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.'"
Already being done in Canada (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still at a loss to explain the difference in the cost of business credit hours, I guess they're just milking those people because they can...
Engineering is dead anyway, be a lawyer (Score:3, Interesting)
IT is being decimated with ubber-cheap offshore labor. Engineering, accounting, and other fields could also be killed by offshore labor. Healthcare could be socialized, or regulated until it totally sucks. What can't be offshored can be killed by H1Bs, or illegal immigrants.
But, not law. Ever hear about massive layoffs of lawyers? Any lawyer, who is not completely incompetent, can probably count on a six-figure income, once he/she has a few years of experience. Lots of lawyers in the USA are millionaires. Aside from money, lawyers have all the power: Judges are lawyers, so are politicians, and so are lawyers. We live in a virtual "lawyerachracy."
There is no way lawyers could have their jobs offshored - it requires too much local knowledge (i.e. what this judge will put up with, what that judge doesn't like). And there is no way there can be too many lawyers, because lawyers cause the very problems that lawyers are paid to solve.
IMO: if you don't want to be a lawyer, be a professional litigant. In the future, everybody in the USA will "earn" their living by suing on another.
First offshoring now this (Score:3, Interesting)
With dwindling opportunities for US citizens in engineering, flat wage growth and short career spans for those already in engineering, enrollments have dropped over the past 7 years at most engineering schools. Selectively charging more for engineering curricula is piling onto this trend.
See Jobs Update: The Death of US Engineering [vdare.com]
Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
Heck, this would even have a major bonus: when I was in school I know that one english "teacher" that I had deliberately lower the grades of engineering students )including myself) as opposed to BA majors (others may well have done this too, but I only am sure of it happening from one "teacher"). By entering as a BA canidate and then switching a student would be free of this type of grade discrimination, which I expect happens much more on the "arts" side of the university.
I should also mention that I paid more than the art history majors, and that was many years ago. But it was sone in the form of "Lab Fees" for engineering courses, not based on what my major was.
Re:Too late. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just those Stanford undergrads. I used to have kids from Franklin & Marshall college renting the house next door. I would often overhear them talking about not wanting to be "stuck" making $250,000/year for the next decade. (Meanwhile, I own the house next door on about $45,000/year.) One girl told me that she might go to law school, but is just hoping to meet a rich guy to marry.
It might just be kids from expensive schools, but I've found this attitude in kids from my local high school, who are middle to upper middle class kids. I'm only 25, so why is there such a gap between me and these people who are only a couple years younger than I am?
Higher education costs (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't do an engineering degree (Score:2, Interesting)
If I had done business studies plus a two year law conversion course I would have graduated at the same time. I'd still be earning $60k 2 years out of education, but it would be about to jump past $100k/year. I'd also be living in a decent location instead of the kind of crappy industrial wastelands where they stick things that can go boom.
No matter how much you love engineering... do it as a hobby. Corporate engineering is all paperwork anyway. If you qualify as a lawyer or an accountant (which will be easy for anyone capable of passing an engineering degree) then you can afford to fund your own fun projects like blowing shit up.
Elite Academics Get No Sympathy (Score:1, Interesting)
When you end up paying thousands of dollars for just a few token classes taught by a run of the mill professor, you have a hard time seeing the justification for the cost. You could easily find some guy with adequate credentials in industry pay him a generous wage to come teach part-time in a rented-out civic center with far less cost.
Once you actually go over the line-item budgets that our public universities are required to publish, by law, you lose sympathy for the sniveling provosts and presidents who "regret" to raise our tuition year after year.
Students don't deserve massive debt for their education, especially when you see what its paying for.
So.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Catching up to the rest of the world... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very time that US companies began offshoring IT work, the US was filled with people with IT degrees and experience. The "lack of qualified workers" seems to mostly been "a lack of masters-degree people who would work for associates-degree salaries".
{....-Now that I think of it, the US university lobby should have been one heavily opposing the B1-B program. US kids are hardly encouraged to go into debt to get a degree knowing that they can always be easily replaced with a less-expensive offshore worker. What was their official position on the matter? Did they even have one?-....}
With some professions it's fairly possible to get into them with a bit of luck and without any college--but for a few like medicine, law and engineering it's pretty-much not easily possible for an average person to do. But one of these jobs is not like the others: doctors and lawyers often need to appear in person to do their jobs; but engineering can be offshored as well.
So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well. Is it a good idea for US kids to go into debt for school, to try to land a job that may not practically exist within a few years? The only ones losing money on this deal are the colleges.
~
Americans, please count yourselves lucky..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think, for a moment, of what we have to face. The top engineering examination is the IIT Joint Entrance Examination, which is the only way to gain entry into the Indian Institutes of Technology. Every year, around 1,50,000 people appear for the IIT entrance examination, straight out of high school. That was the number last time. This time, I think it's much higher. Around 4500 get selected. Everyone else to told to go screw themselves. That means that only three percent of people who appear get in.
The next big examination is the AIEEE - the All India Engineering Entrance Examination. In this system, there are a number of colleges which choose to give admission based on performance in this exam. Here, around 8,50,000 people appeared last year. Out of that, only the top 50,000 are called for "counseling" - they are the only ones who have a chance at getting a place in a college. Out of those, only the ones getting into the top five thousand get the first tier colleges and universities. That works out to about 0.588% of all people who appear. But it usually works out for people with ranks up to 25,000 - they get into a good enough place. That's 2.94% of the total who appear.
