Coming from a lower middle class family, my education was financed by a combination of scholarships and financial aid. With the kind of system that you’re proposing, I would never have completed my BS in biology at a private university. Earning this degree led me to being accepted to medical school. I do not lack for job prospects, and have done quite well, benefiting from the current system. Under the system your proposing, I would almost certainly have been less successful than I am currently.
Again, if your looking at “no-thrills” why not use the FREE college I gave as an example, the College of the Ozarks. LINKHere is what Forbes says about it:
College of the Ozarks, in Point Lookout, MO, is a Christian liberal arts college that is interdenominational and known for its debt-free education. The school charges no tuition due to its student work programs and donations. Around 60% of the college’s revenue is derived from gift income and earnings from endowment. Forty one majors are offered, including 17 focused on education. The mandatory work study program requires students to clock 15 hours a week at one of 100 on-campus work stations, which include a dairy farm, grist mill and a student-run hotel and restaurant. Its Patriotic Education Travel Program allows students to accompany veterans to historic battle sites in places like France, Hawaii, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. The school has hosted important visitors, including former Pres. George W. Bush, former Gov. Sarah Palin and former PM of Great Britain Margaret Thatcher. The college participates in NAIA athletics. Its mascot is a Bobcat. Hard Work U is the school’s nickname. Slackers need not apply. LINK
I did check it. The enrolment is 1500 students, rounding up. The smallest college I attended at the time had an enrolment of 25000. Also, a lot of students DO work on campus already. Part of the financial aid is work-study. There are plenty of students working in dining halls, residence halls, libraries, etc. Everywhere you’d go would be staffed by students. Personally, even I worked 15 hours or more, though unpaid, on campus labs and as research assistant. Over the summer it was 20, paid.
You also forgot to add that this university relies on endowments and gifts. And that it had an issue years ago (but not extremely long ago) with one of their deans having a PhD precisely from a fraudulent diploma mill.
I think colleges should not be allowed to advertise either. Sending piles of glossy papers to everyone age 15-18 is a huge amount of money. TV ads cost thousands of dollars per minute, and really, who would pick a college based on a commercial anyway?
Dont they have alot of unions in California that protect the jobs of university workers? If so wouldnt that cut the amount of jobs that could be done by students or contractors?
Or send out stuff to alumni. I graduated over 20 years ago and I swear I get something in the mail from my college about once a month. A letter. A magazine. A flyer. etc… All trying to get me to send money. And the more money you make, the more you get.
But some students do not know that the opportunities are there. Granted, it is now perhaps a bit less valuable than it was before, pre-internet, but getting some of those packages are what convinced me to apply to some of them. I did get the packages and forms from others that I specifically requested. But it was only through those that I first saw what opportunities I had, beyond of what I thought.
And I think I did applied to some of the ones I got from the “glossy papers”. Granted, some of them I did have an idea that I wanted to apply to them, but the papers helped.
They are also not sent willy-nilly. Many of my classmates didn’t get them, or got different ones. They targeted students with high PSAT scores, for example. I also got a few offering summer school at their campuses (why I didn’t do it I don’t know).
Perhaps they can increase the standards as to whom to send, now (especially with internet), and reduce the amount sent, but I think they are still important, overall.
The ones who do TV ads were not the same doing the mail stuff. The advertising is most done in the for-profit institutions (because they need the students to make money).
Why stop there? No one should ever advertise anything!
How do you know that?
People respond to specific, targeted attention. But a quick search can find things like this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/16/AR2008061600199.html
I meant Berkeley the area being expensive, not high salaries for non-tenured profs. It also depends on department, I think. But Cal never paid well - in 1980 a famous EE professor invited me to apply, but apologized for starting salary being $15k. I went Bell Labs for double that.
The colleges who advertise are the ones looking for students. You don’t see a lot of advertisements from Harvard, Princeton or MIT.
http://www.wsj.com/itp/20150827/us/opinion
The president of the university of Colorado discusses cost-cutting and revenue-generating measures they’ve implemented.
I think this is what you meant to link to: http://www.wsj.com/articles/giving-college-administrators-a-business-education-1440628508
Yes, thank you.
Do you have any actual figures on this, such as marketing budgets? I thought it was well known that places like Harvard try very hard to get a lot of people to apply so that their acceptance rate would remain low and therefore they can get the highest possible rank. Since this is not something I have much expertise in, I could easily be persuaded that this assertion is completely wrong.
I think it would be interesting to compare just how much they spend on this and other marketing compared to other schools.
I got a huge, very glossy packet from MIT after I asked for admission information (this was in the early days of the Internet revolution). I don’t remember getting marketing materials from anything other than diploma mills aside from that.
Two types of marketing: Those that are somewhat targeted, and those that are massive floods.
The majority of ads that you see in mass media (radio, TV, newspapers) do not come from the top universities (unless perhaps they’re close by/the local universities). For example, when I was living in GA I didn’t see ads for UGA or GATech on TV, but I would regularly see ads for small private (assume for profit) universities. I would see occasionally ads on the newspaper in Athens for courses in UGA and the local community college (makes sense, these are the local schools).
Way back when I was in high school, after I took my PSAT, I did get glossy catalogues and info from some of the “high up” universities. But my guess is that these were more geared towards students who had either taken the PSAT or done relatively well on it (my siblings for example didn’t get them, and some of my classmates at least didn’t get them either). So the more recognized universities do send out some marketing, but not to everyone. In contrast to the universities who advertise in mass media and even I (not their target) can see them, these other universities only market to a group that is at least college-minded.
I remember getting from MIT without asking for admission information. I got from the ones I wanted admissions information, but I got from others too, which I had no interest in applying because they didn’t even have my field.
Did you watch college football? UGA is not particularly selective (54% acceptance rate) which suggests it’s probably advertising heavily during college football broadcasts, as most southeastern public schools do. Those may be more targeted towards raising money than attracting students, though.