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Rick Perry Thinks Forward On Affordable Education. Barack Obama Poses For A Photo-Op.

Perry Attacks The Problem. Obama Basks In The Optics.

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  October 31st, 2011 at 02:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

A fully accredited college education for the price of a Honda Civic.
College? Don’t pay $50,000 for three years, and then your kid drops out.
College? Pay for your child’s education, not four years of party time.
Wal-Mart University: Save Money. Learn Better.

– Gary North.

America has an increasingly bad problem with its University system. It costs too much to attend, and the graduates leave with ridiculous piles of debt. Both President Obama and Texas Governor, Rick Perry have outlined proposals to fix the problem. President Obama has proposed a meaningless waste of money to look good in front of the cameras. Rick Perry has proposed something crazier than an outhouse rat. He has requested that the Texas Board of Regents study Western Governors University and offer an analogous four year degree than costs $10,000 or less.

The President has proposed renegotiating the maximum required for student loans and to make them forgiveable after 20 years rather than 25. This is roughly equivalent to handing someone in Hell a glass of lemonade. It looks nice, but does nothing to fix the true dilemna. Details follow below.

Obama will accelerate a law passed by Congress last year that lowers the maximum required payment on student loans from 15 percent of discretionary income annually to 10 percent for eligible borrowers. It goes into effect next year, instead of 2014. Also, the remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years, instead of 25. The White House said about 1.6 million borrowers could be affected.

(Ht: HeraldNet.com)

Rick Perry, on the other hand, offers a totally different approach to the problem. He has joined Texas to the consortium that supports the Western Governor’s University. This is an online, self-paced university that models its degree programs to match industry certification requirements. WGU charges approximately $3,000 for its students to participate during a six month period. This amounts to a total of $20,000 to $25,000 to complete a B.A. Degree.

The Governor now wants the Texas Board of Regents to develop a program analogous to WGU that would only cost $10,000 for a Bachelor’s Degree. He will probably fail in achieving that goal. MSMNBCBSNN will pounce. They’ll say he’s crazy and should listen to the experts. He should fail in a manner more conducive to feeding the cartel.

To his persistant nay-sayers, he’ll look poorly-informed. The way Thomas Edison did when he spent over a year messing around with moving electricity through platinum wires. It’s very unlikely that Governor Perry will enjoy a moment similar to the one Edison did when he switched his material to copper wiring. But, I, for one, commend Governor Perry’s willingness to risk an actual failure. He’s failing forward, like a running back that falls for an additional two yards after a tackle. He’s moving American education in the right direction.

Critics make intelligent and accurate points about online education. There is a lack of interaction. There isn’t the same community of scholars. You don’t get Notre Dame Saturday, and you’ll never be able to build collaboration between Phoenix U and WGU that rivals the JPL Empire that Cal Tech and UCLA have founded. And furthermore, the Texas Regents won’t get to $10K for several reasons.

Onlinecollege.org points out several possible roadblocks to Governor Perry’s ambitions. He’s asking for another institution that would operate on a smaller economic scale than WGU; but still cut the per-degree costs in half. Skeptics doubt academic professionals would willingly work at “Cheap Tuition State.” The degree from such a college could be seen as a badge of social inferiority and poverty. All of which may have some truth.

But let’s assume a partial-failure scenario. (I’m optimistic on this; so we can also call it a partial success). Assume the Texas Board of Regents can get this place running for a price of $16K per degree (2011 USD). This, not a lower student loan payment, would help fight the problem of debt-laden graduates. Get intelligent and motivated lower-income people an opportunity to earn an affordable degree that breaks the cost of college barrier that prevents them from joining the affluent America. Even a partial success at this endeavor makes America a better, more just and happier nation. I want my politicians to fail like that Perry dude more often!

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COMMENTS

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  • flteng8251

    Initiating research toward a goal that may not be acheavable, but results in a good and useful outcome is not failure. To characterize it as such is one of the problems in our political arena.

