A recent article in Slate summarizes some of the findings in Do Babies Matter?: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, a recent book by a team of Berkeley researchers. Mary Ann Mason, Ph.D., J.D., a co-author of the book, summarizes their findings thus: The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s,…
Education
How Should Government Promote Stable Families?
While the achievement of marriage equality will be a tremendous step, it comes at a time when an extended recession has drawn attention to the economic fragility of contemporary families. When two parents are required to support a child (or when only one is available), the consequences of unemployment or underemployment can be devastating for…
Updates on Education and Health Care
Two notes looking backward and forward: Education – I was interested to read today this op-ed in the Washington Post and response by Dean Dad. I found this statement by David C. Levy particularly gauling: “Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation…” Makes me…
Ignore the Rankings
Embracing the teaching-centered faculty model I explained in my last post would require a major shift in perspective for many colleges and universities. One of the things that would have to change is the constant eye toward national rankings. This has become, for private colleges and universities and too many state schools, the post-secondary equivalent…
Prioritize Teaching in Faculty Structure
As promised, here are a few of the ideas which I think should be adopted to raise the level of teaching while cutting costs: Eliminate Tenure I used to be a firm advocate for tenure, arguing that it was a perfectly reasonable compensation structure in an environment that privileged free expression. Dean Dad has long…
The Current Undervaluation of Teaching
The sad (to me) truth is that teaching is at best a secondary priority at many of our public and private universities.* Don’t get me wrong, it is a high priority for many university teachers, particularly those early in their career. It’s what lures many people to graduate school in the first place, especially in…
The Value of Education
In a recent comment, Jacob raised some substantive issues worth addressing in more depth. I’ll do so here and then return to a post I’m writing about re-emphasizing teaching at the post-secondary level. I think it’s worth reading Jacob’s comments first since they lay out the libertarian argument on education pretty clearly. To begin with,…
Increasing State Subsidies to Education
The Problem of Student-Funded Education As both Grant and David point out, over the last generation the cost of higher education has been substantially shifted from the public to the individual student. For a nation that prides itself on equality of opportunity, this is really a scandalous development, for reasons I articulated in a previous post. From a…
Keeping Education Costs Down
First, my apologies for the recent writing drought. Though you may not have been aware, this week Arizona celebrated one hundred years as a state. I have an academic specialty in the history of the state, so I made my small contribution to the celebration by writing three published essays on the political legacy of the…
Capping Student Loans
There is an idea making the rounds that the way to keep costs for higher education down is to place a cap on student loans. If students can only borrow a set amount they will look for cheaper alternatives. Schools who want to attract these students will have to keep the price of tuition and…