No doubt, Columbia would offer him a king’s ransom and every other academic perk imaginable. But, for me, to find the first black President—a former community organizer who has ventured more daringly outside the Oval Office (with a stop at a prison, a speech at a mosque, an impending visit to Cuba) than any other modern President—teaching at Columbia (or any school like it) would be a disappointment. To put it bluntly, rich white kids at rich white schools don’t need him. But there are places, and students, that do. I’d like to suggest three.
..Obama could teach at a historically black college/university, or H.B.C.U., as the common parlance has it. Some of the most illustrious names of the past American century, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Thurgood Marshall to Toni Morrison, were educated at these schools.
.. Yet another place that could make great use of Obama’s talent and prestige would be any one of the nation’s eleven hundred community colleges.
.. The third place Obama could teach is perhaps the most improbable, but the one I hope he most strongly considers. I think Obama should teach, for one year, for even just part of the time, in an inner-city K-12 public school. A single course in U.S. government for high-school seniors would suit him well.
.. In 2013, less than two per cent of public-school teachers were black men, which tells us that the overwhelming majority of kids, both black and white, have little direct exposure to professional black men in their daily lives. This has had a disastrous effect on the development of black students, and especially black boys, contributing to their staggering levels of behavioral issues, suspensions, and, ultimately, dropouts.
.. A recent study by the Department of Education found that black boys receive more than two-thirds of all public-school suspensions. Another study showed that black students are less likely to be recommended for gifted programs when they are taught by non-black teachers.
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.
.. “Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access.
.. Journal publishers collectively earned $10 billion last year, much of it from research libraries, which pay annual subscription fees ranging from $2,000 to $35,000 per title if they don’t buy subscriptions of bundled titles, which cost millions. The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication.
.. In response to the suit filed against her, Ms. Elbakyan wrote a letter to the judge pointing out that Elsevier, like other journal publishers, pays nothing to acquire researchers’ studies. Moreover, publishers don’t pay for the volunteer peer reviewers or editors. But they charge those same researchers, reviewers and editors, not to mention the public, whose tax dollars most likely funded the study in the first place, to read the resulting articles.
“That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold,” Ms. Elbakyan wrote.
.. Legally downloading a single journal article when you don’t have a subscription costs around $30, which adds up quickly considering a search on even narrow topics can return hundreds if not thousands of articles.
.. “The prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care over the past 20 years, so there’s a real scandal there to be exposed,” said Peter Suber, Harvard’s director of the office of scholarly communication.
.. But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
.. Private funders such as the Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also begun making grants contingent on open access to resulting articles, as well as possibly to the underlying data.
.. Possibly the biggest barrier to open access is that scientists are judged by where they have published when they compete for jobs, promotions, tenure and grant money.
.. “The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community — Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities — who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr. Eisen.
Is The College Bubble Popping?
3. Lower admissions standards to admit a larger fraction of applicants (including community college transfers) in order to kick the can down the road for another year or two, then feign shock when retention rates fall off a cliff. (My university went from about 81% to 59%, freshman class.)
.. One of our top departmental applicants, a guy who should have been in line for multiple scholarships in a good year, said he didn’t think he’d be able to attend without financial assistance. For whatever reason, millennials are incredibly reluctant to go deeply in debt in order to finance education. It’s almost as if the formative years of their youth witnessed some kind of similar cycle.
.. Keep your eyes on asset-backed security issuance rates for repackaged student loans. The loan market is technical, but it sends off all kinds of advanced warning signals in the form of flagging demand. As of now, I’d say the trend is turning over. And yes, with a 1.2 trillion loan market suddenly facing rising delinquencies and having more trouble marketing fresh debt to a new generation of dupes, this will snowball. As banks can’t find ways to sell debt, they’ll issue less of it, which means fewer applicants, which means that universities will be forced to swallow the depreciation cost of all the improvements they’ve been making under the early rush of new money from the education bubble, for years to come.
Student debt assets were, at last count, making up something like 50% of the US government debt portfolio.
Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force, Report Says
new administrative positions—particularly in student services—drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-ed work force from 2000 to 2012.
.. What’s more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.
.. The rise in tuition was probably driven more by the cost of benefits, the addition of nonfaculty positions, and, of course, declines in state support.
.. You see it on every campus—an increase in administration and a decrease in full-time faculty, and an increase in the use of part-time faculty,” he said. With that trend, along with rising tuition and falling state support, “you’re painting a pretty fair picture of higher ed,”
.. The report also makes clear that the expansion in wages and salaries derived not from instruction, institutional support, or academic support, but from student services, which can include athletics, admissions, psychological counseling, and career counseling, among other activities.
.. Faculty members typically don’t deal with legal disputes, government regulations, athletics compliance, or intervention in mental-health, sexual-assault, or disabilities issues—that’s the professional staff’s job, she said.
“When you put that all together, there may be increased staff, but it’s because campuses are trying to meet the need,” she said. “Any one case is extremely time-consuming.”