Cost of College

[Shawn Juris]

Whether the discussion is why we're outsourcing and offshoring or why residents would leave Ohio for places like NC, AZ or GA, the rising cost of higher education appears to be a factor.
Two questions to start with; how are state Universities funded and what expenses do they have to justify the increase? I've found that we in Ohio are charging twice the in state tuition of these states that we complain about for "stealing" our businesses away. Why do they need to charge more than other states? Are our professors paid more? Shouldn't the cost of building and maintenence be lower? Places like BG or Kent have a lower cost of living than metro areas so shouldn't their tuitions reflect that?
When you consider that one child in college will cost $20,000 more today in Ohio than in many other states, it has me wondering if this is the right state to raise a family in.

[ryan costa]

the creeping inefficiencies of professional prestige mean everyone needs more certifications, and those certifications all cost more. Once you complete them you will believe you deserve your job more. College professors usually only teach a few courses a semester. About half of undergraduate level courses are probably less arduous than my average high school course. The same goes for the Masters Level courses I took.

Professor Rakowsky mentioned something about keeping Professors on many committees. He compared this to the French Emperor keeping many nobles at Versailles so they would be too busy to do anything useful.

If you intend for your kids to go to a nationally exceptional university, the odds are it may be out of whatever state you live in. In this case it would make more sense for them to move to the state on their own, live for a year, then qualify for much greater Financial Aid because they are independant and have very low earnings.

Beyond that, Community Colleges tend to cost much less and have similar or greater course value than the average four year school. Especially in programs which aren't going to lead to a Ph.D in mechanical engineering or a real physical science.

[Ivor Karabatkovic]

ohhh the cost of college. it seems like I can't escape the dreadful thought of what's ahead of me in 8 months..

community colleges are a great way to get core classes out of the way. everything ends up transfering to a main college, and you don't have to take the ACT, SAT, or any other tests.

talk about a steal!

[Lynn Farris]

Many people don't apply to small private colleges because they don't think that they can afford them. However these schools often offer more financial aid and scholarships than state schools do. Many private schools meet need and state schools in Ohio don't.

I was in financial aid at CWRU for many years. CWRU does a good job of meeting financial need. When I went to college CWRU cost significantly less than Ohio State did - when you factored in the financial aid that CWRU offered.

So while I agree that Tri-C offers a great deal. I also think that many people should be considering private colleges when making applications because they would be surpirsed at how cost effective they really can be.

[dl meckes]

If anybody can post resources regarding where students and parents may search for financial aid and scholarships, I'm sure it would be appreciated!

[Lynn Farris]

The Cleveland Scholarship Service is a great resource. It comes to LHS and is open downtown on Saturdays. My daughter went down there and applied for several scholarships and won one of them.

I would recommend not wasting a lot of time applying for the national scholarships - unless you are uniquely qualified. Students have much better chances at local scholarships or again ones for children of.... categories.

Lakewood has lots of scholarships: Arts, PTA, Alumni, Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce etc. Unfortunately these often go to the same students.

Remember that if your school has met need, any scholarship you recieve will be deducted from your aid package by law.

The very best place to look for scholarships is at the college you are considering - The admissions and financial aid office.

They have arts, music, leadership, history, science, writing, academic scholarships. They entice the students they want to come to their school.

The other question you should ask is Does the school meet financial need? If the school says yes, that is one that you should consider strongly. And most people today who attend private schools do qualify for aid in schools that meet need. Look at the percentage of aid in the schools to which you apply. And the average amount of aid.

While I'm not advertising for them, one school that offered both my children great scholarships/aid was Lake Forest College in Lake Forest Il. It is a beautiful campus north of Chicago on the train line. We loved the school and so did my kids, unfortunately for various reasons, both decided to go elsewhere. Best of all if you apply early and online the application fee is waived.
http://www.lakeforest.edu/admissions/finaid.asp Gives you an idea of the variety and number of scholarships they offer. They also meet need. I know they are expensive on the face, but they do meet need.

This is just one example of a school that does well there are many more out there.

[David Lay]

My fiancee goes to Med School in Des Moines, and while it is very expensive, it is also the top school in the nation for Podiatry.

