Costs

American colleges and universities spend billions of dollars a year from state, federal, and private sources. The following articles identify ways to cut costs and ensure that public investment in higher education provides value to students, taxpayers, and society.

Harry Potter Goes to College

Dec 21, 2007 ·

Editor’s note: The latest installment in the wizarding movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will likely make an appearance under many Christmas trees this year. A more important question is whether the books should make an appearance in college courses. This article was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on August 9, 2007.

Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history, Latin, and science. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader’s guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.

The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a young boy’s adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter’s ongoing battle against evil, with its themes of choice and consequences, life and death, and love and hate, reverberates among this generation as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five captured the students of the 1960s.

But are Harry Potter books good enough for the college curriculum?

Accountability – What Is It?

Dec 17, 2007 ·

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
You can send your son to college, but you can’t make him think.”

This little ditty ran through my mind as I was trying to understand the accountability movement of colleges and universities. Under pressure from the federal government, higher education institutions are scrambling to find ways to measure and report “learning outcomes” – that is, to show that students learn something after four years at their institution. This week, at a Washington, D.C., meeting of a Department of Education accreditation advisory group, that pressure will increase.

Fifty years ago, the student was accountable for learning, not the college.

The High Cost of Low Tuition

Dec 10, 2007 ·

The Florida legislature voted this spring to allow three universities to raise tuition well above the average for Florida’s state universities – up to 40 percent over four years for the University of Florida and Florida State, up to 30 per cent in the case of the University of South Florida. Although Governor Charles Crist had threatened a veto, he changed his mind, and tuition is going up in the fall of 2008.

When it comes to setting tuition, who is right – the legislators, following the lead of university administrators, who want significant increases in tuition — or the governor, who signed the bill reluctantly and vetoed a system-wide 5 per cent increase in tuition this fall? (Editor’s note: The legislature eventually overrode the governor’s veto.)

Meet the New Boss

Dec 7, 2007 ·

Most people expected the “insider” to become the next president of the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS). The big question was, which insider would the governing State Board of Community Colleges choose at its December 6 meeting?

In what might be considered a triumph of the visionary over the financial expert, Dr. Scott Ralls, the current president of Craven Community College in New Bern, was selected over Kennon Briggs, the system’s vice president for business and finance for the past ten years. Before becoming Craven CC’s president, the 43-year-old Ralls was the NCCCS vice president for economic and workforce Development.

Another Battle in the Student Fees War

Dec 5, 2007 ·

At most colleges and universities, each student is required to pay fees in addition to tuition and living expenses. Those fees are used to pay for a vast array of things on campus, whether or not the student has any interest in them.

Over the years, there has been a lot of litigation over student fees, with some students arguing that the system for collecting and distributing money is not just unfair but illegal. On November 20, a federal court in New York threw another wrench into the already convoluted legality of student fees.

Campus Safety vs. Civil Liberties

Dec 3, 2007 ·

The slaughter of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech by a disturbed gunman on April 16, 2007 had an impact on the American campus similar to the impact the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had on the entire nation. It became more than a loss of lives; it was a reminder that danger can strike at any time, and a warning shot urging a new vigilance. In the immediate aftermath, universities across the country rushed to tighten up their emergency procedures and to increase safety precautions.

Within two days of the shooting, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper initiated the formation of a task force to study the emergency readiness of local colleges. Shortly after, UNC President Erskine Bowles convened The Campus Safety Task Force to specifically scrutinize the UNC system’s preparedness. The Task Force’s final report was introduced six months later at the November Board of Governors meeting by Leslie Winner, UNC system vice president and General Counsel who chaired the commission. The Board of Governors passed the task force’s proposals resoundingly.

“Conventional Wisdom” Not Always Wise

Nov 28, 2007 ·

There’s a famous line of Mark Twain’s that goes, “The trouble isn’t what people don’t know, but rather what they know that just ain’t so.”

That’s every bit as true when it comes to education as in any other field. Ideas that people are certain are true because they’re heard them again and again are often untrue. They form the “conventional wisdom” that gets in the way of seeing things the way they really are.

In a new paper entitled “Over Invested and Over Priced,” Richard Vedder takes a critical look at several pieces of the conventional wisdom about higher education. Vedder, a jovial, outspoken economics professor (at Ohio University) has focused his attention on higher education for the last several years. He was one of the few people on the Spellings Commission who raised deep questions about the value students receive for all the money we spend on higher education. In this new paper, he continues doing that.

Firebrands, Critics and Seers

Nov 16, 2007 ·

They came! They saw! They spoke!

At the 2007 Pope Center Conference on “Building Excellence into American Higher Education,” that is. They dissected higher education with the precision of surgeons, exposed collegiate absurdities and told tales of their battles with academic bureaucracies.

The conference is over, and the conference speakers are back fighting the good fight on campus. But their words live on! Just click on the links below to see to the conference speeches and panels:

What Does Excellence Mean?
Stephen H. Balch

What “Helicopter Parents” Should Really Want

Nov 12, 2007 ·

“Helicopter parents” are in the news again. These are parents of college students who don’t let go—they “hover” over their children, staying in constant electronic communication. When a problem arises, they drop down and help the students get out of a fix. At the extreme, this behavior annoys university officials, and some administrators fear that these parents are keeping their children from growing up.

Helicopter parents got a bit of a boost recently, however, from a surprising direction—a new effort by colleges to be accountable. A national survey discovered that students whose parents took an active role in their school life were more “satisfied with every aspect of their college experience,” George Kuh, director of the survey, told the Washington Post (Nov. 5).

Admissions Standards Suggested for Entire UNC System

Oct 12, 2007 ·

The University of North Carolina moved a step closer to setting system-wide minimum admission standards at the Board of Governors meeting on October 11. Speaking at a policy session, Harold Martin, senior vice president for academic affairs, proposed to the board the following minimum criteria for entering freshmen in 2013: a 2.5 grade point average in high school and a minimum SAT score of 800 (out of 1600 total) or ACT score of 17 (out of 35).

Today, although each university campus sets its own admission standards, there is no statewide requirement, and some campuses in the UNC system have none. If approved by the Board of Governors in January, initial standards would start in the fall of 2009 with a 2.0 GPA and 700 SAT or 15 ACT, and increase incrementally until the 2013 levels are achieved. Martin added that the chancellor would always have the right to waive requirements for a maximum of 1 per cent of students.