Links for 1/17/11

Bob Samuels

I have put together a comprehensive proposal to save vital services, while absorbing the latest round of budget cuts:

1. Reduce senior management group by 20%...

2. Institute a UC tax on all auxiliaries of 10%...

3. Reduce the number of grants that do not bring in at least 50% in indirect cost recoveries…

4. Cap administrative salaries, raises, and supplemental retirement perks. This will reduce future costs and help motivate some overpaid administrators to leave. (cost: priceless).

5. Prevent athletic subsidies…

Bill Tucker

When you see companies no longer touting just enrollment growth, but also graduation and other measures of student success as reasons to invest, then we’ll know that we’ve got the incentives right.

Leonard Cassuto

We teach graduate students to want the kinds of jobs that most of them won't ever get…

Neal McCluskey

You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically “you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.”

Now, are for-profit schools pure and blameless? Absolutely not: Norton/Norris confirmed several of the GAO’s findings, and some findings they questioned are probably accurate. Moreoever, as I’ve pointed out before, many for-profit schools are happy to take students carrying taxpayer dollars despite knowing there’s little chance that those students will ever finish their studies. Of course, that makes those institutions no different from many public and nonprofit private schools about which Sen. Harkin evinces no concern…

Alexandra M. Lord

employers looking to hire a Ph.D. historian tend to balk when the job applicant has absolutely no experience outside of academe. Consequently, jobs with tremendous potential to transform how the American public understands history often go to people who lack extensive academic training in the subject…