Higher Tuition For an Engineering Degree 531
i_like_spam writes "The NYTimes is running a story about a new trend in tuition charges at public universities throughout the country. Differential pricing schemes are being implemented, whereby majors in engineering and business pay higher tuition rates than majors in arts and humanities. Last year, for instance, engineering majors at the University of Nebraska starting paying an extra $40 per credit hour. One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields. Officials at schools that are implementing differential pricing are aware of some of the downsides. A dean at Iowa State said he 'thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power.' And a University of Kansas provost said, 'Where we have gone astray culturally is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of... the value of the particular major.'"
What about other revenue sources? (Score:5, Insightful)
Catching up to the rest of the world... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone majoring in "Communications" is fulfilling a lifelong dream and not just there for the degree.
Pssh. Anybody with a library and curiosity can learn all the art history they want to, it's not particularly difficult, nor do you need to pay a college tuition to have a discussion about it.
The real shame here is that people might be dissuaded from learning something they would have a much more difficult time learning on their own, due to the cost.
Use price for the students that we need! (Score:5, Insightful)
By charging less for less useful subjects such as history we will end up with a surfeit of people with the wrong degrees - people not suited to the jobs that we, as a country, need.
This is where government intervention/financial_support is needed for the long term good of society -- I can't see it happening since the payoff is way beyond the next election.
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Catching up to the rest of the world... (Score:3, Insightful)
We should do the opposite, actually (Score:4, Insightful)
Think how many millions of engineers China will churn out this year. More than the total graduating class for all of the US, in every category, I'd guess.
Fewer engineers equals 3rd world nation (Score:1, Insightful)
It has paid off for such countries making them closer to become the new 1st world counties that will most influence everyones future world-wide.
Small local supply of engineers equals 3rd world nation.
To get more good engineers, you need cheap education with high standards to stay in the program.
If industry demands top-notch laboratories... (Score:2, Insightful)
So if the industry demands students to work with state of the art equipment, surely they can pony up the cash to support universities to pay for it? Otherwise, why should the universities cave in to their demands?
Already done in Grad Schools and Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
However, that is a reflection of economic realities. School's have to be more competitive in hiring engineering faculty. Whereas for most humanities, most PhDs would like nothing more than an academic position at a university, that is simply not the case for Engineering faculty. School's not only have to compete with other education institutions, but industry as well, which can afford to pay PhDs a lot more. To a lesser extent, this also translates in the stipends a department pays engineering grad students, they get more.
Also, an engineering education costs more in terms of support. Engineering labs, equipment, etc. all add on to the cost of the education.
While I can appreciate the notion of "knowledge for knowledge's sake", which is infact how most universities started, that is not reality today. Not all disciplines are equal in economic terms. The barriers to entry into the arts and humanities are lower than the hard sciences/engineering. For proof of that, look in universities or the working world. How many people switch their majors from sciences/engineering to arts/humanities, and how many do vice-a-versa? Also, most of those who switch away from sci/eng do so because they are struggling in those fields.
Even beyond college, you often hear of a former individual with a background in sci/eng transitioning into more "soft" areas, such as policy research, K-12 teaching, art, etc. But you almost never hear of a political science graduate becoming the lead tech on an engineering project. The only place where that transition does take place is in Comp Sci, and that's because the barrier to entry there is lower than other Engr fields. And I'm not even going to count the transition to IT, because IT is different from Comp Sci, and is not a Sci/Engr domain.
Don't worry (Score:2, Insightful)
For a good student, there are plenty of good programs out there. As far as that goes, if $40 per course is too much extra, go to a military service academy where they'll pay you to attend and guarantee you a good paying job when (if) you graduate. There are plusses and minuses to every option, and scoffing at letting students make their own choices is just ignoring reality.
Re:Use price for the students that we need! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a big part of why Americans are so damned ignorant. Honestly... who but the pampered few could afford intellectual curiosity in such a place?
Re:Catching up to the rest of the world... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too late. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Expectations increase with technical progress ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is due to higher expectations. Yesterday's luxuries are today's necessities.
flush toilets/sewage systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Already done in Grad Schools and Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
Universities are for academic education. Nowadays, universities -- especially in fields like Computer Science -- spend so much time focusing on the immediate economic value of the material that we can't honestly call it an academic institution any more. When professors start talking about "industry" and other similar terms, you know you're in vocational school.
There's nothing wrong with vocational school, they are very useful. However, let's call it what it is. If you are spending more time learning a tool than the abstract concepts behind it, chances are you are in vocational school. The only reason we still call it an academic endeavor is because "vocational school" doesn't sound nearly as impressive.
