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American colleges: High Costs, Low Results Part 2

While University bureaucrats feast on taxpayer funds, they provide increasingly deficient education, in several key ways. The full-time college professor, with the time and facility to provide excellent quality for students, is increasingly being replaced by part-timers.

One example comes from Susan McNamara, writing in the Boston Globe  “Nearly 15,000 contingent and adjunct faculty teach in greater Boston. Many work at multiple schools, trying to make enough to support themselves and their families on low pay with no benefits. All have advanced degrees, and many live at or below the poverty level. We are now a majority of all college and university faculty, both regionally and nationally. Adjuncts are not temporary employees. Most of us do not work part-time hours. Yet, we are denied full-time pay and benefits, and have no job security. Many only survive by creating a heavy, piecemeal schedule across multiple schools. Adjuncts often have insufficient time to prepare to teach a course because they have little advance notice they are teaching at all. Without an office, we may have difficulty meeting with a student to discuss anything confidential, such as grades, or to provide additional instructional assistance.”

With dollars being diverted away from academic needs, the result is an educational experience that fails to produce graduates ready to take on the world.

Scott Jaschik, writing in Inside Higher Ed reports on a survey of employers performed by  The Association of American Colleges and Universities which found that “When it comes to the types of skills and knowledge that employers feel are most important to workplace success, large majorities of employers do NOT feel that recent college graduates are well prepared. This is particularly the case for applying knowledge and skills in real-world settings, critical thinking skills, and written and oral communication skills — areas in which fewer than three in 10 employers think that recent college graduates are well prepared. Yet even in the areas of ethical decision-making and working with others in teams, many employers do not give graduates high marks…”

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Fox News  has reported that “On an October evening in 2013, Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of more than 6,000 at the University at Buffalo — a public college in upstate New York — speaking in a low-key, folksy manner about economic growth in the state’s second largest city. The 30-minute speech earned Clinton $275,000 — a hefty chunk of the $2 million in total she has received for delivering university speeches since leaving her post as secretary of state in February 2013. On Monday, Clinton, now the Democratic presidential frontrunner, unveiled a $350 billion bailout plan for college graduates faced with crushing student debt dubbed ‘the new college compact’ — a proposal her critics cast as blatantly hypocritical and disingenuous. The fee paid by the University at Buffalo could have covered a year of tuition for 42 students at the public institution — an irony her detractors, including rival GOP presidential candidates, were quick to point out.”

A Bloomberg  analysis determined that the annual cost to the taxpayers for the Clinton proposal could be as high as $520 billion over ten years.

The support comes not only from national figures such as Hillary Clinton, but from state politicians as well.  New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo recently unveiled a proposal to provide free tuition to state schools for students whose parents earn less than $125,000.