As much as it might pain me to type this… what Danny Westneat said.
Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?
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I’m reflexively opposed to privatization of government services (and I define appropriate government services very broadly) but I have to wonder if the heavy hand of the Legislature, assorted corporate stacked commissions, the Governor and other folks who failed to avail themselves of an education while picking up their degrees is any longer worth the diminishing contributions the State is providing to the University. The time may be here or soon will be where the University should just say “fuck it” we will go it alone. I realize doing so would cause great disruption to the University and would require some years to regain its momentum.
Colleges absolutely should not be run like a business. My alma mater started going in that direction by hiring a former businessman with no educational experience as our President. He managed to turn a decent institution with a $80M endowment into a struggling institution with a $40M endowment in less than four years.
The top educational priority isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, profit. And that’s what businesses are driven toward.
The Money Quote (From Westneat)
“Seriously, all this mania for making public institutions go free enterprise would be a little easier to swallow if private businesses weren’t being propped up left and right as if they were wards of the state.”
Dare I say “Boeing”? As in “$3 billion gift from the state”?!!
ratcity
Actually the State makes very little contribution to the UW in $$ .. ahout 14%.
The real issue is that these moneys go to making the UW a WASHINGTON state school.
Without those funds, if the UW survived, it would be more like one of the ivies .. a private, NATIONAL school.
This would be the equivalent of deciding to sell Mt. Rainier to the Chinese.
From the ST comment thread:
“Let’s privatize the Iraq and Afghan wars, so only those who want those fiascoes can pay for it.”
Oh well, even though education (and everything else) is going to hell in a handbasket, we capitalists are doing fine. I’ve made another $600 in the stock market this morning.
Why are stocks going up so much? Because corporations are sitting on $1 trillion of cash and raking in more hand-over-fist. Money they can use to acquire companies, boost dividends, and buy back stock.
Our Republican New Economy has fundamentally reallocated our society’s material resources. Capitalists use to get a whopping 40% of GDP while all of America’s workers put together got only 60%. Now those percentages are reversed. Capitalists get 60% and workers get unemployment checks.*
* But not for long, now that Republicans are running the House of Representatives again. Repoublicans, as you know, are against the “little people” getting college educations, unemployment benefits, or food stamps. But Republicans aren’t totally the Party of No. They’re actually FOR something! Yes, that’s right, they are POSITIVELY advocating repealing the 14th Amendment … you know, the one that abolished slavery.
Westnut includes in his examples the cost of unsubsidezed ferry and bus systems, which is fodder for the anti-transit crowd to argue that they should be cut because they don’t pay for themselves. But he doesn’t point out the massive subsidies towards the automobile as a transportation system, which are almost incalcuable and include everything from highway subsidies, public parking garage, wars to protect foreign oil supplies, attempts to drill oil in protected public lands, and even bailouts of automobile manufacturers.
It’s not that I’m against cars. I like cars. I just believe in being honest about how much it costs to operate them as a transportation system. I would ride light rail from my home in Everett to my job in Bellevue if that were available, and keep one car in the garage for weekends or work-related travel. But I could then dispose of the second car, and the expense which goes along with it.
Roger ..
Stocks are NOT going up.
International companies are worth MORE relative to a decline in the value of America.
Buy some Germany, China or Brazil.
But what really burns me up is the starvation of the government transit and highway maintenance budgets, and then having them go to toll lanes so those with enough money to pay the tolls regularly can zip right on by the rest of us. It seems like the wingnuts who keep pushing this proposal want to be like the Soviet party officials who had a center lane on each highway reserved for their use. Of course, if allowed to continue further, ultimately we would have all lanes but one designated as toll lanes, with only one lane reserved for the rest of us.
rhp
Someone should tell the Repricans that NOT payi9ng for infrastructure and education is DEFERRING costs to the future ..
Sort of like deciding not to fix your leaking roof so you can buy shares in Apple.
