Haven't seen a lot of discussion of what a bursting "education bubble" will mean. Anybody have some good links that talk about what will happen? Will universities go out of business? Will people stop going to college? The implications are not clear to me.
little people will get hurt. Apollo Global and co will haemorrage hard, and both it and its backers (like the Carlyle Group) will just continue to turn to other countries they can lobby to set up the same system they have in the US: privatised education where their clients are (as far as they're concerned) paid for by loans (in the US, we're talking federal Title 4 loans, but it could be bank loans as well - clearly hugely subprime) at zero risk to themselves.
Perhaps graduates with PHD's will struggle to get university teaching jobs which pay $8.50 and hour, and never have much of a hope at the good tenured professors jobs.
Or perhaps graduates won't get jobs at all and the tax payers or parents will be on the hook for the student loans.
The services a university provides are mostly not related to education. They're related to credentialing. Like it or not, a degree is evidence that someone is going to be a better employee for the median modern job--if nothing else, just because they had the determination to finish.
Well, University was once selective and about refining a craft. As more people come we develop protocols which counteract the original intent, so we made grad school.
Grad school people earned more money, more people go to grad school, rinse & repeat.
Universities have a real problem: what they teach you has almost ZERO application outside of their ivy-covered walls. For most degrees (non-engineering, IMO), you don't learn how to add value to the economy--you just learn to jump through academic hoops.
I know too many people who have used almost nothing from their undergraduate degrees, and are now contemplating career changes because of it.
Ideally college should teach you how to learn, to set a foundation for the rest of your life. At least in the U.S. though, inadequate high schools and overpopulated junior-level classes mean that you spend the first 2-3 years of college being pumped through a mind-numbingly mechanical process. If you're lucky in your fourth year you'll start to really be challenged to think for yourself.
The kind of teaching you really want to encounter in college requires close, direct interaction with a mentor. In practice you don't actually get that much of this.
Your right about high school and that is probably where we really need the revolution. High School has become the babysitters for a group of Americans that are neither children or adults. We treat them as whichever one is convenient (prosecute as adults, rights as children). I really believe it does no good to "fix" college if the input is broken.
It is a shame the area is locked from most innovation due to lack of funding for anybody but the rich. It would be interesting to try so real alternatives to the current High School system.
It is a shame the area is locked from most innovation due to lack of funding for anybody but the rich. It would be interesting to try so real alternatives to the current High School system.
Under most circumstances, private companies cannot get paid that money. If vouchers were universal then that $8k per student would have a pretty good business case.
"For most degrees (non-engineering, IMO), you don't learn how to add value to the economy--you just learn to jump through academic hoops"
I don't buy this at all. One of the must important skills for any industry is the ability to effectively communicate, and almost everyone that goes through college gets better at this.
The people that just jump through hoops are doing it because they don't care about getting an education and just want the piece of paper called a degree. College is highly valuable to anyone that actually wants to learn.
I don't buy this at all. One of the must important skills for any industry is the ability to effectively communicate, and almost everyone that goes through college gets better at this.
Sure, but is it really necessary to take on tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to develop those skills?
I took on zero debt. I went to community college in ca which was $11 a unit, now I believe it is about $25 per unit. Then I went to a state school which was about 8 grand a year. I worked the whole time I was in school and paid for it myself.
Congrats on getting through at such a low cost--it's really hard to attend nowadays without taking on so much debt. You have to know, though, that you (and I) are in a small minority of students today.
And that's the article's point: college is so damn expensive now, almost everyone has to take on debt to pay tuition. The undergrad experience is badass, but it's also fraught with problems:
-- Students are asked to choose a major (and thus, by implication, a career) before they turn 21. If they choose incorrectly and need a different degree, the costs are astronomical.
-- Non-engineering classes are completely bunk until about the third year. Before then it's mainly "weed-out" courses which teach students little or overload them with work.
-- The cheapest (public) schools also have the largest classrooms. You pay less in tuition, but quality of education suffers.
