Barrack Obama spent a portion of August touring areas of New York and elsewhere championing, among other things, the need for colleges to keep tuition and costs down. He also set forth a policy and a proposal for rating colleges on their efforts to keep education “affordable.” Quite a few people have jumped on this bandwagon, including even a columnist or two, and one on the staff of The Economist, and more than a few of them are citing the need to keep the salaries of teachers and professors in line.  Yes, college costs are going up, but the President and others don’t seem to understand the causes… or don’t want to address the real problems.

To begin with, the term “costs” doesn’t really refer to the total cost of educating a student, but the costs incurred by the student.  In the past, a significant fraction of the total cost, and in some cases at state institutions almost all of it, was paid through funding from state legislatures or other sources, such as endowments at private institutions. Over the past thirty years, the share of state funding for higher education has dropped by half or more, while the percentage of high school graduates entering colleges has essentially doubled.  To make up the shortfall, tuition and fees have increased far faster than have the actual total costs, a fact that gets overlooked.

With some few exceptions, largely in “for profit” education and some elite non-profit colleges and universities, the bulk of increasing costs haven’t come about because salaries of teachers and professors have increased markedly. For the most part, except for a handful of “celebrity” professors and teachers at each institution, those individuals actually doing the teaching haven’t been getting significant raises in years.  Many haven’t gotten raises at all, and more and more teaching at the college level is being handled by grossly underpaid part-time adjuncts, who seldom if ever get benefits, and struggle along on wages more in line with the fast-food industry in hopes of getting the experience that will eventually land them a full-time position.

The second greatest single reason for increasing costs at state colleges and universities – and those are the institutions that the vast majority of students attend – is that non-educational costs have skyrocketed. It’s not the salaries of the teachers and professors that budget-cutters should be going after, but the numbers of executive level administrators and their compensation. This is also happening on the secondary school level, where high-paid executives are cutting out programs and canning teachers at the same time that their salaries are increasing. On the collegiate level, athletic programs expand year after year, and university after university tries to climb higher on the athletic totem pole, with higher–paid coaches, more facilities and assistants, while replacing retiring professors with inexperienced part-timers.  Universities also build lavish student centers and other such facilities to lure students because in most states legislative funding is based on enrollment increases.

 The third reason for increasing costs is that more than half of all incoming college students require remedial courses because they aren’t prepared for college level work, and this is despite a considerable dumbing-down of the collegiate academic requirements.  More remedial work requires more teachers and for students to spend longer in college.

Despite these various obvious and real causes, the President and others are focusing on rising tuition and threatening to punish institutions that increase tuition without focusing in the slightest on the underlying problems creating the need for such increases. State legislators demand that state colleges and universities admit more students, but they continue to cut state financial support, and then politicians at all levels, including the President of the United States, castigate those same state universities for increasing tuition.  This is nothing new.  It’s been going on for well over a decade… and no one in either the state or national political levels is willing to address the fundamental problem. More students, and more with learning difficulties or poor preparation, require more resources at a time when all too many of those resources are going to non-academic aspects of education and when states are cutting their support of higher education.

Same song, umpteenth verse; should get better, but it just gets worse.

While I was traveling, the freezer quit, and it quit over Labor Day weekend, spoiling a great deal of food.  Since I wasn’t there, and my wife was traveling part of that time [elsewhere], we lost a lot of food.  Upon my return, I set out to find a replacement. Surely, this could not be that difficult, even where I live, and finding a freezer was not, indeed, difficult.  Getting it delivered was the difficult part. 

The orange big-box store near us [you know to what I’m referring] had a freezer of the type and size we wanted, and the price was the lowest… but they couldn’t deliver for more than two weeks, and that wouldn’t work because I’d be on the road again, and they only deliver during hours when my wife couldn’t be home [Don’t ever talk to either of us about “cushy hours” for university professors in the performing arts!]. It also took the staff fifteen minutes to figure that out.  Another retailer could deliver in four days, and could give me the answers in less than five minutes, but the price was some fifteen percent higher.  Except… in either case, carting away the old freezer wasn’t going to  be that easy – because the local landfill/waste disposal site won’t take refrigeration equipment until it’s been certified to be drained of its coolant, and that costs more. In the end, I bought the more expensive unit because the “service” supposedly provided for “free” by the large big box outfit would have required waiting almost a month… if I could even count on that.

