Life as a Physicist

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.

From an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Faculty and staff members at the University of California will be placed on furlough starting in September for seven to 26 days per year, according to a plan released today by the system’s president, Mark G. Yudof. The plan, which is expected to be approved by the university’s Board of Regents next week, will amount to a salary cut of 4 to 10 percent, with the highest-earning employees facing the largest cuts.

The temporary furlough will push the university’s faculty compensation to about 20 percent behind comparative institutions, university officials said at a news conference. “We’re going to really have to work hard to come up with creative means to retain the excellent faculty that we have now and to further recruit people,” said Mary Croughan, chair of the university’s Academic Senate.

I feel for California. The state of Washington was in the same place. They are cutting salaries, reducing classes offered, and increasing tuition to try to close the budget gap. We did almost the same thing except for the salary cuts (and we raised tuition considerably more than they did). The trade off is interesting. That second paragraph points out the danger to this approach – others will poach the faculty. Hopefully California can fix the problems they have (economy comes back enough, change proposition 13, etc.) – they have some time as very few people have money to be poaching other universities.

Things are bad here in Washington, but at least I know the future and can plan on the cuts. The California budget crisis is still ongoing – and perhaps the legislature will pull back at the last minute. But given the constraints I don’t see how that will happen. The University of California system is one of the gems in the nation – it is too bad seeing something like this happen.

This cartoon made me a bit sensitive. Here I am in the South of France. I’m in an apartment with a great view of the sea… It sure feels like I’m kicking back. Of course, I’m still working like crazy (especially since my family hasn’t joined me yet). What was the first thing I spent money on here in Marseille? It wasn’t cheese. It wasn’t even Pastis. It was a bit 1080p monitor for my computer so I could work efficiently from the apartment I’m renting. I spent 150 euros for my three months here.

But 2 days a week? What university is that guy planning on working in!? And do they pay decent money? Sign me up!

Well… I used to think it Washington was the worst. It still is, but California is doing is best to take the crown. I’m talking about the budget of course.

Washington state legislature cut support for University of Washington 26%. That would have been the end of UW as I know it – and I guess the state legislature knew it too. To prevent that they allowed us to raise tuition on undergraduates by 30% over the course of two years (30%!!!). Which we will do. This is old news now – the reality came down at the end of April. Final budgets are being drawn up and they are every bit as bad as we were worried at the time. But the institution will survive.

Most states escaped such dramatic changes. I think only Nevada was going to be hurt as badly as we were. California was bad when I wrote that post – about 10%. What I didn’t realize was the 10% depended on a bunch of initiatives being passed that would raise various taxes. Apparently the complete political establishment (and a lot of people I know, including me) fooled themselves into thinking this was going to pass. Ops! I think the only budget related initiative that passed was one making sure the legislature didn’t give themselves a raise!

The upshot is going to be nasty. Berkeley’s chancellor just laid it on the line:

…the campus now facing a budget shortfall of around $145 million — "a shocking number," he said, more than twice the size of the deficit expected just six weeks ago…

…Birgeneau said all campus units will be asked to cut their budgets by an average of 20 percent over two years, instead of the 8 percent cuts expected as recently as mid-May. Staff who survive these contractions — and, the chancellor emphasized, "there will be eliminations of staff positions" — will see their paychecks shrink.

"We can all collectively expect wage reductions in the neighborhood of 8 percent," reported Birgeneau, adding that the formula could include some combination of furloughs and actual pay cuts.

Wow – 8% pay cut? That sucks. I’ve got a lot of friends in the Ca system. If only UW had some extra cash I’d say we should be off hunting there!! Too bad we will also have a multi-year hiring freeze.

To be fair, the Ca budget isn’t final yet. And it could be some of this is a warning shot at the legislature. But if it is anything like the Washington legislature, all the Ca university system will get back is a big ***ger.

