A Victory Media Friendly School

In the comments to my post on The Best Colleges ranking, I received a heads-up from jhicks23 about another questionable accolade which The Penn State Propaganda Portal has recently pimped:

G.I. Jobs magazine has designated Penn State a military friendly school for 2012. It is the third straight time the  Pittsburgh-based publication has recognized the University's programs and services designed specifically to help active-duty military  service members and veterans pursue an education online through Penn State's World Campus.

I decided to take a closer look at how  G.I. Jobs magazine's military friendly school list works.  

According to the Military Friendly Schools website, G.I. Jobs starts with a list of 7000 colleges, universities and trade schools nationwide and narrows these down to around 1000 schools.  The explanation  of how this is done is a bit vague. It supposedly involves "exhaustive research" by the G.I. Jobs Military Friendly Schools Team. And that research "includes government agencies and private entities which administer education benefits and a comprehensive survey administered by G.I. Jobs. A Military Friendly Schools Academic Advisory Panel, consisting of five higher education administrators, helps determine survey questions and weightings."   What does it mean for the research to include government agencies and private entities? Does it mean that the data used in the research comes from these source?  No mention of to whom the survey is administered. Anyway, once they somewhat mysteriously assemble the data they use a set of criteria to winnow the  list down to about 1000 schools.   It is worth noting that the schools on the list are not ranked. Here is the nominal  reason for that

We purposely do not use a numerical ranking system as we encourage student to use our resources as a starting point for seeking education. School choice is not a one-size fits all process, so we built the Matchmaker tool to help narrow down the field.

Up to this point everything seems on the up and up. If we take G. I. Jobs at their word the collect and analyze data to come up with a list of schools for vets to select from by purely objective means.

It is the next step in the process where things get dicey. Once the list of military friendly schools is assembled G. I. Jobs sends out a  media kit to the schools on the list soliciting advertizing from them. Here's the pitch from that kit

Through its many established brands, long experience, deep relationships and unparalleled rating system, Victory Media’s print and web media products serve as the foundation for any school serious about recruiting the military and veteran student. If you’re one of the 20% of all schools nationwide which made the Military Friendly Schools® list, congratulations on such an elite achievement. Our media products, which start at only $990 per year, stand ready to carry your recruiting message to the enormous and valuable military student market. Only Military Friendly Schools® can run advertising in the print version of the Guide
to Military Friendly Schools® and www.militaryfriendlyschools.com. All other media are open to all schools.

[...]

In September 2011, the Military Friendly Schools® list will be released nationally to the press. Your school is encouraged to issue its
own press release to promote your inclusion.

That's Penn State's press release that I linked to back in  the first paragraph.

Here's the  menu of advertizing options from the kit.

From Drop Box

We see here the real reason that G. I. Jobs doesn't assign ranks to the schools. They want to give schools that advertize with them an advantage over those that don't advertize with them.  So even if one is generous in assuming no manipulations are involved in compiling the list,  we see that the manipulation comes in at this stage.   And how big of an advantage do schools that pay for advertizing have over those that don't?  Well, here's what the folks at G. I. Jobs provides a partial answer in their media kit.

From Drop Box

How much does this all cost? Other than the reference to $990 per year in the above quote from the kit, all  prices have been redacted from the publicly available media kit.

But apparently no one at G. I. Jobs had a background in military intelligence, they redacted the prices by pasting opaque images over them which I was able to edit out with a PDF editor. The uncensored kit is here and here are the price lists from that uncensored kit.

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

So has the Penn State World Campus spent any money on advertizing with the nice folks at G.I. Jobs? You betcha

From Drop Box

Note the "add to my school list" button. Schools that don't advertize don't get one of those which make it harder for vets to compare the schools that don't pay to those that do.

How much has Penn State spent on these ads? Once more I turn to the Snyder Reports which, unfortunately, do not give a definitive answer to the question. Penn State has been on the list three years running 2009-2010, 2010--2011 and this year, 2011-2012. This years payments will show up in a future Snyder Report, either the 2011-2012 report or the 2012-2013 depending on if the check for his went out before or after July 1^rst this summer. 

What about past years? According to the reports, Victory Media, the publisher of G.I. Jobs, was paid $24,235 in fiscal year 2007-2008 (p. 471). If the military friendly list came out during the summer of 2009-2010, then this payment predated the World Campus' first appearance on the list.  If this  is the case, one must wonder how Penn State's prior advertizing with G.I. Jobs influenced its first appearance on the list.  And the payment of $17,226 in fiscal year 2008-2009 (p. 551) could be for either of the first two years on the list. 

