[Vision2020] Educational dynamics and economics (was: pay cut)

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Sunday 06 February 2011 12:06:48 Darrell Keim wrote:
> While I agree the continued rise in cost is unsustainable, it really is not
> that simple.  When you seek to have your business compete nationally,
> you've got to pay a wage that will be attractive.  Pay your faculty less,
> get less qualified people, resulting in poorer programs, fewer students,
> even less ability to pay a decent salary... and on and on.

And that's just the supply side. On the demand side, which, in this case, is 
limited by admissions standards, students of lesser abilities will attend the 
schools to which they can gain admission, and because of their lower ability, 
will take longer to graduate, thus costing their parents and themselves more 
money, and leaving them with more education debt to repay after graduation, 
assuming they do graduate. Lesser-ability students tend to fail to graduate at 
higher rates than higher-ability students do, compounding their future 
difficulties finding the superior employment opportunities that would better 
enable them to repay their higher debt loads.

Lower-quality students also reflect less well on the universities they attend 
because the universities' average graduation rates fall, and the extended time 
time to graduate means more professors must spend more time on lower-division 
and prerequisite courses to prepare the students who do survive to return to 
take a proportionately smaller number of upper-division and professional 
electives.

Of course, professors would prefer classes of students so smart that they 
practically teach everything to themselves, but in more cases than some would 
like to admit, students simply are not prepared to learn the breadth and depth 
of courses important to their university curricula. Not only do professors 
recoil against ill-prepared students, but they also defend themselves against 
them by tactics such as raising course prerequisites for advanced courses, the 
better to limit enrollment to really qualified students. For example, since 
when should a year of calculus be a prerequisite for a course in number 
theory, a subject invented 1,500 years before calculus?

Compared with the University of Idaho, Washington State University students 
have higher standardized test scores, higher grades, and higher graduation 
rates. Compared with the Washington State University, University of Washington 
students have higher standardized test scores, higher grades, and higher 
graduation rates. In other words, more of the smarter kids who do manage to 
get into the UW successfully use their higher level of smarts to graduate than 
do those at the easier-to-get-into, and statistically, harder-to-graduate-
from, schools with lower quality ratings. Therefore, ratings of school quality 
are also ratings of student quality, as shocking and dismaying as that may be.

In order to retain some semblance of quality around upper-division courses and 
major curricula, faculty select from themselves a few individuals to teach 
lower-division courses with increased student head-count, which, not 
surprisingly, lowers the quality of the educational experience for students 
and faculty alike.

For example, it is preferable to teach an introductory ethics class with class 
sizes small enough to allow time for students to talk about their personal 
reactions to ethical issues raised in the course. This really is not an  
optional luxury, but rather this is the core of the ethics class experience -- 
times within which a student must personally come to grips with an issue, feel 
and think through it, decide on a position about it, and wrestle with, master, 
and then present coherent justification and argument in support of the position 
to peers and professor. This is the preferable situation, the high-quality 
education situation, the successful educational experience.

On the other hand, it is possible to take introduction to ethics in a lecture 
hall holding multiple hundreds of students, with a twenty-to-fifty-student 
recitation section once per week taught by a teaching assistant who took the 
same class two or three years earlier, remembers part of it, and reads lecture 
notes to the class about the other parts. This is the less preferable 
situation which inadequate budgets are making more prevalent, the situation 
which makes universities less desirable both to parents and students shopping 
for a school, and to surviving graduates who wonder what a smaller class 
experience might have been like. 

An alumni magazine may feature baby pictures of future enrollees, but it may 
not ever see the baby pictures of the children whose parents have decided -- 
no, not my children -- I'm not paying for that experience again.
 
> Fortunately through this wonderful thing called Mr. Market we as a society
> place a value on different positions.  Mr. Market has spoken, and to
> disagree is to lower the quality of education available.

Yes, there is a supply-side market for faculty, staff, and other appurtenances 
requisite for excellent education. There is also a demand-side market for 
students to consume the supply of educational product, and, in a not-so-
curious twist of educational economics, the quality of the demand components 
has a lot to do with the quality of the supply components.

Damaging inherent qualities of either supply side or demand side deteriorates 
the qualities of the other side, and the interactive process both require for 
success. Doing all that is possible to maintain and to better those quality 
levels is important because it is possible to generate an interactive downward 
spiral that takes proportionately more time and effort from which to recover 
than would have been required to maintain quality levels in the first place.


Ken