I read this in an article on ars technica. First the setting:

When San Jose State University student Kyle Brady published the source code of his completed homework assignments after finishing a computer science class, his professor vigorously objected. The professor insisted that publication of the source code constituted a violation of the school’s academic integrity policy because it would enable future students to cheat. Brady stood his ground as the confrontation escalated to the school’s judicial affairs office, which sided with the student and affirmed that professors at the university cannot prohibit students from posting source code.

And second, the thing that made me decide to write this post:

Cory Doctorow shared his thoughts about the issue on Thursday in a blog post on BoingBoing. Doctorow suggests that assignments are ultimately more valuable to the students when the work that they produce can have broader purpose than merely fulfilling academic requirements. He also rightly points out that peer review of source code and studying existing implementations are both common practices in the real world of professional software development.

These are both compelling points and they illustrate how traditional academic sensibilities can be detrimental to the intellectual development of students.

Give me a break. This has nothing to do with any high end ideals. It has to do with work. In lower division courses there are only so many types of homework problems you can write without making something really complex, and in upper division courses creating a good problem that is hard, solvable, and interesting takes an immense amount of time. The professor of the course just wants to be able to re-use the homework problems – and cut/pasting the answer from the web is something he/she wants to make as hard as possible.

I wrote a bunch of problems for my graduate course this last year – they took a lot of work – I spent hours on them. I’d very much like to be able to reuse them – or reuse the core of the problem. If the solutions were widely available then that means I have that much more work I need to do next year.

I think, on its own, the answer to the question about a student posting their source code is clear: they should be allowed to do it. But the issue isn’t black and white when you get right down to it – that solution is a product of both the students and the professor’s sweat. Finally, actually saying that you can’t post code is totally unenforceable in this day and age (e.g. RIAA). There is also the basic fact that a student that decides to cheat is only cheating themselves… boy, that sounds kind-a lame, doesn’t it?

I don’t have an opinion in this particular instance. But I think the overly simplistic view that is taken is a bit sensationalist. Cory Doctorow wrote a much more nuanced bit:

But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience — especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives. Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.

I disagree. It isn’t just about convenience of the profs – it is about having a good course for the next student. It is about the professor learning what worked to teach the students this time and refining it next time – these things have to be factored in. Both the students and the professors, it seems to me, have a shared responsibility here.

Though a bit later on he seems to go off the rails (no pun intended):

I’ve always thought it was miserable that we take the supposed best and brightest in society, charge them up to $60,000 a year in fees, then put them to work for four years on producing busywork that no one — not them, not their profs, not other scholars — actually wants to read.

Well, gee. When you start learning something you have to start with the basics. You can’t start with Quantum physics – you need to understand a bit about mechanics, E&M, and other things – after all, quantum had better devolve to those in the macroscopic world! You can start out students on cutting edge research – we all do it when we take on undergraduate researchers – but they have to learn the basics too. It is, sadly, a fact of life. If you don’t know how to start a program, how can you learn how to write cool code!?!?

BTW, if you read down, you can find a response from the student involved in this case.

This email arrived last night in my inbox from Emmert, the president of the University of Washington:

For the University of Washington, the resulting budget decisions are dramatic. The bad news is that the Legislature decided to reduce state funding to the six public four-year college and universities more than any other sector in state government. The University of Washington received the highest percentage cut in all of higher education-26 percent. This is a stark and sobering number. Beginning July 1, one quarter of our funding from the state will no longer exist. It is unprecedented in state history, and as far as we know, it is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low.

That is impressive, isn’t it? 26%. States worse off than us have cut their big universities by far less. I don’t know what folks were thinking.

They threw us a pill to try to mitigate the pain. But the pill is rather bitter. Essentially the state transferred a large part of the funding they used to take care of onto the backs of our students. If you are going to cut by 26% then something has to be done in order to mitigate the cuts. The university does not survive as one of the premiere ones in the USA if you don’t. In the end the cuts end up being 12%.

I’m curious to see what happens to individual departments. I also hope the university tracks (and makes public) how many people they loose because of this. I suspect a lot of people are looking for jobs elsewhere now.