Let’s Hold Off the Blame Game at Virginia Tech
It seems fruitless on this day to comment on the “inside baseball” of the state budget process or the academic climate within higher education. There are other days and other weeks for those serious conversations.
This week, all such policy discussions take a back seat to the briefness of life.
Today I turned my thoughts to my disbelief and anger over what occurred Monday at Virginia Tech. We were all shocked as news began to circulate that a gunman – in two separate shootings – killed 32 students and professors and then later himself, leaving 33 dead in all. The gunman was identified Tuesday as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student originally from South Korea. Many at Virginia Tech described Cho as a “loner.”
Rate increase proposed for community colleges
RALEIGH – Members of the joint House-Senate appropriations committee Thursday proposed a 5 percent increase in community college tuition to help fund additional programs within the system.
If approved, the rate increase would be the first since 2005. It would provide $6 million of additional revenue.
The tuition hike was included in the spending report of the Joint Appropriations Subcommittee on Education. It includes what areas the joint committee intends to fund and how much. Now, the committee will split to work on appropriation matters in their separate chambers. House members are expected to release a budget document by May.
The Higher Ed Completion Hobgoblin
There is a cottage industry in the U.S. (located mostly in Washington, DC, but with satellite plants scattered around the country) that produces hand-wringing policy reports saying that America faces a crisis unless it finds a way to put more students into and through college. (Here are two recent examples: “The Waning of America’s Higher Education Advantage” published last June by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and “American Higher Education: How Does it Measure Up for the 21st Century?”) H. L. Mencken once wrote that politics is a game of menacing the people with “an endless series of hobgoblins” to keep them clamoring for governmental officials to make them safe. This business of scaring people into thinking that we’ve got to get more students through college fits that description perfectly.
The most recent addition to this genre is a paper released March 7 entitled “Hitting Home: An Analysis of the Cost, Access and Quality Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today” published by the group Making Opportunity Affordable. The paper’s big point is that the U.S. suffers from a “degree gap” that threatens our economic future. In the words of the author, “In fact, the size of this gap – the difference between degrees produced in the United States and those produced by nations who are among our top competitors – could reach almost 16 million degrees by 2025….” To close this supposedly dangerous gap, the paper advocates government action to get far more young Americans into and through college – thus “producing” the degrees that will enable us to keep right up with those competitors.
Commission Turns Thumbs Down on “UNC-Rocky Mount” Proposal
Last week, a study commission examining the feasibility of bringing North Carolina Wesleyan College into the University of North Carolina system released its findings and recommendations.
The study commission was created through legislation backed by legislators from eastern North Carolina last year. Political and business leaders from Rocky Mount had hoped that adding North Carolina Wesleyan into the UNC system would give a large boost to the region’s economy, described by one supporter as like a “Third World country.” While acknowledging the economic concerns, the report made it clear that UNC had to look at what was best for the entire state not just that particular region.
Missing the Mark in Higher Education
The old saying, “be careful what you wish for,” is especially apt when it comes to public policy, whose consequences seldom reflect intentions. Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education may be about to prove this adage true once again.
Protecting Against “Heterosexism” — for $200,000?
Harvard’s president Derek Bok has written that universities have something in common with gambling addicts and exiled royalty – there is never enough money. One reason why that’s true is that people on campus are almost always spending other people’s money and when that’s the case, there’s a strong tendency to demand all sorts of unnecessary things. After all, if available money doesn’t get spent on what you want, it will get spent on what someone else wants.
The story of the proposed Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) Center at NC State is a good illustration of the infighting that erupts when interest groups battle over how to spend other people’s money.
Senate introduces flurry of higher education bills
RALEIGH – Bills that would provide full funding for all University of North Carolina budget requests, create a ROPE Scholars program, and alter tax deductions for contributions to 529 plans were among the bills introduced in the State Senate Wednesday.
The introductions came during a busy day in the General Assembly that marked the deadline for bills in the State Senate to be filed with the Senate Principal Clerk’s office. The House has a similar deadline of April 18 for public bills and May 9 for appropriation bills.
300,000 UNC students in ten years?
GREENVILLE � Enrollment across the University of North Carolina could reach 300,000 by 2017, according to projections presented during a Thursday policy meeting.
The projections also point to a growing number of Hispanic students from North Carolina who will seek higher education. UNC leaders say if that occurs, a number of campuses will not have a majority of one race or ethnic group.
Duke Praised for Educational Innovations
Duke University’s undergraduate curriculum — like many others – went through a period of erosion beginning in the late 1960s. For many schools, that decline has continued, but not at Duke, according to a new paper just released by the Pope Center. “The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: The Focus and Gerst Programs,” written by Russell K. Nieli, examines how Duke stopped the decline and suggests ways in which other schools can help their students find more meaning in their education.
Nieli, who graduated from Duke in 1970 and now teaches at Princeton, observes that the administration at Duke – as at many other prominent universities – succumbed to two Siren songs during this period. One was to relax the constraints of the old idea of a core curriculum in order to give students more control over their college education. The result was a “distribution requirements” system that allowed students to pick most of their courses from a smorgasbord of offerings.
That change destroyed the educational commonality that had once tied Duke students together. “Gone were the days when almost all Duke students would have read the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and King Lear; when you could strike up a conversation with even a Duke chemistry or biology major on the differences between St. John’s Gospel and the Synoptics; when students eagerly debated in their dorm lounges whether Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were fascists or high-minded traditionalists; and when Southern students and faculty took special pride in the outstanding literary achievements of the great Southern writers,” Nieli says.
Duke Brings Coherence to Curriculum, Says Policy Report from Pope Center
Two academic programs at Duke University are helping
undergraduates experience a well-rounded education and could be copied by other universities.
This is the message of a new report from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, “The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: The Focus and Gerst Programs,” by Russell K. Nieli.
Duke is responding to a problem that afflicts many universities: There is no longer a “core curriculum. “
Students round out their education by selecting courses that meet loose “distribution requirements,”
but the resulting education can be fragmented, limited, and incoherent.