The original article argued essentially that he was drastically overpaid for the work he did and what he contributed to the world, and further that sociology, along with most social science fields, are nearly worthless in the grand scheme of things due to its extreme left-wing ideological leanings, esoteric concerns and lack of practical impact.

The responses have varied.  My first thought was that, while correct about higher ed’s ideological leanings, that doesn’t make all of the arguments presented from those ideological perspectives invalid.  My 2nd thought was that he must have been a crappy teacher / researcher / mentor.  (At least the first part is born out at ratemyprofessor.com.  His research productivity is far in the past – a quick google scholar search shows nothing new in more than 10 years.  I pity his graduate students who are now getting tarred and feathered by association.)

What does keep coming back to me as I read through this whole thing is how his experience, right or wrong, is based on getting in to an academic position at a specific point in time (when there were far more opportunities than PhDs applying for them), rose through the ranks at a school that was trying to become a major player and therefore was offering salaries and benefits to attract the best, and has coasted ever since.

The harm I see in this article is that it gives a perspective on the academic life that DOESN’T EXIST ANY LONGER.  Are there people out there who have had this experience?  Some.  Not as many as the conservative blogosphere would like to think, but definitely some.  But for a new graduate or a newly tenured faculty member, the life he describes doesn’t exist.  The R1 I attended expects every faculty member (tenured or not) to bring in enough grant money to cover their own expenses as well as those of any PhD students they want for research assistants.  Chair (who got tenure about a year ago) still takes only one day a week off, and only because his lawyer wife (another 60+ hour per week career) insists on it.  Granted, he has the freedom to do his work on-campus, off-campus, or even out of the state/country if he plans it well.  But reading yet another bad paper from a grad student is no more fun just because you are doing it in a coffee shop.  And compare Rubenstein’s load to that of the instructors at a community college who make less (lower prestige) and teach as many as 6 sections per semester of students who are often ill-prepared and have life-stories that will make you sob.

Rubenstein was lucky to be born when he was, enter the field when he did and lock in the benefits that he got.  Academics of more recent vintages have a very different experience.  The worst damage he has done is in the implication throughout much of his article that his experience is the norm.  It’s not even the norm for his generation of scholars, let alone those that have come along since.  In the process, he commits a major research error (sample size of one) and makes the fight far harder for those academics who follow.

All too many people are looking at this from a one-dimensional perspective; for-profit = bad.  To this group there is some kind of ethical issue with making money on education; these are the same people who have been tarring and feathering charter schools for the past decade. The corollary is that making money principally from money provided by the government is worse.  (Why this doesn’t apply to defense contracts and such is beyond me.)  The picture is much more complex.

We are caught in an explosion of credential-ism, whereby the administrative assistant who used to need a High School diploma now needs an Associates in Business and a promotion to manager needs an MBA.  Do these jobs really require what is taught in these programs?  Probably not.  But the degree is a short-cut; it indicates purpose on the part of the person, discipline to complete something and some assumed level of knowledge.  (Note that at the same time employers routinely complain that students don’t learn what they need them to learn in school, but that’s another post entirely.)  Regardless, most people can’t stop working long enough to get the credential, making the “traditional” college experience an unachievable goal.

At the same time we live in a society where the message for the past few decades has been that degree = success = money = middle class.  My father died in 1993, when I was in my late 20s.  I had dropped out of college after the first semester of my sophomore year and not yet gone back.  On his death-bed he informed me that I was going to be a bag lady because I hadn’t finished school.  At the time I was making $50k working as a tech support manager in silicon valley.  To him that didn’t matter, and we continue to deliver that message today.  We tell kids and adults that they HAVE to go to college, and we talk about increasing the number of graduates, all the while watching the benefits of that degree shrink.

These competing pressures are driving more and more non-traditional students back to school.  (Traditional students are full-time, 18-21 year olds usually living on campus and working maybe 10 hours per week.)

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full-time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools.

And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. — USA today citing NCES

We have a system in place that is made to support a small fraction of what today’s college student is actually like at a time when public funding for education is being drastically cut, limiting innovation in the public sector.  Is it any wonder why for-profit firms have stepped in to fill the gap?