When I went to upgrade my antique cell phone – only very slightly – I had to wait a half hour for anyone to get to me… and that was at the second cell phone retailer.  At the first one, no one even noticed me.

This is far from the first time events such as these have occurred, and while I’m reluctantly willing to pay more for service that reduces the stress in our lives, what bothers me about all this is that I see those kinds of choices vanishing, and the ones remaining becoming more and more highly priced.  If you want to take enough clothes on a trip or vacation to provide a choice of what to wear – it’s going to cost you more one way or another.  If you want an appliance delivered in a short period of time, it’s going to cost you more.  If you need service on your cell phone, you’re going to wait.

At the same time, there are people who need jobs…and for all the increases in employment that the government statistics say are happening, an awful lot of them aren’t getting hired, and those same statistics don’t reveal the true costs of goods and services, which are rising.  The result is that we’re all seeing higher prices, less service, and fewer jobs, even as all the economists are claiming we’re moving to a service economy.  Come again?

On a recent book-related trip and then at a dinner after I returned I overheard two conversations remarkably similar in content, if from two dissimilar sets of individuals.  Both were discussing, often heatedly, concerns about the mistreatment of animals in the United States and the concerns about starving and suffering children in war zones and third-world nations across the globe. The underlying question posed by one person in each of those settings was, essentially, why are Americans so concerned about suffering animals in the United States when there are so many suffering people, especially children, in the world who could use the dollars and caring lavished on animals here in the U.S.?

It’s a seemingly straight-forward question that isn’t, similar in many ways to the statement made a few generations ago to children who wouldn’t “clean their plate” by parents who said, “Finish your dinner. There are millions of starving children in China,” or some variation on that theme. Just as I wondered how cleaning my plate would do anything for starving children, since I perceived no way that my uneaten dinner could get to China, so too, today, the problem remains that much of the care lavished on mistreated domestic animals in the U.S. cannot be transferred economically or practically to malnourished children, even in the U.S., let alone across the globe.

But beyond that rather practical observation, and beyond the protests that there must be a way, lie even more fundamental questions/issues. Why must some people assume that concern over mistreated or deserted animals precludes concern over maltreated, abused, starving children?  Does a preoccupation with alleviating human misery, to the extent of ignoring animal misery, reflect not only real concern, but also an innate assumption of human “superiority” and a minimization of the ills of living creatures less able to control their fate and destiny?  Given that we are a part of the ecological weft and web of the world, and that our survival requires the continuation and prosperity of that web that is also the food chain of the world, in the “grand scheme” of the universe are we really that special?  Who says so?  Besides us, that is?  More and more studies show that the more intelligent mammals, as well as some reptiles, have what we term feelings, such as concern for offspring, affection, grief, and even forms of altruism.

Add to that the fact that studies have indicated that individuals prone to mistreating animals have a far higher propensity to mistreat vulnerable humans, such as children, spouses, and the elderly, and given that, wouldn’t it be better to not to create such a firm dividing line between the need to help animals who clearly experience suffering and humans who do?  That might also have a social and political effect on those not-so-“human” individuals, not only throughout history, but even today, who characterize groups of humans that they dislike as “little more than animals,” because in a very real and absolutely physical sense, none of us are more than animals who can think and use tools better than the other animals.

I’m extraordinarily tired of single-factor solutions to all ranges of problems, and yet the more I look around, the more I see of such approaches to everything, from “repeal Obamacare and all our problems will be solved” to either “less government is the answer” or “more regulations on business are necessary.”  Universities and state legislatures are adopting the “business model” as the latest solution, despite the fact that the business model hasn’t worked all that well for business, let alone for education, especially in the area of “for profit” education which has the highest percentage of student loans and especially defaulted student loans.

The accounting department and the sales department of a business have different requirements and needs, yet all too many corporations attempt to impose the same management structures on both.  In education, the performing arts have different requirements from history or business, and the science departments differ from either, and yet administration after administration and state legislatures all seem to impose “one size fits all” requirements on colleges and universities. 

