Our higher education system has been and will continue to be a massive failure for most children. Here’s why:
- 50% of college graduates under 25 do not have a meaningful job, yet over a million jobs go unfilled because employers can’t find candidates with the appropriate skills.
- USA Today documented that a report based on the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses found that, “After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”
- Federal statistics show that just 36 percent of full-time students starting college in 2001 earned a four-year degree within four years. Even with an extra two years to finish, that group’s graduation rate increased only to 57 percent.
- College tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Since 2007 tuition and fees have accelerated at a faster pace yet.
- Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade. The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200—a nearly $5,000 increase over five years. Two-thirds of students graduating from four-year schools owed money on student loans.
- In 2007, U.S. universities spent an average of $41,337 per student, while the average tuition rate was $10,929. So who paid the other $30,408 per student? Taxpayers like you and me!
- The cost of higher education has gone through the roof, costing everyone a fortune and leaving students and their families with an often terrible financial burden. And why? Because it is a system run by people interested primarily in themselves, not in the education, lives and futures of their students. Here are some examples:
- From 1993 to 2007 UC Davis “went from 3.2 full-time administrators per 100 students to 13.5. That’s a 321.9 percent increase per student”, while “the number of instructors, research and service employees actually shrank by 5.2 percent, from 9.6 to 9.1 per 100 students”! “UCD student fees climbed 77.2 percent over the study period. They’ve shot up in the past year, reaching almost $12,000 after a record 32 percent fee hike approved by the UC Board of Regents in November.” And what was the main response by the University’s administration to this circumstance? Why, more money from the government (translation: the taxpayers), of course, along with bigger gifts from alumni and, last but not least, yet another big tuition hike. Source: Top ranks swelled at UCD By Cory Golden | Davis Enterprise | August 19, 2010
- UC Berkeley’s new vice chancellor for equity and inclusion has 17 people working for him, including a “chief of staff,” two “project/policy analysts,” and a “director of special projects.” According to state databases the vice chancellor’s base pay in 2009 was $194,000, which does not include a variety of possible add-ons, including summer salary and administrative stipends. By comparison, the official salary for assistant professors at UC starts at around $53,000! Source: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2011/10/yes_were_broke_but_leave_the_d.html
- “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the University of California’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned when commenting about the system’s financial crisis. Not quite to the bone. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.” Source: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2011/10/yes_were_broke_but_leave_the_d.html
So there’s a taste of the problem.
So how do we insure a high-quality and useful post-secondary education for ourselves and our children given all the challenges? Next week I’ll give advice on some of the things we can do for now and why I believe that these problems will ultimately be solved, and quite dramatically, in the years to come. I say this because I believe we will soon reach the point where our entire education system, and especially our system of higher education, will have no choice but to undertake massive reform or go out of business—to be replaced by a far superior system that is just beginning to surface.