Yes.

OHSU the most expensive med school in the country

Jeff: OHSU is the most expensive "public" medical school in the country (vs private). An important distinction.

While I'm glad Frohnmeyer has initiated an important conversation, I'm not sure that looking to a model that has made OHSU the most expensive public med school is a winning strategy. The simple fact of the matter is that Oregon drastically underfunds higher education. That's the problem. Most of the buildings/facilities are old/rundown, the teachers are overworked and underpaid, and the costs are rising at annual rates only exceeded by increases in health insurance costs.

A well educated citizenry is the linchpin of democracy, and we are failing future generations.

Contrary to your "everyone" claim, I don't recognize the value of higher education in the abstract or in the flesh.

Most of the research that purports to show the value of higher education merely confuses how wealthy countries/ states/individuals spend their money with how they got their money.

It's kind of like the glibertarian fantasy that economic growth is how you clean up the environment -- they look at the rich countries, see that they can pay for a lot more environmental protection and that they tend to pass more stringent laws that are more often enforced and they think "Ah, presto! Greed is good, because we get richer and things get cleaner!" Except that all that really happens is that the rich countries export the environmentally disastrous activities to the poorer countries.

The studies claiming to find a link between increased lifetime earnings and higher education are a lot like the studies that prove that pickles are toxic because everyone who ate pickles in 1851 is dead. The professions and business have made a higher ed credential the ticket to entry (which works nicely with the exploding cost of higher ed to ensure that the children of the credentialed can advance in the "meritocracy") and thus we get huge reams of data that appear to show some connection between higher ed and earnings.

In other words, it's simply a tautology. Having a degree means you're in the top 25% of educational attainments and in a country where there's a lot fewer jobs than willing workers, everyone starts by weeding out as many people as possible using as many apparently neutral measures as possible -- and edu-credentials are perfect for that. Thus, everyone in the pool considered for even pretty menial jobs must have the credential, and the credential suddenly appears to confer value.

Not long ago the Missus wanted to hire a woman into a government job because the woman was doing the job, a very difficult one that required a lot of skills and the ability to work well under a lot of pressure and in the public eye. The candidate had done the job for more than two years as a contractor and was very successful. HR would not allow the hire because the candidate did not have a college degree. That gets recorded as "the value of higher education" but it really should be recorded as "the cost of educated morons who confuse degrees with competence."

It's broken in ways you can't imagine.

How can a tautology be wrong? The data are they are -- people with higher education earn a lot more than people who don't have higher education.

The question is whether education causes that or merely correlates with it. The burden is on you, someone in the higher ed system who is asserting causality. The income mobility studies that show that the US is an increasingly rigidly stratified society (you are most likely to end up in life at or below the socioeconomic level you start at) suggest that higher education and lifetime earnings are simply both products of coming from the advantaged classes.

I think the higher ed as a mass activity (as opposed to the province of the rich) is going to essentially disappear before long -- we're seeing the first cracks in the edifice and they are nothing compared to what we're going to see. When families realize that the debt that has to be undertaken to buy the credential is essentially signing up for a lifetime of debt bondage, they'll stop. And more and more of them are realizing exactly that. A very bright young man I know is questioning the value of his UO English degree as he works the night-shift in an assisted living and finds that he cannot even get work as a barista in Portland, much less work appropriate to his education. He is now considering grad school because, well, what are the options?

"Tea Party revivalism"? You mean anyone questioning a liberal totem must be a Teabagger?

how can higher ed be broken they are getting stable funding now and have for years at 10,000 bucks a kid?colleges continue to raise tuition too.

"There are increasing online colleges and universities that offer very low cost classes and degrees."

The rules from the HR department at my last two companies was clear - applicants from Phoenix and other Sally Struthers endorsed credit for “Life Experience” degree mills never make it to the interview. Never.

"Let them each become private to sink or swim on their own. They will need to raise tuition and to attract paying students."

Because only the wealthy deserve to be educated.

GAS,

Not every company restricts their hiring to college degreed applicants, though I will admit it is a gatekeeper of sorts.

Graduating from high school, getting good grades, or demonstrating some level of proficiency helps an employer differentiate one applicant from another.

I won't discourage someone from pursuing a BA degree in English, but that person also needs to realize that in the real world this might be a disadvantage in a tough job market. Unless the person can convince a future employer that he/she is better than the other applicants in a convincing way, the quest for a job is going to be hard. It doesn't help that there are fewer jobs, and qualified people are losing theirs everyday.

