Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, one hockey coach, and 10 dorks who aren’t even in charge of a team.
So are my hard-earned tax dollars paying these coaches?
Probably not. The bulk of this coaching money—especially at the big football schools—is paid out of the revenue that the teams generate.
So what’s the problem then? These guys make tons of money for their schools; shouldn’t they be paid accordingly?
There are at least three problems.
- Coaches don’t generate revenue on their own; you could make the exact same case for the student-athletes who actually play the game and score the points and fracture their legs.
- It can be tough to attribute this revenue directly to the performance of the head coach. In 2011-2012, Mack Brown was paid $5 million to lead a mediocre 8-5 Texas team to the Holiday Bowl. The team still generated $103.8 million in revenue, the most in college football. You don’t have to pay someone $5 million to make college football profitable in Texas.
- This revenue rarely makes its way back to the general funds of these universities. Looking at data from 2011-2012, athletic departments at 99 major schools lost an average of $5 million once you take out revenue generated from “student fees” and “university subsidies.” If you take out “contributions and donations”—some of which might have gone to the universities had they not been lavished on the athletic departments—this drops to an average loss of $17 million, with just one school (Army) in the black. All this football/basketball revenue is sucked up by coach and AD salaries, by administrative and facility costs, and by the athletic department’s non-revenue generating sports; it’s not like it’s going to microscopes and Bunsen burners.
Source: Reuben Fischer-Baum, Deadspin.
After decades abroad Saeed Malik (left) returned to his native Pakistan to rectify the poor education system. He remembered talking to a group of boys, 9 to 16 years old, and finding that the majority wanted to be freedom fighters and die as martyrs, because they had nothing else to live for. “And I felt, in what way can we bring these kids back to the beauty of life, to the beauty of future, to be of value to fellow mankind and to themselves and to the country,” he says. “And I started thinking in what way can we help the children.” Malik felt books were the way to broaden children’s minds, to introduce them to a whole world of subjects, and to help build tolerance for others. But he discovered that virtually none of the public schools in and around Islamabad had libraries. Through donations from the UN and private individuals, he founded the Bright Star Mobile Library, which now serves about 2,500 children, providing a range of books in Urdu and English.
Read more here.
NEW DELHI —Their classroom is a flattened patch of dirt and rocks under the elevated rail tracks. Their blackboards are rectangles painted on a chipped concrete wall. Their teacher is a shop owner with no formal training, but a conviction that education is their only hope.
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Per-student revenue from state and local governments fell by $2,600, after adjusting for inflation, between 1987 and 2012. During that same period, per-student tuition increased by $2,600. In other words, the entire increase in tuition at public colleges and universities over the last 25 years has gone to make up for declining state and local revenue, leaving no additional funding available to improve programs and services or fund costs that are rising faster than the rate of inflation such as employee health care.”
Source.
International students are allowed to seek part-time employment off campus after six months of full-time study, as a way to help them defray costs. They can also obtain foreign work credentials: After earning a four-year undergraduate degree, they can apply to work in Canada for up to three years.
Miranda Cheng, director of the Center for International Education at the University of Toronto. ‘‘International students bring cultural and academic diversity to our university,’’ she said.
Other nations are not as generous: In the United States, international students are eligible to work only on campus, and many struggle to stay in the country after graduation. Tough visa rules have led to a foreign student “brain drain,” prompting both lawmakers and members of the technology industry to appeal for a change in
immigration law.
In Britain, international students can work no more than 10 hours a week and need an endorsement from their school to work after graduation. Its government came under fire over what critics called an overzealous immigration crackdown after London Metropolitan University was stripped of its right to host non-E.U. students, leaving thousands in limbo last autumn. For a while, it seemed as though those who could not quickly secure school space would face deportation.
Overseas study is generally expensive. As with most British, Australian and state-funded U.S. universities, most Canadian institutions have one rate for domestic students and a much higher one for international students.
If all goes well, I may soon be one of them :P
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The job of American schools, as enforced by the bureaucracy, is not really education. It’s censorship.
That may sound overly cynical. But I’ve worked as an educational writer and curriculum developer for almost 20 years, and the most important part of the job, it often seems like, is not imparting information, but rather figuring out how to make sure that the students don’t receive any.
