Helen Kramer
Notes for Higher Education 9/30/15
Robert Bonfiglio:
1960s: “The Golden Age” of Higher Education (things were both gotten right and beginning to change)
Since then, the demand for and supply of has skyrocketed.
Terms:
a) public goods : (education, e.g.) something used by and valuable to so many that taxes take responsibility for it (public schools, roads, public parks)
b) private goods : (education, e.g.) something meant to benefit not the entirety of society
- the cost for these are distinguished from public v. private/individual benefits
c) cost : the amount of substance that is necessary for an outcome
d) (net) price : the amount paid after subsidization or interest
- sticker price : what is listed as what something shall cost
e) value : can be determined by experience (money) gained back, by an emotional and individual sense of accomplishment, or by a perceived sense of what can be gained through association
Higher Education and Social Movement History
What is History’s place in cost difference?
Consider the Reagan era, or the era of the Civil Rights Movement, or the rise of globalization. How did economics play out in the role of higher education during each distinct time? Apart from economics, considering value, how have social movements or ideologies affected the demand for higher education (when women began increasingly attending institutions of higher education, the perception would have been strongly affected)?
Campuses themselves are facilitations for socializing; the public’s perception of the social aspects of higher education have large effects on the demand for higher education.
College currently seems to, through self-perception or media or even rankings, promote the party scene, or a place of socializing rather than learning. The portrayal seems to have shifted, but not largely, from generation to generation.
Initially, college was meant to be such a socialization: considering college roots, character growth and drinking and misbehaving were all publicly accepted parts of the higher education.
How can society perceive higher education as a public good when the cost is so high and unachievable for so many?
Higher education is harder to technologize than most other industries: it is fundamentally based, until online courses take hold, on the person to person interactions.
Reforming Higher Education under the Capitalist Network
Merit aid seems to be not allocated too evenly within the middle class itself. Merit aid also plays a much larger role in attracting students to vocational schools, as those students must thrive at that school, and those schools want those students.
Merit aid: why do it?
- attract students of lower income, enabling them to attend
- enabling the class diversity to be met by appealing to those students who might not otherwise attend
- attract students of the most talent to create a student body of ultimate peer learning
The nation seems to be more concerned with democratizing education: right now the focus is on making higher education more affordable, rather than focusing on what the learning should consist of. Higher education, although it’s become more utilized, has become much more expensive: so is the concern instead what is being taught?
In a framework of reforming capitalism, where in higher education can costs be cut? It seems like the labor, the faculty, are driving the price up, especially where technology cannot ameliorate these specific cost factors (of faculty) (even though technology ameliorates a lot of the other costs on campuses).
To redistribute wealth within a singular institution will not take affect nearly as efficiently as redistributing wealth among institutions of higher education.
The funding for higher education is stymied maybe because public perception of it is not terrific.
Where does the funding go if no toward higher education? Usually, the military and corrections…where the maintenance for the individual in those sectors is generally less than the maintenance of the same individual in the education system.
Notes for Higher Education 9/30/15
- Defining public and private goods
- Public goods: benefit greater population
- What are examples of public goods in society as a whole?
- Public schools, water fountains, roadways, public spaces like parks
- Used by so many people that the notion is it’s paid for by some kind of tax system, therefore the good that everybody shares is spread out
- Therefore there has to be some sort of understanding that the good is valuable for society as a whole
- What are examples of public goods in society as a whole?
- Private goods: benefit individuals
- Public goods: benefit greater population
- Defining price vs. cost
- Cost: the amount [of money] that is necessary, for example, for a student to go to college for four years
- Sticker Price: amount college reports as tuition, what colleges advertise
- Many students will see sticker price and assume they can’t afford it; deters high achieveing low income students
- Net Price: the actual tuition that an individual student pays; discounted rate
- Value:
- Value of one institution over another
- You can put a price on value, but isn’t value so much more than that?