Having been on the hiring side for many technical jobs - engineering and marketing - I have taken risks by hiring non-degreed people, and a few have done quite well. For those few, my company paid for additional schooling to improve their job-related skills. I've also hired a few people from the best schools with superb credentials who did not work out so well.

As for Oregon higher ed being broken? Not entirely, but yes in certain areas.

Some departments are doing quite well, as they have aligned with industry and other foundations to fill in the funding gaps. It also helps in some areas when alumni open their wallets for academic interests rather than sports.

In the end, there are a finite number of jobs and opportunities for people. In most cases, the best people pursing the right career paths get the better jobs. There are however a surplus of people with skill sets that aren't marketable - degreed or not.

It's a tough world out there.

I too wish that Oregon's higher ed was funded better. Unfortunately, the public revenue stream is declining. Many students have a better chance at the private colleges which are more liberal in financial aid, due to the deeper pockets of their alumni.

What is it about Oregon's schools that fail to attract those alumni donations to make the academic side stronger? Why do the sports programs get the big bucks?

Would you submit to open heart surgery performed by a graduate of the University of Phoenix On-Line Medical School? I understand the Internet simulations are very realistic.

So, where is it written that tenured professors are better, more adept and create better classroom experiences? More and more Oregon students are availaing themselves of the COmmunity college experience where the education is better, less expensive and more attuned to their lives. They then transfer to 4 year colleges and university for degree completion.

I am not an expert, but I seem remember that a certain (large) percentage of the faculty have to be full time employees of a college or university in years that the institution is subject to accreditation review. This does not mean that all are tenured professors, just full time employees.

Also, as I remember, accreditation only occurs every three or fours years. During the years the institution is not under review, the institutions can employ a larger portion of part-time faculty. In my opinion, in many disciplines, part-time teachers are superior due to their real world experience.

Again, I am completely at sea about Oregon's approach to higher education, which seems to me to be: "Let's close our eyes and hope that the logic which prevails everywhere else on the planet will not be in effect here."

Oregon wants to do things on the cheap.

Dave Porter relentlessly pushes Chinese languages and computers. Kurt Chapman thinks that tenured professors are unnecessary. Mike M thinks that English degrees can be a problem in the real world, and besides, not every company requires a B.A. And George A. Seldes thinks that this whole higher education thing is a fad whose time is pretty much over.

And I have to wonder: how many moons circle the world you people inhabit?

Look. The purpose of education is not to create new model worker drones to pick up the oars of the sinking capitalist system.

Habermas perhaps put it best when he divided the purposes of education into three domains:

(1) work knowledge (how do do empirical investigation, analytical thinking)

(2) practical knowledge (the formation of intersocial norms and intersubjectivity; the realization and valorization of solidarity)

(3) emancipatory knowledge (critical self-awareness of the master narratives that color social discourse . . . feminist theory and psychoanalysis are examples of emancipatory knowledge, but there are many others)

You have probably noticed that none of these domains are going to be advanced by cheap-ass professors, online courses, or "I-for-one-welcome-our-new-Chinese-masters" student exchange programs.

No, it takes actual EXPENSIVE REAL UNIVERSITIES. You know, the kind with ivy climbing up the brick walls. Professors with degrees from big name colleges, lots of published papers with language in the high discourse. It means a commitment to do the stuff that Harvard and Brown and Stanford do, or at the very least that the U. of Michigan does. It means spending lots of American dollars. No, there are no shortcuts. No you cannot have just the Engineering department without the Women's Studies Department, and shame on you for asking. Yes we will have to raise taxes to do it. Yes we will have to pay the professors a lot of money. Yes it will be worth it. (Ask Massachusetts or North Carolina.)

This is what it means to be a human being: to think deep and long about what it means to be a human being.

Is it so hard to remember what education is about? Is it so tremendously difficult to understand our own lives as something outside of the web of capitalist greed?

tell me why joe hill we need to raise taxes for higher ed?tell me why 10,000 bucks a student is not enough money to give students a quality college education?a college education mr hill in case you have not noticed does not gurantee you anything in this bad economy.a good high education means nothing if you cant find a job right now.look at all the college grads mr hill who are struggling to find jobs now.what did that college degree get them?baloney oregon wants to do things on the cheap.10,000 a student mr hill is not doing things on the cheap that is stable and adequate higher ed funding.

So, if I get this right, higher ed is broken because it costs the student too much and less people can afford to get that degree and reap all the rewards it offers. And "Frohnmayer's proposal looks to a model that has made OHSU the most expensive public med school in the country." So adopting the quasi-public model of OHSU helps how?