    The only failure in the above sequence of events is Mr. Obama’s failure to look objectively at the problem and attempt to formulate a real and lasting solution.

  • satchman3

    I really really like the idea of getting free market ideas into the higher ed marketplace and getting prices down by competition.

    However we already have low cost options like community college and U Phoenix. Students seem to be stuck on the prestige of a high-priced university experience despite the evidence that the payoff is more like a lottery ticket than an investment. Maybe if we could get government out of subsidizing the loans we could see a shift toward more rational buying behavior.

    • wennejunk

      Call my a cynic, but I seriously doubt the quality of the education and career prospects factor highly into the decision process for most of the undergrads.

      I think drinking, sex and carousing are the primary factors and the assumption is that they’ll just automatically get a job when they finish in 4-7 years…because they went to such and such U.

      OWS is the elephant burial ground for these who suddenly realized they duped themselves but can’t admit it.

      • renl57

        College tuition is skyrocketing because of basic supply and demand.

        The stagnation in blue-collar wages has caused more and more American families to want to send their kids to college.

        And foreign students are coming to America in droves, armed with visas and tuition subsidized by their governments. Those governments will pay higher tuition if American universities demand it. After these foreign students graduate, they go back to their home countries.

        Even worse, nowadays even state universities are recruiting these heavily subsidized foreign students.

        Perry recognizes this, but thinks the answer is online education. Online education can’t replace a university: A student can’t do lab work. He can’t do field work. He can’t really carry out a serious research program.

        The real answer is to accredit more actual “bricks-and-mortar” universities. How many new universities have been accredited in America in the last 10 years, and where are they? (I didn’t know myself till I researched it.)

        It’s been 50 years or more since we accredited a new university as prestigious as Harvard or M.I.T. or Cal Tech. We need to change that.

        • izoneguy

          And it will.

          I do training programs for a living. Most of it video based.
          The old method of teaching students sitting in a chair
          while a professor drones on is dead.

          Most students lad & field work is not even done in a school.

          iPad University – embrace the future or be left behind.

          • Menlo

            Besides the labs (many of which are on-site), differences in learning style, and testing issues, the biggest problem with distance education is that the modern workplace demands the ability to collaborate and to work in teams. The ability to work with other people is necessary to both finding jobs and succeeding in them, regardless of one’s career field.

          • lineholder

            I’m attending college online for HI (Health Information) and will finish next summer if all goes as planned.

            We do have group projects in our online classes. The college hasn’t migrated to teleconferencing capabilities yet, but we do have the opportunity to have our “project team” chat room on the school website where we can post various information pertaining to a project. It’s very similar to what would be experienced in a “team” work environment. One person is the team leader, responsibilities for various portions of a project are designated to other members of the team, deadlines are established, etc. I usually end up being the one to develop either flowcharts or specialized documentation, because I’ve had experience working with those in those past.

            It’s the exact principles that would normally be used in a real-world environment applied to a virtual context.

          • wennejunk

            “the ability to collaborate and to work in teams”

            In the right environment, that can be achieved. We are piloting online training for telecom workers, where they will attend online lectures and then collaborate together working via teleconference on a live communication system, with the instructor “looking over their shoulder” via the same teleconference.

            None of them – instructor, students or lab equipment are in the same location, everything is remote.

            Not all learning can occur this way (e.g. pouring chemicals, etc) but what can, should be.

          • Menlo

            A live teleconferencing system is going to lead to issues of inaccessibility, poor quality/broken transmissions, and slowdowns, among others. I’m not saying some group projects cannot be done online, but that seems like a bad idea.

        • retire05

          the government subsidizes them. Grants are the mother’s milk of universities. Costs could be cut greatly by allowing students to take non-lab courses via the internet. It would not require a professor droning on in a class room, simply sending the lecture or class material via email and allowing the student to study at their convenience. Yeah, assignment deadlines would have to be met, but a student could do that by email as well. Questions posed to the professor could also be dealt with via the internet and if a student needed actual face time, it could be arranged. Do you really think you need to sit in a class room to get anything out of an English 101 class?

