Eating our seed corn

State colleges and universities nationwide are becoming less affordable, meaning that families have to spend an increasing percentage of their incomes to pay for tuition.

The increases include community college tuition, which is a crime. Community colleges should be as close to free as we can make them.

Meanwhile, to cut costs, colleges and universities use lots of part time faculty to teach classes. A study indicates that the part timers are less effective as instructors than full time faculty.

That's not surprising. When you pay someone low wages which include little or no office hours or prep time and the part timers are often shuttling between two or three campuses to eke out a living, they're not going to give 100%. Combine that with the possibility that the part timers are less carefully chosen than full time staff and you're more likely to get instructors whose academic preparation and commitment to teaching is lower.

A high school teaching colleague once said, when education budgets in Oregon were being slashed on a yearly basis, "We're eating our seed corn." That pretty much sums it up.