A Little More Data on Tuition Inflation

One of my previous posts speculated on the relationship between the availability of student loans and the rising cost of higher education.  Inflation of tuition is a complicated issue, but let me share two more pieces of data on the subject. Both are specific to the University of Colorado, but I feel are at least somewhat representative of the larger picture.

First, state support for higher education has dropped dramatically.  In effect, this transfers the actual cost of higher education from the taxpayers to the students.  You can see the fraction of the state budget devoted to higher ed in Colorado below (click to embiggen). 

In the same time period the average cost of a state-school increased by almost a factor of 4 and the state funding in Colorado dropped by about a factor of 4.

The second piece of data concerns another idea I've heard batted around which is that tuition inflation is being driven by excessive pay for administrators and/or faculty.  CU's provost (the head of the Boulder campus) was paid $389,000 last year, which is a lot of money, but it also comes out to 0.03% of the university's operating expenses for 2012.  You can argue that administrative pay is too high, but it's just not a big enough chunk of the budget to be the cause of tuition hikes.  As for faculty pay, a very unscientific study of the faculty in my department shows that they work on average 55 hours per week and make about 85% of what someone with a comparable level of education and experience makes in the private sector according to PayScale.com.

Again, I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do think it's important to get as much data into this debate as possible.  Thoughts?

Does the Availability of Student Loans Drive Up Tuition?

President Obama was here at CU recently taking some great pictures at a local hang-out and talking about student loans.  I'm not going to get into the political issues around student loan interest rates, but something from the discussion caught my interest - the idea that the availability of student loans has caused tuition to rise.  A survey released today shows that 47% of Americans believe that it has.  Clearly the idea behind making student loans more available is not to drive up the price of tuition but rather increase access to higher education, so if in fact easy access to student loans drives up prices then we have a serious problem.

I don't have an answer to this question, but here are a couple bits of data to mull over from the College Board's Trends in Higher Education reports. First, here is the average inflation-adjusted cost of college tuition relative to 1981. 

The fact that a college education today is somewhere near three times as expensive as it was 30 years ago even when adjusting for inflation is alarming, and the natural call is to find ways to make it more affordable, particularly for low-income families.  Student loans are often touted as ways to help many more students for less than it would cost to simply fund the university directly with state or federal funds.

The second graph shows the inflation-adjusted pool of money available for student grants (in blues) and loans (in reds and oranges) per student over the last decade.

From 2000 to the present, tuition has gone up by about 50% and the total financial aid per student has increased by almost exactly the same percentage from about $9,000 per student to a little over $14,000 per student.

Of course correlation does not imply causation and frankly it may be that the increase in tuition is driving the increased availability of financial aid, not the other way around, but I do find this idea intriguing.  As people that have spent a lot of time at colleges, I'm interested in your thoughts.  Does increased financial aid lead to higher tuition and if so how can the government help keep higher ed affordable?

How do I Love Summer? Let Me Count the Ways....

How do I love summer? Let me count the ways.
I love summer to the depth and breadth and height
My uninterrupted time can reach, when feeling out of sight of undergrads
For the ends of Research and ideal Parking.
I love summer to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and Colorado thunderstorm.
I love summer freely, as grad students travel to Conferences;
I love summer purely, as grad students strive for Publications.
I love summer with a passion put to use
In my old coursework, and with my passing of Comps.
I love summer with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost Time, --- I love summer with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my hopes for graduation! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love summer better after my PhD.
-Elizabeth Browning (with some minor modifications)

Here's to summers in grad school - when we actually make progress towards our degrees!

CU Joins the Pac-10

The rumors have been swirling around Boulder for over a week, but now it's official. From a general e-mail sent out all CU students today "on Friday, June 11 at 11 a.m. MDT, the University of Colorado will hold a press conference to formally announce that CU will accept an invitation to join the Pac-10 Conference." If you want more on the athletics end of things, I recommend checking in with Dr. Saturday.

However this is more than simply an athletic move. Conference affiliation carries considerable weight in academic circles too and the Pac-10 schools are on average much better academically than the Big-12 schools (sorry Baylor) with which CU was previously affiliated. CU has been pushing upward in various rankings, both undergraduate and graduate, for the better part of the last 20 years. Here's to hoping this continues CU's rise to prominance.

And as a side benefit, perhaps I'll get to see Oregon or Oregon State play in the stadium I see out my window everyday, as shown in the helpfully annotated image below.

The Physics of Ski Moguls

One of my favorite things about physics is that it is so widely applicable. Statistical mechanics can be applied to the stock market. Fluid flow can be used to model freeway traffic. The movement of large crowds of people around obstacles can be described using wave-function scattering techniques from quantum mechanics. Basically physics is applicable to almost everything.

