Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Higher Ed reform

The proposal is so disingenuous that you can't really talk seriously about the substance, but Tom Tancredo, candidate for governor of Colorado, is out there claiming that you can save a ton of money on the state budget without blinking:

Tancredo supports a range of fiscal austerity moves. They include: …

•Amendment 23, which guarantees minimal funding for K-12 education, must be repealed.

Requiring higher education professors to spend 30 instead of 13 hours a week in the classroom would save $60 million.

•Eliminating the "master's degree bump," the automatic salary increase that comes with the graduate degree, would save $158 million.

Just thinking of the second point, I wonder if he's factoring in how many grant dollars would be lost? It looks like just the University of Colorado at Boulder brings in a fair bit. According to a report from here:
The University of Colorado continues to be a national leader in research funding by attracting $711.5 million in FY2009 … .

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

He's expanding ... used to be enough to bash undocumented people. I guess he's developing a full program.

Anonymous said...

He obviously doesn't know anything about teaching vs. research time and how it affects funding.

On the third point, there's also the issue that funding is well-correlated to time-to-degree stats. It's a carrot towards finishing. Finishing means getting a degree, and getting a degree usually means engaging in research, which then, in turn, brings money into the system.

Anonymous said...

Even beyond the research issue, and even assuming that he thinks teaching is all university faculty should be doing (which is clearly incredibly ignorant), he obviously has no idea what kind of time goes into teaching. I normally spend at least two to three hours prepping and grading for every hour in the classroom (for lower-level undergrad courses - upper level and grad courses require more time). They're going to have to start paying faculty a little more than they do now if they're expected to dedicate 90-120 hours/week to teaching. ;-)