Yeah, I think our experience with Wall Street has taught us that we definitely need LESS regulation when it comes to institutions that suckle from the public teat. That tram has really penciled out well, and we're tripping over the new influx of highly paid professionals from those 10,000 new biotech jobs.

Tim Young posted here: 'Liberty has costs, but it is worth the investment.'

To a point, yes. But with the combined federal/state/local government institutional take in taxes and fees approaching 50% of stagnant or even lower incomes for an increasing number of people and the constant calls to increase that take at every turn, at some point bearing the 'cost of liberty' starts to look a lot more like enslavement to the state.

Ditto bartender's last bit of eloquence.

This is getting a bit old. Progressive minded folks pony up major bucks for something worthwhile. Tired old hacks piss it away and demand more, pointing a gun at our kids' heads.

My 7 year old daughter looks at this and says, "They get a lot; why can't they do better? Businesses do." Hard to explain to her about inflated middle management. Equally hard to explain it to most here. When you make your position that obtuse, you give the TEA crowd a foot in the door.

Also, time to separate the two functions that have become confounded in educating 18-22 year olds. One function is what is being discussed here. The other function is as baby sitter. College is what kids do to pass the time for four years. Trying to dress that up as education gets expensive. If we would separate the ones being baby sat from the people at school to learn, we could reduce a lot of costs overnight.

Finally, if you want to prepare them for life, draft them all! Jobs aren't about ability and knowledge. Well, it is to the extent that if you have more of those than your boss, you're history. No, the content of your urine and your ability to kiss ass is far, far, far more important than the content of your mind and getting the job done. Teaching them objective facts makes that harder. American business is largely based on fraud. The best way to learn that isn't to spend huge sums on tuition, reading about cellular biology. Religion, the military...those are the places that our youth learn the fraud skills needed to succeed in this society.

Hey, you guys do know their are online courses other than those offered by "Phoenix and other Sally Struthers endorsed credit for “Life Experience” degree mills" don't you? In fact, every college, university and community college I explored a few years back had many online offerings. Welcome to the 21st century.

This is what it means to be a human being: to think deep and long about what it means to be a human being.

Is it so hard to remember what education is about? Is it so tremendously difficult to understand our own lives as something outside of the web of capitalist greed?

And you have to have a college degree to do this? What elitist drivel. While I agree attending college is the only way some people will be exposed to "higher thinking" - having it forced down their throat in required courses they could care less about, but need to complete their degree - it is far from the only way. Are we really incapable of indulging our curiosity, expanding our horizons, seeking knowledge and the wisdom of those with more experience and insight than our own, without the benefit of attending an ivy-league caliber university? What a narrow world you must live in.

The sad truth is that while being a well rounded individual is important, earning a degree is not necessarily gonna make it so. And not everyone has the financial resources to sit around "contemplating their navel" (as my father would say) for four years without also gaining the knowledge and skills to pay for that education and support oneself later.

In other words, many of us understand our own lives as something outside of the web of capitalist greed just fine all on our own. We have to go to school to learn how to survive and maybe even prosper in the inescapable web of capitalist greed. An education is an investment and therefore a risk like any other. It is not a guarantee of prosperity or wisdom or anything else.

I worked for years at a major multinational corporation. I started young, as an entry level clerk and worked my way up more rapidly than anybody ever had until I topped out after only 6 years. At that point, I was training the young college grads, fresh out of school, who, because they had a degree - any degree - made $10,000 / yr more than I. I had a great boss and mentor who did everything he could to help me, but corporate rules dictated that you could not rise above a certain level w/o a degree. My last year there, I devised and implemented a program that saved the company more ($12 million/per year) than the whole rest of the department combined. I wasn't allowed to attend the awards dinner where they honored those with the biggest "Programs 4 Profit", because I was just a lowly aide.

Fast forward 20 years, and I've finally got my degree - the Holy Grail which will open doors once closed and put me on the track for financial security. Now I can't get a job in my field because I don't have practical experience. C'est la vie. I'm paying off my student loans the only way I reliably can right now - tending bar. You've come a long way baby. Not.

Shouldn't we really leave higher education alone and just throw more money at it?

I mean we pretty much teach the same way we did a 100 years ago, throw as many kids in a class room as possible, have them read expensive textbooks that are about 10 years behind outside world topics, toss in computers for a nice show, but don't really take advantage of too much computer self-paced training, make sure we have a nice sports program, be like PSU and drop standards so we can get the head count up.