          Also, if professors were required to do what the taxpayer or the parents are actually paying them for, teaching, instead of taking tony salaries to spend less than 10 hours a week in a class rooom because they are pulling down a second salary doing research, that would also reduce the cost of an education because professors would not be looking for a way to do nothing but teach one three hour class a week.

          • wennejunk

            loans are easy to get, little risk analysis is done on the lender’s part due to various guarantee programs and more rigorous bankruptcy discharge laws.

            A student wants to borrow $100k to learn gender studies and the lender doesn’t care that no one in their right mind will pay the student a decent wage to ever pay it back.

            Its the same underlying phenomenon that gave us the inflated housing market and subprime debacle.

        • avgjo

          bureaucracy.

          Universities have to hire more ‘support’ staff to comply with gov’t B.S.
          Many jobs ‘created’ by politicians for various causes (affirmative action, ‘education’ improvement, etc.) are in the various administrations in a university. Not much actually makes it to the students or teachers. Proof positive: tuition keeps going up, but you still have to pay various technology, lab and facility fees ON TOP of the increased tuition.

          Another problem is that America doesn’t have the diversity of jobs she once did. Many fields related to industry are now downsized, lowering the number of positions available. Wanna make money? You’ll have to get a four year degree in most cases. Small business gets harder and harder to succeed in, because of endless regulations, licensing, etc. imposed by bureaucrats and pushed for by lobbyists for large companies that want to stamp out competition. The demand goes up, the standards go down and a college degree becomes more expensive and less valuable. And since a college degree is, for most people, the most affordable and practical way to improve their lot in life, it becomes a form of leverage for politicians: ‘vote for this increased tax, or we may have to cut back on education. And you know what that means….’ This results in more money being allocated to universities, not for improved facilities or instruction, but for more staff, i.e., constituents who will always vote for job security.

          Bottom line: we need to adjust regulations, tax structure and re-examine so-called ‘free trade’ agreements to bring back manufacturing here. Trade schools will expand and improve, giving an alternative and competition to our universities. We need to heighten the standards for university education, throwing out affirmative action quotas (de jure or de facto), useless programs (gay/gender studies, most of the philosophy department, sociology, communism and sedition posing as ‘ethnic studies’, etc) and requiring higher rigor in liberal arts schools (including an increased requirement of analytic classes like mathematics and formal logic), ensuring that only people really cut out for college will graduate. Professors should be protected from stupid policies that put attendance numbers over quality of education (e.g., relieving professors of a class because too many students failed a tough test), to maintain the integrity of a degree from their institution. And on and on.

          The problem with all this is that it would actually solve a problem and we can’t expect our leaders to do THAT.

          • avgjo

            I should have written

            high rigor should be restored to liberal arts schools.

            (I momentarily forgot how rigorous those studies were, esp. up til the end of the first half of the 20th c.)

  • retire05

    is academia itself. When you have professors at the University of Texas knocking down amost $400K/year and they spend less than 10 hours in the class room but earn more by doing research paid for by groups other than the university, we have a problem. These professors are being paid to teach, not write research papers that wind up being read by less than a dozen people.

    Mach Brown, head coach of UT, makes over $2.5 million a year. Can anyone justify that?

    Part of Perry’s plan is to make professors do what they are being paid by the Texas taxpayers to do; teach. I find no fault with that. A university degree was once aimed at making the student employable. No longer. Degrees in stupid stuff like Sri Lanka Women’s Studies and South African Basket Weaving (tongue in cheek here) are useless, feel good degrees.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      Giving people an alternative is the first step to busting the trust.

    • gawntrail1

      Mach Brown, head coach of UT, makes over $2.5 million a year. Can anyone justify that?

