Tuition Rates Going Up == Evil Universities October 29, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in university.7 comments
The CollegeBoard recently did a study for college tuition prices with the sub-title Public Four-Year Tuition Continues to Rise at Faster Rate than Private Four-Year Tuition. The report actually isn’t that bad:
The College Board announced today that college prices for the 2009-10 academic year continue to rise as state funding and endowment values decline. The financial difficulties facing households across the nation are putting increased pressure on financial aid budgets.
This was picked up by lots of news paper articles – for example this one from the AP:
With the economy struggling, parents and students dared to hope this year might offer a break from rising college costs. Instead, they got another sharp increase.
Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273.
From there it turned into articles talking about how universities were taking advantage of the students and families. At least the article that appeared in the New York Times got the real reason right – here is paragraph 2:
Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5 percent last year. Prices at private colleges rose 4.4 percent, according to a report issued Tuesday by the College Board.
The next quote in that article takes a sharp left turn into.. well:
Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called the increases “hugely disappointing.”
“Given the financial hardship of the country, it’s simply astonishing that colleges and universities would have this kind of increases,” Mr. Callan said. “It tells you that higher education is still a seller’s market. The level of debt we’re asking people to undertake is unsustainable.
I’m sorry, but give me a break. I totally understand the tuition problem. My university is going to raise tuition by 30% over the course of two years. Ouch. That will certainly strain students that don’t have financial aid. But what exactly were people expecting?
The state of Washington cut almost 30% of the UW budget. The voters in Washington made it clear that there were other priorities. So, UW has two choices: shrink by 30% in 6 months (about the length of time we knew what was going to happen). Shrinking by 30% is certainly possible – but it would be huge. We’d have to take about 30% less students than we do now – that probably would mean no incoming students this year at all (or we would have to kick out students that were already here), fire 30% of the faculty, close lots of departments. Probably have to completely kill off research. Actually, that would help with firing 30% of the faculty – most of us would just leave as fast as we could. Students who came to a major research university for learning would now be at what was basically a teaching college full of very pissed off professors – not what they signed up for. So Seattle raised tuition by 30% and took a 6% over all cut to the operating budget. All signs point to the same thing happening in the next two year budget as stimulus money disappears.
So look – we like to call these things public universities – but that implies public support. Frankly, the more the state backs out of its implied contract with the university, the more like a private university these institutions will look. At some point the state support will be small enough that the universities will want to change their relationship with the state. Heck, why deal with the oversight if they aren’t getting anything in return for it!?
Somewhere out there there is a year-by-year trend plot of state support of universities. It has been steadily falling for over 20 years. This last year was particularly bad, but not really that different from the trend overall. California is at risk of destroying one of the best university systems in the country over this very same issue.
Want to keep tuition down? Keep public universities accessible? Don’t just yell “cut costs, get rid of waste” at the universities. Make sure your state legislature continues to support the university as well. The budget has to balance. If the state gives less, then that extra money has to come from somewhere!
Ah, the soap box. How I have missed thee.
Dark Matter Discovered – Loosing Control Of Your Data October 26, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in GLAST, physics, physics life, science.2 comments
Ok, so it is a sensationalist title. But it was triggered by archive submission with the following title: Possible Evidence For Dark Matter Annihilation In The Inner Milky Way From The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. Wow! That is quite a title!
First, a bit of background on this paper. This is authored by two theorists who analyzed publically released FermiLAT/GLAST data. Fermi is a NASA funded project and one of its stipulations is that all data it collects must be made publically available 6 months after it has been collected. The authors of the paper downloaded the data, used a simple background model, added in their dark matter theory, and did a fit. And pow:
The red points are the data from Fermi, the dash-dot line and the dotted line are backgrounds (galactic diffuse, and a single TeV source), and the dashed line is their model. Nice fit, eh? Yep – looking at this my first reaction is “Wow – is this right? This is big – how did Fermi miss this?” and then I run across the hall to find someone that actually knows this data well.
It turns out the basic problem with this analysis is that not all sources of background are included. This is the galactic center, and, as one would imagine, there are lots of sources there. Not just one TeV source modeled above. My impression from hallway conversations is that when you take into account all of these sources there is much less (if any) room left for the dark matter model. I don’t think that Fermi has published a paper on this yet, but I suspect they will try a some point soon.
Ok, so all’s well. Fermi will publish the paper and everyone will know the right way to do this non-trivial analysis. Except that things got away from them. Nature news has picked it up and wrote a short update. This is pretty widely read. Now Fermi has a PR problem on its hands – people are running around talking about their data and they’ve not really had a voice yet (the science coordinator for Fermi was interviewed for this bit, but her comments were relegated to the end of the post). Fermi is a big collaboration (yes, not the size of the LHC), even if their paper is close to publication it would probably be at least a month or more before the collaboration could agree on a response. So what to do?
There are a lot of issues surrounding making data public. To first order, it is the tax payers that are paying for these experiments, so the data should be public. On the other hand, you can already see that besides the work and infrastructure of making the data public (which costs real $$ – especially for a big experiment like Fermi or one of the LHC experiments), you have to respond to other folks that analyze your data – basically pointing out their mistakes and trying to help them along, even when they might be in competition with some of your internal analyses. In NASA’s case all the data has to be made public – it is written into every grant submission and NASA even provides money for it. This is not currently the case for particle physics. In many of these advanced experiments the data is quite complex – and someone that can’t depend on the large infrastructure of the experiment to help interpret it is bound to have some difficulties.
One only wishes that the authors had gotten in contact with some Fermi folks before submitting their note to the archive…
Units, Units, Units October 23, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics, physics life.4 comments
Undergraduates know that Physics Professors get all wound up about units. We can’t help ourselves.
But in reading a nytimes article this morning I couldn’t help myself:
In addition, Mr. Holder said, the authorities have seized more than $32 million in American currency, 2,700 pounds of methamphetamine, 4,400 pounds of cocaine, 16,000 pounds of marijuana and 29 pounds of heroin. More arrests are expected.
Well… this is what happens when you wait until the evening to write a blog post you spotted in the morning – they change the article. That 2700 pounds? It was 2700 kilograms (which is significantly more). In short – they had mixed kilograms and pounds. I was going to get on my high horse and… well, seems someone at the times is as sensitive about this as us physicists are.
But it also occured to me that the notion of units is rather flexible. For example, when we do particle physics calculations we often set the speed of light to 1. Normally it is 300000000 meters/second (really fast!). Seriously. We just set it to 1. We are so annoyed by having to carry around that number in our calculations that we just up and set it to one. We do that with an other constant as well (called h-bar). Your unit system ends up being very weird when you do that:
Normal Every Day Units Units in h-bar = c = 1 Energy Energy Time 1/Energy Mass Energy Length 1/Energy
I know this seems weird – but you see it all the time. This is just like making the following unit conversion in the list of drugs: instead of telling us the number of pounds or kilograms, tell us how much pot they got in terms of its street value. And to tell the truth, that would have been a very useful number to have in that article.
Heck, in the old days, the unit of measure in the market was the length of the king’s forearm. When the king changed, the whole country would change its unit system…
Un physics professors getting wound up with units is ironic – we don’t really use them that heavily when we get to more advanced calculations. On the other hand, we can only drop them because we have already learned how to use them. At least, that is what we tell ourselves and everyone else! 