Here's a great example (and one that's very applicable to life in Colorado) from Physics Today: ski moguls.
Contrary to what you might think, ski moguls actually tend to move uphill over time as new snow is deposited on their uphill slopes and removed from their downhill slopes. So while the snow is carried downhill by gravity, the moguls actually move uphill. On average, studies have shown that a mogul will move 10m uphill over the course of a ski season.

So the next time you're screaming down the slopes just remember that physics is all around you.

I Survived the Swine Flu (Maybe)

Many of you have been following the progress of the swine flu, or more correctly the H1N1 virus, as it threatens Western civilization with near certain doom. Well it turns out I may have just shown the world how to save itself. You're all welcome.

Last Thursday I came down with a fever, headache, body aches, sore throat, and upset stomach. These are your standard flu symptoms with only one complication - it's August. Who gets the flu in August?

So being the concerned citizen I am, I checked the student health center website at CU and, sure enough, CU was experiencing an outbreak of swine flu. It seems that as the masses of undergrads returned to campus, some of them had brought death along for the semester. AND IT WAS SPREADING! TO ME!

After checking that my symptoms matched those infected by the swine flu, I called up my ever-reliable student health center (yay for student health care!), who informed me that I probably had swine flu, but that since I didn't have cancer, bullet wounds, or an advanced case of polio, they had to leave me on my own and save those weaker than myself. So with nothing more than generic cold medicine and orange juice, I was left to fight for my life.

And fight I did. I fought for nearly 60 hours between Thursday night and Monday morning. To the untrained eye this fighting may have looked like sleeping, but I tell you it was intense. And when it was done, I stood alone on the cellular battlefield. I DEFEATED THE SWINE FLU! (maybe)

So if any of you come down with swine flu, follow my lead. Take generic cold medication, drink orange juice, and sleep your heart out. You too might make it through this flu season alive.

The Morality of Self-Plagiarism

I am used to thinking of academic honesty as a pretty clear issue. If you steal a page out of somebody else's writing and try to pass it off as your own, you are acting in an immoral and academically dishonest way. However an incident here at CU has made me realize that the issue isn't as cut and dry as I once thought. Please excuse my vagueness as I wish to protect the identity of the affected student, who I will call Bob.

Last spring Bob was taking a senior-level writing class and a business class. He wrote an opinion paper for the business class advocating a certain management practice, turned it in, and received a high grade on the assignment. A couple weeks later Bob was assigned to write an opinion paper in the writing class on a topic of his choice. He lengthened the paper from the business class by roughly 25%, made some general revisions, turned it in to the writing class, and received a high grade.

After the writing professor returned the paper to Bob they chatted about the assignment briefly. In that chat Bob mentioned that sections of the paper had been used in a previous assignment for another class. The professor then told him that he had violated CU's academic integrity policy and would receive no credit for the assignment. A couple days later Bob was informed that he faced possible referral to the Dean of Students (the closest thing CU has to an honor code office) for additional action. Bob was shocked to find out that what he had done was being treated the same way as plagiarism or cheating.

CU's academic integrity policy specifically bans "submitting the same paper for multiple classes" which has been dubbed "self-plagiarism". I was surprised to hear this, but it turns out that most schools ban self-plagiarism, including BYU. I can never recall being told that by anyone in my time at BYU and CU. Perhaps I simply missed the boat, but if this practice is banned, shouldn't students know about it?

The bigger issue in my mind is why so-called self-plagiarism is a problem at all. If a student can use their own words and ideas in more than one context, why is it immoral to do so? The student is not gaining an unfair advantage over other students anymore than a science major has an advantage over a humanities major in a general education science class (or vice-versa for a GE humanities class). And the student has not stolen words or ideas from anyone. The only reason I can see for this rule is that professors want students to do work specifically for their class, but if an assignment is off-topic isn't a poor grade a sufficient punishment?

I personally think that there is nothing morally reprehensible about reusing old assignments, but I want your thoughts on the matter. Why is it wrong to reuse your own previous work?

The Best Small Town: Louisville, CO

CNNMoney.com has released it's list of the top 100 small towns in America and guess who is #1 on the list:

1. Louisville, CO

WINNER

Top 100 rank: 1
Population: 18,800
Unemployment: 6.0%*

Some towns nestled along the Rockies are full of pretentious eco-hipsters. Not Louisville. Ice cream shops dot the historic downtown. Families grab burgers at the cozy Waterloo Café. A Friday-night street fair, with a beer garden, live music, and games for the kids, runs all summer. No wonder this down-to-earth town has appeared high on Money's Best Places list before--and on many others.