@4 SJ I understand what you are saying and basically I agree with you, but at some point those miserly contributions of the State just aren’t worth the hassle of idiots in the Legislature demanding performance audits of the English Department or corporate chieftains demanding that all students major in Computer Science. Forget Mount Rainier, you should worry that the Legislature will sell the UDub to University of Phoenix to finance our penitentiaries.
I always worry when the Seattle Times editorial board picks a public-owned target like the U.W. What usually follows is a flurry of articles about how it needs to be run “more like a business”, how it’s professers and administrators are “overpaid and receive benefits which are too high”, and other calls to raise rates, reduce taxpayer contributions, etc.
While the content of the articles might be fairly straightforward, the Times’ editors can manage the public discussion by placment of the articles on the front pages, organizing them in a series of stories which over several days or weeks which reach a climax call on the editorial pages for “reform”, and other such tactics.
The problem is that the Blethens live in a different world from the rest of us. When they socialize, they are doing so with other wealthy people. Their main goal is to keep taxes low on their businesses and personal income and purchases. If they have to pay increased tuition for their kids or grandkids, it’s pennies compared to the dollars they save in tax breaks they receive simply by threatening to move their business elsewhere.
Most of them pay for their children to go to Ivy League schools, or for other private instutions just outside the Ivy League – USC, Stanford, etc. For those, they simply don’t see any reason to support lower tuition for the rest of the masses. Let them pay their own way!
But then there’s the problem of little Billy. He was brought up in the best private schools Seattle has to offer, but he’s got a bit of a “motivation problem”. His grades in high school were abysmal, and were only brought up to a “gentleman’s ‘C'” by more expenditures on tutors who pretty much did their senior project for them. He’s not going to get into Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, no matter how much effort is expended by the parents.
But what about the U.W.? Isn’t that supposed to be the school that everyone in Washington can attend? Without having to compete nationally, couldn’t Billy go to school there?
But horrors! It seems that the U.W. is just about as hard to get into as an Ivy League school. In order to get into a popular department like computer science, you almost need to have a perfect 4.0 and other impressive qualifications on your application. Other majors are less stringent, but a 3.0 to 3.5 high-school GPA is pretty much the bare minimum, unless you are a recruited athelete.
But what if the tuition is raised, so that more can’t afford to attend? Suddenly class sizes would drop, and perhaps little Billy can attend, after all! After all, isn’t that what America is all about – those with the most money can buy their way into any public resource, and those without money are simply denied the opportunity to earn more money in the future?
It is a good article. It highlights the problem beautifully. Private enterprise benefits greatly from public dollars. Either directly in cash support, like the breaks Boeing gets, or by government paid for infrastructure, like the highways.
The state legislature has for years been funding its other shit with the money that should have been going to the public universities for decades. UW saw it and started to seriously find and use other private sources of funds to maintain what it has built. Good for them. They are also hiring a mad contingent of development officers to amp up private contributions, I hear.
It’s plain as day that the people who are in charge of looking at higher education funding in the leg, see higher ed as the cash cow to fund other programs. After the cash cow is dead, I don’t know what they will use instead.
Like a blind pig, even a guy like Westneat finds an acorn every now and then.
Yes, the UW takes out-of-State students to make more money. Even worse, the UW takes International students because they pay the full cost of their education. I would favor a Washington-first policy, but that would not maximize income.
The UW screwed the Community Colleges when they convinced the Legislature to change the long-standing rule forcing UW to admit any WA Community College student who earned an Associates Degree. This devalued the CC degree and eliminated an unprofitable source of in-State students who were taking class space away from the more profitable out-of-State and International students.
Then UW convinced the Leg to kick Grad students out after 6 years. I never understood this and see nothing wrong with some working Citizen who might many years to finish her degree, paying tuition all the while.
Moreover, I have been told that the UW pressures the State to limit the number of CC students. This policy, if true, does not serve the Citizens of Washington
The academic decline of the UW can be seen by examining the Summer Time Schedule. Twenty years ago of the UW offered so many different and varied Summer classes that it was hard to choose. Now its hard to find something worth taking.
