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Are administration costs driving up college tuition?

January 3, 2013 / Staff

Free image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The costs of a college education are getting out of hand. Even state schools are seeing a dramatic rise in tuition, and way too many students are leaving college with a mountain of debt. Something has to give.

Meanwhile, articles like this one are pointing out a potential problem – the explosion of administrative costs at American universities.

J. Paul Robinson, chairman of the Purdue University faculty senate, walks the halls of a 10-story tower, pointing out a row of offices for administrators. “I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its 16 deans and 11 vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Ind., makes $125,000.
The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”

Read the entire article and it will probably piss you off. The dean-to-professor ratio is getting out of hand, and hopefully people will start demanding changes.

Your Education

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Fracking heats up the job market

December 30, 2012 / Staff

$natural gas fracking$

Fracking, also know as hydraulic fracturing, is pretty controversial among environmentalists. The process threatens groundwater, but then natural gas burns much cleaner than coal.

Another issue affecting the fracking debate involves jobs. With the natural gas boom fueled by fracking, we’re now seeing a ton of drilling for gas, and also oil, and that’s creating many jobs.

On the East Coast, abundant natural gas flowing from the Marcellus Shale formation, which runs through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, is enriching farmers who lease their lands to production companies and is estimated to have created 60,000 jobs in the region, with another 200,000 possible by 2015.
Cheap domestic energy is also good news for the manufacturing sector. “The discovery and development of North America’s shale resources has the potential to be the most remarkable source of economic growth and prosperity that any of us are likely to encounter in our lifetimes,” U.S. Steel CEO John Surma told the Congressional Steel Caucus in a late March hearing. It’s a virtuous cycle: More drilling requires more steel, and lower energy costs give U.S. steel producers a cost edge. This at a time when the Department of Energy reports that the energy intensity of U.S. steel companies is now among the lowest in the world.
In St. James Parish near Baton Rouge, ground was broken last year for a $3.4 billion steel plant being built by Nucor Steel (NUE), the first major facility built in the U.S. in decades. U.S. Steel is investing in a new facility in Lorain, Ohio, and V&M Star Steel (the North American subsidiary of the French pipemaker Vallourec) plans to spend $650 million on a small-diameter rolling mill in Youngstown, Ohio.
It’s not just Big Steel that will benefit. Feedstock made from cheap natural gas is a boon for the petrochemical industry. Citing “the improved outlook for U.S. natural-gas supply from shale,” Dow Chemical (DOW) says it will build an ethylene plant for startup in 2017. (Ethylene is used to make things like plastic bottles and toys.) Dow will also restart its ethylene plant near Hahnville, La. Shell, which is building a new petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania, is also considering a $10 billion Louisiana plant to convert natural gas to diesel. “Low-cost natural gas is the elixir, the sweetness, the juice, the Viagra,” says Don Logan, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. “What it’s doing is changing the U.S. back into the industrial power of the day.”

Studies show that fracking will support millions of jobs. Of course some will argue that green jobs are even better for the economy, and the environment, in today’s economy we can’t be too picky.

Your Business, Your Career

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MOOCs are changing the college game

December 28, 2012 / Staff

Free image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What’s a MOOC? More and more people are going to start finding out.

Jonathan Salovitz’s course load sounds as grueling as any college undergraduate’s: computer science, poetry, history, math and mythology, taught by professors at big-name schools such as Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.
Except Salovitz, 23, is not an undergraduate. His effort won’t count toward a bachelor’s degree, and he hasn’t paid a dime in tuition. Nor have his classmates, who number in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.
Instead, Salovitz calls himself a “guinea pig.” He’s participating in a grand experiment in higher education known as Massive Open Online Courses –MOOCs, for short. Learners of all ages around the world are flocking to them. Top universities are clamoring to participate. And MOOCs already have attracted the interest of some employers, paving the way for a potential revenue source. All in less than a year.
“The industry has operated more or less along the same business model and even the same technology for hundreds of years,” says John Nelson, managing director of Moody’s Higher Education. “MOOCS represent a rapidly developing and emerging change and that is very, very rare.”

Welcome to the self-education revolution. Follow that internal link as we’ll be tracking the progression of MOOCs and other ways you can teach yourself new skills or give yourself a rewarding education. This can also help young kids in high school learn subjects that aren’t taught in their school. It is also a threat to rising college costs.

The possibilities are endless. The true potential of the Internet is now reaching education. Take advantage of it!

Your Career, Your Education

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New Jobs: Electronic Medical Records Professional

December 24, 2012 / Staff

In our series highlighted news jobs in the new economy, we found an interesting article about new opportunities for people to become an Electronic Medical Records Professional.

Just two years ago, about one in five hospitals used electronic health records (EHR). Thanks to an incentive program from the government, the number is growing fast: More than 3,600 hospitals (about 72%) received payments to transition to EHR as of the end of July. Much of the work remains, and the health care sector is scrambling for technicians and consultants to aid the switch.

Workers can start at $50,000 to $60,000 per year. With the explosion of electronic records for health care, and now with the new health care law that will bring millions more people into the system, there should be no surprise that this would be a growing field.

Your Career

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Make More Money Playing Poker Online

December 21, 2012 / Staff

Poker is a fun game because it is based on strategy with an element of luck. However, there is a whole different dynamic to the game when you play it online instead of at a casino in person. Some people even think the chances of winning poker online are better than in person. You do have to have a different kind of skill, though. Take a look at how playing poker online is different than playing in person, and what you can do to improve your chances of winning.

Looking for Tells

When you play poker against people at a casino, you get to see them physically. So, you can look for your opponents’ bluffs by watching their body language. When you play poker online, you don’t get to see your opponents. However, there are still plenty of ways to tell when your opponents are bluffing. For instance, you can look for changes in your opponents’ behavior, like in the amount of time it takes them to place a bid, if they bid an amount that is out of the normal range of their bids, or if their chat behavior changes. When you play poker online you have to notice how your opponents play and make note of any changes — that’s how you make a lot of money as a poker player.

Placing Bids

When you’re playing poker for money, such as on sites like sportsbook.com, you have to keep track of the money you have on the table. This is a little more difficult to do online because you don’t have physical chips in front of you to remind you how well you’re doing. There is just a money number on your screen. Plus, it’s easier to get wrapped up in the amount of money you can bid when you have easy access to your bank account to get more money at anytime. Be wise with your money and don’t place bids that you wouldn’t do in a live casino.

Knowing When to Fold

Poker hands tend to go faster when you’re playing online, so it’s easy to be tempted to play every hand. You have to be careful, though, because if you don’t have a good hand, you might be setting yourself up to lose money. The rules are the same when you’re playing in a casino as they are when you’re playing online, but you can’t let the speed of the game throw you off so you play poker hands you shouldn’t.

It is definitely a different experience playing poker online, but the strategy is very similar. Be careful with your money, be wise about the hands you choose to play, and be on the lookout for your opponents’ tells. You’ll make more money that way and have fun doing it.