David M. Perry: The answer to every story about elite college admissions is to make sure every American has access to a low price high quality public education within a reasonable drive of their hometown. The wild thing is we mostly achieved this. Then destroyed it.

The answer to every story about elite college admissions is to make sure every American has access to a low price high quality public education within a reasonable drive of their hometown. The wild thing is we mostly achieved this. Then destroyed it.

I should probably pitch this.

I'm not so much worried about Harvard as worried about Penn State Erie, UW Whitewater, SUNY Cortland

When even your flagships like WVU are under attack, those regional publics are in serious trouble.

Oh boy is there trouble in these here (former) engines of social mobility! If only anyone was paying attention!

Faculty at a regional public- in very strong agreement here. It’s bleak.

My two years at UW-Superior were a casebook for this.

I bet. But Scott Walker hurt them badly, and nothing has improved.

going to have a grudge against that guy for the rest of my life.

Rightfully so.

Scott Walker, agent of the great neoliberal Satan (Koch apparatchik). www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2...

www.tandfonline.com

I had a phone interview for a job there. I feel like I dodged a bullet. A couple of the UW satellite schools seemed to be on the job search yearly.

I did a year at UW Whitewater and it was pretty grim.

😞

And SUNY Cortland has nearly the same undergraduate enrollment as Harvard.

better fishing too* *unless you got an ocean-going boat.

legacy admission, with pitying condescension: "Oh, we call them 'yachts,' but I suppose you didn't see many growing up on the farm. Maybe you could tell us about tractors some time. They sound fascinating."

I had the analog of this conversation at WUSTL with another advisee in my advisor’s house. He was there to tread water before taking over daddy’s business. My advisor later told me I wasn’t suited to computer science. 45 years later, I’m still pretty sure he was wrong.

Emporia State University in Kansas. Appointed a Koch Bros crony with 0 education administration experience as president. Immediately fired 14 percent of the faculty and set about effectively turning it into a tech school.

I'm still not over what happened to Emporia. I went to someone's graduation there in the fall and my eyes rolled backwards when that clown was talking.

I taught at Emporia State for most of the 1990s. It was an amazing, wonderful time. There’s a larger story though. The College of Emporia, a private liberal arts Presbyterian school had earlier been a choice-closed in the 1970s, I think. Imagine having private and public local college as options.

I'd rather not tbh. I don't like any private school after going to one K-8 and then public from high school to a master's. I don't care what age range or flavor of private school.

Exactly. The fact that DeSantis has likely wrecked FL higher ed for a generation is a much bigger story than whether Claudine Gay answered a bad faith question poorly.

SUNY Potsdam is also in trouble.

I did my undergrad at a 90%+ acceptance rate regional campus and while I definitely missed out on some things, I have nothing but appreciation while looking back on it now during my Ph.D. It’s heartbreaking to see all the regional campuses being gutted here (in WI) and back there (IN)

pitch it!

"disrupting" elite control of knowledge, I bet the techbrahs will love it

i've been trying to pitch something connected to it. fwiw and apologies for SSP. flagship publics are clearly huge success stories, but Leonhardt et al are worried about diversifying the 1%. open.substack.com/pub/jeffreyf...

The Misguided Defense of the SATopen.substack.com On elite colleges and the goals of higher education

If I might suggest a couple paragraphs: the University of California system created a new campus to serve the deeply impoverished brown central part of the state, that campus had to do weird financing to pay for a major expansion, and this has led to a major budget crisis and stalled enrollments

PLEASE

If we know everything is gameable with wealth, I never understand why the push isn't for high quality, affordable education at a college near you!

Because if everyone has access to a good quality education what's left to brag about?

Yeah - well, it's fine if people have access to good-quality education, the key is whether or not they have access to high-prestige education and the connections and status that go with it.

Nobody's paying for $120k Ivy League tutors because they think it's the best way for their kids to be educated.

Yup but also, many of those kids already have connections from prep school. The whole thing is a "prestige" game but the game is to show their kids aren't just rich but also smart. It's supposed to be a thing you can't "just" buy and in some ways you can't

What I mean is the kids of prominent senators or the kids of presidents don't turn up at Harvard or Stanford or Yale or whatever based on GPA alone

I had the privilege of going to an affluent public high school with a guidance counselor who really went to bat for me. That was a prestige thing too, but in a different way. There are various ways to get there but it’s always a prestige thing in the end.

And the massive treatment gap between scholarship kids and those paying full freight within private schools never actually vanishes, just subtly reinforces who is supposed to work for who after they all graduate college.

This says a lot about what the people in charge think regional institutions are for:

what's that from?

I assume this but I'm not signed in with my account so I can't check the article www.inquirer.com/education/pe...

Gov. Josh Shapiro proposes sweeping reform of Pa. state-funded higher educationwww.inquirer.com Shapiro’s three-part plan calls for a cap of $1,000 per semester on the cost of tuition and fees at state-owned universities and community colleges for Pennsylvanians making $70,000 or less.

right right! /that/ Shapiro.

Hahaha oh I see

It’s from an inside higher ed article - www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

I was 50/50 on it. And ugh Eve this ain't great.

Once you start renaming colleges things like PennWest, you’ve gone down a dark road

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