| A couple of graphs concerning higher education funding made the rounds this week. The first was courtesy The Bridge, which put into perspective the House Republican vendetta against the University of Michigan and Wayne State University (my own emerging feeling is that the House Republicans regard their relationship with the University of Michigan the way a controlling man regards an uppity woman ... at the end of the day, they'll do whatever they think needs to be done to put her in her place) in terms of funding. The second was from the national perspective from The Atlantic. The upshot is that as states have cut support for higher education, the costs for students go up. Student debt is currently the biggest chunk of debt there is in the country, and since you can't repossess a college education it's unsecured. This situation is being made worse by the kinds of temper tantrums we saw this week in our ongoing experiment with the Dunning-Kruger effect. By punishing Wayne State and the University of Michigan for working within the law, they're actually punishing students and creating more unsecured debt. If you read The Atlantic's article, it points out that Michigan has hacked away at higher education support freely, but the state's colleges haven't just jacked up tuition as we're constantly told they are (chiefly by the people hacking away at the appropriations). They're cutting costs. Some of that is in energy use and efficiency. Most of the state's universities have aggressive programs related to energy usage. Part of that, however, is also by trimming tenured faculty and leaving more of the work to non-tenure track faculty (those would be your adjuncts or temporary instructors). Those people not only tend to get treated like garbage by administrations, but they also tend to not be as qualified or have the professional reputation of tenured professors. In other words, in some disciplines, they're watering down the product because of reduced support from the state. Meanwhile, I don't think the Detroit News understands how a university budget works. |
