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Debating the future of higher education funding
By Annie Harrison on September 14, 2012 6:30 am / 21 comments
Editor’s note: This is the first story in a series about the future of higher education.
Faculty from departments across Central Michigan University agree that students are their main focus as higher education faces new challenges.
Orlando Perez, political science professor and department chairman, said increasing cost of higher education will have a negative impact on students from lower income families. He said the financial burden of college will reduce the number of students who can afford a higher education, and increase the amount of debt they will incur to achieve a degree.
Michigan has continuously decreased funding for higher education whenever there is a state budget problem, Perez said. Because higher education takes a big hit in terms of funding, universities have to raise tuition. However, he said some higher education costs are to be expected.
“Higher education is not cheap, and it shouldn’t be cheap,” Perez said. “We’re not Wal-Mart. We’re not trying to deliver a product.”
Rather, Perez said higher education should be cost-effective for students. He said the value of higher education is clear because college graduates earn more than those without degrees.
“The emphasis has to be on quality and the best product possible, and that’s going to cost money,” he said.
While money will certainly be a factor in the future of higher education, Perez said, CMU has made a concerted effort to maintain the quality of its programs.
“Cost will have an effect, but the key to maintaining quality is to think about interests of the students and to have quality faculty,” he said.
The world is changing, and higher education must also change to adapt to new information and technology, Perez said. He said CMU is always thinking about what is best for its students and how to improve the learning process.
“The students that are coming in today have different skills,” he said. “We need to harness that technology and be creative and innovative in the way we deliver our courses.”
Misty Bennett, assistant professor of management, said over time universities have had increased pressure because of less financial support from the state, and universities have had to cut costs and find creative solutions for economic concerns. She said both students and faculty have been affected by cost cutting, but the goal of higher education is still to work toward preparing students for careers.
As an assistant professor in the College of Business Administration, Bennett said she makes connections with area businesses to find out about the latest trends in the workplace. She said students must have up-to-date skills to be competitive in their careers, and it is important for higher education to revamp curriculums to reflect these changes.
“We’re trying to come up with ways to keep our curriculum current and keep our facilities current,” she said.
Bennett said one challenge that faculty face is keeping students involved and interested in the learning process. As higher education moves forward, she said she would like for the College of Business Administration to find more ways to stay high-tech and engaging.
“I think we’re concerned with preparing students for the job market,” she said.
Jason Sarkozi, Spanish fixed-term faculty, said he sees more hybrid and online classes in the future of higher education as students’ needs change. He said one disadvantage to online classes is that students lose a sense of community, but there are benefits for students who work or who cannot be on campus.
“You see more and more online universities popping up,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s for cost or for convenience.”
He said one thing that makes CMU stands out from other universities is the main focus is on the students.
“People really care about their students,” he said. “When we voice our concerns, we voice our concerns about our students.”
Perez said in a perfect world, he would like to see states investing in higher education instead of cutting funds. He said he does not have a clear answer to resolve the issue of debt, but students should not be saddled with thousands of dollars in debt for pursuing an education.
He would also like to see the work of faculty be valued more, by both administration and the public, he said. Many people don’t appreciate how hard-working faculty are, not just in the classroom, but also in class preparation, research and service to the university, he said.
“We don’t get into this business to make money,” Perez said. “We are highly trained professionals who do this for the love of profession, not to get rich.”
Sarkozi said the cost of higher education will affect enrollment, and ideally he would love to see a world where education is free. He said when he studied at a university in Spain, the cost of higher education was much cheaper than in the United States.
“In a more socialist world, education could be free or low cost,” he said.
Sarkozi said he understands that money has to go toward university employees and programs, but he said he doesn’t understand why it has to be so expensive for students, because other countries can make it work.
“Education is one of our basic human rights,” he said. “We have the right have an education just as we have a right to not go into debt once we get sick.”
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21 Comments
CMU and higher education has a spending problem, not a funding problem.
In the private sector, we fly coach. As CM LIFE disclosed last spring when they did the Kai Penn story, CMU flies first-class. Save $$$ and fly coach.
