Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Is it time to restructure the university system?

Very interesting opinion piece regarding restructuring the university system. The basic premise is to split off ASU West and ASU Polytechnic and make them into separate universities. I am not quite sure why ASU Downtown is spared, perhaps its the fact that they now house several programs that used to be located at Tempe.

Now, I don't think that the naming convention for the new schools is as important as this guy mentions, but I think the idea may have a few merits. As I mentioned before, adding some competition to the market may not necessarily be a bad thing. Besides, if Crow wants to toss Poly aside to continue to build his prestigious empire, perhaps we can find someone else who would want to actually offer affordable undergraduate education to students. Heck, while we're at it, that could be two more in town college football teams in the mix!

1 comment:

Heath Reed said...

Yes because first of all, the university regents tend to screw ASU and NAU and give more to Pew of A. What should be done is allow them to be what you see in the UC or CSU systems in California. Ok, that is not a good example due to their issues, but they have tons of schools that are for instance, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Berkley, UCSD, UCSB and the list goes on. They have two Cal polys that is part of the CSU system too. UC is more prestigious while the CSU systems is more affordable.

I think you can tweak the names, like Arizona State Polytechnic University. I know many want to bash on him, but the dude has been doing a hell of a job, better then what we have been getting from past presidents. The regents are on of the big issues here.

If we want to have a more stable economy, one that is not primarily focused on growth/construction, higher education is one of the big keys in this. I think MCC should be turned into a 4 year college. Change it to University of Mesa, Central Arizona University, Arizona Tech etc. Similar size to what NAU is. We should also encourage a private university too. More education, the more higher paid jobs will follow and work with the universities.