[Shawn Juris]

The issue that I concerned with as I look into this topic further, is how the state of Ohio has managed to create a $3,000/year instate tuition increase for those looking to attend one of our state colleges. This is the increase in the past 3 years from approx $5K to $8K. Ten years ago when I was graduating it was approx $3/year. This does not consider room and board.
Originally, I started thinking about this topic as you consider that the US is continuing to lose ground to India and China because they recognize the importance of investing in education a make it a priority. Then there's the question of why even within the US, Ohio is losing businesses and residents to other states. It wasn't intended as a political issue but from everything that I hear, in Ohio it's clear as day. The decision to lower funding for higher education with the incentive of a tax break is insane. The tuition increasing are outpacing the tax cuts.

http://www.policymattersohio.org/media/ ... 5_0803.htm

In addition, I question our state universities ability to manage their money. Many are operating with hundreds of millions of dollars. For a small example picture 19 students in a classroom for a 3 credit hour course. Credits break down to $266/hour ($8,000/30 hours per year for full time). That's income generated of $798 times 19 students which equals $15,162. Now this income doesn't include grant money for research or whatever federal funding is left. A professor making $80,000/year would break down to an hourly rate of $40/hour. Throw in an asst making $22.50/hr. After these two paid positions you have $14874.50 from this one class to pay for building maintenance (they normally own the buildings so there is no lease), support staff (for one class how much can it really cost to register 19 students), advertising (well if you charge twice as much as other states you better spend alot on this), insurance, taxes (?), board members, and most importantly landscaping.

For the amount of money that seems to be flowing into our state schools, I agree now more than ever that Lakewood should establish an accredited university/college. I'm all for changing the curriculum and recognizing that not everyone needs to be an attorney or an MBA. There seems to be an awful lot of money that is being spent on this industry and as long as the market will bear the cost, there doesn't seem to be any interest in controlling the price. And we thought that the gas companies were gauging us at $3/gallon.

[Bill Call]

In addition, I question our state universities ability to manage their money. Many are operating with hundreds of millions of dollars. For a small example picture 19 students in a classroom for a 3 credit hour course. Credits break down to $266/hour ($8,000/30 hours per year for full time).

Shawn:

You have commited a dangerous and unpardonable sin. You have thought about how much money is being spent and how it is being spent. DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN??

In real terms, allowing for inflation we are spending many times more than we did 20 years ago and many times more than any other country in the world.

The only answer you will get from the education bureaucrats is: WE NEED MORE!

If issue 3 passes look for the universities to increase tuition at an even faster rate.

[Stan Austin]

Shawn--- I think you have hit the nail on the head---College tuition at state colleges and universities is totally a political issue. And, I would expand the issue to include primary and secondary public education and our public libraries.

There is a direct correlation between Republican control of state government and reduced rates of funding for public education. Throw in a dollop of creationism and you have a clear cut agenda that is anti education, and intentionally regressive.

They claim that by cutting taxes they are being business friendly. But any business owner who is here or thinking of moving to Ohio will tell you that a trained and HIGHLY educated workforce is the prime asset that they consider.

As an example at the other end of the spectrum, Ireland has ranked near the top of the thriving economies of the world in the last several years. Many economists will tell you that that is a payoff or realization of a decision made over a decade ago to make college free to anyone who qualified. So, along with the best poets, actors, and spinners of blarney that country boasts a group of young people who are ready for 21st century industries.

It used to be that the American dream which has been so avidly pursued in Lakewood was to have the next generation do better than their elders. The current policy has to be the first time where we are emulating primitive societies such as the Taliban in a conscious effort to go backwards.

Stan Austin

[ryan costa]

Ireland's a little different than the U.S.

In the U.S. the high growth areas are whereever a few large corporations team up with municipal and state governments for tax abatements and big spending on highways and roads going to a fresh new patch of McMansions and Big Apartment Complexes and Office Parks. The Banks pay the Developers, who make it out no matter how many buyers end up with foreclosed mortgages, who then build the sports arenas and new University Buildings.

North East Ohio's Ireland was Westlake 20 to 10 years ago. Now it is Stow/Hudson. The businesses then recruit employees with whatever credentials they are looking for from all over the country and world.