No matter how you slice this, Penn State  World Campus is certainly a Victory Media Friendly School.

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Democrats in Harrisburg are trying to Slowly Kill....

....Graham.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting today that

State funding for the University of Pittsburgh and three other
universities could be in jeopardy as Democratic lawmakers flex what
little muscle they have in a Capitol controlled by Republicans.
Democrats are rebelling against a GOP cuts to the state-related
universities, the only spending bills that require a two-thirds vote of
each chamber.

"There isn't any doubt that this is the one place where Democrats can
wield some power. It's the one place where they do have leverage," said
G. Terry Madonna, political scientist at Frankin & Marshall College
in Allentown. "This could get very dicey."

Democrats are threatening to use their votes to get Republicans to
allocate some of an estimated $650 million surplus to state-related
universities as well as other education and health programs.

But if Democrats block passage, Pitt, Temple University, Lincoln
University and the University of Pennsylvania could wind up with
nothing.

I'm guessing that about now  Graham is  wishing that he followed his dream and joined that circus right out of high school.

[Update 6/27/2011 10:18 pm: The Dems blocked passage of funding for the state-related universities this evening.  No word on Graham's mental and physical states.]

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I'm Voting for Sestak....

...anyway...no surprise there, I'm sure. But here is one more reason to do so, via Adam at StateCollege.com.

Joe Sestak believes Penn State and the other state-related universities in Pennsylvania ought to be more transparent about their spending, the U.S. senatorial nominee said Thursday.

"Everybody should be transparent," Sestak, a Democrat, said during a campaign stop at the Centre County Grange Encampment and Fair. "That would discipline a lot of things. ... I think it incentivizes better behavior because it's open."

[...]

But "my take on it is, we just need to know more," Sestak said. He said public calls for government accountability -- in general -- are among the most repeated refrains he hears on the campaign trail.

If elected, Sestak said, he will work on the university-transparency issue. He said it fits into his larger emphasis on encouraging federal-government accountability. That drive for transparency, he said, asks the question: "If you are taking federal money, how transparent are you?"

Of course, the details matter and I look forward to hearing exactly what Joe has in mind.

On a Related Note

After reading the last post on Texas A&M's capitulation to corporate interests, one may ask what is the future of public higher education?  The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece up this evening which looks at that question.

The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."

The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.

And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.

During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.

This is not a pretty picture, but I think it may be an accurate one.

Elsewhere In Academia

The Texas A&M system is about to introduce a radically new way to rank professors.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member's salary. When the document -- essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members -- is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

"If you look at what people are saying out there -- first of all, they want accountability," [Frank] Ashley [,the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System,] said. "It's something that we're really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on."

This does not begin to measure if students are learning, in fact, it should result in a system in which students are guaranteed to learn less.

Does anyone think that hiring a shitload of contingent faculty, paying them a pittance and putting them in front of several hundred students is the best way to teach students? Because that obviously dumb approach would undoubtedly lead to  a very favorable outcome on this metric and therefore is one likely end  result of the use of this metric, particularly in the humanities where the opportunities for large outside grants is severely limited. 

In the sciences and engineering, one might expect that faculty will be encouraged to seek out industry funding which may do little if anything to push back the frontiers of knowledge. This could be particularly problematic in the medical school, where conflict of interest arising out of pharma research is a growing national problem. This metric induces the wrong incentives all around.

This is not the first boneheaded idea introduced at the Texas A&M system recently.

[A]wards of between $2,500 and $10,000 to faculty members based on
anonymous student evaluations... was implemented at Texas
A&M University [in the fall of 2008] and has been expanded to all
A&M System campuses.

Can you say grade inflation?

This is Texas, which has been screwing up education for year through the Texas State Board of Education's textbook standards, so there should be no surprise that the dumb is seeping into the Texas higher ed community. By the way, both of these ideas come from a list of seven proposal introduced by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, which shares a board member with the Texas A&M board regents, Phil Adams who is also a major contributor to the Governor Rick Perry's reelection campaign. The good news is, that unlike the situation with the textbooks  which impact textbooks nationwide because of the size of the Texas market forces textbook publishers to write their books to accomodate Texas, there is no natural mechanism for this to spread outside of the Lone Star state. Nonetheless, there may be pressure from the rightwing business community for other state's to adopt these ideas. Hence vigilance is required.

