What you've got there is a fundamental philosophical divide. I can respect those authentic conservatives who argue against the "handouts" on philosophical grounds. What makes my blood boil is that we have no other political party strongly making the argument for the social contract. Even you want to tie the social contract to "service" and I'd ask of what kind? How many tours in Iraq do you need to work off your debt? You shouldn't have to pay for college with your LIFE while we ask no sacrifice whatever from those better off. This boomer wonders why we only expect sacrifice from young people. I received financial aid when I was in college and I will gladly pay taxes today so that others have the opportunity I had. Isn't it about time we asked all the well-off alumni in my generation to give back?

Like so many ideologues, Bunning's distaste for "government handouts" seems pretty self-serving. Like most senators, Bunning appears to be a wealthier-than-average individual. Nine kids all through college, apparently with no loans or grants or scholarships. Great stuff. When Bunning stopped pitching in 1971, baseball salaries were not nearly as impressive as they are today. So how did he manage to afford so many tuition bills?

There's precious little information about Bunning's private sector career outside baseball on his Senate web bio, or anywhere else on the web. According to the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms 1998 gun rights "Defender of the Month" web page (clearly a sympathetic organization), "He was an investment banker and agent with McCloy-Watterston-Cowen from 1960 to 1985, and provided representation for professional athletes via the Jim Bunning Agency, Inc. from 1976 through 1988. That sounds like a good deal, being an investment banker and a professional baseball player at the same time. And a sports agent after that. Nice work if you can get it.

Convincing Bunning that a more widely educated citizenry is in the national interest, or his own self-interest, is probably not possible. I imagine some of his 35 grandchildren might need help paying for college. But Bunning lives on the lunatic fringe of conservatism.

You are too charitable to Senator Bunning. He was not out of sorts. This is how he is all the time. This is a man who said his Italian-American opponent in the 2004 senate race looked like Saddam Hussein, a man who claimed he had to debate that same opponent from RNC headquarters in DC because of a scheduling conflict. Later it was revealed that he used a teleprompter with answers to the debate questions, questions which he had received in advance as a condition for his participation. This is not a man who will respond to superior reasoning.

Elizabeth -

The social contract is simply broken and Senator Bunning ought to understand this. Since the 1970s, college tuition has far exceeded inflation. According to Wikipedia, "between 1982 and 2003 college tuition costs increased by 295%, outpacing health care (195%), housing (84%), and all items (83%)." Lower incomes cannot keep up with that.

But if college administrations know the government will allow its citizens to go into any amount of debt to attend through Service Pays, where's the market mechanism to keep prices in check?

Of course, your proposal is better than nothing. But repairing the social contract ought to mean making college something lower middle class families could earn and save for, not something they must go into greater and greater financial debt for.

Given the effect outsourcing has had on wages in the tech industry, globalization might be part of the solution in restraining domestic tuition costs. Nowadays, it seems lower income folks could go abroad and earn a marketable degree in an English-speaking insitutiion for about one-tenth the price of state education here. It sounds outrageous, I know, but it's probably already happening, such as with medical students in the Philippines and elsewhere.

The government could help spur this movement along by establishing some kind of accreditation process for colleges abroad. This wouldn't exclude Service Pays but it would give lower income students another choice: study abroad, for one-tenth the price, and your degree will be accepted anywhere in the U.S.

it's a handout since it's proping up one particular industry.

can you imagine what would happen if the government offered to put $100,000 into a retirement account if you didn't go to college?

that might get people to think about the value of going to college.

more specifically, we know that going to college means, statistically, that you'll make more but it's widely known that more than 50% of those who go to college never finish and many also get degrees, like my cousin's sociology degree, that employers don't value.

To boldly go...

Apologies for calling Professor Warren "Ms"; I never looked at the bio...

I was going to say many of these things myself.

The one thing I think the public sector can do is create a freely available online school like MIT's Open CourseWare (Their Website).

The "state of the art" in education hasn't advanced very far and we've spent tons on it, so why didn't that happen? Instead, the literacy rate in america is falling and our children are failing to stay economically competitive.

The main reason why I blog is because most of my teachers didn't have time to read what I wrote and engage in an iterative process that was dedicated to producing something of quality.

I do think it's time to stop "social promotion" and reensure that the high school diploma means something.

Until we get the "high school diploma" thing fixed, I don't think we should be trying to fix the "college problem." Garbage in means garbage out.

To boldly go...

Dr. Warren writes:

I think the senator and I were having an argument over the basic social contract. The senator seemed to be suggesting that the state has no role in developing opportunities for its citizens.

No doubt.  I think you were also having an implied argument over what it means to be middle class in the United States in the 21st Century.  More important than how he put his children through college is how his parents put him through. Maybe a baseball scholarship?  Maybe a NDEA loan?

