GOED obviously isn’t spotlighting this SmartAsset survey….
South Dakota is the worst state for higher education, say the financial advisors at SmartAsset:
Looking at undergraduate graduation rates (the one criterion given double weight), average net price, student-to-faculty-ratio, 20-year return on investment, and in-state attendance rate, SmartAsset finds Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Connecticut, and California offering the best four-year public colleges and universities. Wyoming is the best state for higher ed in our region, ranking sixth.
39 states offer cheaper college than South Dakota. 32 states have better graduation rates. 44 states produce better return on investment, calculated as “the difference between 20 years of median pay for a graduate with a bachelor’s degree minus the costs for attending the higher education institution for four years and 24 years of median pay for a high school graduate.” South Dakota’s 20-year ROI is $237,878, 65/9% of the national average 20-year ROI of $360,831. You’re still better off going to college than not, but according to these numbers, you’re better off going to college pretty much anywhere other than South Dakota.
Financial status is an indicator of the intellecual and social status of a system. The strange circumstances around the departure of Dr. Downs from NSU gives some further revelation of those factors. However, South Dakota’s ranking as the worst in the nation owes that honor to the legislature and the governor,
California is cheaper than SD for a college degree and the return on investment over twenty years is double?
Plus, you’re not surrounded by mean spirited, state residents calling you a socialist, when they don’t even know what a socialist is.
Can you say “brain drain”?
Well….if you wonder why big things just don’t seem to get done in South Dakota look no further than the chart.We can buy a franchise, we can’t start a company.
Hey boys, I got my masters from USD, taught for a year in Reno, finished second to a homeboy in Memphis, and beat out a Yalie at Ringling. I had to send out dozens and dozens of resumes and slides had a dozen or so phone interviews, the worst. USD was a good school, but as far as getting a job goes they were horrible, no help in that at all. I hope that has changed. After my final interview at my thesis show which was simply, you have done it wonderfully. John Day, Dean of Fine Arts, said to me after I offered him a beer, “my final advice, never turn down a free beer” I’ve kept that advice.
Mr. Biden hates America and apple pie and fireworks. Good clean fun.
It is sad Mr. Biden is so vindictive. Beneath his stature as the President.
Mr. Anderson, grudznick has a couple of free beers for you but you know they come with a lecture that “sculpting is not a real job”. The debates can rage from there.
How does Grudzilla know Biden hates America, apple pie and fire works? Northern Mississippi beans are working up a blow for Grudzxlla.
Grudznick, it must seem horrible to you and yours when a president follows laws — not to mention science and counsel of experts. At least he doesn’t hate voting or the pesky democratic principle that in a democracy everyone gets a vote and from that vote majority wins.
Back on topic, does the ROI figure work from a national earning figure, or does it reflect a localized/regional rate for return on the college degree?
The 49% graduation rate is the statistic that most jumps out at me. Growing university attendance cannot be driving that number up. This makes for a shady “business model” and another reason “business model” should be rejected in education.
well…I agree with Mark, that USD provided a really quality education and , in my life, I always felt I benefited from USD and other South Dakota schools I attended. But…getting a job was up to you…got my first job off a bulletin board at USD and never really had any difficulty getting a job since. I was an early baby boomer. I think the job market is much different now.and…John Day was a wonderful person as were many other professors at USD.
Not surprising however much– or for as much–as we might balk at these stats. One among several of the factors in play from my decades experience in the system is an overemphasis on student complaint management on the part of department chairs that puts academia at the mercy of students rather that the other way around. The upper level administrative hierarchy fears any criticism whatsoever and pushes all criticism down the chain, thus freeing and insulating themselves from responsibility and accountability for system quality while thinking to do just the opposite! Hah! This is a typical top-down strategy. That the SD governor is so oblivious to the fact only testifies to the successful implementation of such folly, one that only backfires as the stats in Cory’ s post testify, since the ultimate effect of the state’s strategy is to weaken the very quality and national competitiveness of its graduates.
It’s a regular Duhem–Quine problem insofar as it’s impossible to test any isolated reason, for these abysmal stats since an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background reasons also be invoked. By the time all the reasons are uncovered, SD invariably denies any problem whatsoever.
So here are some reasons from my experience regarding the abysmal state of SD universities depicted in the SmartAsset.data.
First and foremost, faculty in South Dakota are effectively nothing more than state employees like any other, reduced to clerks status, despite their international status as scholars in international professional societies in many cases.
The Council of Higher Education (COHE) was created by far-sighted people (such as the late Stewart Bellman of BHSU) from several of our institutions and authorized by the BOR in 1978. Not surprisingly it took the agrarians and business people (who shall remain nameless) on the legislature about two decades to realize that faculty had been conferred a special status in this right-to-work state. (And why shouldn’t faculty be conferred special status as their collective education greatly exceeds that of the legislature, the BOR, and state officials)?
Some may tell this differently, but the resentment toward faculty if not universities continued over the decades—with the BOR attorney on a mission that spanned a good decade or more to cripple the COHE, employing a reverse Trojan Horse tactic in which negotiated policies in the COHE/BOR contract were gradually subsumed into a separate BOR policy manual, where they remain today after the 2020 legislature banned the COHE.
Ostensibly this would give local administrations and their faculties greater latitude and “discretion” to reduce faculty further to employee status, if that was even possible.
