by David Safier
I want to begin with a note addressed to Jay Greene:
Jay, it’s time to put your academic mettle to the test.
Address the criticisms of your recent study for the Goldwater Institute on
skyrocketing administrative costs at universities by answering the criticisms
in a genuine, scholarly fashion. Better yet, submit the report to a group of
scholars for an objective peer review and let the academic chips fall where they may.
Before I saw Jay Greene’s recent report, I had modest hopes
when I heard he was joining the Goldwater Institute. But now I’m thinking he may
just be another intelligent, highly paid hack who follows the G.I. Research
Report Maxim: Begin with the conclusions you want, then manufacture “facts” to
support them.
I knew Greene was buds with Matthew Ladner, whose
misstatements and misrepresentations about education are legendary. Who can forget Ladner’s
assertion that Bus Drivers are Bureaucrats? Ladner is a
frequent poster on Greene’s blog.
But I also knew Greene coauthored a recent study
concluding that a 20 year long voucher program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hadn’t
resulted in any gains for the students who participated when they were compared with similar students in public schools. That flies in the face
of conservative dogma stating that vouchers will lead to higher
educational achievement every time.
Wow, I thought to myself, a conservative who doesn’t cook
the books in his research. I may have found an honest man!
And then comes Greene’s recent G.I. report saying the growth of
administrations at universities far outstrips
the growth of the other parts of the schools.
When it comes to education, nothing makes the
conservative/libertarian G.I.
happier than showing schools spend too much money, mainly outside the
classroom. If it means you assert there is a 1-to-1 ratio of teachers to
bureaucrats in Arizona’s K-12 schools, arriving at that figure by calling bus
drivers, maintenance workers and cafeteria workers bureaucrats like Ladner did, so be it.
That’s what you do.
So when Greene arrived at a similar conclusion, I thought,
maybe I haven’t found an honest man after all — or maybe he’s a once-honest
man who was seduced to join the dark side of the conservative force by Ladner
(In BfA’s comments section, Ladner once said he likes to think of himself as
Darth Vader – a telling admission which he might have been wiser keeping to
himself).
Now, my assessment may be unfair. It may be that Greene’s
report is based on an honest and objective analysis of the best data he could
find. If that’s true, he should deviate from the G.I. standard operating procedure,
forget all the politics and the posturing, and address the criticisms leveled at his
report in an honest, open, scholarly fashion.
If he does, I’ll put Greene back in the “modestly hopeful”
category. If not, I’ll have to write him off as another high paid laborer in the
G.I. propaganda factory.
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I am also very interested in seeing Greene’s response. The allegations made in ASU’s rebuttal are quite serious and, if true, quite damning.
Bill Aslte noted something interesting in a comment on another thread and that is, according to the ‘study’, private colleges/universities have twice the ‘bloat’ as public colleges /universities. It then becomes truly bizarre for the Greene study to recommend the solution to the problem is to cut funding for public universities and student aid. It is hardly surprising coming from the Goldwater Institute, but it seems beyond belief that this can actually be put forward as a solution to the problem based on the data in the ‘study.’
Feeling real victory in their attempt to discredit public k-12 education, right-wing conservatives will be focusing more attention to trying to do the same to higher education. We will likely be hearing much more about administration as well as claims, likely made mostly by people with PhDs, that what we actually need to be doing is limiting access to higher education instead of expanding it. These arguments will face several problems. One is that higher education is in a much better position to respond to claims being made by the right-wing. Also, there is a very extensive system of private higher education in this country and it is quite clear that private higher education does not result in lower costs. Finally, most people are quite aware that a college degree has significant economic benefits to one’s earning potential (let alone other areas of life) and that many ‘for-profit’ institutions are much less rewarding in that regard as can be seen in things like the shockingly high college loan default rates. While it can be argued that the more people have college education the less it will reap economically, wanting to base public policy on this belief is basically telling most people they are going to get the short end of the stick.
The shame in all of this is that higher education is facing some real problems which are not because of being ‘over-funded’ but rather because in the past 40 years the expectations being placed on higher education have grown immensely. It is expected not just to educate but also to be a driver of economic well-being through their very presense as well as partnering with private industry and improving the community they are located in and the general public. Whether these and other expectations are realistic is a real discussion that needs to take place but instead the Greene/GI solution doesn’t address these and would rather see public institutions do more with less and thereby do more badly. This is likely the result they want since public higher education provides tremendous access to opportunity but their ideology wants it gone.