“The whole south campus of the school was built with football money,” says Murray Sperber, who has written extensively about Notre Dame football. That the University of Notre Dame today is a big, important, wealthy school — ranked 18th among national universities in the latest U.S. News and World Report survey, with the 12th largest endowment — is directly attributable to football.
.. Thus, my first reaction upon reading in The Times that the Rev. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, was threatening to leave big-time college football if the athletes gained the right to be paid, was to scoff.
.. I think Jenkins and Bienen are aiming their remarks not just at the public, but also at the California appeals court that will soon decide whether to uphold a lower court’s decision in the Ed O’Bannon case. That decision calls for players to be paid up to $5,000, which wouldn’t exactly break the bank.
How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics
Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”
.. That said, Stanford’s reputation in the future may depend less on a few big-name recruits than on its ability to train the Ph.Ds whose scholarship is widely cited and reshapes important economic debates, or who become influential policy makers who advise presidents and lead central banks. The last 10 people to serve as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers have all had a Ph.D from either Harvard or M.I.T.
.. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
.. “There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place.
College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education?
During recent decades, tuition and other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than fifty thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”
.. No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, and for the past twenty or thirty years it has gone largely unchallenged.
.. During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t.
.. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education.
.. Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes and conveyed this information to businesses and other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence and could carry out assigned tasks and work in a group setting.
.. According to one study, just twenty per cent of executive assistants and insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than forty-five per cent of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,”
.. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession and its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, and more lasting, also seems to be happening.
.. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”
.. “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.”
.. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state and federal benefits equivalent to roughly fifty thousand dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just two thousand dollars per student.
Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality
A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do.3 Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.
.. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets.
.. a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
.. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores.7
.. One ominous sign is that Hispanics and African-Americans, especially young men, are lagging badly behind whites in educational attainment. (see Figure 2 below) If these problems are not addressed, we are likely to become, if we are not already, what Mettler calls “a society with caste-like characteristics.”
.. Under President Obama, however, and with more aggressive scrutiny by state attorneys general, government oversight has tightened. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has dropped by close to two thirds.
.. David Rosen, an English professor who writes that just when we “appear to be entering a new Gilded Age, with institutions of higher learning as willing or unwitting accomplices,” faculty—many of whom call themselves leftists—“seem ready to politicize everything but the immense changes occurring before their very noses.”26 Decrying inequality is commonplace on many college campuses these days, but the question seldom comes up whether the college itself is helping or hurting through its own admissions and aid practices, and if it’s the latter, what might be done about it.