Deadly Litter

When will we wake up to the fact that littering is one of the most destructive things people do to the environment? Plastic wrappers and bottle caps are deadly! Every fishing line cut and left in the water, every cigarette package wrapper thrown into a gutter, every plastic shopping bag blowing around an alley, every pint of dumped oil, ends up somewhere...usually in a surface water system. This recently-shot series of heartbreaking photos by Chris Jordan shows how deadly these seemingly insignificant pieces of litter really are, and how far they travel.

Working, More or Less

Have your work hours, and corresponding paychecks, been cut back since the recession began? Have you or someone in your household added a part-time job to make ends meet? If so, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta show that you have a lot of company.



If the official unemployment rate (9.8%) included those working part-time for economic reasons as well as workers who have looked for work within the last 12 months, it would be 17%.

This trend is strikingly different from past recessions, and highlights the current problem of underemployment. Can you find a job if you try hard enough? Probably yes, but it's likely to be less than full-time and less than you're qualified for.

University Pres Fires Assistant for Going to Restroom

Reginald Green was driving his boss, a university president, from Philadelphia to Washington DC. He needed to use a restroom once during the trip. But the boss said no! Huh? Who does that?

According to an article in Business Management Daily,

Green warned the president that he would 'have an accident in the car' if he wasn’t allowed to stop. The president ignored his plea. Regardless, Green drove to a rest stop and used the facilities. When Green returned to the car, the president mumbled something under his breath and refused to talk to Green the rest of the drive. The next day, Green was fired.

I guess arrogant jerks do that.

Green sued the university and won, but only because he had disclosed during his pre-employment physical that he has irritable bowel syndrome. The court ruled it was a disability covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and since he was hired with knowledge of his condition the university was required to accomodate his need for restroom breaks.

My question is, why don't ALL employees have the right to use the restroom when they need it?

Who Really Teaches College Classes?

One of the things some students and their parents look for when consulting US News Best College rankings is the fulltime faculty ratio. "A higher proportion of faculty who are full time scores better in the ranking model than a lower proportion," presumably because it indicates courses are taught by professors who make teaching their fulltime job, as opposed to part-timers hired off the street or something like that.

But a report by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed calls into question the percent of fulltime faculty used by US News in its Best College rankings. Nebraska's numbers were among those that seem questionable. Say it ain't so!

Nebraska has plenty of company, including Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, Penn State, U of Iowa, U of Missouri-Columbia and Cornell.

The issue of inaccuracies in the rankings was first raised this month by the American Federation of Teachers, (AFT)....Focusing on the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the AFT asked how it could be listed as having a faculty that is 100 percent full time when data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education show it has 401 part-time faculty members (compared to 1,539 full-timers).

U.S. News divides the part-time total in three, in theory because a part-time adjunct wouldn't be teaching as much as a full-time professor. Ignoring for a minute the reality than many a part-time adjunct teaches more sections than a tenured professor at a research university, applying the formula at Nebraska would not yield a 100 percent figure.

Inside Higher Ed asked Nebraska how it could claim a 100 percent full-time faculty, and the answer was that it left out all of its adjuncts, believing that was what U.S. News wanted.

The issue I think most students would consider relevant is that "the U.S. News figures...exclude instruction by graduate students -- meaning that just about every research university in the rankings would have a lower percentage if the actual section instructors were all counted." In reality, research universities use grad students to teach nearly 1/5 of their classes.

This number only counts for 5% of the faculty resources category, which is 20% of the score, so this is not a big factor (1% if my math is good). Still, it seems some clarification is in order. If being taught by fulltime faculty is important to you, US News's report won't help you figure out where to apply.

Forbes ranked West Point best college in the US

"To our way of thinking, a good college is one that meets student needs." So says Forbes.com, which released its "best college" ratings on August 5.

Do you agree with their criteria?
1. quality of the education
2. experience of the students
3. how much students achieve

Other systems, such as US News College Rankings, give heavy weight to external research funding and alumni donations. The assumption is that more money = a better school. Forbes, perhaps ironically given its business orientation, gives most of its weight to student satisfaction and success. When it does evaluate financial criteria, the focus is on the money that students spend, borrow, and ultimately earn rather than the institution's balance sheet. Their student-centered approach measures the criteria as follows.

25%: student ratings: 4 million student evaluations of courses and instructors on RateMyProfessors.com
25%: post-graduate success: equally based on enrollment-adjusted entries in Who's Who in America, and by the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com
20%: average student debt after four years
17%: four-year college graduation rates
13%: number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes

Every school on the list is in about the top 15 percent in the country. Still, I'm disappointed that none of Nebraska's public colleges made the top 100 public colleges. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at 463rd, is the only public college that made the list at all.

But Doane College and Nebraska Wesleyan University are in the top 100 overall, and Hastings College is 160th. I applaud them!

If you're interested, Forbes.com has a do-it-yourself ranking application that allows you to give your own weight to criteria and see how colleges stack up based on what's most important to you.

Printer Jam!

Jammed printers are a fact of life in our business, but this one created by a young worker with mailing labels was a doozy. It required a complete tear-down!

A Rant on Cost Cutting and Revenue Shortfalls

Like most other higher ed institutions, the University of Nebraska has to reduce its planned budget, even though tuition will increase by more than 4% this year. Some of the cost-cutting by other US colleges would probably make sense to Nebraskans, such as giving scholarships to students who do maintenance and landscaping over the summer. Public funding for higher education has dropped tremendously over the past thirty years, mainly because its historical share of state and federal funding has been co-opted by the rapidly growing costs of Medicaid and the loss of sales tax revenues due to internet sales. Tuition, as we all know, has risen dramatically and that trend shows no sign of changing.

How much of a problem is this, and what should be done about it?

In my opinion, the worst outcome of the drop in public funding is that it has forced higher ed institutions to act like businesses. We sell our rights, names, logos, stadium seats, and property to the highest bidder. We make money off of student purchases of everything from bank accounts to soft drinks, driving up their costs for things that aren't education-related. We sport corporate logos where college slogans used to be. My university has even agreed to let a corporation puts its name on one of our master's degrees. Research funding has always been policy and market-driven, and I would argue rightly so...but we now allow funders and donors unprecedented control over our programs and outputs, simply because we need the money.

As I see it, the state's interests used to come first, followed closely by the student's interests. Now, we chase dollars like a profit-driven company. It's a major change of focus, and an unfortunate one.

The states need more revenue, starting with sales tax on internet and catalog purchases that are equal to the sales taxes brick-and-mortar stores must collect and send to the state. Also, now that we have a service-based economy, services must be taxed the same way products always have been. Sure it would be painful to pay taxes on everything we purchase, but it's fair.

Entitlement programs are unbelievably costly and growing fast. Can we go back to calling these payments what they really are, that is, public assistance or welfare? This is the United States of America! Nobody should be "entitled" to free money. I think our society has its priorities upside-down. For example, we give away more college scholarships to rich students than middle class or poor ones. The highest agricultural subsidies go to huge agribusinesses, and social security payments are highest for the people who earned the most money throughout their lives. That's because we have taken on an entitlement mentality instead of a need-based public assistance mentality.

The two changes I suggest--sales tax for all purchases and need-based public assistance--might not balance the public books completely, but they would close most of the gap. They would also create a business and welfare climate that is more empowering and fair than the current one.