You’re talking about national averages, which can obscure wide disparities in funding between states and within states. At the university where I spent most of my career, the overall funding trajectory was downward. Once in a while there would be a less-bad year and we’d try to catch up, but in my experience, it was year after year of shrinking budgets, deteriorating facilities, and lofty pleas to “do more with less.”
I was a university administrator for six years, and I spent a lot of time around other administrators. Now, if you’re talking about administrators who like making high salaries, I won’t argue. I’ve never met anyone in any field who didn’t want to make more money. But I never saw or heard an administrator say “Let’s soak those students for more dough!” or anything remotely similar. Everyone I knew agreed that tuition increases were highly undesirable, and should be avoided if at all possible. Maybe there was some inner circle meeting behind closed doors and laughing like Bond villains as they plotted ways to put the squeeze on students, but I certainly never saw that at the high-level meetings I attended.
You don’t have to be a comic book fan to acknowledge that the Avenger’s movie (and the MCU in general) provided quite a bit of economic activity. In this time when we are worried out our trade imbalance, and our entertainment being one of the few industries that actually has a definitive export surplus in our benefit, it would seem to me that supporting such an industry would be in the best interests of our nation.
Ummm, and I know you don’t like the Avenger’s movies, certainly not enough to sit around for the mid and end credits scene, but if you had, you would see that there were thousands of people on that project, not just one guy with an arts degree.
Not sure what your dig was in on arts degrees was for there, but I have seen no degree programs that do not include at least one economics class, and I’ve never seen an economics class that did not talk about Pareto efficiencies and principles. I must admit I’ve never seen Pareto used as a verb quite like that, which is something that a liberal arts major probably would not have done. Why do you think that someone with an arts degree would be less equipped to participate in determining the optimal allocation of resources over a mechanic engineer, a physicist, or a computer programmer?
Ironically, and extremely devastating to your point, it would be an economics major who would be best equipped to make such recommendations and analysis, and economics is a liberal arts degree.
One other thing, I have no idea what you mean by “there was only one Einstein.” He certainly contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of the universe, but he did not do it in a vacuum. His work built on the work of others that came before him. His work was informed by and guided by colleagues and mentors. Others have built upon his work and discovered things about the nature of reality that he never would have imagined.
And what about the people that have gone bankrupt over medical bills? Do they have a grievance?
That is not my assumption. I don’t have a degree, and I’m not poor. I know people with degrees (even some with STEM degrees) who are. However, it is a fact that a college degree does in general increase your job prospects and earning potential.
You are making the assumption that someone with the resources to go to college are the ones best suited for higher education. I disagree hard with this classicist notion.
Right, which means taking on enormous debt, the entire subject of this thread.
On this, I completely disagree. If getting ahead and not working at or near poverty means going to college, then your average person needs to be able to go to college.
As I said in my previous post, if you are just pulling out the exceptional people that are able to overcome severe adversities to become successful, then you are not breaking the cycle of poverty, you are exploiting it.
If only people above average level are able to earn a living wage, then society has failed.
I think you meant "The more people have a credential the less it means. ", is this correct?
If so, that only follows if you start with the assumption that a diploma has no value of its own. As literacy rates went up in the last few generations, does that mean that reading has lost its value?
No, but that is a discussion to be had, in what level of education is a public good. We have (mostly) decided that High School level is a public good, the question is whether or not to extend that to higher learning. Do you consider education to be a public good? At what point do you think it should be cut off?
Disagree with this entirely. The businesses that employ only people with college degrees benefit more than any individual does from the system. When we go to the doctor to treat our illness or injury, we are getting more benefit from their degree than they are.
The only way that your statement follows is if the only way you determine someone’s value is by their salary, and not by what they contribute to society with their skills and knowledge.
Great, raise business taxes. Have the companies that demand a college degree before they will look at your resume pay for the cost.
Is a world with only 20% literacy indistinguishable from a world with near 100% to you?
Except of course, it means that 50% of your people are better educated.
That one of the specific desires for a Harvard degree is that is is exclusive and comes with a cachet of networking contacts does mean that that would be a watering down the number of people with those legacy advantages. That’s actually not a bad thing, IMHO.
Okay, so we cut out the bottom 25% of the students. Now what? We still have a new bottom 25% that has no job prospects.
