Apt. 11D

The Whys of Academic Paywalls

Let's say you get an obscure and alarming disease. Let's not make this scenario too scary. Let's say that this disease turns your big toe green and emits an embarrassing odor. What's the first thing that many of  us would do? We would google "alarming stinky green  foot disease." You might find a wikipedia page and a few newspaper articles on the green foot disease, but you would not be able to read any academic research on the topic, because you don't have a university ID. 

Why can't you read academic research? Why can't you read academic research that was conducted at public universities, which is funded by YOUR tax dollars? Let me tell you....

Not only is the research is hidden from the likes of you and me who don't have an academic ID card anymore, but also academics have to pay to read their own research. Yes, academics write research, receive no profits, and then have to pay to read it again. Oh, the insanity. 

UPDATE: Thanks so much to all my off-the-record friends who helped me with this article. And thanks to the love around the blogosphere. Yesterday, my article shot to the top of the Atlanic's Most Popular list. I was thrilled. 

More from Scott Lemieux, Boing Boing, and reddit. 

Henry Farrell calls on all academics to boycott Elsevier. 

UPDATE2: While the response to this essay was overwhelmingly popular, a couple of people have criticized it. The critics say that JSTOR is one of the good guys and I shouldn't be calling for their dismissal. The point is that we don't need ANY academic databases anymore. They cost us a lot of money. I didn't have the time to run down the exact amounts, but think hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, if not more, at the larger universities. If all journals just put their issues online, continued their usual peer review process, skipped printing the hard copy versions, then we would save money AND increase access. There's really no downside. 

Dollars and Common Sense at Universities

I'm doing a little poking around academic expenditures this morning, she says vaguely. I came across this fascinating article about Rutgers. Apparently, Rutgers is cutting funding for professors, while bolstering their athletic program. 

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

 

Penn State's Shame

I'm knee deep in kids this week. Yes, more school vacations. Frankly, I am very grouchy right now about all this parenting. I keep thinking that my skills are not being used to their highest capacity at this moment. 

So, Wendy has requested a Penn State thread. I don't have much to add to the discussion other than a heave of disgust at the students who protested Paterno's dismissal. Wendy shot me a good link that somewhat explains the students' behavior. 

Open thread. 

Constraints on State Colleges

We've been pickering for six days about college education, which is about three days longer than the rest of the blogosphere. Not that I'm keeping track or anything. 

After all that bickering, no one has convinced me why I would send my kid to a private college for $30-55K, instead of a state college of equal educational quality for $10-15K. Especially when that difference in price means a life time of college debt. 

The trouble is that state colleges may not be able to maintain their quality or their low price tag. 

Peter Orzag writes that under pressure from failing state governments, state colleges are not keeping up private colleges on a number of measures. With the effects of globalization and a poor labor market, we need quality college graduates more than ever.

His suggestions are interesting: 

One place to start would be to focus on raising productivity in public higher education, so that we could do a better job of delivering quality with constrained budgets. Would we be better off if research dollars were even more concentrated in fewer institutions, and a larger share of faculty specialized in teaching (which is often given short shrift at research universities)? Can more businesses partner with public colleges to create curriculums to teach specific job skills? Can remote learning and online coursework, especially for remedial subjects, finally realize their potential?

Why Student Debt Happens

From n+1's April article, "Bad Education":

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product. And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major. 

More Tough Love on Academia

Think I'm tough on academia? Read Tony Grafton:

... traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA...

Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into...

But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford...

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.”...

 Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. 

The College Racket

There has been some criticism of the OWS movement, because they can't seem to line up their problems with solutions. They have picked the wrong bad guy for their woes, some say. Well, perhaps. They have a lot of woes, so there are a lot of different bad guys and a lot of different solutions.

Let me simplify things for a moment. After reading through dozens of posts on We Are the 99 Percent blog, it is clear that two common complaints are college loans and the lack of jobs for college educated graduates. 

College loans and the inadequacies of college degrees are huge problems. The national student loan debt is $25,250. If parent loans are included, that number jumps to $34,000. Some states, like NH and OH, were especially tough on college students. Certain schools like NYU were more painful than others. 

The schools where students graduated with the highest average debt loads -- between $29,800 and $45,350 -- include New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Florida Institute of Technology, Kentucky State University and Temple University.

There's no question that Higher Education needs the same of oversight and regulation that Wall Street deserves. Colleges are ripping off students. Tuition plus room and board at NYU will cost you $57,000 per year. All for some stupid communications major. 

Parents and students also need to be smart about these matters. Here are some tips: 

1) Only Ivy League colleges are worth the tuition. Do not attend tiny, crappy, mediocre private colleges, unless you really have access to bundles of cash to burn.  Go to respectable state colleges. 

