I can't wait to see what the NCNA comes up with next.
—Steve Benen 10:10 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (0) **************************************

Next up: Discounts for attending Bob Jones University and bonus discounts if you are white and are dating only w/in your own race. 20% further tuition discount if you can prove that you voted against Obama primarily because he is half black. Of course, you must then agree to indoctrinate your offspring into a rigid style of theocratic teachings that posit that you are forgiven, all others burn in hell and are therefore unequal as citizens.

This is a bad idea for a number of reasons. For example, do we really want people to go into fields that they're not well suited for or even interested in just because it cheaper to get a degree in those fields?

The secret to Jeb's Madness isn't to make certain programs less expensive; rather, it's to make programs that are inherently damaging to the cause of GOPerism less attractive.

Secondly, I note that Jeb wants to make colleges charge lower tuition---which is little more than underfunded mandates---or "unfunded mandates lite...."

As an academic, I think I'd rather see a student loan forgiveness program than a tuition reduction for a couple of reasons. First, universities are up against the wall right now financially. We really don't have the $$$ to subsidize a subset of students. Second, my instinct tells me that you'd get more students enrolling in the subsidized majors that aren't actually prepared for them. There's a reason we have a shortage of nurses and engineers (and other specialties which rely on hard science)--they're difficult areas to master and don't pay as well as they should.

Bush proposed incentivizing tuition by charging different amounts for different degrees. "We need nurses, scientists, engineers, qualified teachers....

I'm sure what he meant was since "We need nurses, scientists, engineers, qualified teachers...." the universities can charge more for these degrees. Now that's free market!

That is interesting. I'm going to send this along to the new board members just elected at the College of DuPage. The old board, heavily dominated by devotees of David Horowitz wanted to charge more for nursing and engineering degrees.

Don't we really need more philosophers?

Nursing and engineering programs costs more to maintain for a university than your traditional evergreen chalk'n'talk discipline, so why on earth would you want to *lower* the tuition amount brought in them? Unless he's talking about extra subsidies to universities to do this...

Yeah, yeah, conservatives HATE social engineering, unless of course it involves abstinence only education. Or patriotism. Or the military. Or...

Interesting practical effects - The actual cost to a university of training nurses, scientists, and engineers is thought to be significantly higher than the cost of training liberal arts majors. In which case, you're going to ask English majors to subsidize the degrees of engineers. A bit of a tough sell, not to mention the political cat fights that would ensue between the different faculties.

Anyoen ever heard of Affirmative Action?

Just asking!

Interesting practical effects - The actual cost to a university of training nurses, scientists, and engineers is thought to be significantly higher than the cost of training liberal arts majors. In which case, you're going to ask English majors to subsidize the degrees of engineers.

Sounds good to me. Does anyone think we need any more English majors?

And I think Jeb's actually on the money here. For jobs which pay shit yet require a long training period, the government should step in to help.

Of course, there is another question -- why are these jobs in supposedly high demand paying so little?

And, btw, we have more than enough engineers around last time I checked. Scientists, too. But I mostly know research scientists, and, jesus, I would never want to go through all those years of schooling and all that expense and all that work to have a 2% job of landing a research position halfway around the country in order to work 80 hours a week of which some time will be spent teaching undergraduates which may be of no interest whatsoever...

Aside from the social engineering aspect of this, I am not sure how well this could reasonably work in practice. People shift majors all the time trying to find one that works for them. People also often prioritize cost in life decisions in a way that might not work best for them in the long run.

Essentially it would have the potential of working like our health care system does now. People take jobs they may not like and stay with those jobs long after it makes any sense because the cost of health care imposes a cost that artificially limits their flexibility and choices. It seems that this could have the same sort of effect on education choices.

They can spin this as a market response to a supply problem, rather than social engineering.

But if a non-Republican had come up with the idea, they'd be wailing about how next we'd decide that we need more farmers and the cities must be evacuated. Or whatnot.

Jeb likes this because it's a stealth subsidy to industry.

"We need nurses, scientists, engineers, qualified teachers....

Why not pay them more and let the "magic" process of the free market work?

More pay, more people enter the field.

You would end up with people trapped in jobs they hated. They might know this years in advance of graduation, but a low-tuition major might be all they could afford.

Personal story: I knew by the second semester of my junior year that I had no desire to be an engineer, but I had a powerful government incentive to stay in the program. What post-boomers won't understand about my predicament is that I could have been drafted if I had switched majors.

Here's how a student deferment worked during the period of peak demand for cannon fodder: Just staying in school didn't keep you on this side of the Pacific -- you had to be making "significant progress toward a degree." If you dropped too many hours behind what was required for your target, four-year graduation date, Hello big muddy. I would have lost so many credits transferring from engineering to anthropology that I could have been drafted.

