Last updated on 2022-12-26
Merry Christmas, Illinois and Wisconsin! The South Dakota Board of Regents is adding your matriculators to the list of non-residents who can study at South Dakota’s multitudinous public (psst: socialist!) universities at the same rates as South Dakota residents:
One of those tuition breaks is called the South Dakota Advantage.
The South Dakota Board of Regents, whose members are appointed by the governor and oversee the state’s public universities, decided in 2018 that undergraduate students from six of the states closest to South Dakota — Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana — should be charged the same tuition rate that a South Dakota undergrad pays.
…The regents at their December 8 meeting received a report on how the South Dakota Advantage program has been performing. It generated nine times the number of credit hours needed to break even during the past academic year, according to the report, which said state universities saw a positive gain of $13 million from tuition revenue.
That report helped convince the regents they should expand the Advantage program. Starting next summer, Advantage becomes available to students from Illinois and Wisconsin, too. And Advantage also will expand to apply to many graduate programs.
…The break-even numbers presented to the regents call for 41 more students from Illinois, 62 more from Wisconsin and 48 more non-resident graduate students [Bob Mercer, “Are South Dakota’s Tuition Breaks Paying Off or Not?” KELO-TV, 2022.12.23].
Getting a few dozen students from Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago to move here shouldn’t be too hard. Plus, with the Governor hiring graduate students for professional positions on her staff, recruiting should shoot through the roof!
Interesting idea, but it seems driven by money, not toward delivering a better education to students. How does this improve education? I suppose it can bolster student numbers in some fields, thus saving a few positions in history and philosophy departments. If it does that, that’s a plus. But it doesn’t seem to be directed that way. If they’re just looking at dollar signs, it might as well be Trump U.
Donald – one word – diversity. One cannot learn about the impact one’s local culture has on one’s world view without some exposure to those holding world views from a non-local culture. Opening one’s mind to recognizing the boundaries imposed on one’s local cultural or even environmental exposure/experience is essential to the development of critical thinking skills.
Just as Herr Trump packed the SCOTUS Mrs. Noem is packing South Dakota’s colleges with white Republicans hoping to pad the Governor’s Club. It’s just that simple.
On the regental board, controlled by Governors Republican for these many years, there is less diversity and more similarity. Back in the days when Dr. Johnson, she with the environmental bent, served there was some real diversity.
Richard, Diversity would have some educational benefit, Attracting some black students from Milwaukee or trans students from Madison doesn’t seem in line with the thinking of current leaders in South Dakota. I think what they really want is to poach a few white conservatives from Wisconsin. Getting these students out of Wisconsin and voting in South Dakota would be a net benefit to Wisconsin and the nation. It will make it a bit more likely that Wisconsin’s electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate for President.
So you are saying it won’t really contribute to diversity here in the Great State of South Dakota then, eh, Mr. Pay? It’s more like how Governor Noem is encouraging all these fellows to relocated to the Black Hills, but they are similar to the other fellows and then they just gawk about and clog our roads and take up spaces in our restaurants. Surprisingly, since the day Dr. Johnson championed environmental causes with the Regental Board, little shifting has occurred in the thinking of the Regental Kings.
The SDGOP wants to boost intellectual diversity on campus by defunding intellectual diversity on campus?
Sponsored by the worst of the worst earth haters in the Legislature House Bill 1073 sought to force South Dakota’s college campuses to allow hate speech that could lead to violence and expose universities to lawsuits. Even the Republican state Board of Regents executive director and CEO, Mike Rush, said HB1073 was a solution in search of a problem.
The SDBOR report came out of Budget and Finance and is necessarily of limited scope and concern. It notes: “Given that there is facility capacity on campus and that the competition for South Dakota students from surrounding states continues to escalate, we must be aggressive in bringing more young people to South Dakota and keeping our resident students in the state.” Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard this for decades as true as it is. The agenda is, as Donald Pay notes in his initial comment, primarily one of survival, not one of quality of education.