Meanwhile we can tell potential students how well prepared they'll be with that liberal arts degree so they can explain iambic pentameter to the other baristas or be able to elaborate on the finer points of their graduate women's studies classes.

Universities don't want to change. They want to put up a wall to keep the outside world out and just make sure that the fairy talkes continue. Even the "real" world classes like business don't want to sully themselves with issues like teaching kids how to sell or be organized.

Yes, just leave them alone, universities know better than us what we need. Besides if we don't have enough gradutes the Chinese and Indian schools are turning out a lot more who are better educated than us.

First, I'd like to correct some misinformation. The state of Oregon general fund does not subsidize universities for $10,000 per student. The general fund contributed $3460 per student for 2009-10. And that will go down if M66+67 are defeated. The state of Oregon is 48th or 49th in the nation in per capita support of higher ed.

Second, I acknowledge that online learning can be a good option for some people in some situations. But many people learn better in person, with immediate interaction. Also, there are purposes to colleges other than book (or computer) learning. Meeting people, working together, establishing a social network, being exposed to different perspectives, living away from home and being part of a community, are all important and help develop young people into contributing members of society. There is a need for a mix here, not all or nothing as some people are making it sound.

Finally, universities are changing with the times. Maybe not as much as I and some people would like, but before you pass judgement on Oregon's public univeristies, come visit and find out what the curriculum is and how it is constantly updated to be as relevant as possible, particularly in applied areas like business and engineering. And even in more "classic" areas (as opposed to applied) like the liberal arts, you will see professors and instructors taking advantage of technology and new teaching methods to increase student learning.

Our universities are vibrant places which have aggressively adapted to the lack of state funding, raising lots of money from donors (and yes, for purposes other than athletics - come see the new engineering and chemistry building (under construction) at OSU or the Integrated Science Center and new Education building at UO). But all these changes aren't enough if we want future generations of young people to be as educated or more than the current workforce. That will take public investment and a public commitment to ensuring access to quality institutions of higher education, from community colleges to regional universities to major research universities.

Brian

My son was scammed out of hundreds of dollars trying to get a high school completion finished thru BYU online. Tests and papers were rife with mistaken grading, teachers were not available. Crap for hundreds of dollars. Beaverton H.S. staff pushes BYU's online courses for the kids they have failed.

Joe Hill, off the top of my head in Massachusetts there are about 100 colleges and universities. About 15 of those are run by the state. The remainder are private for profit or non profit. Roughly some 70 in the greater Boston area. Northeastern has a great work studies program.

There was a study done some years ago that pointed out that the private schools on Oregon do a better job of educating low income students than the state run system does. It would be especially interesting to look at the number of low income students at OSU and UO compared to PSU.

Solution to the problem is to give the higher education system the entire state lottery and tell them to run it for their benefit and not come back to the people for any money ever again.

A means test should be in place today. No one whose daddy and mommy (sarcasm!) is bringing in more than the average income should get a free ride. Pro rate the subsidy if need be.

Close at least one of the schools or let it go private.

Get rid of the law school at UO. There are private law schools in the state that do an excellent job and the state is simply undercutting them.

Abolish the four year schools and send everyone to the community colleges for their first two years then on to the University for the last two years and for post graduate degrees.

The historian Page Smith commented that the community colleges were much better at eductaing student in the first two years of their college studies. Some of the dumbest people I ever met in college were teaching undergrads in their first two years at college. Seems they were post grad students who didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground and for someone like me they were an insult.

I agree Joe Hill, and sorry about the rough day you had 94 years and two days ago.

The problem seems to be one of philosophy. Again, I agree with Joe Hill that education is about emancipating the mind; etc., not creating drones for the factories, so to speak. Those who own the factories and their shills want the drones.

I guess what I would like to know is... the fact the US spends more on health care than any other country in the world and our 'supposed' decline in various measures of health care have become holy writ in all the blather the past few years in supporting the desperate call for health care reform.

But with higher education we have a entirely analogous situation where the US spends more on education (especially higher education) than any country in the world with declining rankings of the results - and most supporters are just saying we need to spend even MORE money.

Why isn't there any similar serious call to action for higher education reform?

Made a big mistake above. Sentence in the last paragraph should be something like; Some of the dumbest people I met in college were grad students teaching ungrads in the fist two years of college.

joe hill, let us agree that higher education is about emanipating the mind. please tell me/us why in the hell it requires expensive tenured professors to do so? The community college model (actually started in CA) works well. It accomplishes what our students need without budening them with useless debt.