I think this distinction is important because we need both academic institutions and vocational institutions. But if our academic institutions are being infiltrated by vocational training, then we won't have any academic institutions left.
Some thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
2. The problem with the runaway salaries of the business school professors was created by the business schools themselves. We know that business PhDs can get very good jobs outside of the academia but that's only a part of problem. The real problem is that the supply of business school professors is very tight. What would you expect when business schools at large research universities produce so few business PhDs? Big universities like Purdue, Michigan State, or University of Colorado at Boulder have business-related departments (such as finance or accounting) that employ dozens of professors, yet they admit about 2 doctoral student per year, and even less of those graduate 4-6 year down the road. In the end, they pay 130-140K to a fresh assistant professor. Compare this to the field of economics. Large universities admit 15-25 doctoral students of economics per year and usually at least a half of them finish the degree. The starting salary of an economics professor is about $85K.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:2, Insightful)
The best part of college is that you a little while you can be with a group of intellectuals that are interested in discussing stuff like that.
By the way moderators, although I disagree with this point, I would hardly call the parent post flamebait.
Re:I didn't say that you did. (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think you know what culture is, my friend. Culture is the collection of commonly held ideas, traditions, and customs people share in a society. So even if we are shitting in chamber pots and getting disease from plague rats, we still have culture by our very existence.
In a modern context, engineering is just a major vocational branch. We need engineers to run our society, in its current form. In earlier times, engineers existed, sometimes to help the King fight his wars by introducing better weapons or to build better shelters for tribes who needed to survive.
I'm not really sure why anyone is asking the question if we need engineers or not. We can most surely exist without the field of engineering, but nonetheless, engineers will continue to exist in the form of smart people coming up with smart ideas that apply to their surroundings. I'd expect, that as communities grow, these smart people will either be called upon, or the smart people themselves will organize into groups that serve to the benefit of the community. Essentially, you end up with what we have today.
Honestly, I would just look at the Dark Ages where rationalism was shunned and backwards myths were held up as the high ideal in answering the question. In a healthy society, various people fit into different roles that collectively contribute to the well-being of the society. Engineers to provide practical solutions, craftsmen to build things, artists to conceptualize the world around us and remind us of our place in the universe, philosophers to provide rational direction, and leaders to make decisions.
Re:We should do the opposite, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
My own background in graduate school for physics had a program of many 80 grad students at a time, 10 to 20 of them born and raised in China. One of our professors, the one most cited in his field, had a similar background and a tendency to recruit other kids from China.
None of the graduate students has any intention of returning to China. Ever. Most were marked at youth for their academic ability, and raised away from their parents in boarding schools. They don't have loyalty to China, nor a big family that roots them to China. The Married ones bring their wives/husbands with them (often having financial issues while in grad school).
I've known some from western provinces that would be a 'Stan and loathe the government. I know others from the big cities that just want the money they can get here. So now the brain drain is very favorable for the US. So doom isn't going to happen in 10 years. But maybe in 20 or 30 when we stop being the target of the Brains looking for money.
Re:Demand for Engineering Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Engineering faculty salaries are due to the fact that engineering PhDs can get high-paying jobs in industry, whereas liberal arts professors don't have any companies flashing money at them to lure them away.
So no, unless you're living in a dreamland, whatever demand from industry there is isn't actually attracting more people to engineering.
"Does this mean music majors are free?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
If ever there was some area of our world that shouldn't be run as a business, it's Education. Providing a good education to our citizens is our best and surest way to insure that our country has a viable economic future.
People complain about the high cost of Health Care. Look at what it costs to become a doctor. The schools that train Doctors and Lawyers long ago realized they could cash in on the fact that these fields had more earning power, and they've been limiting who has access to that earning power through steep tuitions ever since.
If we keep on this course that seems to be guided by the principle that anything that can be sold should be sold to the highest bidder, we'll lose everything our ancestors fought to preserve in creating this nation.
Commerce has it's place, but this isn't it. Free market capitalism is good at distributing goods and services, but not at providing equitable education available to all citizens.
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, the Computer Science and Engineering is 40% engineering, so every 3 hour class I take has a $150 fee attached to it. What if it is a 3 hour Computing Theory course? $150 extra. What if it is thesis hours? $150 extra. All because engineering courses "cost more". Even if, like thesis hours, there is no classroom.