And, arguably, diversity and development of critical thinking comes about in much more substantive ways than importing blacks from Milwaukee, something many of our SD sports programs already do.
More and better course electives to open the minds of students in various majors, more electives required of majors (although that will increase the duration and expense of education which no one wants), an overall expanded curriculum, a critical mass of ideas and course offerings, international opportunities for study abroad (which will also increase the duration and expense of the education)…these are the contexts in which critical thinking is primarily shaped. Most technical fields have no room for an expanded curriculum and the content is irrespective within those fields of anything having to do with “diversity” in its popular incarnation.
Sarah Mayorga notes that diversity is an ideology that enables whites to only superficially commit to achieving social justice. “Diversity ideology dictates that intentions, as opposed to outcomes, are what truly matter,” she wrote. It “does not demand that individuals take specific actions to promote inclusion or equity.” —“Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood”
In any case no one size fits all when it comes to the effects of diversity.
“Loes et al. (2012) found that, when important confounding experiences (e.g., precollege critical thinking skills and tested academic preparation) were taken into account, students’ diversity experiences had no overall significant link with first-year gains on a standardized measure of critical thinking skills. However, consistent with the earlier findings of Pascarella et al. (2001), the positive effect of diversity experiences on critical thinking was significantly more pronounced for White students than for students of color. Loes et al. also reported that the effects of diversity experiences were more important for the students least academically prepared for college, as indicated by relatively low ACT scores. ”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/536530/summary
“Increasing diversity undermines attitudes among stayers. Individuals who move from a diverse to a homogeneous community report improved attitudes. However, there is no effect among individuals who move from a homogeneous to a diverse community.” —James Laurence, L. Bentley: Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effect on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within the Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate, 1 February 2016, European Sociological Review, Vol 32, 54-67.
See also Heather MacDonald of St. Olaf University:
“John Hinderaker: The title of your book is The Diversity Delusion. What is the delusion?
Heather Mac Donald: It involves three principles. The first is that race and gender are the most important things about an individual; second, that discrimination based on race and gender is the defining characteristics of American society; and third, that any disparity in race and gender proportionality in any American institution is by definition the result of race and gender discrimination. Difference in academic skills, in behavior, in culture, or in career preference are not allowed to be noticed, though they in fact drive such disparities today.”
https://www.americanexperiment.org/magazine/article/qa-heather-mac-donald-and-the-diversity-delusion
A big topic, and not one to be simplistically reduced to “more diversity is therefore better.”
Melissa from Madison will have a very different impression of life to that of Kenny from Kennbec.
I see you have all mostly adopted the “popular” (and simplistic) understanding of the term “diversity” as being somehow related to race. bah. My Doctoral Dissertation exposed the folly of such a single variable understanding of something that is inherently muti-faceted. An accurate representation of the notion requires a multi-variate consideration.
Bah indeed Dr. Schriever, grudznick believes “diversity” applies to political bent, biological sex, imagined sex, left-handedness, eye color, and bacon-or-sausage (or both) choices. Some of these choices do have 3 or 4 options.
Did your dissertation take into account the 8-sided die of the libbie mentality as it still persists in South Dakota? I expect it did, even if you did not give prior credit to Dr. Jacobs.
Social science research into the topic of “diversity” tends to be limited to a single variable approach as such concepts are EASIER for people interested in the social sciences (who tend to have personality types that are more averse to embracing mathematics) to researchers in the “hard” sciences. In addition, what would be better termed as “racial differences” research in the social sciences have become relabeled “diversity” research in homage to political correctness and isnlt really about the phenomena of diversity at all.
The studies cited above by DaveFN exhibit precisely this pattern. Great examples.
grudz, the variables in my dissertion included, age, gender, race, tenure, personality type as measured on the Myer-Briggs personality inventory scale and education. Using these measures, I developed a statistical representation (score) of individual and group variability and DIVERGENCE. That score was used to explore the variations in beliefs about work group effectiveness between groups based on the diversity contained within the groups.