Columbus is a wider example of the same. While I lived there the people who lived their longer than me joked about each massive set of shopping centers, apartments, and houses built in about a year. Within 2 or 3 years the area is sufficiently inundated with boneheads and miscreants to encourage more prosperous residents to flock to the newest development half a mile away. Everything is Faster! A large newer Microsoft Building was near my apartment in Polaris: Now it is empty!

We have enough college graduates: We are a net exporter of college graduates. The only shortcoming Ohio faces are the quality of some of its public school districts. I.E., an abundance of students who dissuade people from wanting to live in the same area.

I have faith that most people are shortsighted enough to continue the kind of sprawl growth of Columbus and the Sunbelt. The Growth of Cleveland will have to mimic the attraction of places like San Francisco, Windsor, or Toronto: Pretty old Buildings, irreplaceable architecture. Brain Gain means attracting people with Brains. As a nod to Ireland, we have plenty of bars and aspiring poets.

But Cleveland is a bad Brand. People associate it with Urban Crime and Decay. Regionalism won't work in Cleveland, because the Cleveland touch drags the rest of the region down. A modified version of Regionalism is necessary: Reversing the annexation of many neighborhoods, then reincorporating them into municipalities or parts of outlying cities. However, rather than completely segmenting the school districts, police forces, and city services, it would do to divide them by perforated lines. These new partitions can then have what autonomy or level of cooperation is effective. The big troublemakers and nogoodniks can eventually be pushed towards the East Side or into the agricultural jobs in the Sunbelt(or they can magically become better people because the economy is "growing").

Ireland is a little the same like the U.S. The Per Capita GDP of both is about 42,000 dollars.

Which is a nicer place to live? How do we become more like Ireland or Ireland become more like us? It is nice of them to provide free college education, but how much per student is spent at each level compared to us, and what activities does each level of education encompass?

Here is more interesting news on Ireland, from the CIA World Fact Book: They use 2/3rds the oil per person we do. We consume 2.13 times the electricity per capita they do. Their imports from third world countries, China, and Japan are an insignificant portion of their imports. The same goes for their exports.

I do not know how many TVs or Toilets per household they have, but most of them live until their late 70s. I do not know what portion of the population is on prescription medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, violence, or extra sex.

So....where's the growth at?

[Shawn Juris]

There's the mention of Ireland again. As I mentioned, I'm reading the World is Flat. While there's an awful lot of points to consider, when I saw Ireland listed as one of the developing countries along with India and China, I had to scratch my head. Their approach to education could be the thing to put them on the map. As for all the other factors, at least for the purpose of this discussion, I'm merely interested in how we are approaching the issue of state funded higher education.

Here's to some real work getting done beyond just sitting Strickland in the Governor's chair. Providing state funding to develop a educated workforce is only going to get us half way there. The point that seems to be more important from the example of Ireland is that education is awarded on a merit system not to those that "need" it.

[ryan costa]

After reading The World is Flat, I consider it somewhat of a Con job.

A large reason college is so expensive is that a large portion of it is dedicated to teaching, or re-teaching, students things they should have learned by the end of high school. Then there is Professional Protectionism: upping the pre-requisites required for a job, when a small fraction of the knowledge base of those pre-requisites is required to do that job. This is less common in the Deep and Mid-south, and part of the reason their economies are presently "growing" faster.

Here is a segment of Thomas Rehermann's review of the book "Home from Nowhere" on Amazon.com. It goes a long way to describing the origins of our nations assorted education problems.

In Germany, I was raised in a single-family house with a fine lawn and access to a public bus (10min to downtwon) in a 250,000 city (Moenchengladbach, west of Cologne, 15 miles from the Dutch border). As a child, I effortlessly visited my friends, the school, the church, the theater, the cinema, etc. by bike or by bus.

Retail and affordable housing was mixed, residential villa areas (such as the one of my parents were interspersed with rent complexes) etc. Buses were used by teachers, academics, students, workers - and still are. Not just by the "help" (latina nannies and cleaners as in the US)

To understand better, why a focus on urban life is so important and why suburbia - home to half of Americans - is such a wasteful life(socially, resources-related, etc.) it is important to understand why so many Americans have chosen to life in barren, cloned, residential confinements: the unwillingness of US Public High Schools to differentiate by academic merit and merit alone.