- You have overlapping reasons for being in a certain place
- Important: there’s a relationship between price and value; if price far exceeds value, then it won’t be worth it (or it’s unaffordable). So there has to be a relationship between price and value
- Long term value?
- Friendships, networks, opportunities, name dropping “Oberlin College”
- Name dropping “Oberlin:”
- Not always a prestige value, sometimes a kindred spirit feeling
- According to Brittany, name dropping “Harvard” has a very different effect
- Only 200 schools that accept fewer than 50% of applicants. When we talk about such schools, we should keep in mind that they’re only a tiny part of the higher ed framework
- Movement to viewing education as a “private good”
- View of colleges as locus of counter-culture and protest movements of the 60s à decrease in willingness to use tax dollars to support them
- Increased prejudice with which media looks at students
- Contributed to rise of Reaganism; less government spending
- View of college students as degenerate on the rise:
- Media, movies, “self-invested millenials”
- But also, our own generation says “oh that’s what College is supposed to be, I’ve seen it on TV”
- Women going to college in same schools as men, oh no! Fears of sexual freedom and women drinking on the rise
- View of colleges as locus of counter-culture and protest movements of the 60s à decrease in willingness to use tax dollars to support them
- Comparing US to other higher ed systems:
- Unique feature of US ed is its high decentralization
- One of the reasons education in Germany is so supported is because it’s very much a public good, eg you’re paying for a student to become a doctor because the country needs doctors
- Students in the UK have massive protests when tuitions are introduced
- We’re selling a completely different product; in addition to education, we’re selling climbing walls and student clubs and healthcare etc, whereas for European students, going to school is like having a job; it’s separate from the rest of your life and nonresidential
- Summarizing:
- 2 strands: how do we regard education as a public good vs how do we finance higher education; intertwined problems
- Small group discussion:
- According to Davidson, all the money required to fund everyone going to college is already in the system, it’s just poorly distributed
- Comparison between elite institutions (who have more money to give aid) vs less elite institutions (who don’t have the money to give the aid).
- So there’s technically more access at elite institutions
- Thought: higher you make the price tag, the more “merit aid” you can offer without actually costing yourself anything
- Merit aid thoughts:
- Students from low income backgrounds don’t have money to help prep with ACT, SAT, etc, making them less qualified for merit aid
- Relating aid to perceived value; there are students who could come but have other options, and merit package is what brings them, the “pat on the back”
- Often the parents need this more than the students: to make parents willing to allow their kids to go to the school
- Students who are good students may need coaxing to come; they want to feel wanted by the college
- Students may choose a school that gives them merit aid over a school that does not, even if the price is the same
- It’s like bribing
- Also hope that bribing students in the short term may encourage them to donate back to the school later on
- Reasons to have merit aid:
- To attract the people that you want for your “ideal college class;” filling the slots
- Perhaps students feel better about getting merit scholarship than about getting financial aid, so aid gets “disguised” as merit
- Merit aid could convince middle-income people to come
- Colleges are competing with each other for top students; that competition drives colleges to offer aid so that they can keep their ranks high
- Hope that students will give donations to the institution in the future
- Potential Goal: limit distance between what college costs and what people can afford.
- Prompt: What’s the goal: political power to decide what kind of education people receive vs economic power to help people afford an education?
- Liberal arts education is becoming more elite
- College have become more expensive even as they have become more accessible
- What kind of education are we getting now that we have one?
- Should everyone be getting a good education? If that’s the case, what does that cost?
- Keep in mind: for-profit institutions have a bottom line that may not be in line with the public good
- Interesting thought: the supply of higher education comes from the people who were formerly the demand of higher education (professors passed through undergraduate);
- Costs have sored through the sky in higher ed because efficiency of higher ed has not risen nearly as fast as efficiency of manufacturing and industries that don’t require skilled labor
- Higher Ed as an industry is moving toward hiring adjuncts and part time professors above tenured professors
- Additional technology being used to increase value, for example engaging students who are in a large lecture class
- A lot of technology may increase value of education, but it does not necessarily decrease cost
- Considering choices about how we distribute resources:
- Notice that state spending on public educations is very close to state spending on corrections
- There’s a way in which we’re spending education money on correction
- How many jobs are you likely to create from investing in military vs higher education?
