Should we make college more expensive? I agree with Glenn’s reader. Ending subsidies would actually reduce costs, and focus academics on the people who should really be in college. But it’s going to be very hard to break the back of the politician/media/academia industrial complex. But if any time is one to do it, it’s one of fiscal austerity on the part of the government. If we can defund CPB/NPR, that would be an indication that it’s time to go after this.
15 thoughts on “Time To End The Education Bubble”
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Rand, the LAT comments are excruciating. No wonder CA has the economic problems we do.
Brandon’s advice? Don’t obsess about your kid needing to go to college. Many teens would benefit from a “gap year” — time after high school doing almost anything productive — and then decide whether college makes sense.
I can’t speak for everyone but this worked great for me. I had the grades to go to college after high school but wasn’t ready. Instead, I joined the Army National Guard and became a paratrooper. After training, I went to electronics school for a couple years. I joined the active duty Air Force (training to jump out of airplanes and kill people is a lot of fun when you’re 18 but there isn’t a lot of civilian demand for those skills).
I didn’t start college full time until I was 23. By then, I was ready for college and since I was paying for it myself, I didn’t cut classes. By taking heavy courseloads, I completed a BS in math in less than 4 years. In the years that followed, I earned two masters degrees.
None of the things I learned as an electronics technician or math major was wasted. That knowledge proved very useful when I was learning to control communications satellites and in my current work as a defense contractor. Even my Army experience – as limited and dated as it is – has proven useful.
Check out those comments again in a couple of days. I just tossed in this grenade:
Some of the author’s critics here say that colleges are needed to further economic prospects. (Unless you get just a bachelor’s degree, but that’s another story.) Fine. Colleges can contain costs by getting rid of departments that do little to add to the student’s future employability. There are lots of departments whose career product is mostly more professors – Women’s Studies is an obvious example. Literature and history can probably be scaled back.
And then there’s (let me touch that third rail) athletics. There’s a lot of tradition in that arena (no pun intended). Find a way to make it pay for itself without sapping the taxpyers.
What we really need to lower the cost of school I output metrics. Right now schools are accredited based on the inputs, so the more money they spend on students the better the college ranking. No industry will lower costs that way.
Only once we can measure educational productivity can we then compete on price.
One of the problems with colleges is their large fixed costs. That is a tricky one to solve even if you go to a virtual classroom.
Funny how the one thing Communists, National Socialists, third world dictators and Tea Party conservatives all have in common once in power is seeking ways to reduce the size of the universities or to convert them into vocation schools by getting rid of the “useless” humanities and social sciences.
Of course its not about money, the real reason has nothing to do with money. The greatest danger to any ideologue or dictator is a well educated electorate, which is why the Founding Father spent their time starting universities and schools instead closing them.
Or as Thomas Jefferson, Proud Founder of the University of Virginia stated
[[[“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” –Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526]]]
Or as he is more famously noted as saying
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” –Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384
I expect Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves at the very though of finding ways to limit higher education to “those few who should be in college”.
But then they didn’t see college as merely trade schools as so many on the right do today, but as something much more important, the source of an educated and informed electorate.
To them the policy of cutting funds for education would not be austerity but stupidity.
But then the fashion these days is to follow European policy where only the privileged few are allowed into the club and the masses are locked out.
As a side note, the increases in college costs are not coming from the humanity side, but mostly from the science and tech side where there is a constant need to buy the latest and best equipment for labs and teaching, the newest computer and expensive software for them, new science and engineering textbooks, as well as compete for faculty desired by industry. So getting rid of Humanity Departments and turning colleges into trade schools actually does little to stop the raising cost of education.
Well TM, if you conflate a degree in Black Studies with a degree in engineering, then your problem is obvious. One degree requires learning a large body of knowledge for which there are definitive right and wrong solutions and the other teaches its students to get on the grievance industry gravy train. Not all subjects benefit our society equally, and the better, more moral way to determine that benefit is in the market, not in the political system. The way to cut costs in higher ed (full disclosure, I have 2 college degrees and spent 6 years working in higher ed) is to cut salaries, benefits and pensions, which are way out of line with the private sector. Oh and Godwin’s law applies.
Funny how the one thing Communists, National Socialists, third world dictators and Tea Party conservatives all have in common once in power is seeking ways to reduce the size of the universities or to convert them into vocation schools by getting rid of the “useless” humanities and social sciences.
Dude, Marxists are overrepresented in humanities departments.
Conservatives want nominally non-sectarian universities to be actually non-sectarian. Humanities departments are where academia’s propagandizing tends to get strongest, although you get the occasional politicization of something purely apolitical like math.
My impression is that the humanities have overexpanded into more niche markets than universities can afford. I think some of these niches should consolidate. Not all colleges have law schools; not all need to have (say) pre-Columbian American history.
At non-sectarian universities, fields that are purely subjective (like women’s studies, or deconstructionist approaches to literary interpretation) should be the basis for a student organization, not a curriculum.
RKV,
[[[cut salaries, benefits and pensions, which are way out of line with the private sector. ]]]
But isn’t the government dictating what salaries are rather then the market place a socialist approach?
Alan,
Question – why do they call a University a University? Think about it.
TM, I’d prefer complete divestiture myself. Then your concern would be moot. In the mean time, while we are preparing to sell off assets (i.e. all government schools) we should unilaterally cut wages and benefits. That of course would cause at least some of the unionized employees to strike. Then we can and should fire them. Got it? The unions have negotiated contracts which we, the public, can’t afford. Time to get out of the deal.
RKV,
[[[In the mean time, while we are preparing to sell off assets (i.e. all government schools)]]]
The only federally owned schools are the service academies. So who do you think we should sell them to?
I said nothing about federally owned, did I? Quit avoiding the core issue. We subsidize ‘education” and get more of it (and pay more fore it) than we would otherwise ceterus paribus. My suggestion is to let the market take care of education. Your solution is to a) keep spending money we don’t have to get results we don’t particularly want or b) other? Which is it? If a, please explain why it is moral to take money from taxpayers without children and give it to those who do have children?
Question – why do they call a University a University? Think about it.
I doubt that any university ever truly lived up to the etymology. The politically correct ones are openly hostile to the notion.
Resources are finite. Universities have to become going concerns. A going concern can afford only so many loss-leaders.