      Yes. The UT Football program CLEARED $65 Million in 08-09 according to this article:

      http://www.aolnews.com/2010/06/30/for-longhorns-money-grows-on-football-program-instead-of-trees/

      So, yes. Mack Brown is worth $2.5 Million a year.

      But, your objection does have merit………you got to ask how much revenue any of the pointy heads bring into the university to justify their contracts……

    • Fla Mom

      “A university degree was once aimed at making the student employable.”

      Actually, I think there’s way too much of exactly this going on right now, vo-tech disguised as college. (onemovoter discusses a trade school that doesn’t pretend to be anything else below. My only quibble with him/her is the sentence, “The trade school didn?t waste your time with extra classes that didn?t apply to your field of expertise.” See below about what I think of the importance of ‘extra classes.’) Yes, there are the trash degrees as you lampoon above, but I think most folks think that the purpose of college is to train someone to do/get a job. In my opinion, training someone to do a job so they can work that job is what is done at a vocational-technical school.

      Education, in the classical sense, is what should be done at universities (and used to even be done in grammar and high school). Instead, employers use possession of an undergraduate or, increasingly, a graduate degree, as a basis for screening out ‘unqualified’ people (like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, et al.; degree = can follow rules and sit quietly), so universities are now used to teach simple skills that qualify people for ‘jobs.’

      The problem with this is that learning engineering, or some other valuable but technical skill, doesn’t help with what one needs to know in order to be a true citizen. Look at what we discuss on this site: why is abortion killing a human being; how much should a government be able to confiscate in taxes; what are the right limits on personal action; why is our form of government (as originally designed) preferable to others? No one getting a conventional college degree has any idea how to analyze these questions and is clueless about what Western civilization has said about them over the centuries. A classical liberal (in the old sense) education is what citizens need, but it is not what they are getting, and our country is suffering for it. (Though hearing tea-partiers discuss Constitutional principles has been encouraging.)

      For some interesting history of the development of universities (that I just found, I’m no expert), see:

      http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7w23551240r3674/

      http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/universities.html

      Fla Mom

  • onemovoter

    I have been in the IT business for just over 10 years and have found that my BS degree in CIS did not help that much in the field I’m in.

    I ended up going to a high end trade school that offered class work that helped to get industry certifications that are much more prized than a 4 year degree. The trade school even had a very active job placement program with contacts all over. They were very willing to help you out as long as you completed their programs and passed the certification tests.

    The trade school didn’t waste your time with extra classes that didn’t apply to your field of expertise. For a total of 15K I was able to complete a full year of high end classes, of which I can retake for free at anytime. The certification tests are given by the industry separately, so if you pass them, companies know that you know what you are doing.

    Once I pass a few more certifications I can work for companies like Cisco for 6 figures without the need to include my BS degree. On average these kinds of trade schools range from 5k to 20k, and the rewards are being able to work in very good paying jobs usually right off the bat.

    Perry’s plan is excellent in pointing out that college costs are way out of hand and it’s time to look for alternatives. Highlighting this will go along way to show that Perry really is for better options to the current Democrat controlled education system.

  • center77

    cost of college has gone up way too much. When I started school, my price was 360 less per credit hour than it is now, and I’m just getting done with year two. This is a problem. As for online classes, I have some that I take online, though I go to a campus school. My online classes take more work than the classes I go to, and that is the way iyt should be.

  • lcnsac

    have called traditional university campuses functionally obsolete for some time now. Online classes juxtaposed with professorial interaction have proven to be as effective in learning as the traditional classroom venue. You can now earn online degrees from some top universities. If the place from which the degree is earned is important–and it often is still– the quality of the professor still matters, and you won’t find that frequently at proprietary schools.

    Perry’s idea is solid, although I agree he won’t get it done the first time. The universities are huge lobbies–Cal is often the #1 contributor to the Dems.

  • poorredman

    Easy fix, end the guaranteed student loan program. It has only allowed millions of kids that have no business of being in college (because they have no goals or idea of what they want to do for a career) to enter these schools and drive the price up for everyone else.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      Do you have the balls?

