Links for 11/15/10

Robert Dickeson via Doug Lederman

"The price of program bloat for all is impoverishment for each," he said.

"If you do across the board cuts, shame on you," Dickeson said…

Robert E. Martin

Archibald and Feldman conclude, the true villain in the higher education cost story is productivity growth in the rest of the economy. Faculty wages have to go up to keep professors from looking for better-paying jobs in other fields, but since productivity in higher education is stable, that means its costs must rise.

There are, however, some factual problems with that argument.
average real faculty wages hardly increased at all from 1970 to 2008…

Faculty wage costs per student did increase significantly after 1980, but the reason the wage component went up is because faculty productivity went down…

most of the cost increases since 1970 come from “administrative bloat.”…

Anne D. Neal

Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability…

A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!...

accreditors sought to demand more evidence of student achievement to ensure “educational quality.” But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality…

Andrew J. Rotherham

Today there is an almost $500 billion shortfall for funding teacher pensions, and that gap is growing. Why should you care? Because ultimately taxpayers are on the hook for that money…