On one project, a colleague of mine working on a world history course was told not to include the fact that gay people were targeted during the Holocaust. In another instance, I was told that I could not, for sensitivity reasons, include a test passage about storms at sea. Passages about rats, or alcohol, or love, or death were similarly proscribed. So were passages that depicted, or even mentioned, slavery — and this was for an American history exam. Again, there were sensitivity concerns, though whether we were worried about offending black people or white people, I don’t know. Probably both.
I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that the Chicago Public Schools have recently decided to restrict access to Marjorie Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, which deals with her experiences growing up under the fundamentalist regime in Iran. The exact nature of and reason for the ban is still somewhat unclear. There was initial speculation that the book was being banned from all school libraries because its negative portrayal of the thuggish fundamentalist Iranian regime was somehow Islamophobic or insensitive to Mulsim students. This story made CPS look, obviously, very bad.
School officials have hurried to explain that they do not actually object to the political content. Instead, they say, the book is still sanctioned for school libraries, but that lower grades may not use it because of “graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use in the seventh grade curriculum.” High school teachers are still, apparently, allowed to use the book, though only with special training.
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n the hierarchy of information, most would agree that it’s more important to know whether someone is a rapist than whether someone is failing Chem 100. But administrators at Oklahoma State University apparently misunderstood the Federal Education Rights Privacy Act, which grants students some rights to privacy about their grades and other information. Nevertheless, in a moment of over-zealousness, the university decided not to go to the police multiple times to report alleged sexual assaults, because it—it says—it was worried about violating this privacy act.
Oklahoma State’s interpretation of the act was incorrect; the legislation allows administrations to call the campus police to investigate crimes. Whether the school genuinely misunderstood to act or used it as a shield to avoid reporting allegations of sexual assault remains unclear.
This news comes amidst the University of North Carolina continues to cause controversy over its efforts to intimidate a female student who has been outspoken about her sexual assault.
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Creating a data system was the easy part, even though new information about college acceptances, ACT scores, and grade point averages poured in daily. Translating the “language of college” proved far more difficult. The labyrinthine rules and processes surrounding scholarships, loans, and financial aid did not account for the messy realities of poor families’ lives.
One senior, for instance, qualified for a state scholarship that provided full tuition at a two-year technical or community college. The student couldn’t access the money, however, because he lived on his own and had no parent or guardian to sign for him. Bailey tried to register him as “homeless” so he could sign his own forms.
She discovered it took mountains of paperwork even to qualify as homeless—particularly since one of the boy’s grandmothers had falsely claimed him as a dependent on recent tax forms. “We have a lot of kids who just don’t fit in the federal government parameters of what’s a family, what’s a parent,” Bailey said.
The scholarship parameters also weren’t designed with a thorough understanding of what low-income students are up against. TOPS promises qualifying students a free ride if they earn a 2.5 grade point average and score at least a 20 on the ACT. But the scholarship fails to cover numerous expenses, and this keeps many low-income students from even starting college.
One Walker student planned to attend Louisiana State University through a state scholarship. But the grant did not cover the $150 he needed to get on a wait list for a dorm room, or the housing deposit. Bailey delved into the student’s financials, trying to figure out when his next paycheck from Taco Bell would clear so he would not miss the deposit deadline and find himself homeless in Baton Rouge.
The communication barriers extend in all directions: The federal and state government bureaucrats little fathom the complexities of low-income students’ home lives. But the students, most of them first-generation college aspirants, often do not understand what a “loan” or “interest rate” means—much less how to make sure they maximize their TOPS and Pell Grant payouts if they qualify for both. (For reasons that were nebulous to Bailey, some students receive full payments from both while others do not.)
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I think this is a must read (pun not intended) for teachers and parents especially.
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In biology class, public school students can’t generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.
Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. “I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks,” says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. “A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations.”
These bills are “a kind of code for people who are opposed to teaching climate change and evolution.”
Stated another way, students could make untestable, faith-based claims in science classes without fear of receiving a poor mark.
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”Out of 41.7 million working college graduates in 2010, 48 percent—more than 20 million people—held jobs that required less than a bachelor’s degree. A further 37 percent held jobs that required no more than a high-school diploma…those who graduated from elite private institutions fared better than those from state flagship universities and other public universities” and “the number of college-level jobs is growing at a slower pace than the number of college graduates.”
As one commentator noted, however:
This is a problem if you consider a college education only to be career training. If you believe higher education helps prepare you for a job, AND allows you to a live a fuller life and more knowledgeably participate in society, the piece is meaningless. Success should be measured by more than a paycheck
Thoughts?
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