      • poorredman

        Did you, your family, or the government waste before you dropped out of college Neil?

        Another one of your craptastic tech posts run out of steam after a few replies so you follow me to someone elses post?

      • poorredman

        The prez doesn’t need to sell changes to the people to make it happen, or did you miss the action last week?

        • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

          I was under the impression that Neil was keeping you around for laughs. Turns out you should have been more of a chuckle.

          Blam.

  • packeryman

    Perry has a dismal record on education in Texas. He has been governor for four terms and we rank 34th in the nation in education, he just cut 4 billion from the education budget (that should send us to the bottom). Ask Texas teachers what they think of our corporate shill for governor, class size have been increased, teachers jobs have been cut along with programs.This guy wants the department of education abolished and wants Texas to secede from the union(we tried that once and it was a dismal failure). This guy wants doctors to have to give a sonogram to women wanting an abortion(same hypocritical crowd that don’t want the government in their health care, only when they don’t like something). We have the highest high school dropout rate in the US along with teenage pregnancies.They have removed the strife of the civil rights and labor movement from history inour public school text books. This guy has been a total failure in the area of education and all other social issues in Texas. This B.S. is on lower university cost is smoking mirrors , it is being promoted because he is running for nominee of the Republican party(hopefully the majority of the GOP can see this phony for who he is).This guy has so much negative baggage, he could never win a national election. His support in TX comes from bible thumping religious fanatics and tea bagging lunatics, therefore he will never carry the Independents needed for the GOP to beat Obama. Romney is the only candidate that can do that. Cain is supported by the same far right people and cannot carry Independents. He is a one dog and pony show with his flawed 9-9-9 plan, now he has troubles with harassment of women. That rock won’t roll” Again no matter what the party’s defacto leader(Limbaugh says)Romney is the only viable candidate that has a chance of winning in the general election. While were at it Independents lets clean the HOUSE of religious fanatics and tea baggers in 2012 election. They have proved the cannot govern in the house of representatives. The American public is fed up with the my way or the highway, no compromise crowd. Our government cannot work with radicals like this in congress. Dump them.

    • gekster

      You know, the ones whose first language is spanish.
      The one the Federal government says they have to educate,can’t deport.
      You know. Themmmm.
      If all those illegal, numbered in the thousands, I guess, were not there,
      I wonder what the ranking would be then.
      But I guess you didn’t factor that in, did you.

      • packeryman

        Agreed a large influx of poor uneducated illegals with children raised in those households and put into our school systems is going to lower the educational ratings against those states without as large of illegal population as border states. Here is the problem with a guy like Perry,he makes huge cuts in education when those cuts could have been elsewhere.We are going to have to deal with the problem whether we like it or not. There has not been any effort by the federal government to close the border, use troops to secure it or mandatory sentences on these that hire illegals. Reagan gave 4 million amnesty. George Bush tried two times to float an amnesty bill and supported the Comprehensive Immigration Bill. Obama has done nothing to stop immigration or secure the border. This is beyond the two parties. So it is left up to the states, Texas has a real high percentage of Latino students and it continues to rise. We have to educate them according to the supreme court. We better do a good job or we will have a large uneducated workforce and that means many on the dole. We pay now or later. Perry is playing the game the way the religious fanatics and teabaggers want it not one of rational thought. This is a serious problem that has to be dealt with and Perry’s approach is very reactionary.He has no vision except playing to a base that does not understand the scope of the problem. Yes it does change our ranking but Perry’s answer is not the right on.

        • gekster

          you are a troll and I will not respnd anymore.
          Go over to the HuffPo where they celibrate that language.

        • Doc Holliday

          .

          • streiff

            got him

          • Doc Holliday

            -nt

  • publious

  • RichmondG30

    Hand out mortgages to everyone with a pulse and housing prices rise to meet the artificial demand.