The UW is an occasionally-successful football team loosely attached to a rapidly-declining Institution of Higher Learning. I’m glad that I did my classwork 20 years ago instead of now.
I LAUGH at the idiots who NEVER seem to understand the difference between a “public service” and a “product”. A product (say iPod) can be made and sold as a profit (hopefully). A public service is PROVIDED for the benefit of the public and by nature doesn’t make a profit. The military isn’t SUPPOSED to make a profit, it’s service is to protect the country so all the profit making companies (like Apple) can go about their business without having to spend THEIR resources repelling the Russians or Chinese. The police, fire department and libraries aren’t there to make a profit either. They don’t exchange their services for money. Now the post office specifically does, so they potentially can…but 98% of government services are just that, services, not “products” exchanged for money.
Yes you should always eliminate waste fraud and abuse in private (Boeing, Apple, Starbucks) or in public (local, state, national government). But beyond that, you don’t run public services like a business. You don’t constantly short them to make the greatest short term profit to satisfy investors (at the risk of long term viability). Your sense of investment is also vastly different. Just apples and oranges.
@4: Damn you for putting that out there in the world . . . now they’ll actually sell Mt. Rainier, and we’ll all have to admire Mt. Petrochina on our way to work in the morning.
14. Brenda Helverson
Brenda,
this is a good post. If you want it seen by more UW types, I suggest you post it at The-Ave.US.
In the meantime, I think you really do not understand the nature of the UW.
You say:
A “Washington-first policy” is EXACTLY what we have now and I support that. However, what UW brings to our state is a world class university. Those out-of-state kids offer OUR kids the chance to compete with the peers they will meet in the real world!
You say
You have this utterly wrong. If the UW is to be a premier university, competing with Oxford, Berkeley, Princeton, Wisconsin, MIT etc, then we MUST not simply be a finishing school for the community colleges.
We are VERY lucky in WA state to not only have the UW and WSU, but to have outstanding state colleges and community colleges. Most students who go toi community colleges would be served better and at lest cost by finishing at Evergreen, Western, or Eastern than at the UW.
The branch campuses of the UW are an esp. bad idea. Their main value is as economic stimuli to their communities. As higher ed, however, they lower the standards of the UW, as well as WSU) and cost MORE than it would cost to expand the state colleges.
I hope that Bothell will be redeveloped into a new state college. Tacoma? Well the Chair of the Regents was its main backer, so I am skeptical that much will happen there.
You say …
?? I think you are confused. AFIK we do not limit the length of graduate school to six years. Did you mean undergrad?
You say ..
This is VERY unlikely. Everyone I know at the UW thinks the CC are great. The issue that may be confusing you is the number of CC students who are admitted here. That number is mandated by the state. Cutting that number would very much serve the citizens as long as we, the State, made it possible for CC students to go to the state colleges.
There is another issue her that you may not understand. The UW does have a HUGE problem with class sizes in the first two years. Some see the CC as answer to that problem because their badly paid, part time faculties are less expensive than UW faculty even with TAs.
The trouble here is that students in this horribly large classes at the UW do have the huge advantage of being able to access the respurces of a real university. Making bigger class sizes is bad but cutting kods off form the resources of a university, esp. those highly able kids most able to use the UW, is even worse.
This is a funny way to measure “academic decline.” I suspect the course you refer to are well taught at the community colleges?
Personally, I would like to see LESS of this sort 9f thing at the UW and more at SCC. Better yet, I would go so far as to suggest we would all benefit by SCC and BCC growing into
state colleges. This would mean a smaller, better UW undergraduate school.
You say
Even a blind pig, etc….
The really idiotic thing is that it took so long for ‘main street’ to get it.
“Why is it OK for private business concerns to get public dollars?”
The comments in this thread: I am honored to live amongst such smart people.