I would strongly argue that learning how to learn is a useful skill in and of itself. What you got out of those classes is entirely up to you.
Economic activity is the exchange of goods and services. From a strictly economic point of view, they are not exchanging the value of their labor for good or services, they are using it to pay off debt.
If they are sending the money to a bank for a mortgage, they are getting a house out of it. A house has been exchanged for the value of their labor, that is economic activity.
Let’s put it this way, there are unscrupulous people out there that will put liens and debts against people who do not owe them. Sometimes they manage to succeed even in court to get a judgement (if someone sues you for a debt, make sure you show up to court!). If someone did that to you, and you suddenly found yourself owing a few tens of thousands of dollars, are you saying that there would be no difference in a strictly economic point of view of paying off that debt vs using that money to engage in economic activity?
Hard disagree. I’m gonna have to call for a cite.
And if you are correct that someone with a graduate degree has no greater potential to be productive than someone who cannot read, then that would be true.
I do not think that you are correct, and that having more people with credentials means having more people that have greater knowledge.
And you do not think that that has anything at all to do with the fact that jobs have become far more complex over the last few generations?
50 years ago, if you could read and do simple arithmetic (and were white), that qualified you for a job that would support a family.
Now jobs require a bit more learning, not out of some sense of degree bloat (though I will acknowledge that that does happen) but because people actually need to know more. How many computer programmers did we need 50 years ago compared to today? How many factory line workers did we need 50 years ago compared to today?
You are seeming to refuse this point without actually countering it. Is it really your contention that the jobs available to today’s job market are not more demanding in skill and education than those of previous generations?
Okay, but we are still punishing the students for something that they did not create or benefit from. How do you suggest the student change the system?
Asking for a cite just out of curiosity. I don’t doubt your numbers, but I would be curious to look into them a bit more.
From my cite, I see that college enrollment in public colleges has gone 10,840,000 to 14,610,000 in those same years.
You indicate an increase 36.5% in funding, and I see a 34.8% increase in enrollment. Not that huge a disparity.
Now, have you addressed the fact that the tuition that a student pays has gone up more than tenfold in that time?
I’m not sure what the “greed” is here. Are they greedy in that they want to have more students in their colleges? How much have their salaries outpaced inflation?
If administrative bloat is a problem, then that is certainly an area to address. However, administrative bloat will not be solved by ignoring the problem and punishing the students. How much was spent on administrative costs 30 years ago vs today, and how much does that account for the increase in tuition costs? At the beginning of this post, we addressed Pareto. There is both Pareto efficiency and Pareto principle. In the Pareto Principle, we typically assume that 80% of the costs come from 20% of causes. Are you saying that administrative costs is one of 20% of things to focus on to affect 80% of the costs? If so, then make that argument with figures showing that administrative costs are the primary driver behind tuition inflation. If not, then there are obviously other places that should be addressed, and complaining about administrative costs is a distraction that will interfere with solving the problem.
Could you cite where you got those numbers from? Once again, not disbelieving you, but I am not finding the same numbers that you have, and I would be curious to look further into it.
If the definition of a greedy person is someone who rubs their hands together while saying things like “lets soak people for more money” than almost no greedy people exist outside of comic books.
College administrators know that affording tuition is a great concern for most of the students, and that they are richer than the students are or will be yet accept the high incomes anyway because they can. Taking more than you need at the expense of those poorer than you is greedy in my way of thinking. Not that college administrators are uniquely greedy, most people are greedy and would do the same thing in their place.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but what I am hearing you say is that anyone who takes more than the bare minimum required to survive is greedy to you. Is that what you are saying?
There is always someone poorer than you, and by taking more than you need will always come at their expense.
I don’t completely disagree with this line of thinking, I just don’t know if you are aware of all the implications your position is taking.
That is not an assumption I am making. The ones best suited for higher education should go. Some of them will have to borrow money to do so, but since the credential they will earn is worth much more than what they will have to borrow to get it, I don’t feel sorry for them.
I took on an enormous amount of debt to buy my house. Luckily for me my house is now worth 250% of what I paid for it. Should the government pay me back for making a good investment?
First you say that it is not your assumption that the only way out of poverty is a college degree and then you outright state it.
Literacy is not a credential it is a skill. Skills have both absolute and relative value. Credentials only have value to the extent that they correlate with skill.