So I got that degree. Went to work as an engineer. Got an ulcer in the era before acid blockers (Zantac, Prilosec, etc.) had been invented and an ulcer was a much more serious disease than it is now.

I love it when people propose something that's *already happening* and treat it as if it's the neatest idea since...

Many colleges and universities effectively charge higher tuition for more popular programs, although the higher tuition is mostly disguised as program-specific fees. Nursing programs charge lab fees and field experience fees. Business programs charge their own special fees. Engineering programs as well. Computer science. And on and on...to say nothing of explicitly differential tuition at the graduate level. (That is, some graduate programs charging higher tuition than others.)

And it is, of course, a purely market argument: "Program X is more valuable to students--as indicated by their greater willingness to enroll in Program X when tuition is the same--so charge more for Program X."

What Jeb really want, it seems to me, is to use this as a ploy to reduce public support for higher education.

"Social" versus "societal."

I don't think the big issue is cost of tuition here. Engineering is a very difficult major, and most folks in it forgo a lot of partying in exchange for long nights at the library. A lot of people start out as engineering or science majors but switch out of the major a year or two in.

With the hard majors, either you can do it or you can't. If you can do it, you will, because there is more earning potential after school. A person that can't do it stays far far away because an science degrees are no joke to acquire. Making an engineering degree half the cost of an Sociology one is not going to change that dynamic.

The real solution would be for a healthier job market, with higher salaries. Yes I know entry level EE pays a lot more than entry level English but if we have a shortage of EE graduates its not high enough.

A lot of kids are turning away, for example, CS and Comp Engineering because of the rise in outsourcing and H1Bs in those fields.

Jeb certainly knows how to confuse matters. "Charging different amounts for different degrees" is something universities can do, while "subsidize at the fed level" is something the government can do. What exactly is he suggesting?

As for people getting involved in majors they're not well-suited for, for financial reasons--my impression is that it happens in law and medicine all the time, for the opposite reason. Students go so far into debt getting their degree that there's no practical way for them to pay it back without finishing up, graduating, getting a job practicing law or medicine, and paying it down. I don't know how that affects quality in those areas, though.

One of major reasons with not enough nurses is there aren't enough nursing teachers. Jeb's idea, while good, will not solve this problem.

Want to really revolutionize college education? Do what Ireland did -- make college education free to everyone who qualifies. Maybe pro rate tuition costs starting with families earning over $250K annually.

Many people credit this decision by the Irish government for the resurgence of the Irish economy. It led to an end to the Irish "brain drain" and made a country with relatively low wages extremely attractive to high tech businesses, many of which now have offices there. Some also credit this decision to what has become a net influx of Irish back to their homeland from America for the first time in decades.

College would still be open to all, but only residents would qulaify for free tuition. Make it a requirement that families must be able to prove legal residency in the US for three years prior to a child entering their first year of college.

Bush's social engineering idea is ridiculous. Let the kids study whatever they want.

The reason I found this interesting is that it doesn't sound like an especially conservative idea.

There are no conservative ideas. Any idea for using government to improve people's lives is by definition liberal, since conservatives believe that the only appropriate role for government is the protection of property rights (that is, the military and the police).

And, btw, we have more than enough engineers around last time I checked. Scientists, too. But I mostly know research scientists, and, jesus, I would never want to go through all those years of schooling and all that expense and all that work to have a 2% job of landing a research position halfway around the country in order to work 80 hours a week of which some time will be spent teaching undergraduates which may be of no interest whatsoever...

There you are. As an engineering PhD, allow me to rant a bit. First of all, where's this shortage in engineering and science grads? Tried getting a job recently? If you don't have a security clearance, it's a hard slog. Any real shortage in engineering or IT candidates has been matched by large corporations whining to Congress about this horrible disaster and the necessity of opening up more H1B visas, which as currently structured are as close to indentured servitude as you get in the US middle class. So the market gets flooded by foreign grads who mostly went to heavily subsidized universities and little debt, stuck with lousy immigration options.

On the academic front, it's publish-or-perish and if you're technical, you'd better be bringing in the grant money. Researchers now tend to be more like commissioned salespeople, whose salary comes out of the grants they can "sell" and who have to pay facility fees to the university out of them.

Republicans always seem mystified when people start making rational economic decisions in response to conservative free-market policies. Engineering and science degrees tend to be difficult, time-consuming, increasingly expensive, increasingly competitive, and increasingly risky. You can get stuck specializing in the wrong field when the industry blows up (hello, Web and telecom), and if you're not dealing directly with customers you can get outsourced.

For the people currently in academia, what are the main drivers of the increased costs? I'm pretty damn sure it's not faculty salaries.