Annie, go back and ask Sarkozi how he can say that about Spain with a straight face when Spain is declaring bankrupcty. Unemployment is skyhigh. There are runs on the banks. THe people of Spain are hurting because they spent TOO MUCH MONEY ON SOCIALISM!!!!! Spain and Greece are bankrupt!!! That will happen in the USA in the next couple years if we don’t stop spending!!!
Annie, compare CMU 2012 with CMU of the 1970s and 1980s. Payroll has skyrocketed in the Athletic Dept., Political Correctness Dept (Multicultural/Diversity),
the President’s Office. We didn’t have all the staff people all throughout campus like we did 30-40 years ago when tuition was $12 an hour.
Annie, ask Perez and the faculty, why they are paying union dues and union campaign dues to Obama, Stabenow and the Democratic Party. If they didn’t force CMU students to pay higher tuition so they can have pay raises to raise $$$ for Obama and Stabenow, tuition could go down.
I could go on and on about spending. You could cut spending in half, cut tuition in half and have better quality of education because you could keep and reward the good professors and get rid of the bad ones who are protected by the unions.
Also, Annie, how much are the students and the Michigan taxpayers paying for the Athletic Dept. and that great winning football team of ours. At U-M and Michigan State, the Athletic Departments are self-funded. Taxpayers and students pay zero unless they want to buy tickets to go to the games. Don’t want to go, then you pay zero. I’m guessing students and taxpayers are subsidizing what 15 million dollars maybe? Likewise, down at WMU and EMU. Same situation. Annie, how much are you students kicking into the Athletic Dept? Take whatever that amount is and divide the number by the number of students. I’d be willing to bet that it costs the CMU student more money to go to an athletic event here than MSU or UM students pay to go to their games.
How much are the CMU faculty and administrators paying this fall to bring Democrats in here to brainwash the students to vote Democrat? I see there is one coming in late October, a former Clinton adviser and big-time left-winger from CNN.
Until the taxpayers and students want to get tough on these spendaholic college administrators and professors, nothing will happen.
I can’t tell if your response is based on you feeling
marginalized on the socialist, liberal campus environment or you actually care
about the rising costs of higher education.
You bring up a few points I thought I would address…
Your opinion is we need to cut student services. My opinion is we need to keep student
services. You want to know why? Because students want them (which leads to
increased enrollment) and the law is getting close to telling us we need to
have them (unfunded mandates). Spend
some time reading about legal issues in higher education and you’ll quickly
realize the need for Counseling Centers, Disability Student Services Office,
etc. Students want help getting jobs
before graduation; congratulations, you just hired a Career Services
staff! I’ve worked on college campuses
for over 10 years and I can provide both a legal and ethical rational for all
of these student services… The law says
we should have them. Students and
parents want them. Enrollment goes
up.
Your opinion is faculty salary is too high. My opinion is that salaries are just about
right. Salaries are the largest item in
any University budget (do your own research; all Michigan public colleges are
required to make their budgets available), but salary increases have not kept
pace with inflation on most campuses.
Add the rising costs of benefits and salaries are not “out of control”
as many claim. I would also argue that
faculty salaries are about ½ of what talented professionals could make in their
field (i.e. business) if they left academia.
You want good teachers? You have
to pay for them to walk away from good careers.
You want experienced teachers?
That costs you…
I’ll give you the point that staff should fly coach. But have you considered perhaps the staff
negotiated not only THAT they travel, but HOW they travel? Surely someone with
experience in the private sector such as you realize that isn’t an uncommon
practice. (much like negotiating the level of hotel you can stay at…)
As far as athletic ticket prices, I couldn’t find out the
actual prices of football tickets. You
need a student ID number to look at both MSU and U of M tickets. I doubt you looked, either.
1. Tell me what law says we need a Multicultural and Political Correctness Dept.
2. CMU professors could double their pay by leaving and going to work for Dow, Ford, GM, Whirlpool, Apple? Are you kidding? That’s a laugh. Exactly, what jobs would the $100,000 sociology or journalism professors do at those places that they would start at $200,000 a year?