I went the formal education route and had plenty of tenured professors subject me to their stilted views from ivy covered walls of academia. I also was fortunate enough to have: a retired Army Colonel, an excellent retired businessman an active member of the federal arbitration board and a former political activist. I learned far more from them with their real life experience than any of those tenured profs could offer.

"I went the formal education route and had plenty of tenured professors subject me to their stilted views from ivy covered walls of academia. "

My professors in public colleges (2 year college and a state college which had been around since the turn of the 20th century in Calif. and what are now SOU and WOU in Oregon--degree plus teacher certification) were by and large excellent. "Stilted views" only applies to a few profs: one who was a fill-in for a few weeks while a lower division speech prof was gone, 2 who were fairly new and in one case disciplined because of complaints from the way he ran a summer school class.

Generalizing is more a propaganda trick than the way to have an intelligent conversation.

"A recent federally sponsored study “found that, on average, online learning, at the post-secondary level, is not just as good as but more effective than conventional face-to-face instruction..” "

For every class? Face to face conversation (such as a seminar where the prof and maybe 15 students sit around a table and students present papers written for the class, teaching how to proofread and rewrite, helping someone understand a complex question from a class are ALWAYS better online because a study said "on average....".

My concept of any form of average (mean, median, mode) does not mean all are alike.

But LT and Jeff, If we are talking about the first 2 years or 100 level classes, then it is more apri po to honestly add in the 250-350 folks in an auditorium getting blasted with a powerpoint by some grad student who is mouthing the words of their prof. they have to or lose out on their grad school grade.

Sorry, I still believe that the over reliance on tenured profs is way out of line here. That and the insistence that OU andn OSU deliver a statistically better prodict in the first 2 years of study.

Sure, tenured profs will in fact engage in studies and bring in some federal $$$, they teach very little and even then have little to offer from a real world perspective in many courses that matter.

Alworth sez: Everyone recognizes the value of higher ed in the abstract.

NONSENSE. The vast majority of Oregonians made their livings with the hands until about 20 years ago. Nobody needed a college diploma for a job in the woods, the mills, or on a fishing boat. This "everybody recognizes" claim is a claim made by someone who himself had a college education, and I'll wager that his parents urged him to get one and may even have had one themselves.

Realize I'm not advocating against higher education, only cuationing against the romantic notion that everyone thinks a college education is worthwhile.

And do not forget the distinction between education and training. The critical-thinking skills one acquires in an actual higher education have little resemblance to what students acquire in technical programs in community college.

"Tenured professors do a lot more than teach 100-level classes."

Yeah, they hustle up as many consulting gigs as they can.

As far as: (1) work knowledge (2) practical knowledge (3) emancipatory knowledge A lot of that is obtained thru life experience. Expecting a teacher whose main worry is tenure or publishing a paper in a sheltered enviroment to be able to pass any kind of applied knowledge is asking a lot.

Welcome to the 21st century, everyone who wants to make this country a better plac had better be auto-didactic. Expecting to get a degree and have it "made" are very naive.

I'd love to have universities actually foster that sort of innovation instead of the same 100, 200, 300, 400 series and then, bingo, a BSEE.

I want to do my best to engage some of the conversation here. Apologies for coming in late.

Mr. Vantress wants to know why $10k a student is not enough? Instructively, he asks this on the same occasion that the University of California system, once one of the glories of the world, is RAISING tuition alone to $10k a year. True, Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan cannot be brought back to answer for their crimes, but the destruction they rained down on the University of California system looms large.

My question is: are you conflating K-12 with university education? Are you conflating undergraduate with graduate education? If so, with which universities? I'm afraid I don't know exactly what you mean . . . but I get your drift.

Of course the short answer is: knowledge is a very expensive investment, but it pays very handsome and relatively stable dividends. It does not however (as several other people have have pointed out, with attitude) guarantee one a particular position in society.

It is expensive because it takes a lot of money to keep a critical mass of Very Highly Educated People (we're talking bleeding, ragged edge here) together in one community. And that is what a university is.

This brings us to the P.O.V. of Mr. Steve Marx, who argues that universities are resistant to change and still want to teach the way they used to. To which I say: hell yes. Basically, teaching is getting Socrates on one end of the log and the student on the other. The trick is in getting Socrates to a place where he'll engage in structured serious conversation with you. And, with all due respect, unless you are Socrates, or Einstein, or Kropotkin, or Chomsky, or one of those individuals who have made a lifetime of original and often indispensable contributions to their discipline, you are simply not qualified to say what conditions it takes to help others master and advance that conversation. Emotionally, you might feel that you are, in the manner that Sarah Palin feels that she reads lots of magazines, but . . . not so much.

