More college enrollment news

Remember when I said schools might price themselves out of the market and apply to state schools.  Well turns out more people, in Massachusetts anyways, are applying to the state school this year.  Mostly, this has to do with the economy starting to tank but I wanted to point out how I (and probably millions of other people) said that state schools would get a boost due to high private school costs.

Did we ever talk about how a good economy might of driven up the costs as well?  Seems plausible, people making more money allows schools to be more liberal in tuition increases because schools knew people would pay the costs.  Now as the economy sours people need cheap alternatives.  People will drop the classism just to get the education it would seem.

 

Taxes get passed on…sorta…kinda…maybe?

An astute commenter asked if taxing non-profits such as schools and hospitals would increase the costs to the consumer.   The answer is a resounding “we aren’t exactly sure.” What the linked study shows is that if a business can get away with passing taxes off to the consumer they will.  However, tuition is pricey and I am not sure schools can get away with it.  I am unfamiliar with hospital costs so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on it.

Geddes commented on a Fair Tax system.  Factcheck.org thoroughly debunked Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s insistence that a Fair Tax system would work.  People paying $15,000 – $200,000 would pay more in taxes while those earning more than $200,000 would pay less.  Essentially, consumption taxes and payroll taxes punish the poor.

 

the aims of education

The title is a reference to the title of a speech given to the entering class at Chicago every year. Specifically, I was thinking of the 2002 address, which I think completely sums up my views on education.

Geddes, I agree with you almost entirely. Education is great. It makes people better, not only at their jobs, but at being people. Education is inherently valuable, and it enhances the lives of even the meanest people. So we all ought to have college degrees? This is where I disagree. Unfortunately, I’m having a devil of a time framing my critique in a way that isn’t terribly classist, so I’m going to come off just a bit offensive: to those who have the capacity for it, education is an unqualified good, far beyond its economic value. To those who don’t, education is wasteful.

This is a hard thing to justify; I’ll let my poetry speak to it:

A farmer boy once drove the plow,
‘Til a priest said “scripture learn thou!”
He studied all night,
As hard as he might,
But only a farm-boy is he now.

Seriously, I have no theoretical justification, just the facts: millions of people in this country have college degrees and nothing to show for them, except the same jobs that their high-school-educated parents had. Perhaps Aristotle makes secretaries better, but there’s been no evidence of that. Perhaps he makes them happier, but I think that there’s little evidence of that either. (and this is ignoring that many people with “degrees” aren’t learning Aristotle at all; in our culture of educational inflation, even menials have to go to undergrad, even if it only be to major in basket-weaving)

 

More On College and Tuition

I just finished reading the biography of my Great Grandfather E.G. Peterson, president of Utah State University from 1916 – 1945. Unfortunately I brought it home for Thanksgiving and gave it to my brother, so I can’t quote directly from it, but one of his projects as president was to greatly expand the institution. When he became president of Utah State it was known as “Utah Agriculture College,” its primary purpose was to research and teach new methods to increase crop yields. When War I came it was converted to a military training school. To complete the conversion the military was going to come in and build temporary barracks to house the recruits, but E.G. convinced the state to provide extra money to make the new buildings permanent, so that after the war, UAC could use the new facilities to expand into forestry, and (yes you guessed it) the liberal arts. When googling around for more info on his tenure, I found this quote, written by the historian Joel E. Ricks in 1938, on the occasion of the semi-centennial, describing what made UAC so great:

 

This corps of loyal and devoted instructors sought … to give the students the mental stimulus that … would encourage them to face life unafraid.

The alumni and community chose to honor not the very useful agriculture and forestry skills that were taught, but the mental stimulus that came with the instruction. For any college program, the value to the student is so much more than the mere trades learned. The critical thinking skills gained by studying anything with a university-level approach lead to a fuller, deeper, richer, and ultimately more meaningful life. This is what Ricks so eloquently called the ability to “face life unafraid.” Much like the development of agriculture enabled humans to improve their lives by building permanent dwellings instead of hunting/gathering al the time the development of higher learning enables humans to improve their lives by being deeper and better thinkers.

Fine, you might say, a noble cause, but is it really good for society? In these modern times, it is imperative, absolutely imperative; to have a well educated populace. William Tyndale, an early translator of the bible once said:

“I defy the Pope and all his laws. . . . If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

Tyndale wanted to make the bible accessible even to the poor farmer boy, so that the church would not have a monopoly on ideas. Likewise, it is very important now that all Joe the plumbers have a solid understanding of sophisticated social concepts and have the capacity to competently evaluate ideas when presented to them. Their votes are the ultimate check on corruption and concentrated power, and if they are easily manipulated, we can kiss competent government goodbye. Chavez, Mugabe, etc. are the kinds of leaders that can stay in power in democracies when most of the population does not have access to higher learning.