His degree is in economics...I guess that's what helped him put this spin into his official biography:

Bunning was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, winning by a mere 6,766 votes. In 2004 he won by a margin almost 3 ½ times larger than his victory in 1998,

Hmmm... an incumbent Senator winning by c. 23,000 votes, with all the advantages of incumbency.  I'm impressed--not.

Mike

I agree, bluebell.  Interestingly, a lot of colleges and universities do too.  Numbers of them, including my own, require a service learning component if students are to graduate.  Some of these are more serious than others, but it wouldn't take a lot to extend Dr. Warren's idea and connect it to the idea of service learning.  I like the idea of encouraging people to start giving back at an early age. 

aMike

I can accept a belief that the liberal arts or service commitments may be irrelevant to some engineering students. What I consider, however, more and more relevant, and required at some schools, is cooperative work/study. That might turn a 4-year program into a 5-year, but real-world experience helps focus the later engineering studies, and sometimes also tells people that their intended specialization is not something they really want to do for a career.

Possible relationships between liberal arts and engineering are harder to establish. I definitely feel my dramatics courses helped enormously in presenting and teaching.

Happily, I was sufficiently well-read that even in high school, I placed out of English courses. Journalism, technically an extracurricular activity for me, but rigorous in a college with a nationally-rated journalism department, had far more value than English literature and composition -- but perhaps that is me, and it might or might not be as useful for other students.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

From the mind of a libertarian…

Thought experiment. Let us say that colleges currently charge tuition of $40,000 a year. Now at this point the government comes in and offers to pay up to $40,000 a year in tuition for any student. If I am a rational college dean, I will increase the cost of my tuition. If the market is supporting tuition of $40,000 a year in the absence of “government handouts” what is to keep a college from charging $80,000 a year if the government willing to subsidize education by $40,000?

I understand my thought experiment is an oversimplification; in the long run colleges will eventually expand enrollment rather then increase cost but that has not started to happen yet. Part of the reason that tuition is increasing so fast is because the government is subsidizing tuition growth.

If you must waste money I only ask you to do it efficiently. To lower the price of education you need to get away from the “increase the aggregate demand” mode of thinking and start thinking about how to increase supply. I think it would be better if the government stopped funding the tuition of college education altogether and instead invested that money in building new schools, or expanding the capacity of existing ones. As the supply of education services increases the price will fall.

Yes, we definitely disagree here. I believe that when students work, they should be paid primarily becase most students have loans. By asking them to "donate their time," they are essentially being taught "poor financial management" since the "opportunity cost" is tuition de facto, an unfunded mandate.

As you know, it's very easy to spend other people's time and money!

And, just because students say "the experience is valuable," doesn't mean that it is.

As I noted, my cousin enjoyed his experiences, and tried to impress people by exceding expectations, but-- after all that effort, he learned that the "real world" could care less.

More specifically, even though the "corporate world" uses "feel good images of philanthropy," to get your money, they hire employees based on skill and the bottom line.

To boldly go...

understand my thought experiment is an oversimplification

no it's not. what you're doing is predicting a bubble. one of the reasons why I blog so much about alternatives is because of the $25,000 in tuition bills i recieved.

they made me realize that i'd become bankrupt if i needed to depend on universities for lifelong learning.

as costs mount, more and more students will start looking at alternatives and mind share could shift to other methods.

in the long run colleges will eventually expand enrollment rather then increase cost but that has not started to happen yet...

why would they add capacity if their students already provide them with a comfortable life style? the average professor at a university makes $130,000 a year and, on top of that, they get pension payments for life.

I think it would be better if the government stopped funding the tuition of college education altogether and instead invested that money in building new schools, or expanding the capacity of existing ones.

Here in Minneapolis, they spent over $100 million (I heard) on a new library and then had no money left over to operate it.

And, when I was at the University of Arizona, "building utilization studies" determined that utilization was around 40% since most buildings were only used between the hours of 8AM to 5PM because of work hour preferences and security concerns.

That's why I think that a much better public investement would be building up online resources because they'd be accessible 24x7 without the need for security guards, janitors, heating/cooling, etc...

And, after reading the utilization studies, I stopped giving donations to univerties because they're unwilling or unable to be efficient.

To boldly go...

Do we, I wonder, have the meat of a whole new thread here, about effective teaching? No, I'm not restricting it to an academic sense. I'm including adult education and upward mobility, learning political action techniques, acquiring the background to manage one's own health, etc.

Let me mention some of the great teachers I have known, in formal and informal educational settings. You mention teaching assistants, and they certainly tend to be the less exciting instructors of lower-level courses. At American University, the late Leo Schubert was chemistry department chairman, which, of course, gave him first pick of the courses to teach. He created, and taught, an accelerated version of first-year chemistry, intended primarily for chemistry majors but available, on an individual approval basis, to other science majors and some very carefully selected people in other majors.