Remember, during the Vietnam War era, the draft was jiggered specifically for the purposes of social engineering, managing the activist generabion by means of "the club of induction," as they called it.Remember, during the Vietnam War era, the draft was jiggered specifically for the purposes of social engineering, managing the activist generabion by means of "the club of induction," as they called it.

This Gadarene On Parade idea sounds a lot more like offering sticks rather than carrots, in contrast to the Obama plan, which only makes it enrollment easier, offering financial aid in exchange for service later, rather than punishing choices Big Brother does not prefer.

Why not pay them more and let the "magic" process of the free market work?

The free market assumes rational actors with good information. That fails for several reasons:

- 18-22 year olds are not that rational

- the information (future value of various careers) is uncertain

- people, in general, overestimate their chances of success (Lake Wobegon Effect), so you will get overinvestment in "tournament economies" (lawyers, executives, sports/music/film stars) (Robert Frank, Winner-Take-All Economy).

- it doesn't help that some of the degrees required for tournament economies are not that hard. MBAs and JDs are pretty easy, compared to even undergraduate degrees in engineering from good schools (so say my friends who have done both), never mind graduate degrees in engineering and sciences.

The engineering degrees have the extra penalty of front-loading a lot of the "hard" when students are young and least rational, and once you fall off that track, you're done. In my case, I hated Chemistry, which sent me into Electrical Engineering, because that major had the smallest chemistry content.

Another "cure" for this problem is a stiff progressive income tax; it reduces the expected "winnings" in a tournament economy, which gives people some incentive to engage in slightly more rational behavior.

Jeb Bush talking new ideas about education, is like Paris Hilton coming up with a way to regain your virginity

Great Scott! I believe he has invented the scholarship grant!

I think while the idea is certainly worth discussing and investigating, there's a bigger issue that needs to be addressed, namely the extent to which tuition $$$ are being used to support research, rather than instruction.

One of the many reasons that college tuitions have been rising faster than the rate of inflation over the past few decades is that they are being asked to support an ever-growing research structure.

Yet tuitions at community colleges, which do not conduct research, have remained very reasonable, and you generally receive instruction that is as good as, and often better, than that at a 4-year college, since your instructors are actually there to teach, instead of viewing their classes as a nuisance that interferes with their research.

The smart economic play for just about anybody these days is to do their first two years at a community college and then transfer.

dr2chase -

You forgot to add in that the institutions who SHOULD be the most responsible for passing along on good information are the ones who would lose the most by doing so.

Ever talk to ANY admissions office from ANY department and hear "Things are tough right now for graduates?" Or "About 80% of our graduates are not in their field 5 years after graduation?" Fuck, no. Instead you hear "This is a growing field.... growth potential... here are several rich famous people with this degree..."

And you are right on the money with the tournament economy, too. Kids shouldn't start college until they know the difference between the median and the average... a lot of these careers can make a lot of money for a very few, and everyone else is an overworked, unhappy bottom feeder. Look at job satisfaction rates for lawyers... pretty awful stuff.

This is just the middle class version of "hoop dreams."

at community colleges [...]you generally receive instruction that is as good as, and often better, than that at a 4-year college [/em]

Heck, all the biology profs at my community college all work at the local state college, too. You are getting the same education.

I guess that's one of the benefits of adjunct faculty. Everyone works at at least 3 different colleges.

it doesn't sound like an especially conservative idea. In fact, it sounds like social engineering

worse than that, its an anti-market solutions idea. If society needs nurses and engineers, "the market" ass propagandized by the wingnuts should fix that by making compensation for nurses and engineers more attractive than other careers. But in fact, as we've seen in so very many areas, "the market" fails in an unbelievable number of ways. Instead, the rewards system has been disastrously rigged to society's MOST USELESS careers like Wall Street Banking/Financial advising, and Hedge Fund Managing; careers that provide almost no benefit to society or the nation, but inordinately reward corrupt and non-productive activity.

Jebbies idea is fine, but it certainly goes against the corrupt, worse than useless market mantra of the plutocracy.

You know what's so typically conservative about Jeb's idea? He thinks cutting taxes is going to magically increase the number of students. In reality, it would make the situation worse.

Nursing schools are already full up. Admission is already very competitive. Overworked nurses are already not interested in precepting more students. Practicing RNs already have little enthusiasm for the pay cut of a teaching career.

So anything that doesn't involve building more nursing colleges and hiring more instructors at competitive salaries is going to make the problem worse.