# 17: As mentioned, the policy used to be that someone graduating from a Washington State Community College with an Associates Degree had a more or less straight path into admission at the state universities. There were several reasons for this, but three of which stick out in my mind are:
(a) given that spaces in the entry class of the state universities are limited, and there is a high dropout rate in the first two years, it make sense to use the community colleges to expand the potential size of the “entry class” into the university system.
(b) the value of a community college associate degree is enhanced by it’s tranferability into a university program. This brings in more motivated students, which brings in better faculty, and generally enhances the community college system.
(c) a family with limited resources can better afford to send two, three, or four children to college if they spend their first two years of college while living at home. This isn’t a problem for many of us here in the Puget Sound region, where the U.W. and W.W.U. are generally within commuting distance, but elsewhere in the state commuting isn’t an option, and the cost of dorms, food, etc. can be a considerable extra expense.
Note that most of the discussion here is about the University of Washington. We don’t here the discussions about access to W.W.U., C.W.U., or even W.S.U., because those are still relatively open to those with reasonable grades. The problem was the number of well-off people who couldn’t get their kids into the Univ. of Washington, and somehow felt it was beneath them to send their kids to the other universities or, heaven forbid, community college. They complained that a student with a “C” average in community college could get into the U.W. when a freshman applicant had to have 3.5 or better high-school GPA to get in, depending upon the program.
But they aren’t equivilents. Some kids do well in high school and crash in college, others don’t do well in high school and excel in college. Some high schools have an incredible amount of grade inflation, where virtually all of the senior class graduates with a 3.5 or above (there were articles a few years ago about high schools who couldn’t select a valedictorian from among the dozens with 4.0 averages). And there was absolutely nothing to prohibit these parents from sending their kids to other universities in the state, or the community college route.
But the university wanted to increase it’s prestige, so it joined in the push to limit community college admissions.
As a citizen, i really don’t care if the UW or WSU are world class institutions. I do care that they function in their roles as inspiring centers of learning and research, dedicated to their students growth and development as citizens of the state.
The demographics in the state are pretty sad when you consider that nearly one-third of all students drop out of high school. Out of the remaining 67%, the UW and WSU take the top 6-10% (Evergreen dips into that pool as well), the cadre of WWU, CWU, EWU get another 10-15%, leaving a whopping 40+% with a variety of choices that are not altogether inspiring. Less than 19% of the total (about half of that 40%), actually achieve an AA degree and/or matriculate to a four-year university or college.
UW and WSU have world class departments and research institutes that provide for the common good of the planet and its population. They need to be supported for all that they do, and not just for the provision of an undergraduate education. Maybe we could see more of their contributions on the nightly local news or in the local newspapers? Perhaps it is time for some of the professors to step out into the limelight and tell the public (that is paying for at least part of them) what they do and how their contributions matter. We need to educate the public about education.
I think Danny W has something worthwhile to say more often than you give him credit for — not a sure thing, I’ll acknowledge. But this piece was definitely on target.
On the question of privatization of public resources:
Today’s Aviation Daily says that by the end of this decade at least ten large public commercially-owned airports in the U.S. will become private.
Dynamics which work toward this trend include the fact that airports are due for major (and expensive) upgrades in infrastructure and technology which have been derred over the past decade due to tight budgets; the slim likelihood of getting any additional funding for airport improvements out of Congress while the Republicans are in control of the House; and the dire financial predictament of the public entities which own many of the nation’s commercial airports.
I would link to the article, but it’s on a subscription only basis.
I’ve posted this before, but once again it seems apropos to quote the bumper sticker the principal of our kids’ elementary school had on her car:
Won’t it be great when education is fully funded, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?
?? You are contradicting yourself. The prestige of the UW IS the same as its ability to inspire and do research.
The great bargain of the UW iks that a WA kid can come here, at a low tuiiton, and get an education that ranks among the top 20 in the world.
Education at other state univeristies, not in that elite tier, is as expensive or more expensive than it is here.