He put it that getting his department's majors off with a good start was the most important thing he could do as an educator. Further, he wanted students to succeed. In addition to the courses, he led a couple of weekly "study sessions", in which he would work through, with all the student participation possible, a number of test questions. He guaranteed that he would not ask a question that had not been covered in a session, but that he expected the answers to build on what he discussed. While I never personally experienced this, is this something like the tutor system at Oxford, Cambridge and the like?

While she was not one of my professors, but someone I occasionally had as a professional society lecturer or as a volunteer guest speaker at student computer science groups, Grace Hopper was one of the greatest people I've ever encountered, in encouraging people to use their minds, experiment, and learn. As well as her favorite nanoseconds**, one of the Amazing Grace artifacts treasured by her disciples was a clock that ran counterclockwise. It told perfectly good time, but she held that until you could accept and use its premise, you weren't ready to challenge conventional assumptions.

I was lucky enough to have a good sense of self-study from as early as I can remember, with people (some teachers, some not), that encouraged and sharpened the skill. For example, my high school junior English teacher, Florence Roy, took me under her wing and told me I was already a first-rate writer, with nothing to worry about in her grades. She challenged me to work with her and become a much, much better writer. Again, perhaps this is an American version of the tutor system. I'd write an article or story, and then she'd go through it with me -- far more constructively than professional editors of my books. She'd point at a sequence of paragraphs, agree they both said valid things, but they didn't flow as a whole. To this day, when I write and start rereading, I have a mental image of her face and voice saying "Howard, where are your explicit transitions?"

Turning back to your dislikes, I'm a little surprised, in an engineering context, to see adjunct faculty listed. For me, these were often the best teachers, as they worked full-time in the real world, and then often taught because they enjoyed passing on the knowledge. Quite frankly, if I ever get a doctorate, it will simply be as a union card to let me do such teaching.
--
Howard

**As computers became faster and faster, their operation times started being measured in nanoseconds rather than microseconds. One day, she turned to her staff and said "I don't think I get the essence of a nanosecond. Bring me some nanoseconds."

Her staff had no idea what she had in mind. Of course, Amazing Grace had a very specific idea, which has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists that needed to get ideas across. She directed her staff to measure how far something at the speed of light could travel in a nanosecond (about 11 inches), and then cut scrap telephone wire to that length. At all her presentations, she'd hand out nanoseconds. Usually, she'd conclude by having a strong junior officer on her staff, carrying a massive and heavy coil of wire, stand next to her.

"That, ladies and gentlemen, is a microsecond."

Everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps - right? Maybe these people should work harder, save more, plan better - and they too could have a different fate. There are the fortunate few who will never need any "government handouts." For those who are able to effortlessly glide along, the notion of what it's like to just make ends meet can be hard to imagine.

What Senator Bunning fails to realize is that the future and betterment of our society depends on the economic future of the middle class and increased education opportunities. If government funding options for college continue to be reduced, more and more sudents will continue to jeopardize their future financial security before many have begun the duration of their working lives - and this could have even greater widespread economic effects.

The model could be changed to help give folks college funding assistance where the government could match a certain dollar amount based on contributions or another type of program. It would require a redirection of funds from other governmental units. It's all about power, priorities and redirection.

Lets cut to the chase about this B.S. about "I" paid for my own college!

These numbers are from memory but are good enough to ask for you consideration of who paid the portion of college that allowed most to graduate today and in some part of the past.

Nationwide the average dropout rate is around 50% before height school graduation. We really do not know the true figure because of the inaccurate way things are counted.

Some places require a student to come in and sign a form that they are dropping out! Others do not count students who drop out over the summer and the exceptions go on.

Half of these 50% try college: 50% of that graduate.

Today the first 2 years are mass lecture halls and it is in this period that many drop out.

These dropouts are subsidizing those graduating because these mass lecture classes are the ones that are "profitable" to the college and pay for the loss the colleges experience is the smaller upper level classes.

No one pays all college expenses them self and as with the rest of things in our society the winners are subsidized by the economic bottom!

When you think of the few who stared out in education that do not even make it to high school, and the number who do not graduate from college, why are we not worrying about the majority?

So anyone who says I paid for collage by myself should be ashamed for not thinking of those who subsidized him or her!

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

"...It's all about power, priorities and redirection."

Agreed. I just wish someone would redirect Bunning to Kentucky with a one-way ticket.

Jim Bunning,

when the Democrats do it they're called "Government Handouts";

when the Republicans do it they're called "Incentives."

As a Democrat I believe Unemployment Compensation is an incentive to eat.

Brilliant, IMO. And that is truly all that needs to be understood. Too bad people like Bunning disregard this little truism.

**Single-issue voters get what they deserve. Unfortunately, the rest of us suffer along with them.