2) Pick your major carefully. You can major in a liberal arts or humanities and still get a job afterwards, but you have to be very realistic about what your options will be afterwards. If you major in poetry, you may be using your skills to write press releases for a pharmaceutical company. If you major in philosophy, you will have less job opportunities than if you majored in computer science. Why not double major and choose both?

3) Be careful of the practical majors. A lot of education and business majors don't have jobs right now either. And because so many of those programs don't have the heft of traditional liberal arts classes, the gradutates don't know how to write and missed out on four years of reading good books. This is not the time to take Easy A classes. 

4) Colleges have really crappy job placement programs, so you can't depend on them. You can't even rely on them to help you with your resume, so you might need to pay someone to fix up your resume. 

5) I love college internships, where you get real work experience in exchange for college credits. Do it, if you can. 

6) If you can't get into a good college, don't go. Do not attend for-profit colleges or colleges with poor ratings. Spend a year or two taking classes at a community college to improve your grades or start looking into some other profession. 

7) If you can't get a college internship, then work when you are in college. It will reduce your student loan debt and you will have a job to put on your resume. 

8) Do you not choose a school, because it has hot tubs in the dorm or because it has a killer football team. Choose a school where the students spend their Saturday afternoon reading in the library. 

9) And do not, under any circumstances, take all the loan money that they give. They will give you whatever you want. Do not take it. You are allowed $15,000 in debt. OK, that was an arbitrary number, but I think that is an acceptable amount of money that a 21 year old kid should be saddled with. But no more!

Is that enough tough love? Any more suggestions? I think I want to be the Suze Orman of Higher Education.

The Big Shark Publishers in Shallow Waters

This morning, I made a todo list. It was a very long, cumbersome list, but this marks a major advance in my life. For the past couple of weeks, I've been only dealing with whatever emergency was right in front of my face. It was impossible to think beyond that immediate moment. 

One of the many crises that happened yesterday was dealing my father's textbook publisher.

My dad is the editor of a popular political science textbook. It's in its 20th edition or something. He and his co-editor pull together pro and con articles on hot button political topics, such as gay marriage or gun control. They edit the articles down to a manageable length, and then write introductions to the topics to guide classroom conversation. 

He started off with a small fish publisher in the 1980s, which was bought out by a medium fish publisher, and then the medium fish publisher was bought out by a shark fish later in the 1990s. Well, it appears that this Big Shark Publisher is flapping around in shallow waters now. 

His editor sent him a long e-mail with requests for technical work. She wanted him to scan these articles with his $50 copier/scanner, merge the files into one document, and then convert it from a .jpeg file to a .pdf file. My dad is 75 and never really mastered the concept of copying a file to a disk. 

So, I drove over there and worked with him for a couple of hours. Then I got huffy and decided that this was a bad use of my his time. I told him to tell his editor to do it herself. That's why God invented underpaid editorial assistants. But my dad told me that the Big Shark Publisher has fired all of its editorial assistants and so they are making the authors do all the work. In fact, it had already moved its operations out of New York City and to Iowa, where costs are cheaper. Pierson, another textbook publisher around here, is moving to North Carolina for the cheaper costs, too. 

Why are textbook publishers having such a hard time? My guess is that most students aren't paying full price for textbooks anymore and are instead buying used books through Amazon and other online sites. They were too greedy, so that spawned a huge used book market. Also, the quality of these textbooks have declined so greatly that professors are using their own course packs. 

After we kindly told his editor to go stuff it, I went home to meet the next crisis. At some point, I would love to sit quietly and read a book. But until then, I have to locate the box with the aspirin. 

This Morning's Recycling

Insert Caption.

Love this line from Slate. "In all likelihood, a humanities Ph.D. will place you at a disadvantage competing against 22-year-olds for entry-level jobs that barely require a high-school diploma. A doctorate in English that probably took you 10 years to earn is something you will need to hide like a prison term while you pay off about $40,000 to $100,000 in loans. Your consolation: deep thoughts about critical theory."

The Crime of Downloading Academic Articles

Thanks to Henry, I've just learned that Aaron Swartz has been arrested for hacking into JSTOR and downloading a ton of articles. According to Wired, if convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a non-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.

Swartz is a co-founder of Reddit and is 24 years old. 

Henry writes in the comment section, 

There is a lot of messy debate here that is ready to explode. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the reasons that JSTOR didn’t want to go ahead with this was precisely because it feared having a cause celebre, with an articulate, intellectually attractive and selfless defendant, explode out of it. And I confidently predict that there is going to be one very unhappy prosecutor who has no idea of the major political shitstorm that she is kicking up by doing this. Aaron is very rightly beloved by a whole lot of people – he’s spent the last several years providing unpaid help for a variety of good causes.

I have to think that one or two of the authors whose papers were downloaded are secretly happy that someone read their papers.