{"id":18792,"date":"2014-06-23T18:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T01:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18792"},"modified":"2014-06-23T18:55:10","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T01:55:10","slug":"its-nice-to-know-someones-doing-higher-education-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18792","title":{"rendered":"It’s Nice to Know Someone’s Doing Higher Education Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Schuman has a piece up on Slate, “Doing Higher Ed Right<\/a>,” in which she writes about Iowa State University, which is “the only\u2014only<\/i>\u2014institution of higher learning in the entire country<\/i> to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty and shrinking its administration.” This is in contrast to, say, the University of Akron, which Schuman mentions in the same piece, which threatened “to shutter 55 degree programs\u2014you know, frivolous<\/i> ones, like elementary education” because of budget concerns and the vice provost of which, whose name is Rex Ramsier, suggested “that if his institution [had to stop] using underpaid adjunct labor, it would have<\/i> to raise tuition 40 percent.”<\/p>\n

It would be easy to\u00a0go on and on about how college administrations have managed to increase tuition by an astonishing 1200% over the last thirty years, at least according to this piece<\/a>\u00a0in Salon, but, like Schuman, I think it’s important to focus on what Iowa State has done, and so I am\u00a0simply going to quote a\u00a0couple of paragraphs from her article:<\/p>\n

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ISU President Steven Leath explained to the\u00a0Des Moines Register<\/em>\u00a0that ISU wanted to \u201crun a very lean operation and put as much into direct support of students and faculty\u201d as possible, boosting full-time faculty hiring by an astounding 41 percent. (No riot-inducing tuition hike yet, Rex Ramsier!)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indeed, Iowa State is being lauded as one of the most efficiently run universities in the nation\u2014and its student retention is up\u00a03 percent since 2005<\/a>. This might not be a spectacular number, but it\u2019s a better increase than its rival, the University of Iowa, a prestigious flagship Research I institution (that, according to the Delta Costs Project, has added much\u00a0fewer full-time faculty members and many more staff positions<\/a>).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So yes, Virginia (and every other state), it\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0possible to put student learning and faculty quality first and for capitalism not to collapse upon itself. In fact, only question the ISU data inspires is: Why, exactly,\u00a0isn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0every other university also doing this, when it is quite obviously not only possible, but makes for a better-run institution? Why indeed.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted<\/a>.<\/em>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Schuman has a piece up on Slate, “Doing Higher Ed Right,” in which she writes about Iowa State University, which is “the only\u2014only\u2014institution of higher learning in the entire country to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18792"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18794,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18792\/revisions\/18794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}