OK, people, you’re out of control. You’re generating way too much quality content that is disappearing into the ether because Virginia’s newspapers and bloggers simply aren’t equipped to cover it all. Once again, I find myself falling back upon the Bacon Bits format, just to ensure that readers know what’s out there.
Advanced placement credits. Virginia boasts the third-highest percentage of public high school seniors qualifying for college credit on Advanced Placement tests, according to the College Board’s 2104 report. Reports Virginia Business magazine: “28.3 percent of Virginia’s 2013 graduating seniors earned a grade of three or higher on at least one AP exam. Virginia’s seniors trailed behind students in Connecticut and Maryland, who earned the No. 1 spot.” Gains over the past 10 years have been especially marked for African-American and Hispanic students.
Fixing virtual school governance. Chris Braunlich, writing in the Jefferson Policy Journal, elucidates how Virginia lags the country in using virtual (online) schools to provide education to children with special needs or circumstances at home. More than 2750,00 students are enrolled in virtual schools nationally, and the number is growing 30% per year. The number in Virginia: less than 1,000. Writes Braunlich: “It’s just one example of state law not keeping pace with a 21st century world in which students aren’t limited to their neighborhood school, but quite literally are ‘students without borders.’ The fact that the law hasn’t kept up with technology has badly hurt the growth of full-time virtual schools.”
University endowments kicking bootay. The University of Virginia endowment grew to $5.16 billion during fiscal 2013, up 7.9%, making it the largest endowment in Virginia and the 19th largest in the country. Runner-up was the University of Richmond, whose endowment surpassed $2 billion, followed by Washington & Lee ($1.345 billion) and the College of William & Mary ($698 million). Read Richmond BizSense’s recap here (the article lists all endowed Virginia universities) and read the report upon which it was based.
The end of higher ed’s golden age. A must-read essay by Clay Shirkey describes the dilemma facing higher ed today:
Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.
As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers. …
Golden Age economics ended. Golden Age assumptions did not. For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.
Each of these changes looked small and reversible at the time. Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.
Our current difficulties are not the result of current problems. They are the bill coming due for 40 years of trying to preserve a set of practices that have outlived the economics that made them possible.
(Hat tip: Michael Cassidy.)