Their pay should keep up with inflation? The private sector which keeps CMU professors, administrators and staff from being unemployed are seeing their salaries plummeting thanks to your socialist president, Barack Hussein Obama. In fact, the stats came out this week—Median income is at the lowest since 1995. So, let’s roll the salaries of everyone at CMU back to 1995 levels. George Ross would take a huge paycut.
3. Negotiate travel? If I worked for Ford, Dow, any big company and sent an email to the CEO that I want to negotiate to fly first-class, I’d be fired! They will tell you how you will fly, how much you can spend for a hotel, meals and incidental expenses. Many times, companies will make you fly out on Saturday for the Monday morning meeting because airfare is cheaper. Obviously, you’ve never worked in the private sector.
4. Athletic ticket prices at UM and MSU. I called and got the student ticket info at both places, Einstein. If you have a phone, call their box office. Don’t take pot shots at me!
1) Proposal 2 sure helps… As well as Title IX. I can continue if you want… The ADA basically requires a disability student services office. Recent cases at MIT, Virginia Tech and NIU have required overhauls of counseling service and residence life protocols. Or are you just concerned with “socialist” campus programs that don’t have a direct benefit to white males?
2) Oh boy, are you off base. Starting faculty salaries are lower than your stated figures, and only considering tenured faculty will skew your averages… What about the post-doc making $45k/year? I know they don’t fit in your argument but look it up, i told you where to look… And you’re constantly calling something (or someone) a socialist? I’m just gonna guess you’re Republican?
3) You must not be in the management level. I mean no disrespect in that statement, it’s just an observation. It’s quite common in both the auto industry and client services/logistics industry to negotiate the level of travel. I’ve done it and so have my peers. You should try it… Now I’ll give you the “stay over a Saturday” point… It’s sometimes cheaper to pay for the extra night at the hotel!
4) What are the prices??? I’m curious???
Egotistical unions are another problem. We see it here in Michigan in K-12 and on college campuses. Look at what’s happening right now in Chicago. Average household income in Chicago is $40,000. Yet, teachers who make an average of $79,000 and work only 9 months and have vacations throughout the year and Illinois has one of the most pristine educational pension programs, want a 4 percent annual raise and have little or no reviews on their work. This is another problem of K-12 and higher education funding—-rogue unions. It’s sad what’s happening over in Chicago. Poor people who are barely getting by with their minimum wage jobs thanks to the Obama economy and a Democrat Party rule in Chicago, are having to stay home with their kids. Thus, they may not have money this money to pay their rent, utility bills, etc. We’ve got to get rid of unions in education. It will enhance teaching and learning since good teachers can make more money…and the lousy teachers, professors, instructors will make less money or be thrown out on the street.
Education in Michigan and nationwide will get much better.
What they should do in Chicago is do what Ronald Reagan did when the air traffic controllers went on strike in the early 80′s—fire them and get replacements.
So the idea is that the problems in education can be solved by cutting teacher pay and making their working conditions worse. I don’t really see how that’s the solution. Is that supposed to attract better quality teachers?
Guest, you’ve been brainwashed by the unions and Liberals.
Let me explain.
It’s two-fold.
Get CMU out of the research business.
You can cut 60 percent of the faculty. You keep the best faculty.
Here’s the 2-fold to make CMU the most popular undergraduate school in the state:
You cut 60 percent of the budget for paying professors and their benefits. The savings would be passed on to:
1. Students. We’d have the lowest tuition in Michigan which means we would attract the best and the brightest from all Michigan universities.
Students would learn only from the very best faculty because we would have gotten rid of the dead weight.
2. Instead of giving all the money savings back to the students, we could pay the remaining 40 percent of the faculty. It’s possible CMU profs teaching undergrads could make more money than MSU and Michigan!!!!
Also, because we’d have an outstanding faculty, we could lower out-of-state tuition and attract top-flight out-of-state students.
Guest, we’d have the best undergraduate school—costs and faculty—and we’d have no problem attracting the “Best and the Brightest.”
