(02/28/2011 03:56 PM)
Channeling
American out-of-state tuition is designed to channel people,
not to raise money. Unless you are rich, or
you rate a merit-based scholarship, you go
somewhere in-state. Most state universities have student bodies
which are ninety or ninety-five percent in-state. Admission
standards are higher out-of-state, as well. The two factors
tend to coincide. There are very few places which are both
expensive and easy to get into.
One might add that in liberal arts departments, advanced
graduate students can often register de-facto full-time
for one or three hours, paying only a small fraction of what
a law or business student (MBA) would pay. The
university would prefer that people studied liberal arts, and if
they insist on studying law or business, they are made
to pay extra for it. In the western states, they have
something called WICHE, organized by the Western Governors'
Conference. So many western states only have
populations of a million or so, and cannot afford to run the
range of academic programs which a state like Ohio or
Illinois can. So they have a system of exemptions from
out-of-state tuition for people from the WICHE states for
selected programs. This tends to be applied to
professional school programs, typically health-care-related,
rather than to liberal arts. The nature of the work is different,
being more group-oriented. An advanced medical student
might be registered for "the surgical clerkship," or "the
obstetric clerkship," carrying sixteen credit hours, which works
out to living in the hospital, assigned to a
particular service, and being on call twenty-four hours a day,
sleeping between cases. The curriculum being so structured,
adjustments cannot just be organized on an ad-hoc
basis. People who have good reasons for coming in from
out-of-state are given appropriate discounts. Programs like WICHE
do not mean, however, that freshmen from, say, Idaho
are allowed to go to school in South Dakota without the financial
penalties kicking in.
Similarly, there are tuition differentials between community
colleges, state teachers' colleges, and state universities,
corresponding to differences in admission requirements. In
borderline cases, people are expected to start in community
colleges (doing what would be considered secondary school
work in Europe or Japan). They can then move up
to state teachers' colleges, and then go on to
universities. The point of this is that community
colleges do not have fraternities. A certain combination of wealth
and academic performance is required to go where
one could join a fraternity. To go within the reach of a
fraternity, you have to demonstrate that either, a) you can afford
to be a playboy, academically, financially, and socially, or
b) that you are of a sufficiently scholarly temperament not
to be inclined to be a playboy, and are impervious to the
fraternity recruiters. There is a delicate balance-- fraternities
are allowed to go so far, and no further, in recruiting their
drinking schools.
Englishmen, being at a distance, tend to miss these
kind of subtleties, and when they set out to create an "American
Plan," they are apt to create a rigid bureaucratic
monstrosity which no American would have created. That seems to be
what is happening in England now.
About a year ago, I heard about something curious. It seemed that
an English college was offering a course in wearing
high-heels. So I took the trouble to track down
the references. It turned out, on inquiry, that the
college in question was South Thames College, a "Further
Education College" (FEC). This term will probably be instinctively
familiar to Jonathan Jarrett, but to Americans at a distance, it
takes a certain amount of thought to get one's brain
around a FEC.
It seems that a FEC is somewhere between an American
vocational high school and an American community college, in other
words, a community college with a minimum entrance age
of sixteen instead of eighteen. I gather a FEC is the
kind of place for kids who didn't do very well
on their O-levels (now called GCSE's), taken at the
age of sixteen. Looking at the South Thames College catalog, it
seemed a good deal grittier than an American community
college, and much more relentless in the assumption that
anyone with brains had been skimmed off and sent somewhere else.
As I read through the catalog, I felt progressively depressed,
thinking, "isn't there _anything_ these people do at more than a
third-rate level?" An American Vocational High School or
Community College tends to have things, not
necessarily academic, which it does well.
Community colleges tend to deal in practical skills at a
high level. You can often learn to fly an airplane at a
community college, or drive an eighteen-wheeler truck, or
become a locomotive engineer, etc. Then there are various
kinds of mechanics' programs. In short, you can learn all
kinds of things at a community college which a Harvard or
Yale (or Oxford or Cambridge) liberal arts graduate would
not have a clue about. It was this sort of quality
which seemed to be lacking at South Thames College.
The business about the high heels turned out to be a
supplemental course, but the burden of it was that the girl
students were being officially informed that they were too stupid
to get by on merit, so they would therefore have to learn vamp
tricks as well. That seemed rather brutal.
http://idle.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/06/10/1623246
http://www.south-thames.ac.uk/Chapters/Courses.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Thames_College
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_education
(03/04/2011 10:26 AM)
American Community
Colleges Are An Expression of Community.
In America, the social distinctions are less absolute. I got my
undergraduate degrees (in Anthropology and Engineering), in the
late seventies and early eighties, at the University of
Cincinnati, where my father was a professor of Philosophy. As
a "faculty brat," I was entitled to take unlimited numbers
of course and degrees, tuition-free, and it was taken for
granted that I should enroll in something or other, every term,
summers included. I did a lot of taking courses by way of
exploration which I could not have done if I had been paying
tuition. After I had earned my first degree, in
Anthropology, and was studying engineering, I took liberal
arts courses on an "audit," or non-graded basis, so that I
could depart without formalities if the subject should
prove not so interesting as it had first appeared.
It was much the same principle as starting to read a book in the
library without being required to finish it, let alone to write
and submit a reading note.
The University of Cincinnati controlled all the state-funded
higher eduction in the area ("French model"), including
not only the medical school, but also three or four
community colleges. On a couple of occasions, I wound up
taking courses in the community colleges, and got to know
something about them. I took some standard academic courses
during the summers between high-school (a standard practice, one
of the functions of the American community college is to provide
suitable instruction for advanced high-school students, on a
part-time basis), and met the kind of classmates who were,
um, synchronizing community college enrollment with the
collection of unemployment insurance. Instead of everyone being
in their socially assigned compartment (Sixth-Form college, FEC,
etc.), there was a kind of cross-stratigraphy of age and
ability.
On another level, when I had finished my second undergraduate
degree, my engineering degree, and was waiting the better part
of a year to get into graduate school, I went and enrolled in a
course in woodworking in the University of Cincinnati's
equivalent of an English "tech." This was a school known as the
Ohio College of Applied Science (originally known as the
Ohio Mechanics Institute). OCAS had a range of programs,
from traditional crafts, such as woodworking, to styles of
engineering only slightly less mathematical than those taught in
the regular engineering school. One oddity was a nondegree
program in Fire Science, designed to prepare men for
the civil service examination for the ranks of Lieutenant
and Captain in the city fire department. At any rate, when I
first visited the woodworking shop, two things happened. First,
I was greeted by a professor of French, who knew my father, and
who was doing carpentry for his own amusement. Second, the
shopmaster issued me with a piece of wood, a carpenter's plane,
and a steel carpenter's square; and instructed me to plane the
piece of wood perfectly flat. Perfectly, mind you. Cincinnati is
a German-American town, originally shaped by the refugees from
the 1848 revolution, and this was craftsmanship in the
German manner.
This sort of "larger cohesion" was the sort of thing which
seemed absent from the South Thames catalog.