We ask students to decide on a career during a transitional phase in their lives, in an economy where no one works in the same field for more than a decade, and then charge them $50k in the process? That's just unfair.
One of the reasons it's expensive is that it doesn't get cheaper with technology in its current form. Good professors rightly have a high and often rising salary and students and parents want small class sizes.
We also know that the gap in income between those with a higher education and those without is increasing significantly.
Don't know why you were downvoted--you make a great point here.
You can pick up the same communication skills if you worked during the day (and partied at night) during those 4 years. By doing both you're learning to socialize and communicate with coworkers.
heh, just realized, in my case, I should have probably taken courses called 'emailing managing directors', 'scheduling meetings in obsolete Lotus Notes versions', 'using that one goofed-up sharepoint where you have to click through six unintuitive links to find the files that anyone actually uses'. (Yeah, I know, my current assignment is pretty lame, sorry-- my snark is directed at it, not you).
Of course, I actually did learn this kind of stuff in college. You do similar stuff in the courses and it applies to the job in unpredictable ways. The point is that you learn to learn, and if you (with the college's help) do it right, you pick up the specific job skills much sooner.
I know (from experience) this can be a painfully hard sell with HR at a lot of places, but saving a few months of learning-curve time for your employer or your clients adds value to the economy, especially in an economy where technology, tasks and jobs change so often.
"what they teach you has almost ZERO application outside of their ivy-covered walls"
I am of the opinion that the problem is they don't focus enough on theory. CS Theory classes at my university are 4000 level courses. Until then, you're just learning 'good' OOP design with Java.
"For most degrees (non-engineering, IMO), you don't learn how to add value to the economy--you just learn to jump through academic hoops."
I'm at CU Boulder, and they've done a pretty good job with the CS course. Freshmen are required to take a "CS As A Field Of Work And Study", which introduces both workplace concepts and some of the underlying theory of computers.
I'm currently taking a "Discrete Structures" class. It's a 2000 level course, and it's all theory. And it's fun.
Over the past couple years I think I’ve come over to the point of view that the university degree system should be abolished and that higher education needs to be restructured.
Higher Education was born out of the need to verify applicant knowledge for employment. Then society realized we needed institutions to instill that knowledge. So the university system was born to disseminate knowledge.
But today we have infinitely better ways to disseminate information and the only reason we aren’t using them is because Universities don’t want to lose their stranglehold on education. The end result of which is an elitist system that traps knowledge behind a very expensive paywall. So expensive that only 27% of the nation manages to actually get a degree.
I don’t have a problem with the Universities still existing. But I do think we should make a free education available online for all people and grant degrees based on standardized testing.
I've been working through some of the MIT OCW math courses lately. It's actually been a better experience in many ways than my old college classes. Instead of sitting in a room full of 100+ people with a teacher too busy to answer questions I can sit back on my couch with a laptop and a lemonade and take my time, pause, rewind, etc.
There is something valuable in the kind of direct interaction you get at higher course levels in most colleges though. Any real alternative to the current system is still going to have to employ specialized, dedicated staff to answer questions. Crunching people through a meatgrinder of canned lectures and standardized testing is only going to take you so far.
There's an interesting supply issue in your example, as well. I mean, those were MIT courses after all, produced mostly by tenured faculty paid to teach students enrolled at MIT, not DIY courses produced by freelance instructors on the internet. Now the ratio of how many students can be taught by one instructor does go up greatly with something like OCW, but it seems we still need some sort of system where the people producing and updating that material have jobs that let them do so.
(If we massively shrink higher education, we'll also need some alternate way of paying people to do scientific research, since currently universities are the source of a lot of that as well. But that could at least in principle be decoupled from the education angle, at least for undergrad education.)
An interesting corollary is that something like OCW might eventually mean that we need a small group of highly-paid, extremely talented instructors but far fewer average instructors. Or maybe all the average instructors can stop giving lectures and instead offer their services as tutors?
