Students don’t gain from a customer mentality
Some education professionals have noted that an increasing proportion of students these days are taking a more combative stance against classroom rules and grading policies, and are often even taking these complaints to their department chairs and college deans.
“I want to speak to your supervisors!!!”
The students described who miss tests and demand make-ups or late homework turnins are acting as if they are customers at a store and the teacher is just a service representative not living up to the customer’s expectation.
Is it the high and constantly growing tuition bill? Is it a frantic scramble on the student’s part for more money and time? Is it the influence of helicopter parents and the results of a generation growing up over-protected, perhaps even spoiled? Is it a rise in the number of students who find themselves overextended, realizing only too late that they had taken on more responsibility than they could handle? Of course, these students are the minority but the temptation to think this way is increasingly the norm in our consumer-centric culture.
But whatever the cause - whatever the excuse - this isn’t a good way for students to actually get an education in real-world expectations.
If a student treats college like a commodity and tuition as the only cost, they are inevitably going to fail at the task of getting an education - even if they receive the degree. Sure, maybe you can come up with some sad story today and weasel your way out of some bad grades, but how long will this strategy hold out?
A better way to view college is as work experience: Every great achievement or major mistake is going to affect your entire career’s development and potential. If you come into class late regularly, consider yourself lucky if you haven’t failed yet. At most jobs, you’ll be gone in the first week if you’re always 15 minutes behind the schedule. If you don’t follow directions on the first corporate report, you won’t be asked to present it to the executive board. If you haven’t done your assigned research before the meeting, there won’t be someone else to fill in the blank and keep the discussion progressing when it comes to your topic.
What you learn is the real value of college. The degree might get you into the door of your first good job, but if you didn’t learn anything from college then you might be walking right back out the door and into the unemployment line. If you think you know a better way, you’re free to start a business and prove it to the world.
Politics and the College Tuition Problem
Its everywhere in the news these days: prices are going up. With food and oil, the increases may come as a shock. However, in college education, price increases out-pacing official inflation calculations have been the norm for many years.
The Consumer Law and Policy blog asks: “How High can Tuition Go?”
Unfortunately, my response is: “A lot higher.” The popular political proposals might shift the burden around for a while, but it also has the unfortunate inflationary effect of adding more money to a system without necessarily adding more of the resources that money is chasing (professors, dorm rooms, textbooks, etc…)
But wait: Maybe not if the government gets involved. Poligazette has a write-up of the presidential candidates on education:
Obama has plenty of ways to bring new money into colleges, perhaps enough to keep the constant rise in tuition costs for a few more years by shifting the financial burden to taxpayers. Of course, government spending plays a large role in the current inflationary climate to begin with, so some of this extra spending could also have a part in adding a little bit more to fuel and food costs.
McCain’s plan doesn’t even really address higher education, so there’s no real reason to expect any solutions beyond periodic increases in federal student aid for the purpose of nudging students into the increasingly expensive programs.
Tuition prices probably won’t drop until after enrollment drops, and we have a political system in place that favors spending. Politicians don’t want to be blamed for the loss of college enrollment, and they’ll be glad to open up our wallets to make sure it doesn’t happen on their watch.
Of course, if our politicians don’t act soon to make tuition more expensive, the Chinese might. Chinese citizens are increasingly able to get state permission to travel to the United States and the 17% annual increase of visitors includes students looking for college enrollment. While it is only a small portion of the total Chinese population that can afford U.S. college tuition rates, that small percentage still accounts for millions of potential students.
For parents and college-bound kids, perhaps the only solution is to buckle down: save up, apply for more grants and scholarships, and find ways to cut non-essential costs.
Student Loan Companies Rating and Dropping Schools
Today offers another update in the on-going student loan drama. The current situation is a sort of consequence of the excessive profit scandals from earlier in the decade, and the more recent freezing of credit and capital markets related to consumer debt. As these problems converged, the lenders are finding a need to drastically reduce risk and maximize returns. Since the Congressional reaction to the high profits was to put lower subsidies and interest rates on federally backed loans, this is forcing the student loan companies to rate schools and consider their track record of producing graduates who can afford to pay back their debts.
From a pure risk management point of view, this leads to a necessary calculus about tuition and returns. The cost of a specific college should be proportionate to the amount of money a student can expect to earn after completing the degree. It makes sense to attend Harvard or Yale if you can be reasonably sure that you’ll make more money than if you attended a different, lesser-known school.
Citibank has taken this line of thinking further and identified entire categories of colleges that return a poor salary relative to their costs, and the biggest losers are: community colleges, private for-profit colleges, and less traditional institutions.
Some lenders are indentifying specific schools to cut from their lending lists. This can’t be fun for the administrators, teachers, and students. Some students are currently being notified that the loans they’ve been using won’t be available next academic year, and the fallout could mean declining enrollment at targeted colleges as soon as 2008. Institutions with their own debt obligations may have a hard time meeting those costs without cutting other expenses, such as instructors, building expansion or renovation, etc…
The downward spiral of the economy seems to show no end. We would all like more money for college, or medicine, or public safety, or a cleaner world - but we’ve reached a point where more money in the system just causes prices to go up. Honestly, I don’t know a simple solution to the larger financial problem other than sucking it up and finding new ways to provide goods and services at cheaper costs. Fewer things can be bought with debt, so maybe instead of trying to save the student loan system we should be thinking of ways to send students to school while paying for it up front.
Summer Money for College Students
Summer is here! While a lot of students are ready to just hit the beach and avoid anything productive this vacation, the season also provides a great opportunity for anyone needing money for college and looking to get ahead of their financial situation.
The most obvious way to make money over the summer is to find a new job. While the market for employment isn’t great now, there are still seasonal jobs opening up: lifeguard, landscaping, summer camp counselor, or just taking care of and watching over the neighborhood kids while their parents go to work. Pay for summer work might not the greatest, but the money earned or the student loans you’re saved from taking out can really change a student’s financial outlook by the next fall.
The next thing to remember is that its never a bad time to look for scholarships and grants. Scholarship and grant deadlines depend on the specific program, so no matter what time of year it is there is some opportunity to find money for college with a deadline coming up soon. Check out the Fastweb link on the left, or try our own free scholarship search to find contests, financial aid offers, loan forgiveness programs, and of course scholarships and grants for any major or hobbies you might be interested in.
Here’s another idea for saving money in the long run that some people may not think of: Attend more classes over summer! In the short term, this may raise your tuition bill, but if you take enough summer classes during your first three years you might be able to knock a semester off at the end of your final year in college. Obviously, this depends on the fees that your school is charging - if you have to pay extra for summer housing or if you have to pay for each year’s tuition up front, this might not be very helpful at all. In those circumstances you’d obviously save money by returning home for the summer and focusing on the job and scholarship searches.
Building a website can also be a financial boost and a chance to learn new skills and keep the mind sharp. Free web hosts are available so you can get started with no risk, or for just a few bucks a month you can set up a shared host that affords more flexibility and control over your online assets.
Most students might be on vacation, but most students are also graduating with record-levels of debt these days. A little extra effort now can pay off big time when compounding interest enters the picture.