Links for 8/23/10

Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida, and Jonathan Mills (need to click through)

Wake Forest, Yale, MIT, Harvard, and Dartmouth spend more solely on administration per student than the average university spends on everything per student. The nearly $75,000 at Wake Forest and the nearly $60,000 at Yale per student spent on administration must buy some truly excellent administration.

STEVEN KNAPP

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have written a lucid, passionate and wide-ranging book on the state of American higher education…

There was a time, in their telling, when universities saw their mission as education; now even small colleges compel their faculties to publish (at the expense of teaching) for the sake of an institutional stature that teaching alone cannot confer.

Daniel Willingham on Paul Peterson

Peterson’s core argument--that reformers seek greater centralization of control, then lose control of the intended reform…

Dean Dad

if you're adjuncting and you feel like you're being exploited, stop adjuncting. Just stop. Walk away…

The culture valued education at x forty years ago, and still does now. The problem is that the cost has gone from .5x to 2x. The culture didn't turn its back on us; we just mistook respect for open-ended entitlement…

The era of “all things to all people” passed decades ago in most other industries. At a really fundamental level, it's time to rethink the “diffuse mission, few funding streams” model in favor of a “diffuse funding streams, focused mission” model. Instead of counting on an ever-stingier state to support ever more programs, let's diversify the funding streams and channel them into fewer, stronger programs. At the community college level, I see that boiling down to the liberal arts, criminal justice, and nursing, with some regional variation. Let the proprietaries handle the vocational stuff; it's what they do, and we can't keep adding boutique programs on ever-declining revenue. Let's get the benefits of specialization, and do a few things well rather than a lot of things just a little bit worse every year…

I care too much about higher education to let it die of neglect without at least trying to save it. But it has to want to live. It has to stop pretending that it isn't badly sick. It has to stop pretending that eating its young is a viable long-term strategy…