What's worse is that this is FEE, not additional tuition. So, graduate students can't get them paid by their scholarships. The all-tuition-paid scholarship doesn't quite mean the same thing at UNL if you have to pay $1000 PER SEMESTER in fees. The involved departments have a harder time attracting top quality talent because of this. They are quite literally focused on the short term cash gain rather than the long term effects on the college.
There are other, indirect effects. Bio, chem, and physics students used to take computational courses to learn the basics of clustered computing. This resulted in long-lasting collaborations between these departments. Computational scientists worked out better algorithms for the physicists, and the physicists got better results. The grad students no longer take these classes, meaning that they are at a disadvantage - or just ignore the computational side of their subjects.
It's lose-lose-lose for the students, professors, and departments involved. The university, however, makes a bit more money.
(Not only do these fees specifically piss me off, they decided to "surprise" the students with them. I mean, the plans were put out for anyone to read. In a cellar. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.)
Re:Use price for the students that we need! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Chem labs cost money: (Score:5, Insightful)
There's another major problem with this as well. When a good education is affordable, people with a lot of potential but not much money can use universities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Education acts as an equalizer, a place where people who haven't had many advantages can still be successful and get ahead in society, and I think that's important in a society where (supposedly) we are supposed to be able to succeed or fail based on merit alone, rather than the size of dad's portfolio, or who our parents know. In short, it makes for a fairer society.
When you start charging people more to go into higher paying fields, what's going to happen? The people who most need a leg up- kids from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder- are less likely to choose those career paths. The kids from rich families are more likely to take those courses. The poor stay poor and the rich get richer. Society as a whole becomes less fair. It's already happening at the Ivy League colleges. These days the overwhelming majority of the kids at the Ivies come from well-off families- maybe not all of them are fabulously rich, but many of them come from the upper ranks of the middle class, and very few of them come from blue collar or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Then many of these kids go off to join Wall Street, or become congressmen and presidents. Basically, the Ivies help the rich get even richer, and the powerful to become even more powerful. They help make society less fair, rather than more fair, to start creating permanent upper and lower classes; they've gone from being part of the solution, to part of the problem. They give opportunity to the people who have already had every opportunity in life.
It's up to you whether you believe that part of the University's mission is to produce a more fair, just society. I happen to believe that should be a university's goal to produce equality of opportunity, but it's a question of your values. A libertarian would argue that, just like individuals, universities should be free to do whatever the hell they want. Fine. I don't agree with that on principle, but I can see how you would justify that argument. However, I think that this situation is not just unfair, it's potentially dangerous. You don't need to look further than the President of the United States to see what happens when you start giving people opportunity based on connections and money, rather than on ability and merit: you get spoiled, rich, idiotic brats running the show. You have the system being run by people who have never had to learn from their failures, pay for their mistakes, or succeed on their own merit. And we're going to be paying for that mistake for years to come.
Re:Too late. (Score:2, Insightful)
Work has nothing to do with it. Almost all natural resources, government contracts, land, capital, even menial jobs are locked up, and the only way to get to them is though politics, nepotism, and outright crime. People work their asses off their whole lives and never move beyond grunt wages. To be successful you have to work smart and dirty, not hard. You literally have to take advantage of other people's misfortunes.
At some point one realizes that everyone else, on average, has been alive on this planet the same amount of time that I have, and I *KNOW* they aren't working as hard as I am. Why? Because I am out there doing the grunt work and I don't see anybody about to break $1 mil. And, yet, the people around me are losing ground. You're analysis is 'blame the victim' in the economic sense. You would tell slaves 'you just need to work harder.' Arbeit Macht Frei my friend.
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Already done in Grad Schools and Real World (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously you've never taught in a public high school. I'd never call that a "soft" area. I have a BS in Computer Science & a BA in Mathematics, and am currently teaching 3 Advanced Placement courses at a public high school. It's the most demanding employment I've ever had.
I know that there are significantly more difficult employment positions in the world than K-12 teaching, but let me say this much - that sort of elitist view of "soft" education does nothing at all to improve the situation. It's hard enough to find anyone with intelligence in their field to teach K-12 education. Frankly, many people in K-12 shouldn't even be there; either they do not have a degree in the field they are teaching, or they are only there for some oblique reason (such as benefits).
Those of us who actually have a college degree of specialization in our field are lumped into the same category as those I just described. Unfortunatley this sort of impression is not yours alone, but is echoed throughout society. Every time a post is made on Slashdot about the declining might of American technical genuis, I wonder why everyone immediately discusses the university situation and ignores the K-12 segment. If high schools continue to serve substandard education, how long before even the best universities will literally have no one to teach?
