Author: Asif Mahmud

I decided to take Chris up on his idea to post about our colleges on the blog. I just finished my paper and I would like to provide a gist of how my college looks like. Basically, the idea I had is to make a college where I would be able to provide a good education to good people who are good at taking college courses while still in high school. I borrow the term “One World Schoolhouse” from Salman Khan and his book “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined” that I read a few years ago.

My admissions system uses recommendations, college courses from my college whose finals people can take for credit (the more you take and pass with at least a B, the higher chance you can get in), and uses grades for a general sense of who a person is (placing more emphasis on the trend of the grades than the actual grades itself).

The main reason why my college is different is that I choose to livestream all lectures online for everyone to watch. Think of it as like a YouTube partner program where professors garner the profits of how many people tune in to watch his or her course. These lectures are also used for analytical purposes to improve instruction. My college also has time-restricted credit requirements (you have four years to complete all 120 credits and you can complete any number of courses beyond the 120 credit requirement so long as it is within four years), proportionally allocated funding based on grades (you get merit aid based on your GPA, so 4.0 = full tuition covered; a description of which is provided on one of my other blog posts located here) in conjunction with need-based aid, and other interesting tidbits. I chose the aid system primarily to appeal to international students trying to get an education in the U.S. without getting into crushing debt. People from around the world are admitted based on their academic qualifications and character and though international students may not qualify for need-based aid, they still get merit aid based on their performance in terms of GPA. To supplement the GPA, I use the LSAC system of grading where an A+ acts as a buffer for the grade so that it refunds a portion of the tuition based on your GPA. Get enough A+ grades and you can actually profit off your education! I also have college-wide extra credit opportunities where students can participate in an internship, volunteer, or do other off-campus things to get their grades for a course augmented and have a portion of their tuition refunded. There are some innovative aspects here and I like where my college has been going so far so if you guys have any questions about additional things, feel free to ask and point out any problems I might have. This post is mainly to showcase my idea for a college and I look forward to any feedback I get.

Have a good summer guys!

Recently, I attended and interview with Matthew Sapienza with a few others as part of the class. We had an interesting discussion with him about tuition and the different ways students could be able to afford college. We also gained some interesting tidbits of information about the inner workings of his field like how the image of the former Chancellor getting a golden parachute is not as ridiculous as we made it out to be. Apparently he denied a raise several times over his career and the golden parachute was a way for the board to honor him and to make up for all the times that he sacrificed his raise and did his job as well as he could.

With that, I would like to present an idea for us to contemplate when writing our papers as a potential funding model for students. We have already seen the Lumina Foundation’s interpretation of what students should pay for college (for those that do not remember, remember the model of 10). Coupled with the discussions with him and these considerations, I recently saw a random post from Tumblr on my news feed on Facebook. It had this idea for making tuition proportional to one’s grades. Basically, the idea is that in conjunction with financial aid, you have a school where the better grades you get, the higher amount of financial aid you receive. If you have a 4.0 for example, you would get a free tuition scholarship akin to Macaulay on top of the financial aid you would normally receive. Any grade lower would have you pay tuition equivalent to the proportional amount. The financial aid would still be there to deter poorer students from struggling disproportionately. Additionally, like law school, a buffer could be in place that counts A+ grades as weighted grades. This means that when receiving an A+, you would get more money in your financial aid package as an incentive for doing better. A+ grades can also make up for lower grades in other areas and can help make up the difference in aid.

This is by no means a crazy idea. Some states pay their students for getting good grades on AP exams and paying students is a considered idea for people. Such an idea would cut the need for students who cannot afford college to get a job and it would allow them to focus on their schoolwork more in order to get the requisite grades needed to afford it fully. It serves as reinforcement so that students work to the best of their potential.

What do you guys think? Could this be a potential financial model for your hypothetical “dream” college?

Recently, a few other students and I got together to interview the President of LaGuardia Community College. In preparing for the interview, and in the interview itself, we all learned much about the role of community colleges in America. Undervalued yet invaluable to the populace, community colleges are often overlooked by most Americans.

In preparing for the interview, my group was to read a few chapters from Gail Mellow’s book, Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of American Community Colleges. Her book is an in-depth account of community colleges in the United States.

Some interesting insights I gleaned are as follows:
1) The average stereotype of a college student is that of an 18-year old freshman living in a dorm at a four-year college. On the contrary, the average American student would be in community college. About half of college-going students in the United States go to a community college, the 1200 or so of which makes up the backbone of the educational system.
2) National expenditures by public community colleges are less than twenty percent of the amount done by four year colleges.
3) Our self-proclaimed “hair on fire” advocate of community college interviewee estimates that about ten times more is spent cultivating a Macaulay student than is spent on a community college student.
4) Community colleges are considerably better at enveloping the democratic spirit of the United States. There is a debate however, on whether or not community colleges should venture into being more selective as time goes by. For now however, everyone is welcome.

Other parts of the book include changes in pedagogy and a statistical background on financial aid. Insights I obtained during the interview also came from two community college students who attended. One was an immigrant from China who aspires to be a college professor, and another was a female civil engineer who spent a summer at Columbia. The diverse nature of these students and their capabilities attests to the sheer amount of untapped potential in community colleges. One must wonder what could happen if community colleges were treated similarly to their more prestigious counterparts. Investing in their growth would help make America more educated, informed, and foster democracy among its citizens. I look forward to discussing the issue further in class.

I understand that I am probably going to get skewered for this because of the audience I am appealing to, but as a neutral party to politics and my own education, I would just like to put this out there. Since we are going to talk about Cuomo’s failed attempts at cutting CUNY’s budget, I figure it would be a good topic for my first response.

Recently, Cuomo has come out with a statement pushing back his planned budget cuts to CUNY after the backlash he received from administration and the broader public. According to the article however, the director of state operations referred to what Cuomo did as a negotiation tactic. I am inclined to believe that it is. The way I see things, I think any personal rivalries between De Blasio and Cuomo are played up when both are somewhat liberal politicians. I think what Cuomo did was try to figure out a way to better his state’s financial state and suggested cuts to wherever he thought was appropriate. As a negotiation tactic, the idea is that if CUNY didn’t raise an uproar to the proposed cuts, he’d just cut the budget and save millions for the state. I doubt that Cuomo had any vested interest in causing problems for CUNY and I don’t think that he would act contrary to the beliefs of the people when it came to funding CUNY. The media can sensationalize things and I understand that the CUNY system has had a lot of problems with fighting this, but I think that the act of fighting it blocked things from changing. The ads on the App Store, the email blasts to students, the protests, and other political tactics I felt were unnecessary. A marked disapproval of Cuomo’s suggestion would have more than enough sufficed. At least that’s what I think. I could be wrong, but with the amount of backlash and bad press Cuomo’s been getting, I kind of feel bad for the guy.