And again, Steve Marx believes that Habermas' knowledge can largely be obtained (and more cheaply be obtained) through "real life experience." Of course "real life experience," is itself a discursive way of disparaging education and theory; it's a classical symptom of what critical theorists call the ideological effect, a kind of fiction created by those in power to convince the oppressed that ideology is simply the way things really are. You see, there is "real life," "common sense," and then there is the useless knowledge that purports to explain experience from a different, dissenting perspective. Why should we raise taxes for that? But that attitude gets things exactly backward. "Real life" is the problem, not the solution.

With respect to wanting the university to become more "innovative" before investments are made, human conversation is how innovation gets done, meaning, how we learn what we did not know before. We get people who are very dedicated to their field, very bright, who are judged by their peers, we give them sufficient tools and resources to explore the universe, and we stay the hell out of their way.

Is that elitist? Once again, hell yes! but only in this sense . . . anyone can do this if they are willing to become excellent. This is the way of the concert violinist, the Olympic hurdler, the ninja code warrior, and the translator of Linear-A. (Just kidding. Linear-A has not yet been translated.)

Nevertheless, if Oregon were to create a first class university, it would be Carl Sandburg democratic. A large set of the state's citizens could come to that university and learn what it means to become excellent. That excellence is fodder for democracy and the opposite of elitism in that the aspiration to an advanced understanding of ourselves and our universe is, as much as our genetic code, what connects us to one another.

If higher ed is so much about excellent people teaching others how to be excellent how come it's not excellent enough to avoid these funding problems?

With all the excellence concentrated there and having every elite position within government and business filled by one of the excellent graduates of these most excellent institutions, it's a wonder that that their biggest problem isn't figuring out how to keep from dying of love and admiration.

Joe Hill commented: We get people who are very dedicated to their field, very bright, who are judged by their peers, we give them sufficient tools and resources to explore the universe, and we stay the hell out of their way.

Well... 'we' stay the hell out of their way except for that endless flow of government grants and research funding bestowed on those who can reliably be counted on to generate results supporting or in line with certain favored political agendas/causes.

Socrates doesn't spend all his time on the other end of a log anymore. 'Big Ed' and 'Big Academia' lobbyists and influence peddlers are just as much a fixture in Washington and the various state capitols as any of the 'Big' business entities...
And Einstein, Kropotkin, and Chomsky spent as much if not more time using their influence to push their personal politics and favored causes than they ever spent on the other end of a log.

"human conversation is how innovation gets done, meaning, how we learn what we did not know before."

Again, colleges are pretty provincial and have been having conversations for a 100 years and the teeaching methods are still the same while the world has changed. If you think college graduates are better prepared for the outside world than they were 50 years ago, great. I disagree.

Conversation in a bubble without the intereaction of the outside world generates flawed theory. If "real life" is the problem, then we just just never let people outside of the bounds of a college campus. WHy would a college want to tap the vast amount of knowledge extant its walls?

Who knows? You might meet someone else besides Habermas and actually learn something instaed of seeing everything thru his eyes exclusively.

"the opposite of elitism"

At a university? Have you met any tenured professors ever?

you are full of it brian collins we do subsidize higher ed at 10,000 per pupil when you include every dollar they actually totally get which you dont.we are not 48th or 49th in per caita support mr collins we are in the top 5 to 10 in the nation in total higher ed funding when you include every properrty tax,fee,federal,state and local tax dollar going to higher ed which you liberals are too scared,lazy and afraid to.we spend more per student on higher ed than you think mr collins.there are people out there mr collins like me that see through the nonstop same old tired underfunding baloney on education you liberals keep trying to get us intelligent people to fall for after these years.we have no funding problems in higher ed on ly a spending problem by colleges.i am tired of being asked to pay more for higher ed when all the money goes to maintain increasing salarie,benefit,healthcare and pers pension costs.why do colleges need to keep raising tuition?how about colleges controlling their costs better?

"Not going", but unfortunately did, do you support the War on Drugs? Then it's incredibly hypocritical to use that language, even for petty insults. Think pols are the biggest 'crites? I vote for MJ smoking teens, that are all against the Drug War, yet use the insult "crackhead" or "are you on crack" every 10 seconds.

matthew actually means well, but he is that twisted. Some compassion, please.

