US College Tuition Racing to Infinity and Beyond!

We are inundated with news stories about the costs of gasoline and medical care. But take a look at the chart below, and see the expense that is truly shooting through the ceiling -- the cost of a university indoctrination and academic lobotomy!

College tuition and fees today are 559 percent of their cost in 1985. In other words, they have nearly sextupled (while consumer prices have roughly doubled).

...“If you’re a state legislator, you look at all your state’s programs and you say, ‘Well, we can’t make prisoners pay, but we can make college students pay,’” said Ronald Ehrenberg, the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute and a trustee of the State University of New York System.

College students do end up paying more. But in the past, after the economy recovered, most states did not fully restore the funds that were cut. As cuts accumulated in each business cycle, so did tuition increases...States will soon have to pay out trillions in public pensions for the retiring baby boomer generation — squeezing the funds for training the next generation of workers even more. _NYT

The New York Times article is being oh, so politically correct. The real reason for sky-rocketing university costs is the bloating dead-weight corpse of university administrations.

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.

A significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. The lion’s share of university resources comes from the federal and state governments, as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs. _Report from Goldwater Institute

Read the full report (PDF)

Universities have taken as their primary mission the indoctrination of young minds into a dysfunctional leftist ideology. By doing so, they are reducing the future productive options of these young people, who will be less inclined to promote an opportunity society and more inclined to support a redistributive welfare state -- which tends to reduce long term opportunities for all, except insiders and preferred recipients of government spending.

Clearly this trend in skyrocketing university costs cannot go on much longer. Thus it won't. Alternative methods of learning and certification of knowledge and achievement are likely to divert large numbers of would-be university students into more productive and less indoctrinating learning paths.

It cannot happen too soon.

Update 10 March 2012:

The Student Loan Debacle

Higher Education Bubble Exploding in Taxpayer's Faces

Grading Student Loans -- New Report

Making Student Loans Invisible, or when what you can't see can still do you unimaginable harm.

Academic Lobotomies On Parade . . . . .

Outside of science and engineering, US universities and colleges too often provide an inferior product. Liberal Arts curricula have fallen prey to political correctness and post-modern multicultural dogma to the point that large numbers of the best US liberal arts graduates are incapable of basic rational thought.

For most of the past 20 years I have served on selection committees for the Rhodes Scholarship. In general, the experience is an annual reminder of the tremendous promise of America's next generation. We interview the best graduates of U.S. universities for one of the most prestigious honors that can be bestowed on young scholars.

I have, however, become increasingly concerned in recent years - not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing. Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago.

As a result, high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.

Unlike many graduate fellowships, the Rhodes seeks leaders who will "fight the world's fight." They must be more than mere bookworms. We are looking for students who wonder, students who are reading widely, students of passion who are driven to make a difference in the lives of those around them and in the broader world through enlightened and effective leadership. The undergraduate education they are receiving seems less and less suited to that purpose.

An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral. A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn't seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn't seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America's Constitution.

When asked what are the important things for a leader to be able to do, one young applicant described some techniques and personal characteristics to manage a group and get a job done. Nowhere in her answer did she give any hint of understanding that leaders decide what job should be done. Leaders set agendas.

I wish I could say that this is a single, anomalous group of students, but the trend is unmistakable. Our great universities seem to have redefined what it means to be an exceptional student. They are producing top students who have given very little thought to matters beyond their impressive grasp of an intense area of study.

This narrowing has resulted in a curiously unprepared and superficial pre-professionalism _WaPo

Is this deficit of thinking skills due to lowered expectations among schools and college professors? Or are the professors themselves incapable of basic multi-POV thought?

Certainly the post-1960s university professoriate is more prone to the teaching of a sort of blurry quasi-leftist mono-POV drivel. Professors are less tolerant of students expressing contrary opinions these days. Rather than teaching students to think for themselves, professors too often try to mould the thinking of students into a press of their own making. A very sad trend, which leads to nothing good.

This massive loss of human capital due to academic lobotomisation is combined with a loss of human capital due to dysgenic differential birth rates. Well educated career women, who tend to be more intelligent, are more likely to have no children -- or one child at most, typically.

A society in the midst of massive human capital loss, is not a society on the rise. US universities are in the middle of a higher education bubble -- with vastly top-heavy and ruinously expensive staffing in the administrative area. Time for massive re-structuring and re-thinking of the university enterprise.

10% of all US Colleges to Fail Within 10 Years

Futurist Thomas Frey has had a lot to say about US education over the past year. Here is an interview with Frey, where he discusses the future of higher education.

GREENE: You predict that within the next ten years 10% of all colleges in the U.S. will fail. Why do you think this will happen?

FREY: Colleges see themselves operating in a closed system where their main form of competition comes from other colleges. However, the disruptive forces that will launch the next-generation learning revolution will necessarily happen outside existing colleges.

Once a college course is converted into a recorded form of online education it becomes a commodity. And, as a commodity, it can be reengineered with better graphics, better audio, improved styling, delivered through hand-held devices, and marketed more effectively to different demographic groups.

Corporations will quickly invent a faster, better, cheaper model for delivering college education.

Colleges are like slow moving whales about to get attacked by saltwater piranhas. While department heads in colleges are off studying the mating rituals of Komodo Dragons in Indonesia, corporate managers are working day and night, ruthlessly focused on opening new markets and uncovering new revenue streams. The pace and intensity of the work is radically different.

The attacks will first take on the appearance of partnerships for handling the IT infrastructure, and the distribution and marketing of courses, but will quickly deteriorate into the tail wagging the dog.