I am going to post one of my favorite pictures here:

 

It is a poster from a protest in Hamburg while I was there. They were going to raise tuition by 500 euro a semester, so the students laid down in front of the street car tracks and brought the city to a halt. Their slogan: BILDUNG IST KEINE WARE! (Education is not a commodity).

 

I could go on about how a college education enables even administrative assistants to do a better job, be more efficiently, and then ultimately move up to a better life.

 

Instead of blaming the government for trying to make education more accessible, and holding the universities blameless for the skyrocketing tuitions, we should blame universities everywhere for mismanaging their funds. I recommend reading Chapter 4 of “beating the college bubble” which you can download as a free e-book on the right side of this page. It’s rather obnoxiously written but it raises several good points. Colleges choose to spend lots of money on things they don’t need to because they feel like they need to attract more students. Wasteful spending includes:

-       Lavish building projects
-       Academic Conferences
-       Executive Compensation

 

These expenses are common in corporate America. Is it unreasonable to expect Universities to behave differently than large corporations? Ultimately the board directing the university isn’t trying to maximize their profits, but what exactly are they doing?

 

higher ed higher schmed

sequitur an earlier thread:

They say that you should go to school,
And, in fact, that college is cool,
But you’ll major in Psych,
Turn into a dyke,
And end up cleaning a pool.

But, seriously, responses to my post have raised some excellent points. In order:

You’re quite right that educational waste starts long before college. I think, however, the presence and easy access of college encourage that sort of waste in high school and earlier. The availability of higher education and funding for school makes students want to go to college; high schools can hardly be faulted for orienting themselves to that. Technical education alternatives are useless if higher education itself is unchanged.

I’m not sure that college education adds a lot of value to most students. I’m certainly glad that I went to college, and I think it’s helped me; I’m sure that all of us here benefited tremendously, both personally and professionally, from higher education. Most college students (some, at least), however, don’t. It’s true that an educated work force is very important, but that’s irrelevant to the claim that many college students end up in careers that ought not to require college degrees: as I mentioned in my earlier post, many jobs that are mainly filled by college graduates require, at most, a high school education. Clearly, however much higher education a developed nation requires, we’ve still got too much.

I like the reinvestment point. I didn’t mean to suggest that schools are solely raising tuition because it’s what the market will bear, though I think that there are a few like that. I think what I was trying to get at more generally was that the boom in higher education is basically fueled by government-backed student loans, and even if all the money is being spent bona fide to educate students as well as possible, that it might still be wasteful.

I think I tend to agree with Russ on this. Re: the Giffen Good business, which I realize is mostly tongue-in-cheek, I think that there’s some small amount of truth to that, basically because easy loans and a sense of entitlement towards college make demand for higher education inelastic (I’ve no idea what those words mean; I’ve never taken an econ class). The rise of garbage business schools is one illustration of this: these schools add almost no value to one’s career, and cost, in many cases, nearly $50k a year, but still have no trouble attracting students. Business school isn’t undergrad, true, but I think the cases are similar.

One last thing: how much does the government guarantee help student loans? I’ve no idea. Alex may have a better answer on this, being a banker and all. My guess is that when you’re getting competitive interest rates and have no default risk, that being a student lender is a pretty damned good business to be in…

 

questions mostly without answers on higher ed

Alex could you elaborate on what you mean by “areas that a developed nation must excel in for a competitive advantage rely on a educated work force”?

You’ve put forward a few interesting points however I think I’m missing the overarching point. Am I right in understanding that you support the high availability of guaranteed loans because you feel that as a nation we have a need to maintain a very large supply of educated grads, which wouldn’t be met by rich kids alone? Or is it something else to the effect that you support making loans available to those non-rich-kids at the “cost” of contributing to whatever else is driving up the price of tuition?

I personally don’t find it hard to believe that the cost of entry to the college game is pretty high. Presumably, among other things, there’s a lot of work and expenditure involved in me going from slapping a sign on my door and declaring myself a college and people wanting to pay me to attend. Do you know if something like the accreditation process is an expensive one to get through?

The other issue being that in spite of the cost of tuition being high, do we know in fact that most colleges are in fact profit machines?

Anthony’s idea about how schools need to reinvest in themselves to remain competitive might explain in some sense how they are in fact not super profitable and to remain as profitable as they are, much of their profit must be diverted to reinvestment. I’m pretty sure I don’t understand how increasing the price of tuition signals a school is inherently more competitive on a national scale. In spite of my lack of understanding, it appears in this article that one James C. Garland, president of Miami University of Ohio (at least at the time of the article) said “[H]igh tuition makes people think a school has a lot to offer”. Is higher education that elusive Giffen good? (this is a rhetorical joke question). Garland appears to respond to the article in the comments even.

Returning to my response though, I’d argue (unfortunately without the support of data, only anecdote and speculation from not-quite-what-I’m-looking-for tables like this one or table 1 in this report (PDF)) that state schools aren’t actually out of favor at all. What makes you say that they are? Or is this more about prestige, in which case, yes, for varying reasons they tend to carry less than some of the more famous and expensive private research institutions.

