Once Again, Three Loud Cheers For Dean Dad

OS probably votes differently from Dean Dad, but he admires this gent so much.

Dean Dad has the unenviable task of helping to run a community college in the Northeast. He sees the realities of the lives of the young people (and now many not so young) that he is tasked with shepherding through the lower realms of American post-high-school education.  It gets seriously ugly sometimes. Dean Dad is a far better man than OS, by far.

This post is one of the best that has ever, ever, ever appeared on his little corner of cyberspace. It realistically describes, concretely, why young people need to pursue further education, and the consequences for those who don't. He also makes the case for the states to keep paths to education available for everyone, not just the well-heeled.

Well worth reading and taking to heart.

Baylor's Little Dust-Up, And One Other Of An Entirely Different Nature

OS evidently tweaked a few noses last week when he held forth about a little dust-up at Baylor University in Texas.

He concluded, and still does, that the administration is doing the right thing, and that the world runs better when it is run by the grown-ups.

One of OS's favorite grown-ups is Dean Dad, who administers a community college he has to keep held together with chewing gum and baling wire, because it is flooded with students and less cash arrives from the state every year to do the job.

He also balances that task with his life as a husband and father, which blessedly come first. He writes with humor and elegance about his daily journey of pragmatically addressing ReallyBigProblems with the modest resources of at hand. He's a real grown-up.

(Hopefully, if Dean Dad reads this, he won't be crying in despair that someone like OS pays him such public compliment.)

Therefore, OS scribbles this, and launches it to the digital tides, hoping that the undergrads at Baylor will pause a bit, and consider what the grownups have to do daily to keep the place running smoothly, so the undergrads can complain about just how mistreated they are. Go ahead, click that link above, and read about Dean Dad's day. OS dares you.

Damn, kids! You're at Baylor! One of the gems of Texas! Do you know how many kids at Dean Dad's college would trade body parts to have your opportunities? And how many kids who can't even make it to community college would do likewise for that opportunity? Within a ten-minute walk of your dorms in Waco, OS suspects there are students who need tutors, and public schools who would gladly welcome you in to help some eight-year-old learn how to read English and do his multiplication tables, so he can maybe, in 2021, have the opportunities you now enjoy. Maybe, just maybe, it's a better expenditure of your adolescent energies.

Grow up, and you can be a grown-up like Dean Dad one day. It's a noble goal.

Dean Dad: Enrollment At Community College

Dean Dad reports a new phenomenon in his institution, a community college he heads.

This Fall, with just a few weeks to go before the start of classes, we’re seeing a weird bifurcation. Applications for enrollment, and applications for financial aid, are both up significantly even when compared to last year. But students who have actually registered are significantly down. Put differently, the number of students who started trying to attend and then vanished is dramatically higher than it has been in past years.

The folks in Admissions have done follow-up calls to the folks who’ve applied and taken their placement tests but not registered, to see what happened. I was hoping to hear that the most common reason was something like “you were my safety school, but my first choice school came through with a great offer.” Instead, the most common answer was “my unemployment ran out.”

This is where the “education as private good” idea has real social costs. If you have a significant population that just can’t find work because the economy is in the tank, and that population would like to go to college but doesn’t have the income for living expenses -- financial aid is great for tuition and such, but doesn’t do much for living expenses -- then what would you have that population do?

There is discussion that ThePeopleInChargeOfSuchThings have decided to define a 10% unemployment rate as 'The New Normal'. With a 10% 'official' rate translating to an actual 15%-16% rate--well, ya'll, that's a prescription for cultural disaster.

We don't want to go there, and we sure as shootin' don't want to define what we now experience as 'normal'. Stroll through a rural WalMart on a Friday evening, and then tell yourself this is what you can accept as The New Normal.

The Joys of Parenthood: Dean Dad And The Science Fair

Tax extension due, and much travel about to be undertaken, so a quick note:

Dean Dad at Inside Higher Education is at his best when writing about the joys of parenthood.

This one, about the elementary science fair, is priceless.

Enjoy!

Running On Fumes And Goodwill

'Dean Dad' at Inside Higher Ed is a community college dean, happy to have found his place in the world in a role he never expected to play. He has a sense of humor and humanity, as one commenter notes.  OS enjoys his posts, because they are as likely to be about the joys of marriage and parenthood as they are about his challenges on campus, which are many.  Dean Dad doesn't whine, and he doesn't participate in that arrogant elitism that infects so many campuses.

So, his account of a recent budget meeting deserves consideration.

He concludes here:

I try to stay positive in public, since part of my job involves setting a tone, and campus morale is a real, if fuzzy, issue. So I'll use pseudonymity here to tell the truth. We simply can't keep doing what we're doing. We're running on fumes and goodwill, and you can't do that forever. The funding increases necessary just to get to 'sustainable' -- let alone 'exemplary' -- are unimaginable. Several areas of the college are still functioning only because a dwindling number of staffers are doing heroic work, and you just can't keep doing that. When heroism becomes the budgetary baseline, even getting to 'sanity' takes substantial increases. In many of the 'support' areas of the college, that's the dilemma now.

As so many, especially Mish, have noted before, the various infusions of federal cash (borrowed from the Fed or the Chinese) have only delayed the inevitable day of reckoning, and Dean Dad acknowledges that fact. The tough days yet lie ahead for his world, as the taxpayer pot has run dry. A state legislature cannot spend what does not exist, and can't print money, although California has attempted to at times.


So, in these years of running on fumes, perhaps it is time to concentrate on building good will. Last week's angry marches by undergraduates demanding non-existent money are counterproductive, because they are viewed by people with high-school or vo-tech educations paddling as hard as they can to keep their own little micro-businesses above water and their families intact, while paying taxes on everything they earn or consume. Wimmen's Studies majors smashing store windows and blocking highways don't build good will with the public. College students tutoring young kids in reading and math in every county school do.

OS is an optimist, who thinks that real solutions will be worked out by good people like Dean Dad and his team, one corner of the culture at a time. The process will be accelerated if the Federal government allows it to happen, by turning off the spigot of funny money, and by the students who see free higher education as an entitlement spending their time in the library.

Or tutoring young kids in reading and math.