For-profit colleges work with a disproportionate number of

1. working adults
2. minorities
3. first time college students
4. first college student in the family

This is not a chosen strategy; every school would rather have the easy students who all complete their programs, know how to deal with the system and make the school look great by going on to great accomplishments.  For-profits work with this audience because that is the one that exists and is being drastically underserved by other higher education organizations.

On the one hand, many people see these groups as disadvantaged and therefore in need of protection from the “big bad corporate wolf”.  But on the other, most non-profit colleges aren’t interested in supporting these students or don’t have the resources to help them navigate the process.  For example, only 58 percent of community college students eligible for Pell Grants applied.

The study, conducted in collaboration with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), identified several reasons that community college students are reluctant apply for aid. These reasons include:

a lack sufficient human and technology resources at financial aid offices to provide students with information and one-on-one assistance

financial aid needs of students may not receive adequate priority or attention because public funding is scarce for many community colleges.

students not having a basic understanding of financial planning for a college education

Say what you want about for-profits, but they provide students the information and resources to apply.

Are there crooked for-profits out there seeking only to game the system?  Of course.  There are also crooked churches, crooked social service organizations and crooked businesses.  This doesn’t make them ALL crooked.  Are there bad apples at every school doing the wrong things?  Yup; if I could take the enrollment counselors who were recruiting from homeless shelters out and paddle their bottoms I would.

But just as there are bad for-profits, there are bad non-profits as well.  Segregating the system based on incorporation status doesn’t provide any benefit to the discussion.  Bad apples in both barrels need to be dealt with, students need to be educated on smart college borrowing, and schools that provide sub-standard education need to be weeded out regardless of whether they put their money into shareholder dividends or new buildings and endowments.

The higher education system has some really big issues right now, and picking on the new kid isn’t going to solve them.  The most sensible voices in the current discussion realize that.  The rest need to come down off their high horses, stop throwing the baby (innovation and superior service) out with the bath water (predatory recruiting practices and uninformed lending) and focus on supporting the students we HAVE, not the ones we wish we had.

Is a for-profit always the best alternative for a given student?  No.  Neither is Harvard, or StateU or Local Community College.  However singling out the for-profit sector isn’t reasonable; there are lots of people flipping burgers with degrees from third-rate universities who struggle just as much with their loans, and many with non-vocationally oriented degrees from top universities who are drowning in debt.  The problem is systemic and needs to be addressed as such.  Access, funding, and the desired outcomes are all in need of some serious re-imagining, and removing the most imaginative group from the discussion (even if you don’t like what motivates their imagination) isn’t going to help anyone.

Another article came out today about how for-profit colleges and trade schools (lumped into one big indistinguishable mass) are using deceptive practices to convince students to sign up for expensive degree programs, then encouraging the students to take out massive student loans that they won’t be able to pay off when they graduate due to low starting salaries or no jobs.  It would be foolish not to acknowledge that some for-profit organizations do this, but it would be just as foolish to suggest that no not-for-profit ones do.

Tuitions are going up everywhere.  State support of public institutions is going the way of the dodo, with the most recent announcement being double digit tuition increases for the universities in Arizona.  In some cases, the for-profits may become the only place with the capacity to take students as budgets such as California’s cause even community colleges to turn students away.  The for-profits may still be more expensive the those public institutions with space, but the gap is closing quickly.

For instance, a full (no transfer credit) Bachelors in Education from the University of Phoenix runs about $43,000 (either online or in a regular albeit evening classroom format).  That sounds huge; how will a teacher ever repay that?  Of course, they could also go to ASU for around $33,000.  Assuming they lived in Phoenix already and that they could take the time off from their current job to get to the scheduled classes and that they could arrange transportation and child care (if necessary).  (The for-profits have few traditional students; most are working adults going back for a career change or enhanced qualifications.)

An Arizona teacher has a starting salary on average $31,000, which comes with the threat of layoff due to the state or a district being short on funds.  A back of the envelope payment calculation comes up with $497 per month for University of Phoenix vs. $382 per month for ASU.  With a take home of under $1955 per month averaged out over 12 months (assuming 18% of gross for taxes and benefits, which is probably low), student loan payments would eat up 25 and 20% of take home respectively. (I’m not even going to talk about private not-for-profits; even the middle-of-the-road ones often charge upwards of $18,000 per year AFTER financial aid.  For example, here is the small liberal arts school I went to for undergrad.  $25k per year for tuition alone is not uncommon.)  Even with the new Income Based Repayment (which would limit the amount to 15% of 1.5*povery rate, or $184 per month) this is still a heavy burden with really slow progress.

