But, seriously, some commentators declare that higher-education is the next bubble to burst, with reports of $1 trillion dollars in student loans out there, and a good portion of them going unpaid - while crippling those who have such loans. And, all the while, such higher-education institutions, such as Harvard, have trusts worth billions of dollars - so much that they don’t even have to charge tuition. (Just Google it. I don’t want to stymie this post with a dump of links.)
On the flip side, you have this highly-educated gentleman’s well-informed opinion:
Personally, I consider college education one of those infrastructure-type investments that ultimately benefits the nation, like highways and airports. It should be subsidized.
At worst, if there is an implosion, I hope it can be parlayed into benefits for community colleges and junior colleges, so that some of these society-benefiting programs can be maintained.
To be honest, I wouldn’t cry too much if some of the exploitive for-profit colleges – the ones that depend on government-supported student loans – went under. (They can go straight to hell for all of me.) Many of them are exploitation shops and diploma mills. They offer crap like masters’ degrees in military history: yeah, that’s a valuable job asset in our society.
The recent sports/academic scandal is another black mark against the system as we know it. And another major sin is paying college presidents twice or even three times what we pay the President of the U.S. Can you seriously claim that you have to pay a college prexy $600,000 a year? You can’t find a qualified administrator who’ll do the job for half that? Bullhooey.
Every person should have both a trade and a profession.
The university industry is self-serving, which is why they promote university education. I enjoyed university education, and I have no problem thinking that everyone should have the chance to have a profession, and it’s a valid goal for society. That, and a trade. It’s insane to have education just for entertainment.
An education isn’t just for entertainment though. I have BA in History (about as useful job wise as that MA in Military History), and, oh, I have an MA in Public History too. The MA in PH is actually useful when it comes to finding jobs but the market where I live is pretty saturated, there’s no room for advancement unless someone dies, and, quite frankly, the pay isn’t all that great so I abandoned that as a career choice even though it’s something I really love.
Anyway, one of the greatest things about going to college is that once I finished my undergraduate work I was much better at not only constructing arguments but also at spotting bullshit. I also learned how to find information about subjects I knew little or nothing about so when assigned tasks in those areas I could hit the ground running. While my current employer couldn’t give a rat’s ass about my knowledge of the prohibition movement in the south in 1908 (my thesis) the above tools I acquired in college continue to be useful to me today. Especially my ability to switch gears and quickly learn how to do something I’ve never done before.
Edit: On the other hand I might just make more money if I quit, went to welding school, and began a career in a trade. There are always employment opportunities for welders and they can make some good money.
Good point and I’d like to amend my earlier statement to include trade schooling. Heck, I’m now in a trade school learning electromechanics, and this after I picked up two bachelor’s degrees. In recent days, we’ve been learning how to arc-weld.
I think the biggest problem is that college has been made into a necessity. A hundred years ago, a high school graduate could walk into a small town bank, take a basic test in customer service, math, and literacy, and have a fairly secure job. It wasn’t the fast track to riches, but it was enough to keep you solidly in a middle class world. In my parents’ youth in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the bachelor’s degree was fast becoming (and to some extent already had become) the new baseline. A BS or BA could take you anywhere, where do you want to go? IBM will take you into their sales training program. Podunk Unified School District will give you a provisional teaching license, would you prefer third grade or fourth? Wobegon State University is looking for some good grad students, how would you like to try for the MS in Important Stuff? Nowadays? So you have a BS? Big whoop, everyone has one. What do you have that sets you apart? Now, there are so many people with bachelor’s degrees that people who don’t have one are considered sub-human in some respects. Soon, you’ll need a master’s degree to do anything except flip burgers. Soon, you’ll need a Master of Culinary Studies with a Professional Graduate Certificate in Short Order Culinary Process Practice and a Beef Council Certified Grill Engineer Level 2 or above credential to even flip burgers.
To some degree it is a supply and demand thing. So what can we do about it? How can we make not going to college (or only going to college for a bachelor’s degree and not going to grad school) into something that is worthwhile for a lot of people?
but you see…herein lies the problem. education subsidies may make you feel good. They make me feel good too. But the question is…do they really help further the cause of education or do they hinder it? lots of things that make us feel good, don’t actually do any good.
If we think of this issue like an economist (synonym for “common sense”) then we know that when you subsidize things, the price is sure to rise. This is obvious b/c if the govt is paying for it, then the schools can raise prices far faster than normal market conditions would allow. and that is exactly what we see happening.
Outside of a handful of Ivy League places with mega-endowments, every college and university in America depends on government-supported student loans. 70% of students borrow, and the average debt is $30,000.
Why the special scorn for for-profit schools? Would you feel differently about the University of Phoenix if instead of profits, they spent huge money on giving senior employees a lighter workload, fancier buildings, million-dollar sports programs, while continuing to spend as little as possible on basic undergraduate education? Because I just described 90% of the “non-profit” colleges.
But, while the linked video does talk about being able to support yourself in a career, it never puts an emphasis on money over life satisfaction or proper placement. That, in my opinion, is still the main issue here. Higher-education, anymore, seems to be a scheme designed to entice people to spend more money on education - as pointed out before, is a creeping baseline - with a hope of making more money. Not only does this resemble a Ponzi scheme, but it doesn’t at all address life satisfaction or proper placement.