Once Obamacare Goes into Effect Maybe We Can Finally Afford to Do Something About That Terrible Hack Afflicting the Fifth District

From Blogger Pictures

Well, GT is at it again, bullshitting  his constituents. I've been having a bit of a back and forth over at the CDT for the past few days over a lie filled letter GT wrote "explaining" one of his votes on energy policy. I hope to build on my comments over there for a post here sometime soon. In the meantime, let's have a go at this tweet. (By the way, the link in the tweet takes you to  the Web site of the Republican members of the  Education & Labor committee where they've posted a portion of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The whole article is here. )

The good news is that I don't really have to do much work to clean up the load that GT's shoveled our way, since the invaluable Kevin Drum dealt with this particular pile of bullshit yesterday.

We're not talking about university health centers here, we're talking about actual health insurance policies. And if you read through the rest of the story, you find that most students are insured through their parents' policies. According to the GAO,
"only 7 percent bought their own policies or purchased school-based
plans." Add to that the fact that so far there's no real evidence that
healthcare reform will seriously impact student health policies anyway
(colleges are merely "warning" that it might) and that a lot depends on
the rules HHS sets, which is all part of how healthcare reform is designed to work. HHS rule setting is a big part of the process and was always intended to be.

So: do I expect vast hordes of angry students descending on Capitol
Hill? No. Do I expect HHS to sit around and do nothing about this? No.
Do I expect that some reasonable set of rules will be worked out in the
end? Yes. Do I expect that critics will take any notice of the fact that
yet another scare story about healthcare reform will turn out to be
overblown and ridiculous? No indeedy.

Why does GT insist on bullshitting his constituents?

It's Beginning to Look Like Penn State Exists Solely For THON

Today's Collegian has a half-assed story  on Penn State's precipitous drop in the Washington Monthly National University Ranking.  The reporter, Micah Wintner, makes no effort to explain why the University dropped like a rock from 7^th to 35^th place.  Basically the story is Penn State drops in Washington Monthly ranking....hey, look over there THON....economic impact...wait!... is that Graham playing the washboard?

You would think that explaining the drop would be the obvious angle on this story.   Let's review, this is from my post last year on the ranking.

This brings me to Social Mobility which clearly is what drives Penn State in to the top ten schools on the overall ranking and something ain't right here. Anyone who has spent any time in Happy Valley over the past fifteen years knows that the Main Campus of Penn State is increasingly populated by upper middle class and upper class students. It's gotten so bad that the University Faculty Senate issued a report a couple years ago on Access and Affordability. It did not paint a pretty picture.

Then there is the 2006 report from Education Trust, Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equality in the Nation's Premier Public Universities, which I blogged about at the time. Penn State received and overall grade of an F and an F on low income access. The Old Main Propaganda Shop wasn't happy.

The grade on low income access was based on the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at the University Park campus in 2004 which stood at 18.0%, according to the report, compared to 33.6the% of all college students in Pennsylvania with Pell Grant that year. The report also noted a trend toward less access at the Main Campus of Penn State. In 1992, the percentage of students with Pell Grants at the flagship campus was 22.2% compared to 27.7% overall in Pennsylvania.

Washington Monthly has the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at Penn State in 2008 as 25%. Has the University dramatically improved low income access to the Main Campus in the last four years? It is highly unlikely.

The Education Department keeps track of this statistic. For 2008, the total number of recipients of Pell Grants at all campuses of Penn State stood at 16,707 or roughly 25% of system-wide enrollment. (You can download the Excel file here.) That percentage is very likely to be lower at University Park and higher at the branch campuses.

Unfortunately, the most recent data on Pell Grant with a campus breakdown from the National Center for Educational Statistics is 2006. It shows substantial inequality amongst the campuses from a high of 63% at the Shenango campus in northwestern Pennsylvania to a low of 14% at the University Park, the flagship campus. However, the percentage of students with Pell Grants at the University Park campus has been very stable around 15% from 1999 through 2006, hence it is likely that the current percentage is significantly lower than the 25% system-wide number used by the Washington Monthly.

You can find a comparison to the other Big Ten schools plus Berkeley for 2006 here.

I think that it is reasonable to concluded that the Washington Monthly over estimated the percentage of Penn State University Park students on Pell Grants...

So this year Washington Monthly got the Pell Grant percent right and Penn State plunged in the ranking.  How hard was that?

Next question, what does that low Pell Grant percentage  tell us about Penn State fulfilling its mission under Graham?....hands....anyone....com'on people....did anyone do the assigned reading?