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:2, Insightful)
So why should other nations buy their ads and "cool" clothing brands from America when they can make them at home?
In contrast, it has taken decades for other countries to match us in engineering. It would have taken even longer if we hadn't begun sliding downwards at some point.
Re:What about other revenue sources? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
What CEO's say, is downright sinister in my opinion and nothing short of pure GREED.
I gave a couple of examples about the trends in off shoring of jobs, but the real question isn't, "How many engineers do we need." I think the markets are willing to manage their own demand.
Besides, American CEO's are not interested in that question, they are more interested in a similar question. Certainly not that one though.
So I explained to my audience, that when you hear these CEO's in front of congress preaching they need more off shore help because there is a "shortage" of qualified engineers, keep in mind they are not asking your congressional reps the full "question".
Certainly I can assure you all hear, when they mean "qualified" they do not mean academic credentials.
What they really mean is, there is not enough fully qualified engineers willing to work for $5 bucks and hour in software, industrial design and architecture, and they cannot find them anywhere in the United States.
Furthermore, I think the educational system in general in this country is way over priced as is, for what you get anyway.
You are practically asking a person to become a financial serf unless of course your wealthy enough to actually go to a University, get through in 4 years (i.e. because you don't have to work and go to school at the same time.).
Particularly if you are in an engineering program which is very very challenging in the number of hours you have to dedicate yourself in.
People are screwed because if it takes you about 6 years to complete a engineering degree, your going to endure a much larger increase in educational expenses, at a much lower living wage.
This can make FINISHING school a VERY hard challenge for a vast majority of students out there, who thought the hardest part of getting into a University institution was just a SAT score, or good grades in high school.
Many are finding, that PALES in comparison to actually STAYING in school and finishing it while working 2-3 jobs while paying for yearly expenses.
Which in the end, you have to ask yourself how much depth you put into that education with a C+ average was really worth it after 6 years, because you could barely find enough time to study while maintaining 2 jobs and going to school.
A what? 40K investment for a C+ average? What depth were you actually able to study the material?
Since grades can be a job entrance factor, todays young people are REALLY squeezed between a rock and hard place.
I see many very bright people never given the chance to get that A simply because it is impossible to sustain a 18 hour work day and compete with "the silver spoon" kids which all they have to do is go to school, and basically do their home work.
I drew a picture of "Johnny" and "Rick" both computer science students. "Johnny" I would say was actually a more intelligent kid than "Rick". But Johnny consistently got lower grades, and had a few late assignments which cost him grade points. "Johnny" had to use the computer lab for most of his work because he had no computer in his dorm. The computers in the computer lab though were not kept up well, slow and very difficult to get on during normal hours. So labs had waiting lists and you had to sign up for computer use.
"Rick" however, not only had a computer, but a laser printer and internet access in his private apartment the old man bought him. Write a compiler? No problem, in a nice quiet apartment with no noisy neighbors, Rick worked deep into the night all through the semester, finishing the project on time, no problem.
"Johnny" had to sleep outs
Re:Exactly what America needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think the only things you learn in college are facts you can learn piecemeal on the internet, you probably don't belong in college.
I've personally had to teach someone with a Ph.D. in IT
From where? Very few reputable schools offer a Ph.D. in IT -- I think the University of Oklahoma does, but very few others do. If you hire people with degrees from the University of Phoenix and its ilk, you can expect to get what you pay for.
it'll be to get the degree and get out of there, because I honestly doubt that they'll be able to teach me anything interesting that I haven't already learned from another source.
Then I suggest not going to college, because with that attitude you'll be right. College is supposed to cultivate knowledge, and if you aren't open to learning -- which includes learning on your own -- you're only going to graduate with a piece of paper, rather than the changes inside college is supposed to foment.
Education as a business (Score:4, Insightful)
Universities absolutely depend upon professors that work well below their market value elsewhere (OK, this is clearer in economics, business, hard science, and engineering) because they believe in the educational system. But to be told to act like a business in performance and workload, but not in compensation . . .
I now make about three times my university salary . . .
hawk
Re:Education as a business (Score:2, Insightful)
For many professors in non-business/engineering/science fields their market value is not grossly higher than their academic salary. I also know a few professors who gave up a highly successful career and took a pay cut to work as a professor. Some of the perks they noted was less stress, a lot more flexibility, and low work load (~20 hrs of lectures/office hours/wk, TAs do all the work, they get summer off).