If I go to the doctor the benefit I get from them going to college is that I don’t have to wait longer or drive further for a different doctor who might be slightly less skilled. The benefit they get from going to college is that they get to be a doctor and potentially make a great salary for decades. Almost all of the benefit that comes from them getting their degree goes to them.
That is a good idea, as long as other ways of distinguishing applicants are legal.
Literacy is a skill not a credential. Literacy makes people more productive, most college degrees don’t.
Tautologically, but doe that education make them more productive? Depends what is being taught. Literacy almost certainly, communications or psychology unlikely.
The number of jobs has not gone down. There are some jobs that you need to have an elite level of intelligence and some jobs that you need almost no intelligence. Most jobs are somewhere in between. If only those jobs that needed an elite level of intelligence could expect a college degree than those businesses filling the other jobs would either have to find other ways to distinguish between applicants or do a better job training internally. Most jobs that now require a college degree do not actually require what was learned in college and most college graduates use very little of what they learned in their job.
Maybe but college is not teaching that.
A college education is a service, they are paying of the debt for buying that service. There is no meaningful distinction.
The difference would be that the person doing the suing is not doing something constructive.
Hereis an eighth grade exam from 1912. Most college graduates today could not pass it.
It is possible that jobs today are harder and more complicated than in the past. However it does not follow that college prepares people for those jobs or makes them more productive.Only 27% of people have a job in a field related to their majors. Most people study things unrelated to their ultimate profession and most people forget most of what they learn in college. I had a great time in college and probably remember more than most, but the amount of knowledge I have ever used compared to that I have not is at least 1000 to 1. I am not uniquein that.
Here is a report about state support of higher education over the last 40 years.
No one is asking you to feel sorry for them. Or at least, I am not, I can’t speak for everyone.
However, I am saying that we should look at the macro effects of the incentives given to individuals, and the impact that that has on our society.
Of course not. If you want your money back, you can sell your house and clear the loan instantly, and have a bunch left over.
That is not the case with students.
Umm, no. I’m not sure what you are misunderstanding here.
I said that exceptional people can make their way out of poverty without a college degree or without any help from outside sources.
My problem with that is that this is exploiting the cycle of poverty, while perpetuating it for the vast majority of people in it.
Algebra is not a credential, it is a skill. Calc is a skill. Diff calc is a skill.
Writing is a skill, economics is a skill, business management is a skill, teaching is a skill.
Credentials are to indicate that you have learned and mastered a skill. If you are saying that our credentials system is invalid, then that’s a whole different discussion than we are having at the moment.
No, you get the benefit of having a doctor. The “other” one would have had to go to college as well. If we don’t have doctors going to college, then we don’t have health services.
Sure, some individuals will lose out on some good paying gigs, but society will lose out on having medical services.
So, you do measure the value of a person based on their salary, and not what they contribute to society?
Why would that be a good idea, when you just said that the only person that benefits from the education is the individual. If you don’t think that businesses benefit from having an educated workforce to draw from, then why would you agree that taxing them to pay for education is a good idea?
I’m just not sure we can see eye to eye on this, if you do not think that a better education makes a person more productive.
Personally, even though I haven’t been in school in over a decade, I still love to learn new things. And when I learn new things, most of the time they don’t do much to make me more productive, but sometimes they do. And I have never been able to tell ahead of time which was which.
In order to be effective, people need to understand how to communicate with others. Communication and psychology are quite useful.If you are going to have any form or management or supervisory position, then being able to communicate effectively and to understand the basic motivations of your employees is actually a very important skill.
When I was in college, I had to take a public speaking class. I thought it was stupid and hated the idea of it. It was a waste of my time and money.
And yet, it was probably one of my most valuable classes that taught me some very useful skills.
I really once again have to disagree with you on the idea that there are few skills that can be learned in college that will be applicable to the workforce.
That’s a bold assertion to make. Once again, I disagree. Maybe people do not learn that in college and then choose to feel that their college time was a complete waste, but most of the people that I know that went to college credit college far more than HS or prior grades for exposing them to different ways of learning and thinking that have greatly enriched their lives.
You are literally the first person that I have had interaction with that went to college who claims that they did not learn about learning in college.
We have already agreed that the service is overpriced, and you have also made the argument that it is worthless. So, an overpriced, and IYHO worthless service.