The war in Afghanistan is now at something like $7.1 trillion and counting.

Now how much were we talking about for higher education?

i am not lying not going to say why dont you get off your lazy rear end and do some research like i have and stop listening to the education crowd and liberal news media because they are never honest on education funding and never have been.i include every tax dollar higher ed gets not going to say you only include the general funds budget which severely distorts and shoots down your lame argument not the thousands more in federal,property taxes and etc that higher ed gets that you liberals are too lazy to include in your arguments.remember education dont gurantee you anything or a job in this bad economy

"Again I ask for evidence."

OK, I give. Let's just keep doing what we are doing and slip further behind countries like China and India and never try anything new. After all nothing has really changed since Greece 5000 years ago.

Besides, I enjoy my barista's interpretation of TS Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

paul g. commented: Alcatross claims higher ed is like health care, spending more and more money with declining results. Evidence of this, please?

here, here, and here - for starters.

Admittedly there is debate about some of the numbers - and one can argue various details of the methodology... but the overall trend of the decline relative to other countries is clear - and it's not a new phenomena. I didn't say the US wasn't still a leader in many benchmarks (we should be given the amount of money we spend relative to other countries) - but we don't 'dominate' the international rankings as perhaps we once did or to the extent you imply and/or may like to believe... other countries are closing the gap.

And you can't have it both ways... pooh-poohing this data as inaccurate/irrelevant while supporters use these OECD reports as primary evidence in their arguments that we're at risk of falling behind and need to spend yet more money on higher education.

not going to say you are the ignorant one because you refuse and are too lazy to thoroughly research education funding.you would rather fall for the same old tired bunk about underfunding.its funny you liberals name call every time the real truth comes out and its proven how wrong you all are.i dont need to post a link not going to say you need to get off the dime and research that yourself.i am not upset i am just posting facts and telling the real truth about things something all you liberals are too lazy,scared and afraid to do not going to say.

I support a vibrant higher education for Oregon. that I question measuring said support by the number of highly paid, tenured professors is where yhe issue lies. Certainly, the question should be more about the quantifiable quality of the education students are recieving from Oregon's higer education system.

at roughly $24k/yr - are the students getting their money's worth? Brick and mortar matter less in a connected world. students can, and should expect their professors to be well rounded individuals who can interact. The growth of a vibrant CC system is proof of the need being filled at a different level with a different slant.

The student of today deserves and demands a different approach to higher education. some may like the dusty halls of academia. Others vie for the intellectual give and take of the on-line world. Believe it or not there are some on-line course available that are worthwhile. While it was a prep school setting, the days of "Good-Bye Mr. Chips" should be nodded to as we move boldly forward educating people for a different century.

Man, that vantross troll is really a nasty grump!

Higher ed feels hurt because the state provides diminishing money per student. That should not be surprising. As the percentage of Oregonians going to college increases, the ability of the state to maintain the same level of per-student funding tends to shrink. As a declining country, we fall short in satisfying our wants in many areas: personal savings, roads and bridges, K-12, medical care, communications, and the list goes on. I would like to see major organizational efforts by higher education to greatly reduce the cost per student. What ever happened to the three year college degree that was once proposed?

"I remain mystified that some still dispute the value of higher ed."

And I remain surprised that you can't recognize the distinction that people make between valuing their education and valuing their schooling, as Twain put it.

I don't know of anyone who disputes the value of a solid liberal education to the person who obtains one. But your claim was that no one disputes the value of higher education in a post about public higher ed.

Given how we fund (or not) higher ed in Oregon, I think the more plausible claim with better empirical support is that "On the whole, we in Oregon do NOT recognize the value of higher ed" -- it's either that or we think that we can have the benefits by importing the educated from elsewhere (which is, arguably, exactly what our real strategy is).

I am persuaded that we will never return to the halcyon days of booming public higher ed, with increasing enrollments, salaries, and opportunities. That's a characteristic of an expanding economy that is generating excess wealth, and that will only be true intermittently in the US from here out, and for increasingly shorter and shorter periods. On the whole, governments all over the country are going to be increasingly challenged to maintain "basic" services, much less to support those that only serve, at most, a third of society.

As a result of its especially dysfunctional tax & kicker system, Oregon public universities will never be able to compete head-to-head with its sister schools; to the extent that faculty are not tied here by personal ties of affection, they will go elsewhere for better opportunities, funding, salaries, and benefits. And as a happenstance of nature, having chewed through our most valuable timber long ago, we have little of the natural resource wealth that has always funded the top US institutions (particularly from oil) -- wealthy states and extremely wealthy individuals create great universities, not the other way around.