Those attacking colleges, albeit indirectly, will be companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM. Many colleges already have working relationships with these companies.

Colleges have long enjoyed the government-sanctioned protections of accreditation and degree-granting ability. This too is about to come under attack. Companies are playing for major stakes, and very little is off-limits in corporate America.

What’s at stake is the possible development of a singular website capable of creating and distributing the vast majority of all courses in the world. It has the potential for becoming the largest and most influential website in the entire online universe.

In business terms, the online education arena has the potential to connect every living person on the face of the earth and become the largest and most profitable company in the world. That’s what’s at stake.

For colleges that get the lifeblood sucked out of them, victims of collateral damage, it’s not that the corporate world has set out to destroy them. Rather, as the intensity for gaining new market share heats up, the gloves come off, and the ensuing wake that follows will leave behind a tidal wave of destruction.

GREENE: So, in the long run, will this lead to a better educated society?

FREY: Students will have far more options to match up with the appropriate style and form of education that clicks with them. They will also have the option of taking the course they are most interested in at the time they are interested in taking it.

The needs of the student will stop evolving around the needs of the college, and [with] the cost of learning plummeting, most barriers will go away, making education far more accessible.

My thinking is that this will lead to a far more educated society, with people far more prepared to handle the demands of the future. _ImpactLab

More at Da Vinci Institute.

A great deal of college and university infrastructure is devoted to wasteful and counter-productive outlays: dormitories and cafeterias segregated by race, special studies departments devoted to indoctrination into left-victimist dogma, entire staff departments dedicated to granting special preferences to preferred groups by ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation etc etc. Universities must return to the core purpose: education and empowerment of individual students. At some point, indoctrination and special preferences became priorities over a good education. Instilling ideology grew more important to faculty and staff than the assisting of individual students in finding, pursuing, and magnifying their strengths and special interests.

Rather than for 10% of all colleges to fail, much better for every college to fail that is not willing to get back to the empowerment and education of individual students and assisting in their individual growth irregardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, philosophy, or political ideology.

Universities have been stewing in '60s garbage for too long. Either get over it, or go away.

The Modern North American University Statement of Purpose?

The revolutionary and progressive characteristics of this university are due to the revolutionary and progressive characteristics of its staff and its courses.

The educational principles of the university are: ‘Correct political orientation, plain, hard-working style, flexible strategy and tactics’.

We must overcome difficulties, contact the masses, and heighten our militancy. Anyone who is not politically correct does not deserve to be a student of this university, for he acts against the rules of this university.

To the class of graduates: ‘You must be brave, resolute, and tenacious. You must learn through struggles and be prepared to sacrifice your freedoms for the liberation of the world.

Written for the Production Drive of the university ‘Study on the one hand, agitate on the other; overcome ideological adversaries and unnerve the enemies.’ ‘Now study and agitate. In future you will rule over the counter-revolutionaries.’

The style of the university: ‘Unity, alertness, earnestness, and political correctness.’

Paraphrased from Mao's words of wisdom.

Well, anyway, it seems to be the accepted approach to education at the University of New Mexico Law School.

Strong Leftist Bias in University Threatens Ability of Schools to Educate

Education is meant to instill in the student both the love of learning and the ability to sort through ideas and evidence in order to arrive at the most workable solutions and systems of thought and action. But if the information available to students in university is so skewed toward a particular point of view--excluding the broad spectrum of ideas prevalent in the real world--the university cannot perform its vital function for the student.

This 2005 study by researchers at Smith College, University of Toronto, and Center of Media and Public Affairs, should put to rest the claims by leftist professors that the university is not skewed to the left.

The study shows that in the arts and social sciences, and soft sciences, the faculty is almost certain to consist of mostly leftists. The proportion of leftist to mainstream is closer to 50:50 in the harder sciences and engineering faculties--where competence must be demonstrated, and where training is more rigorous and demanding.

It is no surprise that leftists tend to flock to areas where competence-testing is rare, and based upon subjective peer appraisal rather than unforgiving objective criteria, as in harder sciences and engineering. This allows them to pretend to be knowledgeable and expert in an area without actually needing to demonstrate any competence--except to other members of their in-group. Circular jerkulating is the rule in those departments of university.

Read the study before commenting, as a favour to others.

Brainwash U--A Tour of America's Universities

If you haven't been on campus for a while, you may be unaware of what universities in North America have become--indoctrination centers.

The active suppression of conservative (non-leftist) ideas extended to extra-curricular speaking and activities programs which supported almost exclusively leftwing viewpoints, and to required freshman reading programs, which assigned only leftwing texts, and to supplemental course offerings – the “house” program at Duke University is a striking example -- where professors voluntarily provided students with training sessions in Marxism and other radical creeds under the guise of enriching their academic “education.”

Another form of ideological suppression conducted by faculty ideologues was the abusive treatment of conservative ideas and conservative students in the classroom itself.

Source.

Go ahead and take the tour. The brainwashing tour.

I would not be as concerned about the heavy-handed leftist takeover of the universities if not for one thing--there is no room on campuses now for the diversity of ideas. Without this exposure to a diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that is important to students--today's students will never learn to think for themselves. Perhaps this is what the brainwashers want--it certainly appears so.

But the western world must face a serious outside threat posed by a fascist and bloody religious extremism from the middle east, if it is to survive. Handicapping the minds of the brightest youth does nothing to increase the strength of western societies--just the opposite.

Young people are expected to be leftists, naturally. But as they gain experience in the real world, the more intelligent will curb their leftism as they acquire wisdom and perspective. When their higher education is so strongly biased to a caricatured left, as it is today, many students will lose the opportunity for true independence that university is supposed to present.