Clearly the free offerings out there need refinement and the point you make about interaction is just one area. But my point is we should only care about the knowledge when certifying someone with a degree. So open it up to any business out there to educate people and just standardize what students have to learn to get a degree.
I guarantee if you submit the task of educating people to the world of startups you’ll get thousands of systems that are better than the current system and all of them will cost way less than $100,000.
Maybe. You might also just get a lot of companies that learn to game the system and crank out students that test well but that haven't really learned much. Commercial enterprises optimize for commercial goals. Look at the University of Phoenix, for example.
If people were spending their own or their family's money for all of the bloat, better decisions and better education would be the eventual result.
Right now things are driven by pressure groups and ideas that are incessantly repeated, but that have no basis in fact, both of which can shape policies freely when costs are simply shifted to the taxpayer.
We are told that if we don't overspend on education, we'll have much worse crime. But spending on simply maintaining order, according to Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point seems more immediate and effective.
And people without the benefit of sitting in a classroom do not run out and commit crimes necessarily. But people who are more impulsive by nature, more likely to commit crimes are more resistant to schooling, the exact opposite of what is constantly repeated as proof that we must turn the minds of our children over to the government.
I think the original point of college was to pass on information we as a society felt people needed for life and I think EVERYONE should have access to that information. Whether they choose to take advantage or not.
The point is it shouldn't be locked away from anyone not wanting to go into major debt to obtain it.
> I think the original point of college was to pass on information we as a society felt people needed for life
Actually, high school was supposed to do that, and before that, grade school. Instead, they're largely child care, and college may be going the same way.
How can a system of qualification not be elitist? Some pass, some fail, that will never change. Strip the "elitism" out of degrees and all that will happen that another qualification will take its place as the gold standard.
An elitist system divides people into an elite and the others.
So a system where you have demonstrate the ability know and do a certain set of things, and give unlimited attempts. Then provide enough help to enable everyone to get over that line. There is some military training that work like this: train/test then if the person fails, retrain and retest and repeat. Everyone learns the material and is credentialed as such.
I agree this will not create the gold standard. The gold standard will still be knowing the right people, and belonging to the right clubs. It may just be that the clubs are not Yale and Harvard.
The military washes people out all the time. What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10?
It is a sad indictment of our society when "elitism" is something to discourage. Let's be very clear: the opposite of elitism is mediocrity. But there will always be bastions of those who strive for excellence.
I think T_TTB's original point about elitism was not to just give everyone a degree, but that the financial cost of college makes it inaccessible (or at least difficult) for a lot of people, regardless of their academic ability. On the other hand, if your wealthy parents made big donations to an Ivy League college, getting admitted and collecting your degree won't be all that difficult.
Bush's 2001 commencement speech at Yale sums it up nicely:
Bush poked fun at his average college record while at the Ivy League school. "And to you 'C' students, you too can be president of the United States," he said to a crowd that rippled with laughter.
The president also got in a good-natured jab at his vice president, who attended Yale for a time. "A Yale degree is worth a lot, as I often remind Dick Cheney, who studied here but left a little early," Bush said. "So now we know, if you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president."
Cheney got into Yale but flunked out. Bush got his degree, in history. Opinions on what that says about his academic ability vary.
> What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10?
I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education.
I kind of knew that my point about training techniques could easily be misunderstood. I am not trying to say there are not elites in the military, Seals are elite. What percentage of people fail basic training?
If elitism is "a situation in which power is concentrated in the hands of a limited number of people". Then opposites of elitism are freedom, and direct democracy.
We are talking about education. Look at literacy levels Sweden. Here is my understanding of how it works: people who don't meet the standard have to go to night school till they meet it. They have the highest rates of adult literacy in the world. Do they have mediocrity? Do they have elitism?
I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education.
