Verónica Bravo's List: Educación Superior

• The average age of doctoral students is thirty-three.

• Because imagining a new approach to higher education is so difficult, I’ve found the concept of business models particularly useful.

• Como apunta Katherine Sellgren, especialista en temas de educación de la BBC, las clasificaciones de QS ponderan en un 40% la reputación académica, 10% la empleabilidad, en un 20% a las publicaciones académicas de los profesores, el 20% a la tasa de estudiantes por profesor y dan un 10% adicional según el carácter internacional de la composición de profesores y alumnos.
• Al difundir los resultados, Ben Sowter, director de la investigación de QS, señaló que "dado el panorama económico incierto, es tranquilizador para los estudiantes saber que las mejores 200 universidades del mundo son también las más populares entre los empresarios, lo que sugiere que un título de calidad mundial sigue siendo la mejor vía para obtener un buen empleo".

• is higher education a bubble?
• • En educación superior, la pregunta sobre una burbuja en los precios es más complicado de tratar porque no existe una medición exacta.
• In higher education, the questions are much more difficult.
• , it's hard to agree on what price should be the focus
• how is whatever rising price that is the focus connected to changes in the benefits of a higher education? Indeed, what are those benefits?
• The ultimate benefit seems to be a substantial wage premium
• The tricky thing is that there may well be an identification problem

  • Problema de identificación: La gente que va a la universidad gana más dinero que otros, porque justamente son el tipo de personas con caracteristicas que las harían ganar más!
• University degrees could simply be expensive signaling mechanisms at best,
• I think the gains from higher education are mostly
• actual learning
• a healthy portion of these learning gains aren't academic in nature, but have to do with things like social capital
• Given the cost of higher education, it seems unlikely that signaling can be the main value of a college degree

  • Dado el costo de la educación, parece improbable que la señalidad sea el principal valor de un grado académico
• Rather, these increases look to me like a reduction in subsidies and a shift in the distribution of the surplus created by the education investment
• College educations have long been incredibly cheap given the (apparent) long-run benefit to the degree-holder. Students today are now paying for a larger share of the benefit they receive. And in some cases, universities appear to be getting better at extracting some of the surplus created by degree completion.

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• $10 billion a year, roughly a quarter of the nation’s university research budget, will continue to be channeled into such things as administrative salaries and building depreciation instead of directly into scientific studies.
• All research institutions get additional money tacked on to federal science and medical grants to help pay for general overhead. But federal rules allow institutions to deposit those payments into their general budgets, with no requirement they be used to directly support scientific endeavors.
• Kevin Casey, an associate vice president who oversees Harvard’s government relations in Washington. “If the government had to create its own facilities, hire the researchers, staff and train students, it would be a more costly venture than to purchase research where it is now.”
• Overhead rates are calculated based on a complex formula that takes into account an institution’s historical costs for construction, maintenance, utilities, and administration.
• The Center for College Affordability & Productivity that advocated for open debate on the rates
• A government database of universities’ negotiated rates is shielded from the public for “proprietary” reasons, even though most schools post their rates on their websites.
• Overhead cost rates came under congressional scrutiny in 1992, when federal auditors discovered that dozens of universities, including Harvard and MIT, had inappropriately billed the government for items unrelated to research such as sports tickets, parties, even a university yacht

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• Universities have been growing for a decade, but most of the resources fuelling that growth have gone into expanding university administration, not faculty.
• One US study found that between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty had grown about 10% while the number of administrators had grown 221%
• In the UK, two thirds of universities now have more administrators than they do faculty staff.
• What is needed is something more modest, but more far-reaching: cutting back empty administration.
• The first step in cutting back empty administration is eliminating the demand.
• An important aspect of this is to remove creeping government attempts to micro-manage the sector
• The next step is to root out the supply of empty administration in universities. A modest first step would be the elimination of “bullshit jobs” in universities
• Staff need to be given space to question and even veto any new administrative initiatives
• Finally, universities need to make it costly for individuals to increase organisational load. For instance, before introducing a new procedure they would need to eliminate an old one.

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