Drat! Spoiled Again by Veblen

For the past five years, Washington Monthly has ranked universities according to their purported contribution to  society. Penn State has done very well in the ranking: 2005, 6^th  place ;2006, 3^rd place; 2007, 5^th place; 2008, a presidential election year, the ranking was not done; 2009, 7^th place. 

Penn State has been very proud of finishing in the top ten every year. The headline at The Penn State Propaganda Portal the first year that the ranking came out was, "Penn State ranks near the top of magazine's rankings." The next year the headline was more specific , "Penn State third in Washington Monthly national rankings." In 2007, Graham figured that there's money to be made from Penn State's high finish in this sweepstakes.  His spiel to fat cat donors included this,

...the University has improved the lives of countless citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond. In fact, Washington Monthly has ranked Penn State third among all American universities and colleges for fostering social mobility, public service, and economic growth.

Last year The Penn State Propaganda Portal returned to declaring that "Penn State seventh in Washington Monthly national rankings"

I've discussed the faulty nature of this  ranking in the past on several occasions. The biggest problem with the ranking is on it social mobility scale which uses the percentage of students on Pell Grants in  both components which which make up the scale. There have been some problems with the percentages used by the Washington Monthly. The Pell Grant percentage reported for Penn State, 25%, was for the entire school. The actual percentage for University Park has been closer to 15%. You can read my critiques here,  here and  here.

This year Washington Monthly made an effort to get the Pell Grant percentages right and......drum roll, please............Penn State's Pell Grant percentage, as reported this year, is 13% and Penn State drops like a stone in the ranking to 35^th  place.

Here's your challenge. Help out The Old Main Propaganda Shop by writing a headline for this year's press release announcing Penn State's finish in the Washington Monthly ranking or help out Graham directly by suggesting how this 37^th place  ranking can be used to separate the filthy rich from their money.The title of this post is my headline suggestion, leave your suggestions in the comments. 

Someone Here at Penn State....

....should steal borrow this idea and adapt it to Penn State. I give you the University of Binge Drinking Web site.

Welcome to the University of Binge Drinking! Here you will become oriented in the dangerous drinking that occurs on our property. You will learn about our policies that take our state laws and modify them so that they allow us to look the other way, the insane amounts of money we make from those binge drinkers, and finally the skyrocketing crime that results from our recklessness, but it is important to remember that's all the 19 and 20 year olds fault.

Go take a look at the site...you won't be sorry that you did.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, University of Iowa, Party School, Alcohol Abuse

Setting an Example

Carnegie Mellon University's President Jared L. Cohon will step down on June 30, 2013 after sixteen years in the job. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,

Penn State University President Graham Spanier called Cohon "one of the great leaders in American higher education in the modern era."

While Cohon had this to say about his retirement,

"It's just time," Cohon, 62, said during a conference call with reporters. A CMU tenured-faculty member, he plans to teach courses spanning civil and environmental engineering and public policy.

"Sometimes individuals can go on for longer than they should," Cohon said. "Universities need new leaders from time to time. They need people with fresh ideas."

Graham I suggest that you listen real close to this great leader's words of  wisdom and consider following in his footsteps....as fast as you can.

Technorati Tags: Graham Spanier, Jared L. Cohon, Carnegie Mellon University

In Our Backyard

Things may not be going too well next door.

LOCK HAVEN - Faced with declining state financial support, Lock Haven University has told its faculty union that layoffs - or retrenchment, in bargaining terms - are possible.

The school has until Oct. 31 to notify the 264 professor-faculty members of the local chapter of the Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and Universities Faculties if job cuts will be made.

In a prepared statement issued to The Express, university Interim President Dr. Barbara B. Dixon said, "As part of its ongoing actions to address projected budget shortfalls in the next three years ... retrenchment cannot be ruled out during the 2011-2012 academic year because of financial considerations, elimination or consolidation of academic programs and courses, program curtailment or other reasons."

The announcement was sent by letter to Dr. Mark Cloud, local APSCUF chapter president.

This is a reminder that the  worst of the Great Recession may still be ahead of us and that it may hit closer to home next year when the stimulus funds for higher education dry up.

Housekeeping Update: I've upgraded my hardware and now I'm in the process of getting everything just right.  Over the weekend, I should finally be getting around to redesign of Left of Centre. In the meantime, blogging will remain light.

Technorati Tags: Unemployment, Higher Education, Lock Haven University

Captains of Erudition

The New York Times (via University Diaries) ran story today on the increasing number of university presidents who sit on multiple corporate boards. As you may recall, Graham sits on at least three separate boards.