How do you know that? They could be using their ill gotten gains to fund an orphanage or something.
Really? I mean, looking through it, other than the fact that I’d have to look up a what a cord of wood is, I’d ace the math part.
To be fair, it’s been a looong time since English and grammar, so there are few parts of the grammar section that I’d miss, but I do remember all of those questions from 6-8th grade grammar tests.
Geograhpy, I have no idea where Servia or Roumania are, but the rest I could find easily enough. I’ll just look for Serbia and Romania, I’m pretty sure they are in that general area.
And I think I can locate those cities, but I’m not sure about Mobile. If it’s Mobile Alabama, sure, it its a different one, maybe not. And it also depend on accuracy. If given a blank map, I could certainly get them i the right countries, and probably close, but if they have to be within 50 miles or something, then maybe not.
I’ll admit that I had not heard of the Wasatch Mountains before.
Physiology, other than question 8, I think I’m in good shape.
Civil government is easy enough. I will say that most people could probably not name any, much less 5 county officials, but I’m sure if they knew it was coming up on a test, they would be able to remember them.
And History, well, I actually would have failed that section, but, once again, if given just a couple hours to prepare for a test like that, I’d do just fine.
Having read through your challenge, I remain completely unconvinced as to your assertion that high school curriculums of 100 years ago are more advanced than college of today.
Which is one of the reasons why when people complain about gender studies majors or whatever, it is a pretty false complaint.
Like I said, college teaches you to learn, it doesn’t’ teach you everything you need to know.
Sounds like someone who shouldn’t have gone to college becuase he wasn’t capable of taking it seriously. Sounds like he went to have fun and party with friends. That there are people out there that do not take their education seriously shouldn’t be a reason to punish those who do.
Maybe punish them. That is a person who took up a seat in a class that was wait listed. That is a person who helped to drive up the tuition of those around him. He shouldn’t have gone. But, it seems as though he was upper middle class, so he had the resources to go, even if he was not suited for it. He took the spot of someone more suited but with fewer resources.
The fact that he credits wearing a scarf for getting B’s in classes that I wore no scarf and got almost all A’s tells me that he was a pretty piss poor student, and should not be used as something to emulate or exemplify.
If we want to talk about how people take education for granted, and do not see how having more knowledge makes you better at thinking, then that is a subject for another thread.
We’ll assume for the sake of argument that the figures from Texas, being a large state, are relevant to the rest of the country.
Take a look at figure 3 from your cite. You see how funding has stayed more or less steady, it’s gone up and down, but always kinda centered around the same spot.
You see how tuition has gone up and up and up?
I see that as a problem. I see it as not only a problem that has caused problems in the past and present, but as a problem that is getting worse, and at some point it will be causing enough problems that it needs to be addressed.
If people cannot afford to go to college, then we will not have college educated people to supply our workforce. You may think that just means that you have to drive a bit further to see a different doctor, but it actually means that there will not be enough doctors. There will not be enough STEM grads to design, build, program and maintain the machines that give us the quality of life we take for granted. There will not be enough liberal arts majors to write and film and edit the shows and movies that we enjoy.
At what point would you agree that things have gotten bad enough that something needs to addressed? And at that point, if you fix the system, how will you alleviate all the grievances of those who were harmed by the current system?
To be honest, I’m not sure if I can make heads or tails of some of their claims, and I don’t see where they are getting their numbers, and their math is rather suspect. They also are not making a convincing argument.
I’m not seeing the case for bloat here.
Even still, if there is a more convincing argument to be made about administrative bloat than that article was able to make, then I have to ask, once again, why are the students the ones who are punished?
[Stock complaint about Forbes]They are not. The Delta Cost Project report they link to has a more nuanced and comprehensive breakdown of changes over time. It’s a good read and may warrant it’s own thread; I’m less interested in “fair” than I am in policy costs and outcomes.
The problem with that report—which was issued by conservative think tank—is that it lumps all 50 states together and concludes that everything’s fine. That would be a reasonable conclusion if all states were doing exactly the same thing, and they’re not. Some states do a good job funding public universities, some states do an adequate job, and some do a terrible job.
This CBPP report actually shows the funding disparities between states.
I’ll also add that funding within states isn’t necessarily consistent either. Some states will lavish money on the flagship university with the popular football team, and neglect the smaller, regional campuses.