One of the major spurs to the explosive growth in college enrollment was the 1960s/70s era move away from (and eventual outlawing) of thing like IQ/aptitude testing for jobs. Employers looking to hire generally smart people started using a college degree as a proxy for intelligence.
The tide is beginning to turn back, as college has gotten more and more expensive, and more and more people are looking at alternative learning credentials.
I think you’ve tangentially mentioned one of the other big problems with getting a degree without really meaning to in this section I quoted. The word at the heart of the matter is “secure.” As job security dwindled away, so too has a lot of the value of a college education. Back in the day a person who graduated with a BA or BS could get a good job and feel pretty confident that they could continue to work at that place for a decade or more barring some sort of stupidity on their part to get them fired.
Now people who graduate from college do not have that promise of job security. No one does. If it’s not going to be the key to finding your place in the world anymore, it’s harder to sell the idea that it’s valuable. Wage stagnation doesn’t help either, because people make less than they used to even though more graduate.
Let’s get a fact out of the way here: A college degree-- any degree from an accredited institution, even in a “stupid” major-- is strongly correlated with a higher income and lower unemployment rate. The bump goes up with each level of degree. The numbers are striking and hard to refute. A college degree is a wise investment, and forgoing a college degree (assuming you are capable of completing it) is hobbling yourself in the job market. Telling people not to go to college is a bad idea.
The labor market has changed. In my mother’s day, a person could make a living as a typist. A secretary would keep pretty busy with marking up a schedule book and maintaining physical files. Today, of course, people can easily type their own stuff, manage their schedule, and save stuff to the hard drive. Secretaries still exist, but they are doing much more skilled work.
And if we decide we don’t want to value education, that’s fine. China and India are building universities as fast as they will go up, and sending their best students to our schools in the meantime. Harvard is now a back-up school for the best Indian universities. I am sure the rest of the world will be happy to take on our highly skilled jobs, while we play around with our “we don’t need no stinking college” fantasy.
(I’ll also note that there are seven different payment plans for federal student loans, some of which are capped at a reasonable percent of one’s disposable income and come with eventual dismissal. There is no reason at all for student loans to be posing a major hardship on a recent grad. No debt is better than lots of debt, but student loans are not as bad as they are hyped up in the breathless media reports)
Cite for this myth, please. I’d love to see you try to do the math on this.
Please don’t offer the useless figures that lump MIT math majors with 1500 SAT scores with 750 SAT score kids enrolling in sociology at East Shitwater State; they do nothing to support the blanket claim you make here.
There are plenty of degrees with a negative ROI, and that’s even without factoring in the fact that half of the people (and waaay more than half of the 750 SAT group) that enroll in college don’t finish – they’re out 2 years and 20k, but they still have no marketable skills.
Is there any level of education that comes with meaningful job security anymore? Last I checked, the US has a big problem with unemployed PhD’s and PhD’s flipping burgers for 5% over minimum wage because there aren’t enough jobs.
“I’m going for my God of Profound Knowledge Degree with a Certificate in Being Very Very Smart. It’s pretty hard to do, only 3% of students who start one finish and 30% of those who don’t finish end up in mental institutions. But once you’ve got the degree, you can walk into most towns and business executives will bow before you and bid each other up trying to make the highest offer to you.”
And that’s one of the things that annoys me. I’m sick of the current hiring system that is based on degrees, years of experience, and answers to ridiculous psychological questions like “What is your greatest weakness?”. Give me the damn Widget Specialist Selection Test Battery Revision 3 with the Practical Problem Solving Assessment Addendum, the Kansas Customer Service Skills Assessment Revised Edition 2014, and the National Institutes of Widgetry’s Widget Processes and Procedures Knowledge Test and we’ll see how I do.
There seem to be two reasons why this doesn’t happen much anymore:
Certain groups starting suing employers claiming that the tests were biased toward non-minorities.
Lack of confidence in, and lack of development and testing of, testing instruments has resulted in the perception that job readiness can’t be tested for in an exam.
I think for-profit schools have a place in the world of education. Their greater focus on short-term profits as opposed to building “ivory tower” prestige can help make education available to people who are willing to pay and are capable of learning but for whatever reason couldn’t get in to a more traditional school or couldn’t find a traditional school that worked for them. Their presence in a competitive market also can drive down tuition and increase services when schools come to terms with the fact that they aren’t the only game in town and that people will leave State U to attend The School of Important Stuff, Inc. if they can deliver a better product at a more affordable price.
One of the reasons that they are facing so much ire today in the US is that many of these schools have developed reputations as machines designed to siphon off Federal student loan money and kick the student out a year later with no degree. Several of them have been implicated in outright or borderline fraud scandals. More traditional schools sometimes have problems with that too, but not to the same degree as certain for-profit schools that seem to be in some trouble or another every two years.
So the question really is whether there is a fundamental problem with the idea of for-profit education or whether or not it’s mostly the current Corporate America ™ crap with a low-morals culture that teaches that if you would profit from raping your own mother, you should do it.