I’m not status quo!
I’d accuse you of being brainwashed by that junkie, drug smuggling, adulterous, misogynist, gas bag known as Rush Limbaugh, but that’d imply that you had a brain.
Your ignorance of basic economics, as well as what what attracts the “Best and the Brightest” students and faculty, is audacious in its arrogance. Clearly, you imagine yourself to be among the “Best and the Brightest”, which is a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect: you’re so dumb, you can’t tell how dumb you are.
The “Best and the Brightest” faculty want to do research; failure to do research is career suicide.
The “Best and the Brightest” students care about research, also. What they don’t care about is the price of schooling, as they can get a full-ride scholarship to a top research university.
“I’m not status quo!”
You’re a loud-mouthed, know-nothing moron; that’s the status quo for you, and you maintain it ever so well.
Without research, there is no discovery. College is NOT the time to learn rote education. College is where one takes what one has learned during the past 12 years and expand one’s knowledge base from those facts; to test theories and hypotheses; to see what works and what doesn’t work. This can be completed in a biology lab, a psychology testing room, field of play, or even at a news outlet as an intern. So much of what we know today is the direct result of research conducted at our Universities by students – not necessarily faculty alone! Furthermore, some faculty enjoy conducting research; why take that away from them?
Get rid of that one-sided image you have of researchers. They are not all lab nerds in white coats running expensive drug experiments on rats. Our college youth are doing incredible things – they come up with the most innovative ideas to test. You are selling college students’ educational experiences short when you eliminate research.
CPS teachers do NOT make an average of $79,000 per year; it’s far less. You’re (willfully) misinformed, yet again. Never let facts get in the way of your narrative (just like the Romney campaign.)
Ugh oh… You got it wrong, again. According to
the latest census data, the median household income in the city of Chicago was
$46,800. Give the hard workin’ people of Chicago their due!
Something else to consider: Chicago’s cost of living ranks
in the top 10 in the US, and CPS teachers are required to live within the city
limits. Hmmmm… You think those two things go together? And before you get all, “that’s their choice,
etc”, remember most municipalities stipulate a similar some housing requirement for
their teachers, police and firefighters.
Hey Matt….I gotcha. Cost of Living?
So, that means since the cost of living is less in Mt. Pleasant than Kalamazoo, Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor, we can pay CMU employees less money!!!!!! Why doesn’t the egotistical CMU employees admit to this?
You did! Why can’t the CMU unions take a paycut now?
Since you seem to pick and choose what points you’ll address
(which is what you do when you’re falling behind in a discussion), I’ll take a
stab at your latest objection.
Guess what? You got a
little closer this time. Unfortunately
you’re missing a significant difference: Cost of living COULD factor into pay
if CMU faculty were required to live in Mount Pleasant. That is not the case. Faculty (chose to) live in larger cities such
as East Lansing and Grand Rapids, while some live in Alma, Shepherd, etc.
Have you looked where CMU salaries rank in-state? Probably not, so I’ll tell you where to
look. Go to the Chronicle of Higher Education
and you’ll see we rank 8th to
10th in most categories. I’ll
also bet you can guess schools ranking higher and those ranking lower. Furthermore, our tuition costs are 9th
highest in the state…
I’m not saying you’re wrong in questioning the costs of
higher education, but you’re choosing the wrong battles to fight…
Try living in Chicago – Cook County for that matter. Sell your michigan mansion and buy a home in Chicago with the same square footage, and with the same purchase price as your selling price…oh, wait…YOU CAN’T DO THAT
You got that right, matt!! Several more errors from michmedia’s (is anyone shocked by that?) post: 1) teachers don’t make that much average pay – and certainly not the new hires. But I defy michmedia to spend even one day in a classroom in Englewood or Lawndale and see whether the salary range in the $70,000’s is worthwhile; 2) the Chicago teachers want the pay raise BECAUSE CPS has added more school days plus extended the length of the school day. If your job goes from 7 hours a day to 9 hours a day, wouldn’t YOU expect that your salary would go up to account for that increase in hours??? Why not the same for teachers – who, by the way, put in more hours that they are NOT paid for at home. But this is not the crux of their strike – to say salary is the reason for the strike is because *someone* is listening to the media and not the teachers (and no, I don’t mean just Karen Lewis!); 3) they don’t have vacations during school year, but they DO want to go year-round. They get days off for stupid stuff (Pulaski Day??) but no, there’s no “vacations”; 4) people are not “staying home with their kids”. Several churches and community organizations have supplied daytime programs for the kids – it’s not school, but they have a place to go and parents have continued to work their jobs.