I have no knowledge of the (is it even real?) 8-sided nonsense to which you refer. And i would not bet anything on its actual existence as a measure or predictor of anything.
Richard, I suspect any “diversity” brought to our campi is an unintentional side effect. The Regents, especially those appointe dby Noem, aren’t going to publicly promote diversity.
The discussion of the program, as reported by Bob Mercer, did appear to focus entirely on budget issues (and tha tmakes sense, as Dave notes, given its committee origin). The Regents note that bringing in more out-of-state students, even at in-state rates, brings more customers to the housing and food service and helps keep those costs down for all students, including our in-staters.
I wonder if this expansion of the Advantage program helps athletic recruitment, to which Dave alludes. Now when we bring in D-1 ballplayers from Chicago, the coaches don’t have to burn up as much of their scholarship quotas.
Why don’t they get Hillsdale to move to South Dakota? Anywhere they want, it’s a diverse state. Ian, get to work.
Richard!!!!! Interesting research!!!! Ecology considers species diversity of various habitats using mathematical/statistical methods, so I can understand a bit of where you are coming from. Multivariate statistics are often used.
It seems that your research approach would be useful in putting meat on the bone of critical race theory. They talk a lot about intersectionality, that individuals aren’t just their race, or their sexual orientation or their religious affiliation, etc. People are much more complicated than being identified by one thing. People live in a multivariate world.
Consciousness-raising is nice, be it from first-hand experience with people of different backgrounds or from formal education methods—and is definitely preferable when it occurs on several fronts and not lopsidedly on one front only, the latter grotesque-style. And conscious-raising is certainly preferable to its myriad alternatives, be they dumbing-down by external influences or simply by remaining mired in the do-loop of own’s own opinions.
Although consciousness-raising via first-hand discussion involving individuals having different cultural and sociological experiences may pass for critical thinking in some disciplines, it fails to do accede to the level of critical thinking required by the most technical of disciplines: what constitutes critical thinking in a course in underwater-basketweaving (to employ an old yet far from outworn stereotype) does not, for example, pass muster in an upper-level organic chemistry class. To fail to make such a distinction between consciousness-raising and critical thinking, between a non-technical course and a technical course, and to collapse each into the other, is to fail to exercise critical thought.
Oh, the irony of critical race theory as commonly misunderstood, and as exposed by the following:
“Critical theorists, particularly those associated with Critical Race Theory, have questioned the soundness of formal equality as a theoretical support for the legal treatment of social injustice. The colorblindness critique developed by Critical Race Theory argues that formal equality’s failure to recognize racial difference masks inequality and white dominance. Traditional civil rights proponents have also challenged the assumptions of formal equality. They have asserted that legal means to confront inequality must be grounded in context and not approached through some beguiling abstraction that has no meaning in the real world. Feminist theorists have similarly critiqued formal equality as not only masking and reinscribing inequality, but sometimes providing new tools for those who have benefitted from gender, race, and class privilege to sustain privilege, rather than promote equality.”
https://mail.racism.org/articles/basic-needs/affirmative-action/9384-diversity-matters
Dave. I made no silly claim that such intersectional/intercultural encounters ARE critical thinking, but that they may spur or nourish critical thought. In particular self-critical or culturally thought.
DaveFN BTW, the presence of an army reserve unit of straw men in your garden is duly noted.
Critical race theory and feminism are, as I understand them, grounded in DATA. Actual data that is compared to mere “assumptions”. As classical philosophy informs us, no amount of the correct application of the formal rules of logic can overcome the problem inherent in an erroneous assumption.
Formal equality alone, by which I mean the absence of racial classifications in law, is not satisfactory to ensure social justice and inclusion. Instead, government must proactively ensure that all citizens have the tools needed to pursue their conception of the good life.
