Category: <span>Economics</span>

Cents and Sensibility

January 12, 2011 9:51 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

The cliche is that we live in a time of rapid technological change; in fact, technological inertia is just as important. Textbooks are a prime example. A writing class, for example, can be effectively taught using only the Purdue Online Writing Lab and the Internet. That’s been true for at least five years or more, if not a decade. Yet the textbook industry plods along, almost unchanged.

There are also open source online writing textbooks available, such as “Writing Spaces.” There is no shortage of open source tools of every kind, from word processing to websites. Given the rise in college costs over the last decade, and the (perhaps overstated) death of the printed book, you would think that there would be a tidal wave of schools dropping textbooks. Not so.

It’s not surprising either, given the complex web of self-interest and money that is woven so deeply into the university textbook system. Still, Washington State University seems to have scored a victory for common sense– and the cost of college– by dropping textbooks altogether in favor of what they are calling The Open Course Library. The future is coming along, slowly but surely.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional

Constructing Class

January 5, 2011 10:01 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Americans like to believe that we are the most mobile society– upward, we hope– in the world. In fact, we have a real problem with mobility in part becuase wages are so stagnant, unions have lost power, and higher education is so expensive. Add to that the pervasive anti-intellectualism of the culture in general and the right in particular and you have a recipe for an caste system.

I think one of the measures of the rigidity of existing caste system is the difficulty we have both in admitting the existence of poverty– the lowest caste are the “invisibles” as much as the “untouchables“– and in understanding the difficulties faced by people making the transition from one caste to the other. That’s what makes, “A New Model Community College,” so fascinating.

The articles describes the Ivy Bridge College, a partnership between a for-profit school, Altius Education, and Tiffin University, a private college. The program tries to address one of the dirty little secrets of U.S. education. As the article puts it, “the national average three-year graduation rate for community colleges is about 25 percent. ” Three quarters don’t make it, in other words.

As Diane Ravitch (among many others) puts it, the real problem in education is poverty. Her point is relevant to higher education as well as public schools. The accumulation of social and cultural capital needed for college takes time and energy; if you don’t begin early, it can be difficult to make it up quickly later. It seems like a simple, common sense idea.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Sweet and Sour

January 3, 2011 9:31 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

I heard a movie reviewer–talking about “The Social Network” — describe the filmmaker as so soured that he was unable to see his characters as anything but one-dimensionally cynical. It’s alienation and greed and petty self revenge all the way down. Given that this movie– and Facebook– had its origins in the darkest days of the Bush administration, perhaps a dour perspective is to be expected, particularly from the man who created “The West Wing.”

I worry that my own perspective is soured too; I criticize while only rarely pointing to what might done to end the quagmire of education in the U.S. (The final chapter of my book does offer solutions.) I don’t like grades, but I don’t talk about portfolios often enough; I think administrations are much too large, over paid, and have too much power, but I don’t discuss unions and democratic reform of university administration in enough detail.

We need the sweet as much as the sour. I think that the overall goal of pedagogical change, for example, ought to be nurturing intellectualism and science. The Chronicle of Higher Education has provided a nice example of what could be done here. The main goal is to reintroduce students to the aims and goals of intellectual work by re-integrating the practical and the theoretical. (The technical term is praxis.)

Dump the standardized tests, organize the teachers, cut administrative budgets in half, reduce tuition, and take our ideas into the wild. Elementary schools can focus on scientific investigations and on nutrition and physical health, while in later grades students can move out into the community and then the world. Education becomes, in a specific tangible sense, both a way to understand people and society and to ameliorate suffering.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Gates, Buffet, Ellison, Walton, and Koch: Here’s What We Want for Christmas

December 22, 2010 9:24 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

After 30 years of “greed is good” even Gordon Gekko is having second thoughts. Arguably, the extreme accumulation of wealth promoted by Reagan-style politics is finally producing the first hints of what might be an entirely new age of philanthropy. After the steel and railroad magnates were allowed to amass huge fortunes, they gave back at least a fraction of the wealth to libraries and universities and museums. Something similar seems to be emerging now.

The poster child for the new philanthropy is the Gates-Buffet plans to give away billions, much of it to health and human services programs in the developing world. Whatever criticism you might have of these efforts, they are at least an attempt to get at root causes. As dramatic as the Buffer Gates plan sounds, between them and the other top five billionaires, there’s more than a 100 billion dollars in their hands. I know what I would like for Christmas.

I think that if these new philanthropists really want to create a permanent, long lasting change they should get together and agree to donate at least 10% of their fortunes to a permanent fund for college. They could then browbeat the next, say, twenty or thirty richest people for another 10 or 15 billion. That would create a permanent fund worth 20 to 30 billion or more. The application for funds should be short and simple and leave everything else up to the colleges.

If you can get into the college of your choice, community college to Harvard, the fund will pay. If you can stay in college, that is if you can meet the requirements of full time status at the college of your choice, the fund would continue to pay until you graduate. The only requirement is that you could not work elsewhere for money– internships and the like are fine. The fund would be generous too, paying room and board, a stipend for incidentals, as well as textbooks.

You can use the fund once in your life for an undergraduate degree, but it could be used it at any time in your life. The fund is a sliding scale. If your family makes less than $150,000 a year in combined income, the fund would pay 100%; it would pay less in small increments until your income reaches $300,000. At that point you don’t need any help. In a single swoop philanthropy could lay the foundation of a completely different culture and economy.