Posts Tagged ‘higher education’

Saving higher education

Posted: December 12, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.

Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.

First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure. 

Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside. 

Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!

Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.

Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt. 

I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes. 

Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.

It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!

Fixing the college mess

Posted: October 24, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

It’s heartening for me to see higher education in trouble.

The anti-Israel bias of some prominent institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines recently. But the problems are much more profound.

I spent nearly 30 years watching the demise of the essence of teaching and learning at three colleges and universities that slid into a bureaucratic morass and a political mess.

I’ll start with the less sexy side of the equation. When I started at Temple University in 2005, I could pop in to see the dean whenever I wanted to do so. The entire staff of the dean’s office stood at eight people.

I met privately three times with the current dean, whom I helped get the job a decade ago, after battling through some of the 20-odd bureaucrats who stood in the way.

The expanding bureaucracy in the Klein College of Media and Communication was typical for much of higher education. The outrageous cost of higher education has more to do with the nonteaching staff at colleges and universities than the expansion and pay of teachers.

For example, I paid $559 a year in tuition to a state school in 1973. That comes to $3,896.77 in today’s dollars. Higher education might be competitive if tuition stood at only two or three times that amount.

Is college worth it? The public is increasingly skeptical. This year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 56% of adults said a four-year college was “not worth the cost,” up from 40% in 2013.

What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As a result, many colleges and universities will have to tighten their budgets by reducing staff, including hiring fewer tenured professors.
In my opinion, that’s good.

Second, politics became increasingly leftist as I moved along in academia. Here are a few examples. I lost one job because I was a conservative and couldn’t advance at another institution because of my views. At one point, a fellow professor slammed the door in my face because she disagreed with my politics.

Tenure is what protects many leftist professors from criticism. It’s almost impossible to get fired once a teacher has tenure, which keeps many leftists from getting called on the carpet for their opinions.

Take, for example, Marc Lamont Hill, who recently left Temple for the City University of New York.

Five years ago, Hill, a media professor and network pundit, called for countries to boycott and divest from Israel in a speech for the U.N.’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” Hill said in prepared remarks.

CNN fired Hill. Temple couldn’t touch him because he had tenure.

With fewer tenured professors and economic pressure from students maybe there’s a chance higher education will get less political and more useful.

The coddling of college students

Posted: May 11, 2021 by chrisharper in education, Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Instead of readying college students for the rough-and-tumble world of work, it appears that a growing number of professors want to enhance the coddling of this generation.

In an article in the faculty union newsletter at Temple University, where I teach, Amy Lynch of the College of Public Health argued for an emphasis on “trauma-informed teaching.”

Following is some of the pablum she preaches:

–Do not have any penalization for students who feel unsafe attending a class in person.

–When possible, have students sitting in a large circle or square, with no one’s back facing another individual.

–Offer choices to students concerning assignments. “You can complete this assignment as a written paper of 2,500 words, or you can submit a flipgrid with at least 4,000 words.”

Note: I had never heard of a flipgrid until now. Here is a definition: Flipgrid is a website that allows teachers to create “grids” to facilitate video discussions. Each grid is like a message board where teachers can pose questions, called “topics,” and their students can post video responses that appear in a tiled grid display.

–Show unconditional positive support for students, directly to students, and in conversations with colleagues about students. 

–Actively acknowledge and discuss when current events trigger emotions related to systematic oppression….

–Educators can promote student resilience.. [by] celebration of “missed successes,” [and] with warm compassion-based “social autopsy,” growing together with the discovery of what went wrong…. 

Note: I had never heard of a social autopsy. Here is a description: A social autopsy is a problem-solving strategy designed to support social skills. Students with difficulties understanding social interactions can use a social autopsy to analyze the social errors they made. Examples of where social autopsies may be used include:

–Ignoring others’ greetings
–Asking a question in a class without raising a hand
–Continuing to talk on the same topic
–Sneezing without covering one’s mouth

For more information, see https://buildingmomentuminschools.blog/2016/02/05/social-autopsy-and-other-social-teaching-tools/

If my colleagues and I follow this plan, Professor Lynch argues, “the seeds of trauma-informed education are planted with the hopes of a full forest of trauma-informed education stakeholders soon to emerge.”

If a student has difficulties, I always want to help. But I am not a psychologist; I am a teacher. I make suggestions to students on how they can seek help outside of the classroom for difficulties they might have.

For the 26 years I have been teaching, I always encouraged students to get outside of their comfort zones. That was the best way to prepare oneself for the tough job a journalist had to do. Now it appears I’m supposed to make students feel more comfortable.

Simply put, It’s unlikely that graduates will enter a “trauma-informed” workplace once they leave the comfort of college. 

The pandemic hit to higher education

Posted: November 17, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Higher education is facing a severe crisis of confidence and money.

That’s not bad news. Colleges have become overpriced with tangled bureaucracies that often don’t prepare students for the real world.

I hope that higher education will face the stark economic outlook because the pandemic will force colleges and universities to strip away the fat that has become rampant. 

Overall, the number of undergraduates shrank by 4% in the fall, while first-year student counts fell by 16.1%, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The tally includes 9.2 million students, from more than half of schools that report data to the Clearinghouse.

Enrollment declined the most at community colleges, off 9.4% overall and 22.7% for first-year students. Enrollment at four-year public colleges and universities fell by 1.4% overall and 13.7% for first-year undergraduates. At private, nonprofit colleges, those declines were 2% and 11.8%, respectively.

The falloff in first-year students may reverberate through the entire undergraduate population for the next few years as students seek alternatives to the high cost of education, such as apprentice and training programs. 

But there’s more. New international students enrolled at U.S. universities online or in person fell by 43%, according to a survey of more than 700 schools. That’s the largest decrease recorded by the Institute of International Education, which has been publishing data on international enrollment since 1954.

International students pay full costs to most institutions, making these individuals crucial to the bottom line. 

The pandemic has forced universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belt-tightening.

Even before the pandemic, colleges and universities grappled with years of shrinking state support, declining enrollment, and student concerns with skyrocketing tuition and burdensome debt. 

Throughout the country, colleges and universities have cut back support staff and even tenured faculty members. For example, here in Pennsylvania, the 14 campuses in Pennsylvania’s higher education system have lost roughly a fifth of their enrollment over the past decade. As a result of the declines, including the one during the pandemic, Pennsylvania plans to cut about 200 full-time faculty out of 5,000 systemwide. 

One option to cut additional costs is to learn from the mistakes of moving online earlier this year. Most faculty members have resisted the notion of teaching online, which ultimately can save both students and universities a lot of money. Moreover, higher education could attract more older students who are working full time. 

Although I have a great deal of respect for some administrative staff in higher education, the number of people has grown significantly in recent years. 

In my college at Temple University, I used to know the first names of almost every staff member who worked there. Now there are so many vice deans, assistant deans, and assistant chairs that I know fewer than half of the administrative staff. 

I hope the pandemic has provided an opportunity for higher education to think about the waste that has accrued and to rethink colleges’ and universities’ missions throughout the country.