Would you prefer that our kids go to Phil Knight’s school (UOregon) where the state only contribs 7%??
You are identifying a bery real problem, but this is NOT one the UW should solve.
Leaving aside the horrid issue of secondary education, we need to decide what portion of our kids need any degree post high school. I suspect that many folks do not need the degrees they earn now, while others who do need those degrees can not get them because we do not offer enough opportunities.
My own solution would be to use the same model that most of the world uses .. the “gymnasium.” Secondary schools grads should not need to go to CC for an AA degree. The community colleges should take on a much larger role in serving the needs of those HS students who are ready for vocational training.
The we should expand the state colleges to take up the needs of those who really need bachelor’s level degrees.
The UW does a horrible job of celebrating its faculty. That is one reason I have founded THE-Ave.US. There is, for example, a very good post there now of the role the uW is playing in Antartica. WE are planning to add much more of that sort of thing if I can get enough writers!
@23 It’s also quite possible that by 2020, most air travel will have become so expensive, unsafe and fraught with indignities in the name of “security” and “returning value to the shareholders” that very few people will be flying any more. Then you’ll hear about the mayor accepting a check for an inflation-adjusted $1.98.
Kiplingers ranks UW in the top 10 “Best-Value Public Colleges”, from among 500 considered.
http://www.kiplinger.com/magaz.....-2011.html
@9 What do you expect? They got their philosophy from Trostky via Leo Strauss.
K-12 education takes 13 years, from the customer’s point of view. Post-high school education takes anywhere from two or three years for an AA degree or trade apprenticeship to ten years or more for a doctor, lawyer or top-level researcher.
There’s an essential conflict here between assuring the best outcome for the “customer” and “running education like a business”, if that means maximizing short-term profitability. For that matter, it seems private businesses lately haven’t been doing very well at servicing mortgages, providing health affordable and equitable health coverage or responsible management of wage-earners’ retirement nest eggs.
I don’t know that I would be so flip as to say that if a student chooses not to attend the UW that they are getting what amounts to a “finishing school” for the community colleges.
Not to diminish what UW does, but Kiplinger also has a couple of other WA State public 4 years in its list of top 100 values. Given what the 6 public institutions receive in terms of grief and hassle versus actual public support, it seems that Washingtonians as a rule devalue what we have.
Lauramae
I did not say that a student who chooses not to go to the UW is getting a finishing school.
What I did say was that it is foolish to treat the UW as if it were a finishing school/
As for the other higher ed resources in WA, I totally agree. They are of immense value but highly under estimated the people of this state.
re 28: “@9 What do you expect? They got their philosophy from Trostky via Leo Strauss.”
That was insightful. Those are the kind of comments that I like — as opposed to SJ’s — which are like a box of stale Crackerjacks with no prize at the bottom.
@32: I agree with your take on Roger’s comment (Roger does pithy and insightful very well) but note that SJ was doing much better up thread…;-)
One important issue that is not mentioned often is; who attends the schools? If you look at the financial income of the families these students are coming from then how many are from the upper rungs and how many are from the lower rungs of the social ladder?
We need to keep in mind that these schools are for the most part supported by a regressive sales tax.
There is a study from some years back that showed that the private colleges in Oregon enrolled more low income students than the state colleges did. So where is Washington if we looked at the issue from that perspective?
The ‘privatizers’ are like the flat earthers of the 15th century or the Marxist-Leninists of the 20th century; no idea what they are talking about and no way to figure it out.
“….and we’ll all have to admire Mt. Petrochina on our way to work in the morning.”
Well, actually, we will get to view a hologram of Mt. Rainier for a fee. Glibertarians are looking for ways to bring privatized property relations to the air we breath.
On the revenue side, differing treatments for different sources of income is a mirror image of privatization. By treating capital gains at a different lower rate, we effectively allow rich folks to obtain the benefits of government services at lower cost.
We effectively have nanny state socialism….for the rich.