Well..one spin off from expanding in state tuition rates to Illinois and Wisconsin will be our Division I and Division II athletic programs. Football and Basketball scholarships are deducted from Athletic Department budgets at the prevailing instate and out of state rates. We seem to be finding that our Coyote, Jackrabbit, Yellowjacket, Hardrocker and Wolves competitiveness is enhanced when we recruit skill players from the Chicago area and 300 pound linemen from among the cheese eaters of Wisconsin. The market for Division I and II players in those states is much larger than in the Upper Midwest. Without this break, it’s almost twice as expensive to Athletic Departments to recruit players from those states. These players will bring diversity to our campuses and perhaps, conference championships. Not even Grudznick can complain about that.
Bob Mercer has a article sure to brighten up winter misery skitters. Can’t wait to read it in full.
Richard Schriever
And on the other hand, critical thinking of the highest order may drive the necessity for an influx of intersectional/intercultural encounters. Top down/bottom up. It’s chicken/egg. But there is a distinction to be made and to fail to make the distinction is a failure to critically think.
Richard Schriever
And yet again, critical thinking of the highest order may rightfully exclude an influx of intersectional/intercultural encounters for good reason as being entirely extraneous to content considerations as the latter are at several removes from any subjective input of relevancy to that content.
“Diversity” as a blanket reply to Donald Pay’s initial comment is far from a foregone, pat conclusion either from the standpoint of concrete implementation or effectiveness in terms of outcome, and was certainly not the concern of the Budget and Finance Committee anymore than was the quality of education, on which such diversity influx may have no bearing whatsoever on educational quality for reasons previously indicated.
To be more pointed and come full circle, Richard does indeed did make a direct connection between diversity and critical thinking in education in his initial comment to Donald Pay.
The idea that diversity automatically leads to a meaningful outcome in terms of critical thinking rests on an illusion. Diversity per se is no guarantee of critical thought nor is it necessarily even a precondition for it to occur.. Increased diversity is, as previously pointed out, entirely irrelevant to critical thought in specialized, technical classrooms and may instead distract from the subject content under consideration.
There seems to be some kind of underlying notion of biological “hybrid vigor” at work which leads to a presumption that the effects of diversity are always good, furthered, perhaps, by evolutionary psychology. In fact, however, genetic cross-breeding results cannot be predicted in advance and the results are not always desirable. Enhancement of regressive traits and sterility occur: “hybrid vigor” is but one possible outcome.
In any case, any connection between diversity and critical thinking in the classroom is far from a given and requires considerable qualification (not that comment boxes are the best of venues for unpacking the more salient aspects of most topics).
Richard Schriever, was this somewhat like conducting your dissertation defense all over again?
The world is coming to kiss Kristi’s feet. SD has figured out a scheme, not for its citizens, but for billionaires and soon to be millionaire politicians like her.
Other sovereigns have done it when they have nothing else to sell. Citizenship, residency, secret tax free banking, and guns I suppose.
“By the 2000s, a small handful of Caribbean islands – notably St Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica – were readily and legally selling their citizenship to wealthy outsiders, and many major western countries, including the US and Canada, offered fast-tracked residence and citizenship via investor visas, which grant residency in exchange for the purchase of real estate, government bonds, or for putting money into regional businesses. A cottage industry of clever middlemen began to advertise “citizenship by investment” programmes to rich clients and convincing small, mainly island countries to allow for the sale of their passports to wealthy outsiders.
The very existence of this business marks an enormous departure from traditional ideas about nationality, allegiance, and belonging. Perhaps the biggest triumph of the modern nation state has been to convince large groups of people that a status conferred to them arbitrarily upon birth was, in fact, not for sale, and indeed, worth defending unto death. The emergence of the passport industry suggests that comradeship has given way to commerce, and that citizenship is becoming a commodity to be bought and sold. Like ships flying flags of convenience, these days people can carry nationalities of convenience.”
watch this space.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/11/the-bizarre-scheme-to-transform-a-remote-island-into-new-dubai-comoros