Higher Education Bubble?

[David]

This may be the most exhaustive study on this question. Does it pay to go to college? Depends.

Is College Worth the Investment?

Key points in this Outlook:

* The return on investment (ROI) from a college degree is higher at more selective universities and at public universities.
* Within each level of selectivity, ROI varies widely among individual colleges.
* With many colleges simply not worth the investment, we need to find ways to collect and publish ROI data so students can make better decisions about what college or university to attend.


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[FastEddy]

Differences among colleges and universities: Usually, the ones that emphasize hard science and engineering have better ROI.

[David]

Great question. Should your college years be the best four years of your life? Seems like you want it to prepare you for good times.

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[qosmann]

Originally Posted by David

Great question. Should your college years be the best four years of your life? Seems like you want it to prepare you for good times.

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As Meg Whitman might say..

"So...."

Is college a place to learn job skills, or is it a place to learn to become a thinking person? A better person? an Educated person?

I am of the opinion that college is a place where we learn to be better, educated, thinking people.

One of the saddest things I continue to experience is people who have no realization of history, or literature, or basic science, or general religion, or general philosophy.

I see it here on this board. People who know only their dogma, and are unable to see beyond that little part of the world with makes them comfortable.

JMHO.

Or, to quote Meg Whitman, "Thats what I think. Tell me what you think. Contact me at IMASTUPIDIGNORAMUS.COM"

[David]

Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web

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[David]

Does it matter wjere you went to college?

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[schaabdl]

I have to go back in time to give my perspective:
1985 - I only had a BA from Maryland (Government), working as a shift supervisor in a Texas Instrument chip factory when laid off. Couldn't get a nibble and my wife started working for H&R Block to have some income. We were at church one morning and a lady asked about my job hunting. My wife responded that it was beginning to look like she would have to put her degree to work (EE and Masters in Technology Policy from MIT!) The lady said she would get a call the next day from TI. Sure enough, 7:30 am, a phone call and she was interviewed, hired on Wednesday earning more than I was with a 25% shift premium! Did she use her degree at TI (she stayed for 5 years) - NOPE - she was a manufacturing supervisor in the defense contract area for Paveway missiles. She learned that she was only lacing one point in maxing out the "quota" fill - race; and her advanced degree from MIT gave her bonus points.
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So yes - school matters!
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BTW - I went back to school using my GI Bill credits for a degree in Computer Science (North Texas) and later finished a masters in systems engineering (Stevens Institute of Technology) but readily admit, I'm looking forward to retirement.

[qosmann]

Originally Posted by David

Does it matter wjere you went to college?

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Sometime in the early 90's, the management of Merrill Lynch decided that for their institutional sales force and for their trading desks, they would hire only from the top 20 business schools. I dont know if that is still the policy, but if it remains policy then obviously if someone wants to work for Merrill (well, Bank of America now) in those capacities, making several hundred thousand up into the several millions a year then yes it does matter where you went to college.

Obviously, employers use criteria like that as much to limit the numbers of applicants they get as to attract the "smartest" people out there.

I recall in the bad years of the mid 70's and in the early 80's that once in a while one might run across newspaper ads from companies hiring requiring a college degree and the ability to life 50 lbs.

[David]

For a lot of students it's not the school. It's their major. There is no doubt in my mind that an engineering degree from a selective school is worth more than a Psychology degree from an elite school.

Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?

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[David]

Easy Money For College Can Mess You Up, Man.
Katherine Mangu-Ward | December 27, 2010

When the government subsidizes something, we wind up with more of it. When it subsidizes something heavily—and combines that subsidy with an aggressive campaign encouraging consumption of that thing from the presidential bully pulpit—we wind up with a lot more of it.

Oceans of federal money gush into higher education every day, and every administration promises more to come. That gush obscures the real demand for educated workers. The result is lots of cashiers and waitresses with B.A.s, and lots of people with student loan debt that's tough for them to repay. For most students, the federal subsides geared toward nudging them to consume more education actually result in the acquisition of more education debt.

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[qosmann]

Originally Posted by David

Easy Money For College Can Mess You Up, Man.
Katherine Mangu-Ward | December 27, 2010

When the government subsidizes something, we wind up with more of it. When it subsidizes something heavily—and combines that subsidy with an aggressive campaign encouraging consumption of that thing from the presidential bully pulpit—we wind up with a lot more of it.

Oceans of federal money gush into higher education every day, and every administration promises more to come. That gush obscures the real demand for educated workers. The result is lots of cashiers and waitresses with B.A.s, and lots of people with student loan debt that's tough for them to repay. For most students, the federal subsides geared toward nudging them to consume more education actually result in the acquisition of more education debt.

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So let's stop subsidizing higher education. furthermore, let's stop admitting academically unqualified people. Most of all, let's end this tenure system.

Let's take full advantage of new technologies which usher in efficiency, even when it means fewer professors needed to do the job!

Last of all, let's get the Capitalists to get out of their idiot mindset that only those with a college education offer them the best bang for the buck.