It's also weathering the economic downturn well. Robust industries in the area, such as high tech, energy, and health care, make county unemployment among the lowest in the state.

But the top reason residents give for moving here? The great outdoors. Louisville is laced with nearly 30 miles of trails, Rocky Mountain National Park is less than an hour away, and eight world-class ski resorts are within two hours. The town's schools are highly rated as well.

Add in dry, clear weather, little crime, good health care, and low taxes, and Louisville is pretty tough to beat.

And guess where I live? Actually not quite in Louisville, but right next door. Here's a map for clarification.

View Louisville in a larger map
That's right, I live right next to the best small town in America. Take that Irvine, Urbana, Chapel Hill, and Waco.

Epsode II: The Winter Strikes Back

So far today in Boulder, Colorado we have had about a foot of snow and here's the forecast for the next 36 hours:That's right. The forecast for March 23rd is "blizzard". I love Colorado.

Decadal Survey Board Announced

The National Research Council's Decadal Review committee has been announced and the members are:

Executive Committee
Roger D. Blandford (Chair), Stanford University
Martha Haynes (Vice Chair - Science Frontiers), Cornell University
John P. Huchra (Vice Chair - State of the Profession) Harvard University
Marcia Rieke (Vice Chair - Program Prioritization), University of Arizona
Lynne Hillenbrand (Executive Officer), California Institute of Technology

Members
Steven Battel, Battel Engineering
Lars Bildsten, University of California, Santa Barbara
John E. Carlstrom, The University of Chicago
Debra Elmegreen, Vassar College
Joshua Frieman, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fiona Harrison, California Institute of Technology
Timothy Heckman, Johns Hopkins University
Robert Kennicutt, University of Cambridge
Jonathan Lunine, University of Arizona
Claire Max, University of California, Santa Cruz
Daniel McCammon, University of Wisconsin
Steve Ritz, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center
Juri Toomre, University of Colorado
Scott Tremaine, Institute for Advanced Study
Michael S. Turner, The University of Chicago
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Hayden Planetarium
Paul Vanden Bout, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Tom Young, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Retired

In bold is the name on my very own research advisor, Juri Toomre. Hooray for widely respected advisers!

Those of you outside of astrophysics may not be familiar with the Decadal Survey, so here's the summary from the NRC's project page:

The committee will address the future of the U.S. astronomy and astrophysics program by formulating a decadal research strategy with recommendations for initiatives in priority order within different categories (related to the size of projects and their home agencies). In addition to reviewing individual initiatives, aspects of infrastructure, and so on, the committee will take a comprehensive look at the U.S. astronomy and astrophysics program and make a judgment about how well the program addresses the range of scientific opportunities and how it might be optimized. The guiding principle in developing the decadal research strategy and the priorities will be maximizing future scientific progress.

And on top of being on this very important committee, Juri also provides delicious treats at group meetings, making him an all-around excellent adviser.

BYU vs. CSU - As Witnessed by Me

One of the advantages of attending the University of Colorado is that BYU plays at least one football game within 100 miles of my residence every year. This year BYU plays at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado (~100 miles to the south of Boulder) on November 15th. Last year BYU played at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming (~70 miles to the northwest of Boulder). And last night, BYU played at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado (~40 miles north of Boulder). And I was there.

For those of you who missed the game, here's a quick recap:

1. CSU scored a touchdown
2. BYU scored a touchdown
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 2 more times
4. BYU scored a field goal
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2 3 more times
6. BYU wins 45-42
   

Basically, it was a high scoring thriller that showed that BYU's offense is very good and BYU's defense is very bad. The photographic summary of the game can be found below.That was BYU tight end Dennis Pitta catching the game winning touchdown with exactly 22 seconds left on the clock, courtesy of the Deseret Morning News. I was sitting less than 100 ft. away from Dennis Pitta when that play was made. I love Colorado.

Departmental Identity

The Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) Department at the University of Colorado is an interesting creature that I've been meaning to post on for some time now. As the name suggests, our department has a somewhat divided nature. We have people who would call themselves physicists that work on things like plasmas, fluid dynamics, and general relativity. We have people who consider themselves astronomers that do everything from solar observations to observational/numerical cosmology. We have people who associate mostly with geologists that study everything from the surfaces of Mars and Io to the composition of asteroids and comets. The APS department really defies identification with a single academic discipline. We are something like an astronomy department that accreted pieces of what are traditionally physics and geology departments.

