Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Great Video On The Value Proposition Of Higher Education
The video below is just devastating. Higher education is extremely overpriced for no good reason. It is a vehicle to steal from the taxpayer and the students, too.
When is this stupid cartel going to be broken up?
Published in Education
You gotta pay for those diversity VP’s.
The problem is not the direct cost, but the opportunity cost. 80% of students do not get a college degree and then a corresponding career, yet, our entire k-12 system is designed to launch kids into college systems. That means k-12 is failing 80% of kids. The opportunity is in changing k-12 to make it meet the needs of the 80%. This is could be vocational and life-skills training or whatever is going to help the 80%. If we get K-12 right, with tailoring to both future surgeons and future technicians, the price of college will fix itself.
They need to be honest about the actual value of the liberal arts vs. the productive stuff, too. It’s absurd to force people to take liberal arts etc. if they don’t want to.
The whole system is bad from top to bottom.
The education system was pretty hostile to vocational Ed when I started teaching in 1996. Since then things have changed quite a bit, but not everyone is on board. We did a very comprehensive long term planning program at my school district (I’m retired but I serve on the school board). One of our goals was integrating more vocational Ed into the high school curriculum, and a fair number of parents still felt that every student needed a college preparatory program. We received a scathing letter from one parent (an MD) about we would be screwing kids and denying them opportunity. As long as lots of people feel that way, things won’t change enough to fix the system.
When I was in high school, there were placement tests in 8th grade. Before we even got to high school, we were sectioned off into college prep or vocational. Somewhere along the way, people were fed the idea that absolutely everyone needs college, and that somehow if you don’t go, it means you were “deprived” or “kept out” or”held back.”
By the time I got to college, the campus had far too many kids that didn’t belong there but had been catapulted in by well-meaning social programs. They of course flunked out, but not before taking the places of kids who did belong there. I think it’s the liberals, the “oh-so-accepting of all” and “wouldn’t dream of being a snob” who did this. They, not us, are the snobs who look down on anyone without a degree, so they thought their “College For All” social programs would be good for society.
All they did was decrease the worth (but increase the cost) of a college degree, which is now more like the value of a high school diploma, and they still look down their noses at valuable careers that we need, such as mechanics, welders, and so forth.
As long as people feel like it’s better to be a drone than a plumber, things won’t change.
The problem with “free” things is that they are not valued. If college is “free” ( payed for by working folks), then students will take crappy courses that the market does not need. Ideally, a student would demonstrate aptitude and interest in a promising career and then “investors” could pay their college costs for a share of future income. Think about how good Alabama is at finding kids in 8th grade that will be future football stars! With a market based system we’d have lots of kids majoring in actuarial science and almost none majoring in psychology. With the Leftist plans of “free” for all, it just becomes a waste of 5 years of life and jobs program for professors of liberal arts.
If anyone was really interested reducing the cost of higher education, the federales would make it a felony for anyone outside the federal government to see a prospective student’s fafsa application. That form contains all of the information needed to develop a price discrimination model for setting differential tuition rates. The result is that college costs (tuition – financial aid) are based on the student’s ability to pay.
I met a guy that does that for a living. He contracts out to two private colleges. It’s high-level statistics etc.
He failed to offer his own proposals. Perhaps the important point is that it’s just a self generating political racket. It’s dead to education. It just goes on because we let it. There are better ways to do all of it. At this point it’s all signaling. Take away the subsidies and loan guarantees and competition will fix it or replace it. The sooner the better.
One of the negative effects of colleges comes from their role as incubators of Marxism/Socialism, SJW, radical environmentalism, etc. etc. And these efforts are almost always inwardly directed towards the most advanced and equal societies, instead of outward towards the nations that need most help to modernize.
link
I’m not quite sure what diversity officers do.
They provide the organization the ability to check off a very important box. In (some) corporate American settings, they fill a very strategically located office…noticeably located so that all visitors can see and read the title on the door and observe a very diverse looking face at the desk. Maximized conspicuous diversity is the name of the game…
[EDIT: Clearly, I should have started my comment with “Allegedly.”]
The only way I see for the cost of college to come down is for the demand for college degrees (and the bias toward established “prestigious” colleges). To me, the most promising route is for employers to use measures other than college degrees as the gating function for identifying qualified job applicants.
I had hopes some years ago when there was an effort to develop skills tests that could be used to show competence, but that doesn’t seem to have caught on.
The incentive for employers to look for alternatives to a degree from a “prestigious” college is the opportunity to hire employees as good or better at lower cost. But employers would have to develop new processes, which is hard to do.
Churches aren’t allowed to push politics or else risk loosing their tax-exempt status (black churches exempted as long as they’re pushing Democrats).
Shouldn’t the same rule be applied to universities? If they want to be political — and they all do — they should loose their tax exemption, just like your neighborhood Baptist church.
You can do that, but it’s also a good way to get sued.
This seems to be a big problem, even for skilled blue collar workers. The software employers are using seems unable to separate good candidates from the barely qualified. I’ve been working on a project of surveying employers and households about skills to develop good measures of skill gaps. The conclusion we’re starting to come to is that hiring practices need to improve. We find good numbers of qualified workers with the requisite skills, in some cases. But employers are identifying those same skills as hard to find. And we can eliminate wage demands as the cause, and narrow skills gaps to mean that workers with those skills simply are not available in the numbers needed.
Ruf,
When the King has no clothes on, the King has no clothes on. This is shock treatment but is absolutely necessary. Every assumption that underlies the University system or as I would call it, Corporate Academia, should be questioned and challenged. This video makes clear the massive financial stakes involved and the total lack of oversight or even healthy criticism. What the video doesn’t cover is Corporate Academia’s political influence designed to protect its monopoly of credentialing education. This is what Corporate Academia fears the most, real competition. I might imagine making an actual anti-trust case out of the credential monopoly that Corporate Academia holds.
If their cushy kingdom is really threatened you can believe they will start making changes pronto.
Regards,
Jim
This x 1,000,000!
This guy is a business man!? So the customer is paying for a service that has increased its prices, every year for 30 years, by sometimes double digits!? And that service provider is generally a government agency of the state but either way pays no taxes. Really!? He never asks how the money is spent. He never pulled up a chart or graph of where spending has increased over the 30 years? Shame on him. For example, the percentage of non teaching university employees well exceeds that of teaching staff. Support personnel and salaries as well as new building construction has skyrocketed. The occupation percentage of classrooms has dropped significantly. In other words, colleges are blowing money like there’s no tomorrow, or like taxpayers are footing the bill.
That’s the scam. But his early graphic was a give away: It starts with Carter, adds Reagan and W. Bush. He left out Clinton and Obama. Two pro-union, pro-acedemia presidents beholden to higher education grandees.
In the end, government is the perpetrators — federal and state working together.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Colleges and universities are on this wild spending spree because students are $1.3 trillion in debt, guaranteed by the government. We’ve been working at UT on very expensive projects for about four years now, with more to come.
Thanks for posting the video, Rufus! This was very informative, even though he did not cover the wasteful expenditures as @jimgonewild pointed out.
If you really want to see wasted money, try going to Art School! Even 40 years ago when I went, it was worse than anything we are talking about in traditional schools today.