To wit:
Faculty must “fit in” and not being a “good fit” is a common grounds for dismissal, especially when the faculty member accepts the pronouncement. A SD university president once told me his guiding administrative metaphor, namely, that faculty are like birds on a wire. If they group together that’s where they should be, and woe be to the bird sitting apart from the others who clearly doesn’t “fit in,” playing along to get along. And we hired him at a third of a million dollars to be a university president? (One supposes against the mentality of SD that this very metaphor may have been what got him hired in the first place).
Of course, in cases where a faculty hire doesn’t fit in, there is disavowal of the fact that faculty search committees have long been reduced to making recommendations only, that candidates are vetted ad infinitum by numerous interviews with administrators to sniff them out, and that the university president has the final say in conjunction with the BOR issuing the contract. If a faculty member is determined to not be a “good fit,” after several years of service, the administration sure isn’t going to acknowledge their responsibility once s/he is terminated.
Fitting in is, of course, the top-down modus operandi of the entire hierarchy in this state (just consider our Governor and her recent fiats). t’s a structural problem that pervades the entire state at many levels. Faculty are to be annually evaluated by state law, and undergo numerous student opinion survey evaluations over a student’s four-year college career. Not that most students take these very seriously, but in the case one teaches an elective course not in the student’s declared major, one is pressured from what I’ve noted over the decades, to not expect of students the amount or level of difficulty of homework in elective courses. It’s a taboo subject to even bring it up, and I’ve seen it played out over and over. There is some tacit metaphor of “moral perfectionism” as though one or two opinion surveys or evaluations weren’t enough to point faculty noses in the right direction in their classroom practice (“write bigger on the board,” “speak louder,” “present more clearly” are able to be addressed. “Too many tests,” and the simultaneous “Not enough tests” are not).
As far as teaching/learning, by the time students get to college they are expected to be able to deal with formal knowledge systems. Those systems are built on years of K-12 knowledge and skills although rarely is that being made explicit in our state. While it’s fair to try to accommodate different learning styles in K-12, at the university level the student is expected to come to knowledge on its terms, and not knowledge come to students on theirs. A great deal of controversy in the educational literature surrounds students who have never been prepared or even hear the term “formal knowledge system.” This lead to the implementation of remedial college courses. Of course, our former Governor Janklow maintained remedial courses offered would best be charged back to the respective institution. Frankly, if I as a student hated taking two semesters of university chemistry I sure as heck would hate taking a remedial chemistry course in addition–which of course led to many of our university programs in the state cutting back to but one semester of chemistry of physics for even technical degrees. Such a wonderful way to guarantee a quality education…
But there’s more. The AAUP statement is that administrations “respect the primacy of faculty opinion.” Square that against a provost in SD who specifically hired a subordinate to purge decades of faculty-developed policies, and who–without bringing the matter to faculty attention–deleted the statement from the university catalogue that “the authority of the faculty to assign grades shall not be infringed upon.” Not to mention the university president who said his university Senate should represent the various stakeholders, from alumni to administration to janitors. (This wasn’t the birds on the wire president, either). Of course, good employees who ‘”fit in” rolled over when the catalogue statement was deleted and offered no resistance under our top-down system as that was what was expected of them.
Now that there is no COHE by state law, anti-COHE rhetoric continues to raise its head. “Now there’s no COHE we have discretion.” Well, if administrations didn’t have discretion under the previous BOR/COHE contract guidelines, they will surely under the state system as it’s currently structured (top-down, business-employee model/mentality) make a muck of things by themselves.
South Dakota is a state that listens—not with an open mind as that would take more education than most people have—but listens selectively to only what it wants to hear, and that mean usually worn-out, minimalist ideas and simplistic metaphors as its lens.
Disgruntled? No. Merely suggesting there are a plethora of reasons for the glaring stats in the SmartAsset chart, individual institutional propaganda to the contrary. Oh, and I’ve lived in SD six decades so it’s easy to find fault–especially when the same faults occur time and time again, passed from one generation to the next.
Oh grudz you’ve got it, I’ve rarely worked a day in my life and I’m better off for it. I remember the man who told me that I was crazy to get my masters in Sculpture, I just told him it would be three more years of doing what I loved at the bare minimum. It turned into almost forty,who knew? By the way Dave, I always took a course a semester from Oscar Howe, I learned from looking into his room twice a week and seeing the progress on his painting of the month. He had nothing to do with the Fine Arts Department. That was when I was an undergraduate. Later in grad school, I had the job of casting, I think 40 of his only relief in bronze. After awhile I hated it because I had to cast 80 to make 40 because you couldn’t use one unless it was perfect. Everyone was amazed because I didn’t cast one for myself but by that time I hated it. I was stupid of course. Needless to say it was a bitc… Departments are good or bad depending on who’s teaching. I’ve had two of my students who showed at the Mary Boone gallery before they were thirty we had a great department for about 15 years out of my 31. If the support from above isn’t there its hard to keep going. I really loved my time at USD, Vermillion is a great place. Brookings was fun but I have to admit I never climbed the Campanile.
Former colleagues have indicated for some time that the regental system is in a shambles that may affect accreditation. The sudden resignation of NSU President Downs is apparently related to the state of affairs. I have also heard that some faculty are extensions of the Jan. 6 mob that stormed the Capitol. It takes something remarkable for a system to be at the absolute bottom of a rating scale with 0 points.
I have to seriously question how this was compiled. The average in-state tuition in South Dakota is about $9,000 – out of state tuition is in that $12-16k range if no reciprocity. And the table indicates only 12% in-state attendance?
This doesn’t pass the sniff test.