This, of course, is a mixed blessing. When we talk about classes, there are invariably disputes between the astronomers, physicists, and geologists over what needs to be included in the "core" courses. Physicist want to see the grad students take courses with the physics department like E&M, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics. Astronomers want to take some of that, but also include classes on radiative transfer and data analysis. Meanwhile, the geologists in our midst feel that topics like fluid dynamics, geochemistry, and planetary surfaces are indispensable. And so we go around and around this topic every time somebody brings it up and invariably some group feels disenfranchised. Currently in the APS department, the physicists and astronomers have metaphorically ganged up on the geologists and so I take classes on quantum mechanics and radiative transfer, but not planetary surfaces.

On the other hand, when I visited the University of Illinois, I found the opposite case (Bill, be sure to correct me if I'm wrong). Illinois has a lot of good research areas, but there is no question that condensed matter is king in that department. While this solves the lack of identity problem we have at CU, it does have it's own weaknesses as well. As an incoming grad student, I wasn't positive what I wanted to do my research on. At CU, I could have gone in literally a couple dozen different directions. While Illinois has other research options beyond condensed matter, the breadth of options certainly isn't anywhere near what it is in Colorado.

My obviously biased opinion is that departments shouldn't be too intent on defining themselves as "the condensed matter department" or "the cosmology department". Although there are issues with being a broad department, I think the hassle pays dividends as various sub-fields wax and wane in popularity. However, I am interested to hear your thoughts. Is your department broad or focused and is that a good thing?

Graduate Electives

I am now entering my third semester of classes at the University of Colorado and that means I get to take electives. Technically I took an elective each of my first two semesters, but to give you a feel for those classes, out of the 10 incoming students last year, 9 were in my first semester "elective" and 6 were in my second semester "elective". So while those two classes were not formally required, they were really no-brainers for incoming students.

Now that I have completed the core courses and the two electives that almost all incoming students take, I am at a place where I can take classes that I really get to choose. I can take classes outside of my research area and even outside of my department. This fall, for example, I will be taking a class on stellar structure and evolution for my research, a cosmology class for "broadening", and a course on spectral and radial basis function numerical methods from the applied math department for research, "broadening", and personal interest. Isn't choice wonderful?

This brings me to an interesting point that has been debated extensively over the past year as my department retools its graduate curriculum - what is the purpose of graduate level electives? In the first year here in the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences graduate program, we take mostly "core" courses. These are things every astrophysicist should know, such as quantum and statistical mechanics, radiative transfer, statistics and data analysis, math methods, fluid dynamics, and magnetohydrodynamics. These core classes theoretically provide the basis for any research area that one might choose in astrophysical and planetary sciences.

Beyond the core courses, which total 21 credit hours when you include 4 credits of seminar courses, we are required to take a total of 39 credits to graduate. That means we take approximately 6 elective classes. At least two of these electives must come from the APS department, but the other 5 can come from anywhere that the adviser deems "appropriate" for the student's graduate study. So I face a dilemma - do I take classes that will directly benefit my research (like a stellar structure class or a class on massively parallel computing from the computer science department) or do I take classes that explore other research areas in physics and astronomy (like a cosmology or particle physics class)?

Both options have their benefits. If I take classes related to my research I will learn my research area faster and it will benefit me in terms of publications and time to graduation. On the other hand, how can I call myself an astrophysicist if all I know is fluid dynamics, MHD, and scientific computing? Shouldn't everyone take a couple classes outside of their research area so they understand a little of what else is out there?

What do you think? What kind of electives are you taking? How do you balance depth in your research area with breadth in your field?

In Case You Doubt Colorado's Beauty...

This is the view from my patio at sunset looking towards the Rocky Mountains.
I apologize to all of you that have to suffer in Irvine, Chapel Hill, Waco, Urbana-Champaign, or any other depressing place you may attend grad school.

Summer Time and the Living's Easy

Here at CU, it's been academic summer for nearly 6 weeks now and for me that means that for the past 6 weeks I have been doing just one thing: research. That's right - no homework assignments, no lectures to attend, no grad student meetings, just pure research. Oh how I love the summer.

Don't misunderstand me - classes, homework, and grad student meetings have their place and are very important, but they do serve to clutter up my schedule. For example, here's the contents of my Google Calendar (which is the only thing that keeps me sane and where I need to be during the school year) for April 7:

08:00 - 08:30 Register for Classes
09:00 - 10:50 Survey Kyle's Students*
11:00 - 11:50 Astrophysical and Space Plasmas (Lecture)
12:00 - 12:50 Collunchium (Lunch with Colloquium Speaker)
13:00 - 13:50 Observations and Statistics (Lecture)
14:30 - 15:50 Meet with Don*
16:00 - 16:50 Colloquium

On top of that, I also had to squeeze in a couple hours for research and a couple more for homework, not including the items marked with an asterisk which were already homework. All in all, it added up to a hectic day where I had to stop what I was doing and switch to something else about every hour.

