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.

 

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.

 

Newsy Poetry

Ani and I have been considering the idea of writing some sort of rhyming verse. This came up because I’ve been involved with a game called Stinky Pinky (not actually as obscene as it sounds) except we both suck at it.

So, to improve, we’d try and write rhyming things. I will get this started.

Two hundred thousand dollars cargo left Beijing
But didn’t make it across a sea that was raging
    The cargo of breasts
    Has caused quite a mess
For “Ralph”, an Australian men’s magazine.

I don’t particularly like this one though, especially since magazine and raging don’t really rhyme. So, here’s a bonus limerick that I think sticks better to proper form:

Last week in Nassau at a mall
a man had an unfortunate fall.
    Underneath others’ feet
    his demise did he meet
which to me is a bit embarassing for us all.

Of course the shortcoming of limericks is that they’re short and so I’ve done little more than summarize the articles linked, and even that was not done very completely. There’s no commentary contained, so I’ll take a moment now to add a bit.

The first one is just a throwaway on some weird entertaining tidbit, but I don’t think it’s very important. It reminds me a little of the celeb cult that Ebert talked about in his blog a little over a week ago. (That post is actually a much more interesting read and maybe we should follow up on it more.)

As for the stampede at the Walmart, the idea of somebody getting trampled to death for a sale is sadly not such a hard thing to imagine given that it happened not even a year ago in China.

In a way that probably betrays some sort of unconscious racism, when it happened in China I wasn’t as disappointed and aghast as I find I am about it happening more recently at a Walmart on Long Island. Both are pretty pathetic though.