Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Links for 11/11/09

Arthur Peng and James Guthrie on "The Phony Funding Crisis"
If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America’s schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating…

Yet somehow… from one year to the next, schools almost always have more real revenue for each of their enrolled students. For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year...
Russell Nieli on grade inflation.
For it was during this period -- the late 60s and early 70s -- when the universities lost their nerve as traditional sources of authority … The student consumer was now king, and the demand to eliminate low grades -- like the demand to eliminate burdensome course requirements -- proved irresistible to institutions that had lost confidence in themselves and sought above all to please their paying customers…

There has been a "Lake Wobegon" pattern in grading, Malkiel says, where every student is above average…

The anti-grade-inflation policy seemed to be working and not harming Princeton graduates in the employment and professional school arenas…
David Grant
after the president’s “pay czar” finishes mastering Wall Street pay, he might try storming America’s ivory towers.
BILL ALPERT
ON TOP OF DOUBLE-DIGIT ENROLLMENT growth, for-profit schools benefited from the generous pricing umbrella of the traditional schools. For three decades, tuition has increased by an average of more than 7% each year at public and nonprofit private universities, according to the government's National Center for Educational Statistics. By pricing themselves between the public and the non-profit colleges, the for-profits have been able to swell revenues at 20%-to-30% annual rates.

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