A plug for my own field, Philosophy, which you would think would (according to stereotypes) be the quintessential useless irrelevant purely-academic field of study.
It turns out, according to this article, business owners (in the UK at least) are catching on that education in Philosophy is a plus, not a minus, on the resume. A philosophical education is useful in just about every industry, and given the employment numbers in the article, it would appear business owners are starting to think philosophical education can sometimes be more useful than industry-specific education.
If that’s true of Philosophy, the most apparently abstract and unworldly of academic disciplines, it seems likely to me it’s true of university studies in general.
Better than what? And are you personally supporting this idea?
Wow, really hate the tone and content of this article. It’s by a person at the University of Virginia, obviously quite invested in the legacy system.
BTW, I was a philosophy major too. I agree that it’s a fine major for all sorts of jobs–IF one must get a university education. It’s nice that hiring managers are beginning to appreciate it (must be the first time in history), but the question remains whether those who earned a BA in philosophy are going to get a proper return on their investment.
By the way, Frylock, what you say makes sense in many ways. A university education is a good thing in itself. Having universities and people studying stuff is good for society. What I think is not good for society is forcing kids to get an education that they can’t afford and don’t want for jobs that do not fundamentally require the education.
America is just about out of jobs that teenagers and trained monkeys can do. The global workforce has changed, and each one of us is now, one way or another, competing with the entire planet. Working with America is expensive, but we have one huge comparative advantage that no other country quite has yet- we have a huge workforce that has been educated by the best higher education institutions on the planet. Even our minor state schools are better than the highest ranked institutions of entire countries.
Other countries are figuring it out. China is spending like mad to get top global faculty into Chinese campuses. Our own universities are opening brach campuses all over the Middle East (among other places) to serve students who for one reason or another will not study in the US. Australia’s national economy is enormously affected by foreign students. India is still trying to build enough world-class institutions to meet demand, and entirely new forms of scrappy educators are bubbling up all over.
In other words, higher education is probably the best thing the US has to offer the world at this moment, and we’d be idiots to start scaling back that system because the competition is coming up quickly. Yes, by all means, reign in tuition. But to try to get fewer kids in school is a huge step backwards and would be disastrous for our economy on the whole. In the end, it’s better for all of us to have more doctors, accountants, and engineers in our country and fewer tree-trimmers, sales clerks and department store Santas. We aren’t putting this genie back in the bottle. We need to make our workforce globally competitive or else we are screwed, and the capabilities that make people globally competitive are still the advanced analysis and communications skills learned in university.
We need to strengthen our public college systems, so that they can return to offering the affordable educations our parents got. We need to carefully explore opportunities for technology and collaboration to bring down the costs of college. We need to acknowledge that some industries will always rely on income based class proxies (my industry, for example, basically only hires on the intern/low-hourly level even with an advanced degree and strong experience- now that people can get educations, they need to know you can work for free for six months in order to sort out the low-class), and we need to find ways to work around that and correct for it. We need to make college admissions more about achievement and less about class, so that our resources go the best investments. We need to stop allocating university financial aid through statistical methods designed to increase enrollment of nearly-full paying students and return to offering real scholarships that really make it possible to put a poor but bright kid through an education they otherwise wouldn’t get. We need to just get rid of college rankings, which are 75% of everything that is bad about universities and encourages colleges to focus on what doesn’t matter while students pick based on what doesn’t matter.
But no, the answer is not to stop getting smarter.
even sven, I do not think anyone here would disagree with you - you are preaching to the choir. Education should be highly valued globally, as it will solve a great many problems the more it expands and the more people who get an education. The issue at hand is how the financial system has infected, for lack of a better word, or distorted the tuition structure of our education system. The risks and rewards are out of balance, because banks are being shielded from the risk, which is borne by the student, who carries the cost of an education around like a yoke for a very long time. Lenders being shielded from risk - this is where the student loan bubble parallels the housing bubble, and it is driving up costs for an education to the point where more people are questioning if it is worth it, economically. That is something we all agree is a bad thing.
I don’t think anyone’s posted anything objective that supports the idea that there is a bubble at all. There’s the NYTimes article that talks about the struggles of borrowers and the WSJ article talking about how the government makes more on defaulted student loans than private banks make on any type of loan. Then there’s a bunch of editorials by Dopers talking about how things should change. I think it’s telling that no one has been able to post anything objectively supporting the idea that there is student loan bubble.
md2000 provided some possible scenarios back in post#3. As this is the Great Debates, you may not get THE answer, but you will get some conjecture.
“It’s hard to predict. Especially the future.” - Yogi Berra
Unlike the housing bubble, where the bank could throw someone out of their home, in the student loan bubble, the bank will not be able to throw someone out of their education. As long as the banks can keep making low-no risk loans where the student bears most/all of the risk, and the schools can keep raising tuition without students bearing the risk of the cost (since student loans are so easy to obtain), my guess is not much will change. Industry will protect it’s interests. The only way something may upset this current scenario is thru legislation, and given the current political climate, I am not holding my breath on that one. My 2¢.
Absent major legislative changes, my guess is that won’t be any sort of “crash”. But new college students will gradually become less willing to take on extensive loans for degrees that don’t guarantee employment. That will slow (but not halt or reverse) tuition inflation. Students will choose cheaper state universities and community colleges, and those will grow to meet demand. For-profit schools will also see greater demand. The elite private schools won’t have any trouble maintaining their enrollment, but some of the not-particularly-prestigious private schools might have to reduce tuition or cut back programs.
This will be over the course of decades. Some of the change in new student demand will happen as gung-ho high school teachers and guidance counselors are replaced by recent grads that are struggling with student debt.
Here is another WSJ articlethat states:
“Issuance of student loans has soared in recent years, hitting $867 billion at the end of 2011, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, more than credit cards or auto loans. The jump has led some to classify the student-lending market as a bubble, comparing it with the housing mess that nearly brought down the banking system in 2008.”
The article suggests the real estate bubble is quite a bit larger than the student loan bubble, and if/when it pops, the Govt (taxpayers) would take the hit.
Here’s the thing about bubbles - no one wants to acknowledge one exists until one day, POP. Even if we were to see there is a bubble, what are we willing to do about it? - that seems to be the core of the OP question.