When you say you encourage people with vocational training to go to college anyway, what exactly do you mean? Though this will probably come out pretty bad, I think that it’s probably not much of a value-add for a line cook to have gotten a “well-rounded liberal arts education” and read Kant and Aristotle or whatever. I think they’d probably benefit from a shorter education covering more specifically useful topics like accounting, for example. Well, maybe not the line cook unless they are a line cook aspiring to be a chef, perhaps, though I’d probably even be willing to try and make the case that everybody who has any money would do well to learn a bit more about accounting. So in this case I wonder if it is just some confusion of terms as to what “college” means and perhaps I am using the word to mean something that it doesn’t exactly.

A final link; that James guy I quoted earlier apparently wrote a column (linked in the article I linked to earlier) for the Washington Post in 2005 about how to run state schools, which I thought might be an interesting read for you guys, in the context of this conversation.

 

More higher ed talk.

It would be interesting to see if this study is consistent region to region.  Speaking anecdotely, my alma mater Northeastern University, is raising it’s tuition to become competitive with BU, BC, Harvard, Tufts, and whatever other Boston school you can think of.  The idea being that the more money they get, the better facilities they can build. They also think that higher tuition makes them competitive on the national scale.

I wonder though, will there come a point where the state school system become a better option for people.   Again, think of all the great state universities we have in the United States.  UCONN, UMASS, University of Michigan, SUNY’s, UC’s and yet they seem to be out of favor right now.  Why?  Maybe it is a prestige thing?  One assumes however, that prestige will only go so far when costs get out of hand.

As for vocational training, yes that is important but I would still enourage those who do vocational work to go to college.  Why?  Because having that college knowledge is applicaple to your trade.  Whether it be through learning business or engineering.  And more knowledge is only a good thing.

 

glad to be here

Just signed up for this this morning. Reminds me of the old blogger days. Some of those blogs still come up when I google myself… Just food for thought.

Anyhoo, can’t say I agree with some of the views expressed on the validity of higher education for the masses. Seems like a lot of the areas that a developed nation must excel in for a competitive advantage rely on a educated work force. (Not just for the managers, but for the production employees as well.)

That being said, I think the cost of college tutition is rising too fast (much faster than inflation) and it is very possible that readily available cheap government  student loans are a contributing factor. Not sure what the solution to that would be, since supply and demand dictate that the price will continue to rise as demand from rich kids and student loan kids exceeds supply. If the market decides the price of a college education then it will rise until one group or the other is priced out. (Supply could also increase… which I guess would be the better solution…)

Food for thought: If college tuition is so high, why isn’t owning a college profitable enough to encourage more colleges to be founded? Are the barriers to entry that high?

 

education, high and low

The notion that the availability of guaranteed loans is in large part driving the increasing cost of college does not seem like such a far fetched idea to me. However, I can’t say I really understand the workings of the financial aid system at all. Ani, do you or anybody else have an idea of how much lending would drop if guarantees vanished, or were seriously curtailed?

With regard to the second point about encouraging educational waste, doesn’t that in some sense start much earlier? It’s my understanding that the US high school education system is lacking in vocational alternatives, for example, at least, in contrast to what I understand things are like in much of Europe. I feel like this point comes up often in the context of discussing standardized testing, namely all those statewide exams like MCAS and such. Often such conversations use China as the more extreme example where teaching to the test, so to speak, is the only thing. Maybe I just hang around with too many people who are now or have in the past been quite active in charter schools and are full of reasons that public education is a mess.

 

too many people go to college

Apparently college is fast becoming unaffordable.

I think that (1) the reason for this is not that universities are money-grubbing, but that student loans are too easily available, and (2) that it would probably be a good thing if fewer Americans went to college.

(1) I think the increasing cost of tuition is a direct response to the easy credit that students got and continue to get; when the government guarantees a student loan, lenders have every incentive to loan huge amounts even to those students whose expected career paths make it very unlikely that they will pay them off. If the government got out of the business of guaranteeing loans (or perhaps only guaranteed a certain flat amount of them), lenders would have to look carefully at potential students before writing huge checks, and universities consequently would have to lower their tuitions or lose students.

(2) More education is possibly a good thing if it means that more people have more opportunities. That is not, however, what I think the mainstreaming of college education has done. There are only so many jobs that actually require a college degree, and while it’s important that we train enough Americans to fill those jobs, there’s no need for anyone else to have a college degree. Nowadays, you need a degree to get a job as a secretary, or an insurance salesman, or a bank teller, to say nothing of the vast numbers of waiters &c. who have useless degrees. Our culture shouldn’t encourage this educational waste; instead we should make sure that those kids who aspire and are qualified to do something that needs a bachelor’s or master’s degree can get them, and that kids who will end up in the (no less noble) professions that don’t require higher education aren’t forced to waste four years and thousands of dollars.