- Change in public reaction:
- Why hasn’t 9/11 turned out a huge increase in funding for learning Arabic and middle eastern studies? What changed since the cold war?
- Why don’t we turn to higher education as a solution to problems facing the nation in the ways we have in the past?
- Why hasn’t 9/11 turned out a huge increase in funding for learning Arabic and middle eastern studies? What changed since the cold war?
- Final thoughts from Steve Volk:
- There are lots of different issues that impact cost and price
- We can sit on the outside and critique, but having to come up wit ha budget that actually makes sense is unimaginable
- We will be coming back to this when discussing “planning the new university”
- Don’t want to forget the value question or the quality question
Robert Bonfiglio:
1960s: “The Golden Age” of Higher Education (things were both gotten right and beginning to change)
Since then, the demand for and supply of has skyrocketed.
Terms:
a) public goods : (education, e.g.) something used by and valuable to so many that taxes take responsibility for it (public schools, roads, public parks)
b) private goods : (education, e.g.) something meant to benefit not the entirety of society
- the cost for these are distinguished from public v. private/individual benefits
c) cost : the amount of substance that is necessary for an outcome
d) (net) price : the amount paid after subsidization or interest
- sticker price : what is listed as what something shall cost
e) value : can be determined by experience (money) gained back, by an emotional and individual sense of accomplishment, or by a perceived sense of what can be gained through association
Higher Education and Social Movement History
What is History’s place in cost difference?
Consider the Reagan era, or the era of the Civil Rights Movement, or the rise of globalization. How did economics play out in the role of higher education during each distinct time? Apart from economics, considering value, how have social movements or ideologies affected the demand for higher education (when women began increasingly attending institutions of higher education, the perception would have been strongly affected)?
Campuses themselves are facilitations for socializing; the public’s perception of the social aspects of higher education have large effects on the demand for higher education.
College currently seems to, through self-perception or media or even rankings, promote the party scene, or a place of socializing rather than learning. The portrayal seems to have shifted, but not largely, from generation to generation.
Initially, college was meant to be such a socialization: considering college roots, character growth and drinking and misbehaving were all publicly accepted parts of the higher education.
How can society perceive higher education as a public good when the cost is so high and unachievable for so many?
Higher education is harder to technologize than most other industries: it is fundamentally based, until online courses take hold, on the person to person interactions.
Reforming Higher Education under the Capitalist Network
Merit aid seems to be not allocated too evenly within the middle class itself. Merit aid also plays a much larger role in attracting students to vocational schools, as those students must thrive at that school, and those schools want those students.
Merit aid: why do it?
- attract students of lower income, enabling them to attend
- enabling the class diversity to be met by appealing to those students who might not otherwise attend
- attract students of the most talent to create a student body of ultimate peer learning
The nation seems to be more concerned with democratizing education: right now the focus is on making higher education more affordable, rather than focusing on what the learning should consist of. Higher education, although it’s become more utilized, has become much more expensive: so is the concern instead what is being taught?
In a framework of reforming capitalism, where in higher education can costs be cut? It seems like the labor, the faculty, are driving the price up, especially where technology cannot ameliorate these specific cost factors (of faculty) (even though technology ameliorates a lot of the other costs on campuses).
To redistribute wealth within a singular institution will not take affect nearly as efficiently as redistributing wealth among institutions of higher education.
The funding for higher education is stymied maybe because public perception of it is not terrific.
Where does the funding go if no toward higher education? Usually, the military and corrections…where the maintenance for the individual in those sectors is generally less than the maintenance of the same individual in the education system.