In the previous post , I explained why I don’t believe that America has many “great” universities. I made another comment on the same article, trying to point out why “just money” is not even close to the answer. Here is the comment.
“We can’t just “..pump more public money back into higher education to keep tuition down and college affordable…”.
First, pump it where? Princeton? Duke? Harvard? Duke’s investments grew from $3.7 Billion in 2002 to $9.1 Billion in 2011. Princeton’s annual return in the same period averaged 9.8% . Their investment earnings in 2011 were $3 Billion. Their operating expenses were $1.3 Billion. They did use $700 million of the investment earnings to cover some of those expenses, and they gave a lot of financial aid. I could list many more schools like this.
Pump it for what? Elite universities receive “national need” grants and sometimes use them to produce PhD’s who should not even have a masters degree. ”
I hope no one thinks that these PhD’s become part of an elite university’s professorial “class”. Many do become unqualified professors at schools that teach people who need a chance at social mobility. But it doesn’t end there. Many students that are taught by these faux-PhD’s (And they are faux, believe me. I was there.) become unqualified high school teachers – no fault of their own.
We have got [have got?:) sorry] to learn to dig into what happens in unversities before we have any chance of fixing this system which is really not broken at all – that is, if you are an administrator, or an uninterested professor. But for the rest of the country, even many of the well off, it is more than broken. It breaks almost all of education.”
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