I completely agree that we need to produce more nurses, doctors (primary care, anyhow), engineers, and scientists. But I question whether the limitation is on the demand side, rather than the supply side. It is MUCH harder to get into nursing or medical or engineering school than it is to get into a liberal arts program. At UC Berkeley, not an easy school for anyone to get into, the engineering school is almost twice as selective as the university as a whole. As the mother of college aged children I know bright hard working young people who are unable to get into any of the nursing programs in the Bay Area, and bright young people who have outshone their peers academically who didn't get into engineering programs. Universities are turning away very qualified students who WANT careers in professions that society has a desperate need for.

My theory is that, in part due to rigid sources of funding, and funding tied to tenured professors, and perhaps in part due to sclerotic unimaginative thinking about their role in society, universities are not able to adapt well to changing societal needs. Creating more student demand for programs that are too small in the first place won't fix that.

May I point out that we already do this to some degree. At the PhD level, if you want to get a degree in Philosophy and History, you pretty much have to pay for it yourself. If you want to get a degree in science, and you are American and have an excellent record, you have a decent chance of getting one of a variety of fellowships (which pay most of your way) from the government.

Whether we should extend this to undergraduates, and to Law and Medical degrees, is another question.

I teach in a college with a nursing school. They have to limit the number of nursing students far below the number of qualified applicants and far below the number of nurses needed ... because they don't have enough nursing professors, as that requires (usually) an advanced degree plus experience. The increase (needed and good) in nursing salaries has meant that any nurse who goes to school another 2-3 years to become a professor is going to take a huge paycut.

I really think that policy makers should ASK before making these pronouncements. There lack of supply of nurses doesn't have to do with the amount of tuition charged, but the difficulty in providing the education for the many, many students who are willing and able and needed. I think the solution has to start with the problem, which is the lack of teachers, not the lack of interest from students.

Maybe governors should ask college administrators and professors and students before allocating money.

Pay professors more, make their work situation appealing (that is, don't try to staff nursing schools by paying adjuncts $1800 a section with no benefits, the way they do in liberal arts), allow part-time professors (with good pay and good benefits) and look to paying nurses to go on for MS degrees. Increase the supply of teachers of nursing... that's the only way you'll ever be able to increase the supply of nurses.

Kathryn,

Part of the reason that we don't have enough positions in nursing, engineering and medical school is that so many nurses, engineers and doctors are working at real jobs, and many of them don't see teaching as more attractive than working in the real world. Nearly all the philosophers, on the other hand, are employed teaching, and thus creating more philosophers.

Already, professors in a Medical school make much more money than professors of English or philosophy.

If a field of engineering is in really high demand in industry, then industry hires away many of the professors in that field, which keeps students from entering this field, meaning industry is willing to pay even higher salaries, and so on. I've seen this happen, and the only way to stop it may be for the government to intervene by giving lots of grants to people working in this field (which means professors from related areas will change their research direction, and incidentally start supervising students in the area in question).

One crazy thing about colleges now is that they've discovered people want to go to the best schools and their perception of what a 'best school' is has more to do with cost to attend than with post-school-employment and pay.

So, what do they do? They raise rates to appear to be a better school.

This incentive structure has to be changed or colleges will run up the cost of higher education the same way medical schools have. We know how that's affecting health care costs...it isn't good.

The engineering degrees have the extra penalty of front-loading a lot of the "hard" when students are young and least rational, and once you fall off that track, you're done. ...

Posted by: dr2chase on May 4, 2009

That sounds like a way to keep their numbers small, like needing a family connection to get into a union or needing a political connection to get a patronage job in gov't.

Maybe we need a lot less of that filtering in the sciences, so kids can study whatever they want.

So many tricks and limitations in our system. It's hardly a pure free (or regulated) market kind of society.

If we need more sciences, technology, fundamental breakthroughs, then who is going to create those things if we leave the system to weed out people, make it available only to the rich or connected or simply refuse to expand the number of slots available?

Want more doctors & nurses? Create more schools & slots for them to study. Lower costs to students while keeping the schools & teachers well paid.

"Why should philosophy and poli sci majors pay the same tuition rates as nursing students, Jeb asks, if the country needs more of the latter than the prior?"

Hey! Hey!! My son just graduated last June with a B.A. in philosophy. Are you saying America doesn't need MY SON?!?

I can think of several ways that the idea can be made "free market" and conservative. If it succeeds, the plan will flood the healthcare market, teaching professions and engineering markets with labor, thus devaluing that labor.

In exchange for gov't subsidy of colleges for the reduced tuition in those areas, they agree to teach creationism, allow healthcare workers to "follow their consciences" about birth control and real science gets short shrift. And healthcare costs go down by reducing labor rather than prices for drugs, profits for investors in hospitals, and insurance companies' premiums.

In addition they choose which colleges to subsidize thus starving "liberal" colleges. Of course Harvard and Yale will remain open for the children of priviledged Republicans.

I'm also of a mind with the commenter above that said religious professions may become more prevalent.