minahkaypoh

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests. I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change. In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 p...

Richard Vedder and my wife, Sara Goldrick-Rab, squared off yesterday on Patt Morrison's radio program on Southern California Public Radio yesterday. They addressed the question, "Who needs college?" Vedder, the founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington DC, recently announced a joint proposal suggesting that some kids shouldn't go to college at all (as recently described in this New York Times article ). At Sherman Dorn notes , making such distinctions is tricky and generally involves suggestions that "the type of people who don't benefit from college" are "other people's kids." In fact, on the radio program, Vedder acknowledged that he would not counsel his own kids from attending college. Of course. As my wife noted in the radio program, many unprepared rich kids attend college, but many better prepared lower-income students cannot, due to affordability and other constraints. And she's got good r...