a child and now am making up for it with increased father time” (true story).

But none of that here! Instead, I’m going to specifically make fun of the hard work and effort put into this magnificent report by (one second while I look it up)….Anthony Carnevale, Stephen Rose, and Ban Cheah.

They do a very thorough study. They divide it up by race, gender, years of education and I guess they come to the conclusion that highly educated white men make the most money. I don’t know. I didn’t even read the whole thing.

First off, Georgetown University costs $41,000 a year. Why don’t you add in room and board. Do you think Georgetown is a cheap place to live? I called up my business partner, Dan, who went to Georgetown and actually played on their famous basketball team (if you call sitting on the bench for every single game until Allen Iverson joined the team, then Allen demanded your specific number, and then you quit, “played”)

“Are you kidding me?” he said, “I’d say the average apartment that you share with five other guys in Georgetown will cost you $1000 a month. All in, Georgetown is probably $70,000 a year.” And then there’s books . And don’t forget people need to eat. Not to mention due to the high amount of senators and representatives per square foot in the nation’s capital, the cost of high-priced hookers is through the roof.

So at Georgetown you’ll be spending about $400,000 pre-taxes, give or take. The other day I heard about another 47 year old dying of a heart attack. “The guy ran a marathon every year,” my friend told me and showed me a picture. The spitting image of health. Two daughters, just like me. You know why everyone is dying of heart attacks? Because they feel they have to spend $400,000 on sending their kids to Georgetown.

Or else their kids won’t have good lives. Or else their kids will die homeless and sad. And studies like this Georgetown study are brainwashing you into believing that. Misinformed studies filled with lies are basically killing you.

How biased can you be?

So okay, back to the report: they did show how the more years of education you have, the higher you make. Now, we all know college is not about the money but I have to dispute this one “statistic”.

Any college Freshman who takes Statistics 101 (and I know I’ve said this before so I wish these Georgetown people would let me teach their Statistics classes) will have heard of something called “Selection bias” which this report is littered with.

In other words, they did not just select people with many years of education. They inadvertently also selected “the type of upper middle class person who is intelligent, ambitious, aggressive” who chose twenty years ago to go to college. That type of person will certainly make more money than his peers twenty years later.

But what if he didn’t go to college? Let’s not forget 20 years ago, college costs, college debt (student loan debt now at it’s highest levels ever) were much lower. So now smart, aggressive people can reasonably choose NOT to go to college. Will their income levels suffer 20 years later?

Will they be less happy? Maybe even sad or suicidal?

http://lewrockwell.com/altucher/altucher69.1.html
 
Old March 26th, 2012 #100
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Student Loan Debt Reaches $1 Trillion

Written by Brian Koenig

Friday, 23 March 2012

Constitutionalists and free-market economists claim that the idea that every high school graduate is entitled to a government-subsidized loan to attend a $30,000-a-year university is fiscally maniacal. But unfortunately, it’s also a fiscal reality that has propelled college graduates into financial Armageddon.

Indeed, U.S. student-debt outstanding exceeded $1 trillion last year — according to new estimates released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — potentially leading to further delays in home-buying and, in turn, an extended impasse on the housing recovery. CFPB student loan ombudsman Rohit Chopra, for instance, asserts that "first-time home-buyers are a substantial part of the housing market," and "instead of saving for a down payment, these borrowers are sending big payments every month."

Bankruptcy attorneys are observing firsthand the calamitous rise in student loan debt, as a recent survey conducted by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys found that 81 percent of bankruptcy lawyers disclosed that the number of prospective clients holding such debt has inflated "significantly" or "somewhat" in the last three to four years.

The student debt debacle, which some experts are labeling the "next debt bomb," involves a coterie of malefactors. On the surface, the culprits entail a stale economy, rising interest rates, and persistently high unemployment. Moreover, CFPB officials contend that such debt is rising because young Americans are returning to college simply to avoid the anemic labor market. These seem to be the logical — and more politically safe — explanations.

But despite what Washington’s entitlement-touting bureaucrats attest, that’s not the end of the story. It encompasses a much more complex plotline.

Predictably, government deserves much of the blame, as its intervention in the higher-education market has spawned a seemingly irreversible distortion that has led to increased tuition costs, and consequently, a monumental rise in student loan debt.

Liberal professors and Occupy Wall Street protesters neglect to realize that their entitlement-based ideology — which affirms that "every American is entitled to a Harvard degree" — is the transgressor.

Similar to the third-party-payer system that is now rattling the fiscal status of American healthcare, the federal government has bolstered its authority in subsidizing tuition costs, as students accumulate bulky government loans to finance their education. This reformed system distorts the high school graduate’s motive to pursue the most competitively-priced schools, prompting many students to select institutions charging $40,000 a year for tuition.

Naturally, this allows colleges and universities to balloon their tuition rates, and thanks to the political meddling that has severely deformed the education market, these institutions get away with it.

As Chopra seemed to indicate, America’s entitlement ideology has left unemployed college graduates in financial turmoil: "Young consumers are shouldering much of the punishment in the form of substantial student-loan bills for doing exactly what they were told would be the key to a better life."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is the prime example of such advocacy, as he incessantly rails against those who believe doling out $40,000 a year for higher education is not always the favorable choice. "Don’t just go to one that has the highest price," Mitt Romney recently told a student at a town hall meeting. "Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And, hopefully, you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on."

Krugman was aghast. "Wow. So much for America’s tradition of providing student aid," he wrote in a March 8 article. "And Mr. Romney’s remarks were even more callous and destructive than you may be aware, given what’s been happening lately to American higher education."

"For the past couple of generations, choosing a less expensive school has generally meant going to a public university rather than a private university," Krugman continued. "But these days, public higher education is very much under siege, facing even harsher budget cuts than the rest of the public sector."

"One result has been soaring fees. Inflation-adjusted tuition at public four-year colleges has risen by more than 70 percent over the past decade. So good luck on finding that college ‘that has a little lower price.’"

Well in that case, let’s add up the variables: Government-subsidized loans have caused tuition costs to soar and imprudent government spenders have prompted widespread budget deficits. It appears that Mr. Krugman debunked his own entitlement ideology without even knowing it.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/cultur...hes-1-trillion
 
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