    Hand out student loans to everyone who wants to go to college, and tuition rises to meet the artificial demand.

    If the Federal Government would stop guaranteeing mortgages and student loans, demand would fall to a real level and prices would fall accordingly.

    You don’t need a PhD in economics to figure this out.

  • renl57

    In my own college education, I had to take a lot of laboratory work. Chemistry lab, computer lab, etc. You had to do a lot of stuff hands-on.

    All a student can do online is read and memorize, basically. He can’t really practice the subjects he’s studying. For example, I notice that Western Governors University offers a degree in Information Technology which includes Network Administration. How can a student become proficient in Network Administration without ever having worked with a real industrial-strength computer network? (No, a wireless home LAN isn’t good enough, and the students of modest means that WGU aims at may not even have those yet.)

    And the College of Health Professions offers a degree in nursing. AFAIK, without the student nurse ever working with real doctors or real patients. Would you trust a nurse to care for you if she only studied stuff online and had never worked with patients when she was a student nurse?

    This sort of thing used to be called a “correspondence course,” when it was done with U.S. Mail instead of the Internet. It has its place. But it’s definitely no substitute for a real college or university.

    • lineholder

      I do agree with you on that much, particularly when it comes to degrees that require labs, so the concept may not work in all situations.

      But after attending online college for the past two years, I can tell you that depending on the course of study, attempting to complete a degree online is no walk in the park. The student has to stay self-motivated, and in many cases, time management is a skill learned simply out of necessity. The online course can actually be tougher than the courses offered on site, with the reason being that the traditional classroom environment (where teachers often end up spoon-feeding students information) doesn’t exist.

      One of the students that recently completed the course study program that I’m in scored a perfect score on their national certification exam. Online students often push themselves harder to try to compensate for that lack of classroom environment, and it can pay off in the long run.

      • lineholder

        the subjects being studied, that depends on the course. I’ve had to take courses that would require the use of an encoder, and the school provides access to an outside site that has a format in place for students to “practice” and develop skills.

  • jrmax13

    Pack,
    These folks cannot take the truth. Give it up before they have you
    moderated. Diehard ideologues abound.

    • Xasteius

      • acat

        packeryman has already met his blamstick.

        Oh wait, you meant jrmax13? Yeah. Good call there.

        Mew

        • avagreen

          So, the Heinz rule is just to ignore?

          • Xasteius

            no text

          • gekster

            This ?rule? originates from a diary by RSer David Hinz, where he encouraged us to not ?feed the trolls.? When someone invokes the Hinz Rule, it says ?OK, folks, that?s enough, let?s not encourage this troll-like person to continue?. But what?s a troll, you ask? ?Troll? is a common term used to describe Internet message-board troublemakers.

          • avagreen

            Trolls: I’ve posted several times about trolls.
            http://www.flayme.com/troll/#

            Been on the internet since 1993……when Navigator was the brand new browser, created by a college student in the town where I lived at the time, and that his mother a millionaire overnight (and a few relatives in that town) when it went public. ;)

          • avagreen

            Trolls: I’ve posted several times about trolls.
            http://www.flayme.com/troll/#

            Been on the internet since 1993……when Navigator was the brand new browser, created by a college student in the town where I lived at the time, and that made his mother a millionaire overnight (and a few relatives in that town) when it went public. ;)

  • Menlo

    I was LIVID when I read that Sarah Weddington had been teaching “law” at UT with state grant money!

    That’s like having Josef Mengele teach medicine. The “profession” is probably a net loss for the economy to boot. I don’t know how much “law” studies cost the taxpayer, but it can’t be insignificant. Couple that with things like “women’s studies,” and other programs that are not even real “subjects” taught by high-paid “experts” who often have very dangerous views, and there is quite a problem.

    Taxpayers should not be funding prestige and the frivolities and outright perversion going on in colleges today.

  • lineholder

    You do know that this article is linked at RCP, right?