Where s/he & I agree (UGH! Whaaa..??) is that Illinois school children have too many days off during the school year. Ironically, those are legislatively mandated days off. Yeah, the kids HAVE to have the day off to celebrate Casimir Pulaski.
Here’s an unknown: there is no recess in any CPS elementary school. This means the teachers have NO BREAK! The entire school day, the children are in the classroom. OK, lunch and maybe running around a gym (if the school even HAS one) for an hour or so, but no recess.
But where the uneducated – those who have only listened to one side of this – have been duped by Rahm-bo and his enamored media is that the teachers WANTED the longer school day. How shocking that they expect to be paid for the extra school day hours!!
As to the remark about CTU’s pensions – the teachers’ pensions are not the problem pensions in Illinois…not even remotely. I am personally incredibly grateful for teacher pensions, and admittedly reaping the benefits from my father’s pension now (life-long teacher, grad of CMU ’33). They work much longer hours than any non-teacher truly realizes, and they put up with a lot of crap from ignorant parents who think their kid is God’s gift to angels. It’s not unusual for teachers to be up until 10 or 11 pm reading and/or grading papers, planning, scouring the internet for deals on buying school equipment (like pencils, paper, and other school-work equipment) & textbooks that kids can’t afford to buy for themselves, and the schools have no budget for those items.
Again, lack of research in getting the FACTS about what teachers actually DO for their kids – on their own time and from their own pocketbooks. There is no “wrong” with the CTU strike – what is wrong is erroneous information about the actual rationales for the strike.
Here’s some real information about the parents’ stance in all of this:
Chicago Public Schools Parents march in support of striking teachers | Video | abc7chicago.com http://ow.ly/dO2Pd
If you read Mary Mitchell’s column in the Sun-Times today, it sounds like I wrote it. Mary is a left-wing, Obama liberal but she has turned against her beloved union. The unions are taking so much heat that it looks like the teachers are feeling the heat and are going to vote to go back to work….and go around the unions.
This proves michmediaperson is correct. As the liberal media is now writing, it’s the union officials that’s the problem. Same thing here in Michigan and nationwide, the teachers are good but it’s their unions that are bad.
Your note on Pulaski. Having relatives in the north suburbs of Chicago, every ethnic group gets their days off. The Polish people get Pulaski. The Italians get Columbus. Blacks get MLK. the Jewish people get their holidays and everyone got Lincoln’s Day off. Personally, it should be Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Memorial Day only! I’ll say this much about the Chicago and suburban schools, at least all the days off are fare. Every hyphenated-American groups get their day off unlike CMU that celebrates months of only a few, select Hyphenated-American months off.
Read all the columnists over in Chicago. They’re talking like michmediaperson.
We’ve got to end public employee unions!
“If you read Mary Mitchell’s column in the Sun-Times today, it sounds like I wrote it.”
To the extent that it’s one-sided and ignorant of reality, sure, it sounds like you. On the other hand, it’s nowhere near so full of obvious bullshit, terrible grammar and WASP-ish bigotry.
Corporate media is not “liberal media”. Nor does one (or more) person’s lazy opinion piece define reality.
“In the private sector, we fly coach.”
Really? Then explain the existence of “business class.”
“Also, Annie, how much are the students and the Michigan taxpayers paying
for the Athletic Dept. and that great winning football team of ours.”
That’s rich. You’ve defended the existence/subsidy of the football program as worthwhile in the past. Given up being a fan, have you?
What you’d have is a community college. Those already exist.