Let's gore every ox we can!

[Rafael]

Originally Posted by qosmann

So let's stop subsidizing higher education. furthermore, let's stop admitting academically unqualified people. Most of all, let's end this tenure system.

Let's take full advantage of new technologies which usher in efficiency, even when it means fewer professors needed to do the job!

Last of all, let's get the Capitalists to get out of their idiot mindset that only those with a college education offer them the best bang for the buck.

Let's gore every ox we can!

Sounds to me me as if you are going off half-cocked. I readily admit that much of college, like much of high school, is nothing much more than glorified, expensive baby-sitting. However, there is a lot to be learned.

I guess the question comes down to, "which is more efficient, studying at the feet of learned professors in a planned program, or to study ad hoc, on one's own?"

I say that the best is a combination. First learn the basics, learn how to learn and what is important from qualified experts, and then spend the rest of your life studying to enhance and in many cases just to keep up. I regularly tell students, "If you only know what we've taught you, you don't know very much."

My area, computer science, is far different from when I first started. Once I was asked in an interview about what to look for ten years down the road. My reply was that I had no clue. If I were to look back ten years, there's no way I could have predicted the current environment.

While I am a teacher, my younger son is a product. It is true that much of what he does did not exist when he was in college, yet his study, then, gave him a good foundation. I am not sorry in the least for the time he spent or the money I spent.

Some of it comes under the idea that we don't want to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. It is a good idea to see what those who came before figured out so we can stand on their shoulders.

I have not talked at all about the value of being educated. In many ways it is the same thing - learning what great thinkers have espoused and then developing a philosophy or world view that suits ourselves.

Life is not all about being a cog in society's machine. Each individual has infinite worth. Of course, that is one of the differences between liberals and conservatives - as those terms are used now. In many ways, knowledge is freedom.

I have a favorite saying; it's at the top of my web page. "Every person must live with the person he makes of himself and the better job he does in molding his character and improving his mind, the better company he will have."

I did not make that up; I'm not smart enough.

[Rafael]

In Defense of the Liberal Arts

By Victor Davis Hanson

12/16/2010

The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget-cutting won't spare education.

The public is already angry over fraud, waste and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education -- from teacher unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies and which courses really need to be taught.

Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal arts "electives."

In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved often incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. After three decades of defining the study of literature and history as too often a melodrama of race, class and gender oppression, it managed to turn off much of the college audience and the general reading public. And cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate university majors, but also core elements in general education requirements.

In such a climate, it is natural that once again we are hearing talk of cutting the "non-essentials" in our colleges such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt and Chopin. Why do we cling to the arts and humanities in a high-tech world in which we have instant recall at our fingertips through a Google search and such studies do not guarantee sure 21st-century careers?

But the liberal arts train students to write, think and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make -- or demand from others -- logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.

Citizens -- shocked and awed by technological change -- become overwhelmed by the Internet, cable news, talk radio, video games and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our past heritage, we in ignorance begin to think our own modern challenges -- the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning or massive deficits -- are unique and don't raise issues comparable to those dealt with and solved in the past.

And without citizens broadly informed by humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below lacks understanding of the present complexity and the basic skills to question what they are told.

During the 1960s and 1970s, committed liberals thought we could short-circuit the process of liberal education by creating advocacy classes with the suffix "studies." Black studies, Chicano studies, community studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, peace studies, woman's studies and hundreds more were designed to turn out more socially responsible youths. Instead, universities too often graduated zealous advocates who lacked the broadly educated means to achieve their predetermined politicized ends.

On the other hand, pragmatists argued that our future CEOs needed to learn spread sheets at 20 rather than why Homer's Achilles does not receive the honors he deserved, or how civilization was lost in fifth-century Rome and 1930s Germany. Yet Latin or a course in rhetoric might better teach a would-be captain of industry how to dazzle his audience than a class in Microsoft PowerPoint.

The more instantaneous our technology, the more we are losing the ability to communicate with it. Twitter and text-messaging result in an economy of expression, not in clarity or beauty. Millions are becoming premodern -- communicating in electronic grunts that substitute for the ability to express themselves effectively and with dignity. Indeed, by inventing new abbreviations and linguistic shortcuts, we are losing a shared written language altogether, much like the fragmentation of Latin as the Roman Empire imploded into tribal provinces. No wonder the public is drawn to stories like "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" in which characters speak beautifully and believe in age-old values that transcend themselves.

Life is not just acquisition and consumption. Engaging English prose uplifts the spirit in a way Twittering cannot. The latest anti-Christ video shown at the National Portrait Gallery by the Smithsonian will fade when the Delphic Charioteer or Michelangelo's David does not. Appreciation of the history of great art and music fortifies the soul, and recognizes beauty that does not fade with the passing fad.

America has lots of problems. A population immersed in and informed by literature, history, art and music is not one of them.

Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

[Rafael]

Just to balance my previous posts - same guy writing -

Americans Still Cling to Ignorance

By Victor Davis Hanson

9/30/2010

The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because, "I need a majority."

For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman -- though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.

Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he's still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America's "superior" ex-president -- and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.

Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.

Now, John Kerry -- who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht -- is voicing similar frustrations about Americans' inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on." Instead it falls for "a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could "get stuck in Iraq." He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service, and are overwhelmingly high school graduates.

In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband's burden, "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."

That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society."

The president often clears his throat with "Let me be perfectly clear" and "Make no mistake about it" -- as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.

Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that "The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats."

Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their "real" economic interests.

When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is redeemed by the left as intelligent -- and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.

Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms "stimulus" and "comprehensive immigration reform." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the Tea Party was merely a synthetic Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing, but for politicians it's a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.

For many of today's liberals, the fact that the president has to deal with so many Neanderthal know-nothings explains why he can't, as promised, close Guantanamo, end "don't ask, don't tell," or do away with Bush-era renditions, tribunals wiretaps, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes or speak candidly.

What an outrageous "How dare they!" thought.


Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

[David]

It’s college admissions season, when parents will open their mailbox and find out the bad news: Their kids were accepted to an elite, big-name college.

That’s right: bad news.

Higher education is one of those topics — like the current state of Islam, illegitimacy rates in the black community or Bill Belichick’s overrated reputation — that people in polite society are not allowed to discuss honestly. And the obvious, glaring truth is that too many parents are sending kids to college, kids who don’t have the academic firepower to make it through a round of “Jeopardy,” much less four years of university study.

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[FastEddy]

"Should Governments Monopolize Education?" - Art Carden - THE ECONOMIC IMAGINATION - Forbes Online Editorial of Mar. 24 2011

"What follows is a revised version of a letter I wrote for our County Tax Assessor early last year with the addition of links to a couple of articles in which Mike Hammock and I summarize some of the research on education monopolies and a few other light edits. My request for a property tax refund still stands.

A non-trivial portion of our City and County property taxes go to pay for City and County schools. As our family does not plan to use the City or County schools at any point, I would like to request an exemption from the portion of our property taxes that would go to fund schools we do not plan to use and a refund of back taxes that went to pay for schools we did not, do not, and will not use.

One could argue that we enjoy spillover benefits from government-provided education. While this is a common justification for government intervention in the educational sphere, it is both theoretically and empirically suspect. First, research suggests that any spillover benefits come almost exclusively from basic literacy and numeracy. Second, the structure of state-provided education suggests that the goal of government education is not provision of the socially efficient quantity of basic education. More research suggests that governments run schools not to educate students but to inculcate them with particular values (see this paper in particular) ;; it’s a rough draft, but it is consistent with other findings). I’m sure that many taxpayers would find this inappropriate, just as they would find it inappropriate if I expected to use tax money to pay my pastor’s salary.

One could make a distributional argument for government education and claim that governments provide education in order to help the poor. Again, I am unconvinced because the structure of government-provided education suggests otherwise. Carefully-done empirical research shows that charter schools, for example, increase educational attainment for their pupils and for students who are “left behind” in traditional schools (see this study, for example).

Other research by economists who are experts on primary and secondary education–which economist Mike Hammock and I summarize in op-eds that appeared in The Tennessean and the Memphis Commercial Appeal - it suggests that choice increases school quality. The difficulty of opening a charter school in Memphis suggests that even the distributional goals of government education are not being met. If the goal is to improve the lives of the poor in Memphis and Shelby county, there are more efficient ways to do it.

More fundamentally, I’m disturbed by the presumption that coercion is a necessary and appropriate way for people to interact with one another. Is the explicit threat that you will seize our property if we don’t pay up really necessary or civilized, particularly given the points I have made above? If I don’t want what my local Starbucks or Taco Bell has to offer, they don’t threaten to take our money or our house at gunpoint. I ask that you extend us the same courtesy. Failing this, please explain how and why it is appropriate and necessary for you to threaten us with violence if we don’t do as you command.

Since we do not plan to use City and County Schools and since they are not attaining the theoretically plausible goals of government-financed education, we would like to see if we can request a refund of the portion of our property taxes that goes to pay for them."

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... and if not, why not?

[David]

I am so glad my kids aren't caught up in this merry go round. A few years out of college and employers could care less what school you attended. As time moves forward it matters less and less. Helicopter parents who live vicariously through their kids' SAT scores have real issues.

College daze: The insanity of the application process

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[BRamey]

What good is college now anyway with no jobs? What will happen is you will need a college degree for occupations that normally don't call for one since so many college graduates will be out there fighting for jobs with those with less education.

[David]

Originally Posted by BRamey

What good is college now anyway with no jobs? What will happen is you will need a college degree for occupations that normally don't all for one since so many college graduates will be out there fighting for jobs with those with less education.

[David]

An Anti-College Backlash?
By Professor X

Mar 31 2011, 7:55 AM ET Comment

Americans are finally starting to ask: "Is all this higher education really necessary?"

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