Now compare that to my schedule for today:

08:00 - 18:00: Research

You see, the days are just a long (in some cases a bit longer) in terms of hours worked, but instead of running around and working on a half dozen totally different things, I get to focus on a single objective. Today, for example, I am monitoring a couple of simulations that test a new sub-grid scale model for our code, running a simulation to explore a particularly interesting dynamo case where the simulated star just can't seem to find a stable configuration, and analyzing data from that simulation to explore why it can't find its happy place. In other words, all of my efforts are focused on improving our understand of how stars generate their magnetic fields.

So, what are you doing this summer? With any luck, you're blissfully doing research as well, but there are other worthwhile pursuits. I hope your summers are as enjoyable and relaxing as mine.

Caucusing In Colorado

As most of you know, yesterday was "Super Tuesday", the closest thing to a national primary that this nation has ever had. Colorado was one of the states that held a nominating contest yesterday. Unlike most states, however, Colorado uses caucuses rather than a primary, so last night Rachel and I attended our local caucus for the Republican party. It was quite an experience.

First of all, I should say that Colorado has recently switched from using primaries to caucuses, so the volunteers running the caucus had absolutely no experience doing this. In fact, one of the first things they did was ask if anyone there had ever been to a caucus before. Of the ~300 people there, no one had.

The next major issue was that ~300 people showed up. This was far more than had been expected and that caused some organizational delays. The poor lady in charge obviously had no idea what she was doing. After about 15 minutes of trying to shout instructions to ~300 people in a middle school cafeteria, they finally found a microphone, which greatly improved the situation. Still, it took them about a half hour just to get everything set for the presidential preference poll - the main event of the evening.

In order to take the presidential preference poll, we first had to gather in precincts. My precinct, the good old #205, had 9 people show up out of 317 registered republicans, meaning that we had about a 3% turnout. With 9 people it was quite easy to get things done, but some of the precincts had 20-30 people show up, which made things like hand-counting votes a little trickier. After 30 minutes of waiting, finally, we voted for the republican nomination for president. Our precinct voted as follows: 4 votes for Huckabee, 3 votes for McCain, 2 votes for Romney. Who did we vote for? You'll just have to guess or wait for another post.

After that, we had done what we came to do, but we were far from finished. We spent the next hour electing representatives from our precinct to attend the county caucus (where delegates are chosen to attend the state caucus, which actually chooses the delegates to send to the GOP national convention). We also had the fun of voting on some non-binding opinion resolutions that included issues like illegal immigration, tax cuts, and spending limits that generated absolutely no controversy among the 9 republicans in attendance. The only excitement came when a 89 year old lady misunderstood one of the resolutions and proceeded to go on a totally irrelevant but very impassioned speech about the "illegals" who are "invading our country".

Finally, after over 90 minutes of caucusing, we were done. When the votes from the 16 precincts in our caucus were all tallied, Romney won by handy margin, 177 votes to Huckabee's 56, McCain's 47, and Ron Paul's 32. As Rachel commented on our way home, it was a very civic experience.

Colorado Hippies

As I have probably mentioned to all of you (and Mike can confirm this), Boulder County, Colorado is an interesting place. Rachel and I woke up Tuesday morning to find this spray-painted on the garages of our apartment complex. These picture were taken just outside of our apartment.

(The top photo was on the left and the bottom on the right, but there isn't enough space to put them side by side. Sorry)

I have seen vandalism before, of course, but this is my first experience with politically motivated vandalism. Before this, I was marginally supportive of the President, but after being told to stop him by someone defacing my apartment complex, I've decided to become a rabid Bush-hater.

Who says you can't change the world with a poorly used can of polluting black spray paint?

Boulder Here I Come

Well, it's offical. As of next fall, I will offically be a graduate student in the department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder! And I can't tell you how good it feels to finally be able to say that. After almost a year of researching schools, picking out programs, filling our applications, waiting for responses, visiting departments, and praying it will all come out right in the end - after all that, I finally know where I'm going and I am very excited about it.

I'll be headed to the home of the famous JILA, which is an acronym without an full name. JILA used to stand for the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, but now it simply stands for nothing. And when I publish a paper, I can have two little numbers after my name that say that I'm from CU-Boulder and JILA. Yee-haw!!!

Basically, the point of this post is that I am extremely excited about finally knowing where I'll be for the next 5 years. I want to thank all of you for the advice you've given me through this process. Best wishes to all of you as you figure out your future plans as well.