A new proposal takes this a step further, calling for schools to be required to keep debt (average debt per student) at or below 8% of the Bureau of Labor Statistics 25th percentile salary.  But there’s a catch; this only applies to proprietary (read: for-profit) schools and trade programs.  That’s where the hypocrisy comes in.

A new teacher from ASU is nearly as finacially underwater as a new teacher from University of Phoenix, yet the proposal is essentially a price cap on the latter but not the former.  I can’t think of a single justification for that beyond the irrational hatred many in education feel for for-profit firms trying to make it in their industry.

Obviously these firms fill some niche that the standard public colleges don’t.  It might be convenience, timing, far superior customer service (as long as you are enrolling for more classes, the for-profits will bend over backwards to help you get what you need), a lack of requirements for classes that appear unrelated to your career, or any number of other possible things.  From a purely dollar-based comparison they may look like a bad deal, but students don’t choose a school based strictly on dollars.  These other factors weigh in, and sometimes the convenience alone can be worth the price.

My point is that if we as a society believe these kinds of limits are valuable then they should apply across the board.  Firms who are deceptive in their recruitment techniques should be sued over it, regardless of their tax status.  The public education system is slow and resistant to learning from the for-profit sector despite seeing how successful that sector is, and that’s too bad.  As state funding drys up, public institutions are going to find even more pressure to drive up enrollment for additional tuition dollars and cut costs (including financial aid) to make ends meet.

In general, even when I abhor some of the specifics of the ACLU’s positions (they’ve supported the KKK, NAMBLA, etc) I agree that defending the constitution is  more important than the specifics of any one case.  However I can no longer support the ACLU.  They seem to have decided to pick and choose the parts of the Bill of Rights they are going to support.

“The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller.”

• Prior to Heller an older case (Miller), if read carelessly, left open the door for the 2nd Amendment as a collective right.  However even the DISSENTERS in the Heller case make it clear that the 2nd amendment is an INDIVIDUAL RIGHT.   How much clearer can it be?  
• The ACLU’s About Us page says:

• The ACLU has historically pushed cases to the Supreme Court in order to get precedent established.  Now that one has been established, ignoring it makes the ACLU hypocrites.

If the ACLU wanted to stay neutral, I would have been fine with that.  The NRA is more than capable of dealing with all the gun rights cases in this country.  But taking a position AGAINST the Constitution, AGAINST the Supreme Court, and AGAINST a civil right is unacceptable. 

The comments thread of that post is amazing – they have 1 person who agrees out of hundreds of posts, many who now intend to stop contributing.  Here are a few of my favorite comments:

George Will wrote an excellent op-ed today regarding No Child Left Behind (NCL.  I’m sure there are people at the Fordham Foundation ranting in the halls about his use of their Proficiency Illusion paper to bolster an argument about getting the federal government OUT of education (as opposed to their preferred solution of national standards).  However it got me thinking yet again about the conflict in my mind over local control.

I have some seriously libertarian political leanings.  I think the government tries to do too much, sticks its nose into way too many things it has no business in and does most of what it does badly.  So I have long felt that any government intervention in education, an area specifically excluded from federal control, is a bad idea.  NCLB is just the latest and worst of those interventions; in K-12 they date back to the Elementary and Secondary Schools act in 1965.  Educational needs have always been best assessed by those closest; the parents and the community.

I’ve been questioning that for the last couple of years however.  Mobility is a key aspect of modern society.  Cheap air fares, cheap long-distance/cell service and web cams have made it far easier to pack up and live anywhere.  My mother lived within 100 miles of where she was born until she was in her 60s, when she moved to Florida to retire near all the people she had grown up with.  I, on the other hand, have lived on both coasts and many places in between.  I have needed to be competitive in markets from upstate NY to San Francisco at the height of the tech boom. 