"F*** off you self-interested corporate fascist."

Look at the mouth on you! You should really go and see my barista in the morning.

One of the projects of the reactionary right has been to "de-fund the left." Some of the important ways that they have tried to do this is by systematically de-funding universities, by eroding the expectations of what constitutes an education, and by providing parallel institutions that are supposed to challenge the authority of the university ("think tanks" . . . I am thinking of all the national damage done by the Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, Education Trust, the Olin Foundation, etc. These people could not generally get jobs in universities nor would their work be published in peer-reviewed journals, but the corporate media treats them seriously . . . more seriously, in fact, than actual scholars. Think of all the paper wasted and hot air expended by the Cascade Policy people here in Portland!

Another unacknowledged problem is that the tax base has changed radically over the past thirty years as the Reagan-Bush agenda (honestly, the Reagan-Clinton-Bush agenda) to raise the Gini coefficient and push money to the very, very rich has succeeded and is still succeeding.

Evidence can be found on your street, probably, but also all over the Web, e.g.

http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Gini-Coefficient.html

This has resulted in a very difficult environment to maintain a tax base, much less nourish growth. There is simply not as much money in the lowest 98% of the citizenry, certainly not in the lowest 60%, and the so-called party of the poor, the Democratic Party, has no apparent stomach to confiscate the product of the financial rape of the national treasury since Carter.

Of course when states try to address these problems, they are faced with the familiar problems of "socialism in one country." A national effort needs to be mounted. At one time many people hoped that such a movement might coalesce around Obama, but it seems clear now that such is not the case.

As in every revolutionary struggle, the key objective that the reactionary right has is to make us ashamed of our dreams; to make us think that maybe, after all, we have no right to an authentic education, or health care, or clean air, or clean water, or fulfilling and meaningful work, or a meaningful life for that matter. To that end they have the newspapers, the monopolistic media, and, apparently, some of the folks who post here quite regularly.

To shift the focus a bit: some commentators are distinguishing between "value" and "values" in today's U.

In my paraphrase, value = the U as a center of wealth production, especially since the digital revolution. Values = the U as a center of reflection and evaluation, in which experts in their fields are relatively distanced from the world of getting a profit by the end of this quarter, and who can contemplate our history, socioeconomic structure, and arts and sciences, in order to offer a critique of our values to our ruling elites. The latter function is in danger of extinction, mainly because the "value" of advanced research has brought the corporate oligarchy and its profit deadlines on to campus with a vengeance. Who knows if "values" can survive the impact of "value."

A useful essay is "The University's Crisis of Purpose" by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, in the 9-1-09 NY Times Book Review.

Endowments are another topic that can give pause about the function of today's U's. Harvard's endowment was about $35 billion before the Wall Street crash, and may be at about $25 billion now. The other leading private U's are also sitting on billions, as are certain publics as well. Little if any of this invested money is being spent for academic purposes, such as tuition reduction, causing some to wonder if certain schools are being used as fronts for their tax shelters. (I suspect that a highly paid administrator may soon write to insist that the dough is for "the future," which never comes.)

As for those students who go to campus to play--sometimes with their parents' approval--rather than to learn in a high-powered intellectual setting, maybe they could find another social institution to use for that purpose, such as Disneyland.

the truth hurts dont it rw?if all you can do is name call and call someone a grump for pointing out the truth it proves how pathetic you liberals all are.

Look at this curve: http://desdemonadespair.blogspot.com/2009/11/graph-of-day-us-total-property-returns.html

and read the excerpt of the warning that comes with it --

THERE's your "broken higher ed" coming at you like a freight train.

Public higher ed necessarily sits as a supplicant for public revenue, which is generated (in Oregon) by taxing (discouraging) precisely those things that we most claim to want more of: jobs/labor, savings and investment, earnings.

A good deal of the tax money goes into paying costs associated with things we claim to want less of: pollution, production of hazardous wastes, consumption of nonrenewable resources. A good deal of tax money is also funneled into subsidies/tax credits for businesses, in hopes of generating jobs/labor, investments, earnings.

Note that our system works to discourage exactly what we claim to want, which we then try to rectify by taking public money and giving it to private interests who will (we hope) undo some of the discouragement our tax system has inflicted. (For a healthy slice for themselves.)

In short, it's like driving your car by stomping on the brakes and then stomping on the accelerator even harder to overcome the drag provided by the brakes and paying someone else to push you from the rear.