I think we need the same fix as with the health care system. Education and health care should be free. Period. Of course I don't know how to do that, but.... maybe you could figure it out. Please?
Q1: Many schools (I have more experience with big public state universities but also one elite private university) choose to give raises to the football coach and president and/or to make improvements to the football or basketball teams' spaces like stadiums, locker rooms, dorms for athletes, money to lure top ranking high school athletes. Sometimes it is to put luxuries in the dorms, gym, etc. to lure students to come because it looks nice to live on campus, since online learning is taking away from these money makers on campus.
Q2: This made me laugh. At the community college I teach at, students typically transfer to Arizona State University (overwhelming majority), Northern Arizona University, Grand Canyon University (private Christian nearby), or University of Arizona. At ASU there are 13 different psychology majors to choose from. They all have slightly different requirements for the math class, communication class, or science class needed to transfer and not have to retake or take extra classes. There is no sense they are trying to pare these down to one psych major but are perfectly happy to make more. I have plenty of other examples of duplicate programs within the same university. Some universities work on a financial model where every college within the university is competing with all the others for students' tuition dollars so they start doing sneaky, weird stuff.
I have been in department and faculty meetings where strategies to increase the US News and World Report ranking for the program/department was specifically discussed regularly, like every month.
Just as we saw in K-12 after the passage of No Child Left Behind where schools started teaching to the test and dropped everything else (the initial tests were only on reading and math so even now, decades later, some schools still don't teach social studies or science with any regularity because the reading and math scores are the only ones that determine school funding, etc.) we have seen the same pattern in universities with the US News and World Report rankings. They focus just on those metrics and ditch things there's plenty of data to show actually helps students succeed so it becomes this circle. But within my adult career I've also heard schools choosing to opt out of US News and World Report rankings as a backlash so there has been some movement in the time this has been on my radar.
Overall, I've never seen a university (big state school) choose smaller class sizes and lower teacher student ratio, it has always been pushing us to increase that and it has always been faculty pushing back that stops any of it (and we often lose). Even at my community college where our class caps are 24 (so lovely!) they are pushing for 30 or 35. So far the data shows they wouldn't actually save much money or even save any classroom space by doing this so we can push it off for now.
One of the things that we are dealing with is that with the 2008 recession people put off having kids and then some never did have them so there are simply fewer 18 year olds to start college these days and that number just isn't going to go back up any time soon based on population data in the US and yet the colleges and universities are all trying to figure out how to magically get back to the numbers of 5-10 years ago. For a community college with lots of returning/nontraditional students I would think Biden's proposal of free community colleges would maybe make a difference but that hasn't happened yet. Otherwise the things I see the administration of colleges and universities focus on really make no sense, but they often have never actually taught college classes, so they really don't know about the thing they have the power to make decisions on.
I think we need the same fix as with the health care system. Education and health care should be free. Period. Of course I don't know how to do that, but.... maybe you could figure it out. Please?
Oh I have so many comments.
Q1: Many schools (I have more experience with big public state universities but also one elite private university) choose to give raises to the football coach and president and/or to make improvements to the football or basketball teams' spaces like stadiums, locker rooms, dorms for athletes, money to lure top ranking high school athletes. Sometimes it is to put luxuries in the dorms, gym, etc. to lure students to come because it looks nice to live on campus, since online learning is taking away from these money makers on campus.
Q2: This made me laugh. At the community college I teach at, students typically transfer to Arizona State University (overwhelming majority), Northern Arizona University, Grand Canyon University (private Christian nearby), or University of Arizona. At ASU there are 13 different psychology majors to choose from. They all have slightly different requirements for the math class, communication class, or science class needed to transfer and not have to retake or take extra classes. There is no sense they are trying to pare these down to one psych major but are perfectly happy to make more. I have plenty of other examples of duplicate programs within the same university. Some universities work on a financial model where every college within the university is competing with all the others for students' tuition dollars so they start doing sneaky, weird stuff.
I have been in department and faculty meetings where strategies to increase the US News and World Report ranking for the program/department was specifically discussed regularly, like every month.
Just as we saw in K-12 after the passage of No Child Left Behind where schools started teaching to the test and dropped everything else (the initial tests were only on reading and math so even now, decades later, some schools still don't teach social studies or science with any regularity because the reading and math scores are the only ones that determine school funding, etc.) we have seen the same pattern in universities with the US News and World Report rankings. They focus just on those metrics and ditch things there's plenty of data to show actually helps students succeed so it becomes this circle. But within my adult career I've also heard schools choosing to opt out of US News and World Report rankings as a backlash so there has been some movement in the time this has been on my radar.
Overall, I've never seen a university (big state school) choose smaller class sizes and lower teacher student ratio, it has always been pushing us to increase that and it has always been faculty pushing back that stops any of it (and we often lose). Even at my community college where our class caps are 24 (so lovely!) they are pushing for 30 or 35. So far the data shows they wouldn't actually save much money or even save any classroom space by doing this so we can push it off for now.
One of the things that we are dealing with is that with the 2008 recession people put off having kids and then some never did have them so there are simply fewer 18 year olds to start college these days and that number just isn't going to go back up any time soon based on population data in the US and yet the colleges and universities are all trying to figure out how to magically get back to the numbers of 5-10 years ago. For a community college with lots of returning/nontraditional students I would think Biden's proposal of free community colleges would maybe make a difference but that hasn't happened yet. Otherwise the things I see the administration of colleges and universities focus on really make no sense, but they often have never actually taught college classes, so they really don't know about the thing they have the power to make decisions on.