CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE FALSE ECONOMY.

I've posted, repeatedly, on the errors of cost cutting for its own sake, whether or not it's announced with some bafflegab about "better service" or "enhanced productivity."

Today, we'll turn the forum over to Laura "11-D" McKenna, whose eldest son has just started at Rutgers, you know, the public university in New Jersey that liked being a crash-test dummy for Penn State so much that they followed Penn State into the Big Ten, which, with regional divisions, means they regularly play Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State as well as you-know-who.

Here's what the enhanced productivity looks like on the academic side.

The good side is that he has totally drunk the kool-aid. Every item of clothing that he wears has the college logo. He proudly tells me that his school is damn tough. The kids are smart enough to go to Ivy League schools. Many of his friends were admitted to Ivy League schools. They just didn’t want to waste their money.

The land-grants and mid-majors are in the same business as Harvard, and the continued success of Jonah's cohort has a name, Spielberg Effect.

The false economy, though, is that the entering class are as lost when it comes to schedule completion as a Rutgers defensive coordinator preparing to face Wisconsin will be.

I’m pretty appalled at everything else. The advisement office put him in the wrong Intro to Physics class. There are two Intro to Physics classes at his school – one has a calculus pre-requisite. He took him a week to figure out that he was in the wrong class. It was too late to get into the non-calc Physics class, so they put him in the Intermediate German class and didn’t warn him that the class was pretty much only for advanced students majoring in German.

All of his teachers are adjuncts. And they tell the students that are over worked and under paid all the time. One got fired in the middle of the semester and was replaced by a very, very old adjunct who complains all the time about his physical pains. He said that he can’t do office hours, because his wife has to drive to him school.

His bio and calc classes have 400 students.

I'm resisting the temptation to suggest that taxing graduate tuition waivers might be a way of draining the adjunct swamp.  It's sufficient, here, to suggest that some of those kids who were admitted to the Ivies might seek to transfer for junior year, once they recognize that the Rutgers -- heck, it's all of the state flagships -- bargain is no bargain.

A small private college would easily cost another $35,000. So, I still think we did the right thing provided we make some changes. I’m taking over academic advisement for him. I spent two hours going over all the course guides, syllabi, and major requirements for the spring terms. I called Deans. I yelled at some. We’ll pay for a math tutor. After we pick his classes, we going to lean into Rate My Professor and make sure that he gets better teachers next semester.

Perhaps this is why only 58% of students graduate in four years.

That's part of it, but these are the difficulties the motivated students face.  We're not talking about the Distressed Material and the Greek letter organization cohorts here.

The comments at the post are instructive.  Happy Thanksgiving Break.