In political issues, especially the hot-button ones like abortion and immigration, the same “messianic” single-rule for all people and all situations is pushed by all too many interest groups and politicians, who ignore totally the fact that one size does not fit all.  An “illegal” immigrant who was brought into the U.S. by his or her parents as an infant in arms, and had no choice in the matter, who was raised as an American, who thinks as an American, who has never committed a crime, and who speaks no other tongue than English is a far different “illegal” than a thirtyish drug runner, but one-size-fits-all mentality either cannot grasp this or doesn’t care.  If they can’t grasp the difference, they don’t have the brains to be making or influencing policy, and if they don’t care, their attitude is little different from a psychopath, and I’m not particularly thrilled about either type deciding laws and policies.

I particularly get incensed when lawmakers go out of their way to find means to reach religious goals through the law-making process or through community-based extra-legal means. In Utah, that semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret where I live, lawmakers, business leaders, and the LDS church are particularly adept at this.  I understand that Mormons believe drink is the devil, but the convoluted liquor laws resulted in the wine industry citing the state as the most unfriendly to wine drinkers of all fifty states.  I don’t drink, and that’s a personal and health choice, and I wouldn’t want to be forced to do so, but just because I don’t drink doesn’t mean I, or anyone else, should have the right to restrict what beverages are on the market [and I’m not talking about food safety issues] and make bringing wines into Utah that the state liquor stores don’t sell a crime.  All these restrictions haven’t stopped people from drinking – all one has to do is look how much beer vanishes from the stores over a weekend and what the liquor store parking lots look like – but it raises costs and inconveniences everyone else. In Utah, we have no state lottery, again for religious reasons enshrined in state law, but Utahans travel to Idaho and Colorado to buy tens of millions of lottery tickets that support education in those states, and the net result is that Utahans still gamble, and everyone else gets the benefits.

Not that what I have to say will make any difference, because simple solutions are just so much easier to sell… and besides, according to so very many people, one size really does fit all, regardless of reality.

Just before the university at which my wife teaches began its fall term, every faculty member was sent a copy of a book [What The Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain].  Because I did spend four years teaching at the collegiate level, I also read the book.  At first, as I progressed through the book, I was intrigued, then vaguely displeased.  When I finished I was fuming. 

Why?  Because the examples that Bain chooses invariably are “inspiring” teachers.  Now, I have nothing against “inspiring” teachers, or at least not too much, but it’s absolutely clear that Bain regards the primary function of teachers is inspiring their students to learn.  All other aspects of education are secondary in his view, from what I can tell.  Just how far have we come from the reputed statement of Thomas Edison that declared that success was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration? The fact is that the majority of students – and people – learn from their failures, not their successes, and failures are usually not inspiring. Learning from them is work.  And work requires more effort than inspiration.

This is particularly important to consider, given that figures just released by ACT reveal that more than half of all entering college students lack either the reading, analytical, or mathematical skills, if not all three, adequate for college level courses.  All the inspiration in the world isn’t going to help much if students lack the grounding necessary for collegiate-level work.

In conjunction with this messianic text of praise to inspiration, the university also passed out to all faculty members a glossy color booklet entitled Extraordinary Educators, which profiled 12 faculty members for their “passion in inspiring excellence in their students.”  Since I was trained in a certain amount of analysis, I looked through the booklet and found it very interesting, and not in a particularly positive way.  Half of those profiled have been at the university five years or less, a quarter three years or less. Only two had been there more than ten years. I’m sorry, but you can’t prove excellence in just a few years. Half were women, all of them attractive, and five of the six were young.  Only two of the men and one of the women were past their late forties.  Because I have taught at the university and been active in university-connected matters and because my wife has been teaching there for twenty years, including stints as a department chair and a member of faculty senate, it’s fair to say we know a significant number of faculty members, and there are educators who are far more effective than at least half, and possibly 80% of those profiled.  Why were those educators who were profiled chosen?  Because, it would appear, they’re popular, and everyone wants into their classes. Popularity doesn’t preclude excellence, but it also doesn’t define it, and from what I’ve seen, too many college educators dumb down their classes to be popular, and administrations, at least in public universities, tacitly encourage it, in order to keep enrollments up. 

 The message I got from the book and booklet was that extraordinary educators must be young, attractive, and popular. Forget about evaluating professors on what they demand of their students or what those students actually learn.  Just look at the popularity numbers, student evaluations [which study after study has shown reward easy-grading faculty members], and class enrollments.

Inspiring educators?  How about more who require learning, effort, and perspiration?