That is absolutely not true. My undergraduate degree was in Mech Eng. Even people with As in A-level maths and physics struggled with some of the course. Half (possibly more) of the freshers I enrolled with didn't graduate from that course with me, they either dropped out altogether or switched to something easier. Or some people repeated a year. But if you don't get partial differential equations (for example) on the second attempt, you're probably not going to get them ever. Doesn't mean you're a bad person - just means you should do something else with your life.
A vanishingly small percentage of the population is capable of a true university education. The only way to enroll more is to relax the standards and simplify the material. Which is exactly what New Labour did with their arbitrary goal of 50% of the population to be graduates.
BTW according to Wikipedia, of every 200 applicants to the SAS (most of whom have already qualified as Paras, they're already elite) only 30 make it. Or if you want to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force, or a Captain in the Navy. Using your analogy, perhaps basic training is analogous to secondary school - it is certainly not analogous to a degree.
> They aren't taught the basics of literature, history or science. ACTA reports that most schools don't require a foreign language, hardly any require economics, American history and government "are badly neglected" and schools "have much to do" on math and science.
If anyone's interested, here in Russia, we do have history of science, philosophy and other non-technical mandatory courses even for technical specialists. The main drawback is that student out of the university is a "Jack of all trades, master of none" kind, you got to teach him all the specifics in the workplace.
There is so much wrong with this article, I don't know where to begin... At the beginning he writes:
"My American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray has called for the abolition of college for almost all students. Save it for genuine scholars, he says, and let others qualify for jobs by standardized national tests, as accountants already do."
Then, a little later, he writes:
"The American Council of Alumni and Trustees concluded, after a survey of 714 colleges and universities, 'by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum.'"
One of the biggest problems with education in this country, and not just in colleges, is that people only learn what they need to learn for the test (New York State's Regents Exams are a massive testament to this). So, if we need to return to a "content-rich general education curriculum", how does that jive with just studying to pass a standardized national test?
I would argue in favor of the more "content-rich general education curriculum" approach, but what he fails to mention is why curricula have changed so dramatically: Big businesses want people who can "hit the ground running." It is why so many CS departments have abandoned teaching fundamentals, over teaching students how to use version control, for instance. Businesses do not want to spend time teaching people things they "should have learned in college," like version control. Ok, learning version control, which was not part of most CS curricula 20 years ago, should now be part of a CS degree today? So this new class should replace what...? And if not replace a CS class, maybe replace...an English class...? The beginning of a slippery slope.
I don't see any economic forces that would trigger a burst. In fact, I see most entry-level jobs demanding more education now than ever before.
A college degree, if required, has always been a -soft- requirement for most professional jobs. It is sometimes used as a first-pass filter, but it's unlikely that the reviewer will make it down to your "Education" section if the "Skills" and "Experience" sections are sufficiently impressive.
People aren't getting jobs because they didn't get enough education, not because they got too much.
No, people aren't getting professional jobs because they don't have any experience or novel qualifications that set them apart from their competition.
The majority of recent graduates just spent 4 years in college instead of gaining relevant experience, so, yes. The economy is tough, they don't stack up to the competition, and adding more schooling wouldn't improve matters.
Their competition probably spent the last 4 years working.
The same must be doubly true with respect to graduate school. There are around 400 students at the graduate level in electrical engineering at my university. WTF!
If you compare the cost of inflation to the cost of higher education over the past 40 years, sure, it's probably in a bubble now. And especially if you compare the number of "free riders" decades ago(people who got their college fully paid for by someone else, mostly the gov't) to the number of kids taking on non-gov't backed loans from banks today, then it's not a pretty picture.
How can a bubble like this even pop? Kids aren't just going to stop going to college en mass.
Universities are not going to drop their tuition rates back to 1975 levels, and instead live off their massive endowment funds for a period of austerity.
The bubble that will pop is the sea of minority, non-traditional, vocational, low-income college dropouts who can't pay back their loans. Granted, the for-profit colleges got a bit too greedy in signing kids up(thanks US gov't for providing subsidies to encourage them!), while the banks, as is typical of their particular species of shark, were only too happy to over-extend cheap credit to kids. I would be interested in knowing the total amount of outstanding private loans at for-profit colleges. Because whatever that amount is, Wall St. better prepare for all of it to be written off as losses without the need for Federal bailouts and financial shennanigans.