Then there are the corporate boards that Graham sits on.  In  2008, he made $270,9800 in compensat[ion] as a director of US Steel and last year he pulled in another $170,000 from the gig. ...He has also sat on the board of Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania  for a number of years and it was announced this summer that he was appointed as a director of FM Global,an insurance company, which according to the press release announcing  Graham's appointment does business with Penn State. Unfortunately, these are not publicly traded companies, hence the compensation of a director is not disclosed by either...

The Times article discusses what's in it for the corporations, whats in it for the presidents-hint: hundred of thousands of dollars annually is big part of it- and what could go wrong for the universities.

Amongst the reasons that corporations like university presidents on their boards

...according to James H. Finkelstein, a professor in the George Mason School of Public Policy, probably the biggest reason companies have sought out academics is the prestige they bring. Universities are among the few institutions trusted by the public, he says, and companies believe they can associate themselves with this quality by installing an academic on the board.

“Corporations think this is a way of enhancing their prestige and legitimacy, especially in the case of Ivy League presidents,” he says. “I suspect that’s the principal motivation. It’s probably not for their business sense.”

So a president on the board helps to burnish the image of the corporation. Amongst the problems that board service can cause a university is a

... chance of reputational risk if a company runs into difficulties.

“Woe to the university president who would sit on BP’s board,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

So the downside includes damage to the university's reputation. Think of it as The Law of Conservation of Total Reputation.

There are other reasons that corporations like to have university presidents on their boards.

John Gillespie, who has written a book on corporate boards, “Money for Nothing,” says academics are often selected for another reason — because they are less likely to rock the boat than directors from the business world.

Academics may be trained to ask tough questions in their own fields, but when confronted with tricky business issues far above their level of expertise they “often become as meek as church mice,” he says.

Put another way, university presidents are pushovers. Pushovers on a board increase the likelihood of a scandal and a scandal will hurt the reputation of the university run by the pushover. It's a nonlinear phenomena.

And these scandals and corresponding damage to the reputations of universities are not hypothetical, "Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University and the first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs board until she stepped down this year."

The risk of a damaged reputation seemed to be an issue when Dr. Simmons announced in February that she was stepping down from the Goldman board.

At the time, Goldman was being battered by questions about its involvement in the financial crisis and the lucrative pay it doled out to executives and employees even after the firm had received a huge taxpayer bailout. As a director, Dr. Simmons was partly responsible for approving Goldman’s bonuses during the boom years — including the $68 million pay package awarded to its chairman, Lloyd C. Blankfein, in 2007, the largest ever on Wall Street.

And then there was this.

Erroll B. Davis Jr., chancellor of the University System of Georgia, was on the BP board for 12 years, though he stepped down in April, just days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, causing the massive oil spill  in the Gulf of Mexico. His retirement, however, wasn’t enough to protect him from being named, along with other directors, in a small number of lawsuits filed against BP over the disaster.

“There is a big risk to academics when they serve on boards. They especially attract criticism when a company gets into trouble,” said James Kristie, editor of Director & Boards, a trade publication. “They are more harshly criticized because they are supposed to be the smartest guys in the room.”

Keep in mind that these presidents wouldn't be on these boards if it weren't for their position as presidents of universities. and they are gambling the reputations of their institutions for personal financial gain. I'm looking at you, Graham.

Technorati Tags: Academia, Corporate Boards, New York Times, confilit of interst, Spanier

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An Ember Reignites

Earlier this month I posted a video of Eva von Dassow, professor of Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota lambasting the Regents of that University for their poor treatment of the humanities. When I saw the traffic to that post, titled She's On Fire, shoot through the roof- it stayed there for several days, by the way-my first thought was, "Damn, who knew there were so many immolation fetishists in the world?" But that wasn't it at all. It turns out that the powerhouse science blogger PZ Myers had also posted the video with a link to Left of Centre. So today, when traffic again spiked to that post, I thought, "Hey, a high traffic site has linked to the video and to Left of Centre again." And this time I was right. I'm a quick learner.

Inside Higher Ed did a piece on von Dassow's presentation to the University of Minnesota's Regents today and linked to Left of Centre. IHE interviewed von Dassow who gave a bit of background on her motivations for speaking up and it got a reaction from an unnamed  UMN spokesperson who said that the  the bigwigs were unmoved by the presentation. The IHE piece is well worth a read, particularly for some very smart comments from John Thelin, professor of Higher Education at the University of Kentucky, and others.

Technorati Tags: University of Minnesota, Eva von Dassow

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