Now, I was lucky.  I went to a suburban middle class school with good scores, a strong program and parents who believed in the need to go to college in order to make it in the world, even if you didn’t move away.  The curriculum set out by my community was strong and full enough to make me competitive.  But I realize that not everyone has that type of background.

Then again, not everyone moves either.  My brother still lives within 10 miles of where we grew up and will never leave.  The 1980 census found 63.9% of people living in the state of their birth.  In 1990 it was 61.8%.  By 2000 that was down to 60%.  Certainly a downward trend, but still not a majority.

To me the only good argument for national standards and anything OTHER than local control of education stems from this mobility idea; that we are no longer functioning as a confederation of states and have truly evolved to be a single entity more than anything else, where our citizens will need to function in an economic and political  environment that requires consistent knowledge and skills.

But those numbers above say something different.  In 2000 60% of the country lived within the state of its birth.  These people could have moved the day before the census or 20 years before.  So are we right to get the federal government, an inefficient behemoth of an institution, involved in something that at most benefits  40% of the population (and as I am proof, probably quite a bit less)?

For that matter, if we DID take the feds out of the picture, would it result in some states making their standards even LOWER or would we see competition between states to provide a better education for their students…. 

I have to agree overall with Will; Nothing good comes from federal involvement in education and a LOT of bad comes from it.

“Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government.” Mitt Romney, 12/6/2007

Does this mean I get to stop paying taxes?  Since my citizenship has just been revoked….

“Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.”

So you can only believe in religious freedom if you have “knelt in prayer” to his god?  Otherwise you’re an enemy?  How can someone smart enough (theoretically) to be where he is and with a staff of writers to write this drivel not have realized that A does not equal B in the above sentence?

There are a great number of things making me cranky today.  Here’s a summary:

• Mitt Romney’s speech and the religious pandering of all the candidates.  (I love this summary, and hate what it means for the country.)
• The imminent mortgage bail-out for those who overextended themselves, but only the ones that timed it right (so that they haven’t already seen the rate jump and therefore had to stop making payments) and who someone somewhere thinks can make it at the low rate but not at the high rate.  So, I should have taken a risky loan and saved myself a few percentage points instead of buying a house within my means?  Good to know.  My friends who have already had their rate adjust and missed a payment?  Out of luck. 
• The fact that my hope of a 20 hour job has just fallen through, leaving me with either the 30 hour consulting job (still not officially offered) or applying for a full time institutional researcher position (where at least I would be on campus all the time, if busy, and have to give up my assistantship in favor of tuition remission through the college, which is taxable).
• I have been calling and emailing adviser since mid November.  First it was “You’ll hear from me after Dec. 1″.  On Sat Dec 1 7:45 am he emailed me to call him.  I was crunching to get things done and called him on Tuesday.  No response.  Called again.  No response.  Emailed.  Got a response.  “I’m finishing up some work on an evaluation project.  I’ll call before mid-week next week.”  Nice to know where I stand. 
• I am stumped on a stupid problem at work.  It makes no sense at all.  None.  And it’s pissing me off.
• It’s cloudy.  Again.  I deal with 115 degree days because it’s sunny here all the time.  Right now I’m feeling jipped.
• My mother called last night to tell me to check my email for something that she sent and I responded to days ago.

I realized last night that part of my procrastination problem is that I don’t feel like a scholar/academic.  I feel like I am taking classes as a hobby.  And if that’s the case, we are accumulating far too much student loan debt to keep the hobby affordable.

A 19 year old Saudi woman who was raped 14 times by 7 men has been sentenced to 200 lashes and 6 months in jail.  This is infuriating for 2 reasons.

1. Since when is being gang raped not sufficient punishment for any offense?  They charged her for being in the car with a strange man, but frankly I’m pretty sure that being raped even once is sufficient punishment for that.
2. This sentence is an INCREASE over her original sentence.  She had appealed and they more than doubled the lashes and added the jail sentence, accusing her of using the media in an attempt to manipulate the process.

The only good part is that they doubled the rapists’ sentences as well, but they are still far below the death penalty which could have been prescribed.  Their final sentences ranged from 2 to 10 years.  10 is fine.  2 years for a gang rape should only be permissible if they castrate the offender.

I am utterly appalled.