The next level are the state examinations. Through them, you can get admitted into the colleges affiliated with the local state governments. In states with good colleges, this works out for the top five to ten percent of people in the state.
If you don't get in through any of these channels, then your only option is to pay huge amounts of money to a college of your choice so that you may be included in the "discretionary" admissions that they allow.
It's not difficult to understand, economically - the government controls who and what constitutes a university and a college. It also fixes the fees of all of them. Further, it also controls admission criterion - who will get in, what the admission policies will be, and every other little detail. Now, by forcing colleges to charge students less than what it costs them to run the place, and making the deficit out of its own pocket, along with imposing the hassle of bureaucracy, it provides a very effective dis-incentive to people to start new places, new centres of higher learning, all the while making sure that the few colleges and universities who have a name are the ones who are most profitable (because they can charge arbitrary amounts for the "discretionary" admissions, and the ones with the best reputation charge the most).
What this, in effect, leads to is that there is a ridiculous amount of competition for a very small number of seats, and that the vast, vast majority (above 70%) of the nation's students are getting an education which leaves them unemployable in any meaningful way.
It also has further, unintended, and catastrophic consequences, in terms of the allocation of resources, many of which are very scarce in a country like India (forgive me if I sound like Sowell here, I'm reading his book right now).
Because of this unnatural competition (in a market system, such an artificial shortage and scarcity would not have happened, and therefore I call in unnatural), people try to find ways to game the system.
These tests follow a pattern - the AIEEE, for instance, will consist of three sections, one devoted each to Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics. The questions in each section will be multiple-choice. Now, given the general pattern, it is possible for a coaching institute, which trains students to take a specific test, to do a statistical analysis of every paper since the test's inception, and guess what will be asked next. The rich can, naturally, afford the best coaching, and thus overwhelmingly dominate the pan-Indian tests.
I remember that during my days in suc
Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Further Devaluation of Liberal Arts Degrees (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use price for the students that we need! (Score:3, Interesting)
- Other people are willing to "pay" a premium to enter that field (in the form of either higher costs or lower wages), e.g. because they enjoy the work or have different expectations about future wages levels than other students do. In this case, if the student doesn't enjoy the work and was just looking for something financially lucrative, he must simply admit that his thresholds of cost/wage levels for that job are away from the market equilibrium level and study in another field instead. It should probably be one that he enjoys, so that he is the one with the natural advantage instead.
- The field is oversupplied due to some external factor, such as government subsidization of particular kinds of education.
If you do the math on loans and find that it doesn't pay to enter a certain educational field, then one of these is true and your claim of the job being "needed" in society rings hollow in my ears.Re:What about other revenue sources? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Americans, please count yourselves lucky..... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Rich people can ace exams by studying at exam coaching institutes? If you throw out competitive entrance examinations and let the market decide who studies then only the ultra-rich will be able to study (as you say the demand is high; implying in a free market the cost will be astronomical). At least the current system favors the smart-and-rich and the smart-and-determined poor rather than the merely rich which your system would end up with.
2. We already have too many engineering and medical colleges. A good three quarter of the people who graduate from there range from the merely mediocre to the catastrophically incompetent. Too many people in India treat engineering and medical profession like high school - minimal stuff that every tom, dick and harry should graduate by default. Little if any attention is paid aptitude, interest and capability of the individual. While we can not control who has the aptitude and real interest, we can surely select the capable to a certain measure through centrally administered examinations.
3. Demand for "professional degree" is so vast that a lassie-fair economy will take many decades to correct itself. This is if it ever corrects itself because the reason why so many people take up these degrees is not merely economic but also strongly social.
There are many draw backs to the current system of education administration in India. But I am yet to hear of a better system suited to our social mores, economic condition and the one true constant of life in India - total corruption and endemic nepotism as a accepted way of life.
Re:Wake up and smell the cappucino. (Score:1, Interesting)
your political rants have very little basis in reality. the fact is silicon valley is in america, not france or anywhere in the EU. google is from the us, so is apple intel and amd. the europeans scramble at trying government fund competitors to companies like google because they are trying to catch up, they are not ahead at all.
and 200-300 years behind? do you remember what the europeans were doing back then? its only very recently that they've stopped trying to destroy the world. bush would have to nuke the world to even that balance.
as for the guy saying we have gone culturally astray because people concentrate on starting salaries, well thats what happens when the middle class has been kicked in the guts. in the past high school grads could get decent jobs like manufacturing and eventually make decent money, now those jobs are gone and its a chasm between poverty and professional jobs with heavy educational cost burden. its only rational to consider salary now.
Treat tuition subsidies like venture capital (Score:3, Interesting)
The trick is to predict that tax revenue with a reasonable degree of accuracy and to identify the most qualified students. The SAT was intended to identify students who weren't "connected" and would have been overlooked by the elite schools, but it produced results in conflict with the tribalist religion known as multiculturalism and I've yet to see a superior objective replacement.
Then there's the problem of the bloated bureaucracies at most universities. There's no real free market pressure to attend to that. I'm not sure what to do here.
The fiction that all students need a university education needs to end too. College has become the new high school, at least here in America. College degrees have become an atrociously expensive substitute for the IQ tests that companies used to be allowed to give, effectively screwing the people the do-gooders claimed to help. Most people would be better off learning on the job. The apprenticeship model is vastly underrated. It would help if the government education monopoly did a better job with the K-12 set. I'd break that monopoly with a voucher system but good luck getting that reform passed.