This is, however, in my view the one crucial difference to the US which might explain why the mixing is still there in Germany and why suburbia is so pervasive in the US: It is possibly for the very same reason why American cities were mixed until 1954.

In Germany, schools are segmented by merit. After mandatory elementary school (Grade 1-4), each child in Germany is assessed on its academic potential at age 9 and then send to either "Main School" (to become a craftsman), "Real School" (to become most likely a very skilled worker) or to "Gymnasium" which is in essence a public (!) prep school with grade 5-13 whose graduates at age 19 then go to University.

In conservative states (Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg), 40-50% go to Main School, 20-25% to Real School and 20-30% to Gymnasium (before 1963 it was 5%).

In left-wing states (notoriously Bremen and Berlin), 60% go to Gymnasium which has, of course, caused a collapse in quality. (German parents take great care to live outside the city-state of Bremen to take residence in either near-by Lower Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein - a rare example of suburbia behavior similar to the US).

If you mix people in habitats, you need to separate students in schools based on their potential. Without that willingness, any attempt to resurrect urban life in the US will not take-off as an option endorsed wholeheartedly by Americans. German "Gymnasiums" are in essence "Advanced Placement Schools" where every subject is taught for every student for nine years on AP level. The beer kegging red-neck segment is relegated to the "Main School" (I know that in the US many children with affluent parents are beer-kegging as well - just another sign of the social deterioration so prevalent in suburbia). As a matter of fact, merit segmentation often reflects social segmentation and much has been written in Germany to rectify this.

As the history of America shows: If you mix public schools - after 1954 - adults refuse to mix any longer and settle in homogeneous habitats.

It is this move to homogeneousness that gives Suburbia its fake ace: it is so easy to erect all those segregated zoning cages - the rich - the affluent - the true middle class - the delusional middle class - the upper trailer trash (who also are made believe they are middle class) - the zoning area you never entered. Teachers do not segment by academic potential: not a problem - then the parents do their job (but parents usually fail miserably at mixing their children socially - but again, this is what cities and towns are for).

Cities and towns, in turn, are very bad at segregating people (and after all: why should they do it ?) Yes, there are neighborhoods that tilt one way or the other, but usually they are too small to support a whole school: Therefore, students from different social backgrounds mix and therefore, teachers must do the separating by assessment based on merit.

If you allow strictly segmented public schools, adults are ready to stay and accept and invite different people around them. Parents must be reassured that social mixing - in cities - does not lead to indiscriminate student mixing of bright and dumb students in the same public buildings. In Germany that means not mixing white dumb students with bright students with Turkish parents.

As the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Differentiation means progress".

US public high schools do not differentiate by merit (enough). As a result, parents differentiate by income. Welcome to suburbia. (Yes, I am aware that in Germany the terms "selection" or segmentation are contaminated for a very valid reason. In your country, the term "segregation" is. Still, I offer this line of thought to you here, since I think it really matters and it helps both bright and not so bright students better to reach their potential when taught separately)

I remember how stunned I was during the first two years here (1998-2000). I could not believe the miles and miles of singe-family houses with no boardwalks, no retail, no restaurant, no cinema, no opera, no theater, no concert hall, no auditorium. Quiet confinements with adults sitting in front of flackering tv screens (with or without children).

It can be done better - in Germany, but also in this country which has a very rich tradition of mid-size and small-size towns that have resolved the task of building a humanly scaled habitat very well.

Back to the author of the book to review: James Kunstler offers his ideas and ideas from active architects of how compelling new ideas - and resurrecting old ones - can be implemented in a very detailed way. Make zoning your ally. Read: "Geography of Nowhere" as well. - The INS should give this book as a free hand-out to any immigrant arriving in the US and considering moving to Suburbia.

I have also read "The Long Emergency" in which Kunstler spells out the predicted events when cheap oil will cease to exist. The first casualty will be US Suburbia - and rightfully so in his view. "The Long Emergency" is laudable for its uncompromising bluntness (see such subtitles as "sunset for the sunbelt". "Home from Nowhere" is valuable for its constructive advise how humans in the US can live instead.
There is a Society beyond the mere Ownership Society. We all can do better.