How do you choose a major? Do you pick a college major that seems best for getting a great job right out of college? Or do you prepare for the long term? The economy is always shifting, and industries come and go. Perhaps it is best to choose a major that will build skills and knowledge and habits of mind that will serve you throughout your life.
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Mark will present a talk on college admission, scholarships, financial aid, and college applications to students and families of Burlington High school in the Boston area.
Continue readingPublic universities, including the land grant universities, are being hard hit by the economic downturn. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today (registration required) reports on a survey of the members of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
Sixty of the 87 responding institutions say that they have experienced cuts to their state appropriations for the 2010 fiscal year, ranging from 5 to 20 percent.
How are the universities responding?
Laying off tenured or tenure-track faculty members was one of the least-common cost-cutting measures taken by responding institutions. Other uncommonly used approaches included redirecting restricted donations, eliminating athletics teams, laying off graduate assistants or student workers, and reducing scholarships.
To bolster their revenue, institutions have increased in-state tuition by a median amount of just over 7 percent, the survey found. The median increase for out-of-state students was close to 6 percent.
Institutions have also plugged their budget gaps with some of the nearly $40-billion in federal stimulus money meant to shore up public-school and higher-education appropriations for the current and coming fiscal cycles.
What does this mean for students planning their college futures? Well, for students looking to institutions in their home states, be prepared for things like larger classes, reduced administrative support (and efficiency), and cuts to some programs. Athletes should also research whether their sport may be likely to be cut during their four years–if you sign to a school that then eliminates its program, you’re out of luck.
Students who would like to attend a land-grant institution outside their home state may find it easier to get accepted this year, as institutions scramble to increase revenue by finding out-of-state families willing to pay the full price of admission. (As always, money talks).
For a full listing of the members of the APLU, go here: https://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=249 .The list includes many of the major public universities in the United States: UCLA, Berkeley, University of Colorado, University of Connecticut, University of Alabama, etc.), but also a few private universities (notably MIT and Cornell)
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
A recent guest post by Alex Berger got some people talking about the importance of choosing a college major. Alex argued that what matters is training your brain and developing a passion.
This video, which first hit YouTube a few years back after a classroom teacher in Colorado gathered some provocative statistics to show at a faculty meeting.
It’s a must-see for any high school student or parent of one. It ends with a question.
Give it a look: it’s only five minutes long. And once you start watching, you’ll want to view it again and again.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
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I recently wrote a post blasting the idea of student-to-faculty ratios as a bogus measure of educational quality. It turns out that universities themselves don’t have a solid measure of what the ratios really are, or even keep track of the percentage of students taught by tenure-track professors–as opposed to adjunct, part-timers, or graduate students.
Yesterday Inside Higher Ed‘s Scott Jaschik reviewed a new book entitled Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, which documents what we know and don’t know about the impact of adjuncts in higher education. The authors also explore the reasons for the growth of adjunct faculty at some of the country’s research institutions.
I won’t spend the time to repeat Jaschik’s review…give it a read. I plan to read the book.
Suffice it to say, however, that college administrators and boards of trustees have little idea about how much teaching is performed by non-tenure track faculty. Their policies–and enforcement of whatever policies may exist–are fuzzy at best, and these trends do have an impact on the educational experience of undergraduates.
[And if senior university administrators don’t have any idea about the impact of adjuncts at their own institution, you can jolly well bet that admissions counselors won’t know! If you ask, you’ll just get the party line based on goofy statistics that don’t mean a thing.]
One finding at the University of Michigan bears out what one of my readers commented about with regard to student-to-faculty ratios: often the non-tenure track faculty have much better teaching evaluations than the tenured faculty. Adjuncts are often better teachers. This fact does beg the question whether tenure is really a useful institution in the 21st century university.
We may also inquire as to whether the accepted wisdom that “good research informs teaching” holds any grain of truth. Research faculty obviously believe in this link. But to read undergraduate teaching evaluations, it appears that most students do not believe it–or at least to not experience the benefits of that research in the classroom.
What does all this mean for you as you seek the best college for you? First, treat student-to-faculty ratios with skepticism, and second, make sure you seek out the best teachers you can find once you are on campus–regardless of their job title.
Mark Montgomery
College Consultant
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