Let's forecast: America has the weakest labor market since the Great Depression, record unemployment, with no end in sight. Like an article I saw just yesterday, right now, today, America would need to add 270,000 new jobs per month, every month, until the end of Obama's 2nd term in office for the employment levels to return to what was normal pre-2008.
And that just ain't going to happen, no matter how much Hopium you're smoking, and no matter what fairy-tale of cognitive-dissonance that you've chosen to believe in.
Unemployment for those under-25 is at a historic high. Wages are probably not rising. The entire business market is now stuck moving sideways, and it's going to be that way for at least a decade(the US is the new Japan). At least 50% of all college kids never even graduate, and the rate is higher for kids attending for-profit colleges.
So where are all these kids going to be working when they either graduate or drop out? They won't be able to pay back the loans. And that is going to trigger the popping of the bubble. And much like the way the housing market explosion threw off a ton of shrapnel and hit targets nobody even thought were in the line-of-fire, a similar thing will happen here. Most of these college loans have co-signers, who are mostly the parents. So it's not going to be a bunch of bankrupt kids—it's going to take down the lower-middle-class with it.
The true tragedy becomes apparent when you compare America to Europe and Latin American nations where the idea of paying for college is as foreign as the idea of paying for health care. Education costs are simply built into the society through taxes, instead of being externalized into a sociopathic, inhumane, capitalist tragedy of the commons extraction of profits like we have in the US. Instead, the US chooses to piss away its wealth on military spending and Wall St. gambling.
tl;dr version: The banks are continuing to wage a covert war against the middle and lower class, exploiting them into permanent poverty through loans that simply can't ever be paid back. The banks have the law, the gov't, and armies of finely suited lawyers and scary storm troopers packing guns on their side, the poor have well, nothing. The class divide in America is about to widen even more starkly. If you're already rich, or your parents are rich alumni, or you're in the top 85% percentile of income, or in a white collar profession, you won't even see this bubble nor its popping. If you are on the other end of the economic spectrum, it's going to wipe out you and a lot of families like you. And it sure is a great thing that these poor families are likely already underwater on a home mortgage loan.
Let me get this straight - the banks are predatory for agreeing to make loans to a supposedly thinking adults (they are thinking adults, right? - I mean, they're college material ...), but said adults are not the ones at fault for delaying their entry into productive society, and should not be held liable for taking such loans, but those who are productive members of society should have to fess up and pay these predatory bank loans off for these adults.
First, college material is only ~25% of society. The banks would cry screaming to their congress-critters if suddenly loans and credit were only allowed to college grads. What's next, only those holding degrees in econ are allowed to receive loans? Second, most folks getting loans by definition won't be college material. Third, there's then a required level of protection from themselves that must be in place in any Decent Society.
In the Randroid Universe, sure, every adult is logical, educated in accounting & finance, has a grasp of the market economy, is not socially nor financially desperate, and possesses enough self-restraint to not ever make such a blunder of a decision and accept a loan that is too big for them to ever pay off.
But here in the real world, we have extensive laws and regulations to stop just that from happening. Why? Because if those laws didn't exist, the banks would just steal everything that isn't nailed down, and turn everyone into a nation of debtors. This isn't the first time it happened in history either—I recommend reading some history about the economics behind the expansion of the rail roads and their collusion with banks in America just around the time of the closing of the Western frontier.
eh, really, bankruptcy is the single most important "protection" - bankruptcy discourages banks from loaning to people who likely won't be able to pay off those loans, and it allows the high risk folks, the entrepreneurs, to have more than one go at things.
Of course, student loans already subvert those protections, and really, compared to bankruptcy, I don't think the rest of the 'protect (dumb|trusting) people from (predatory banks|themselves)' laws are worth jack.
