My father, born 1915, went to a nowhere college in his Missouri hometown for a math degree, spent four years in a submarine and then used the GI bill to get a PhD in economics from the U of Chicago. It all worked out well for him and a long career at Cornell. One of the best pieces of advice he gave us children is a graduate program that isn't offering you a free ride doesn't really want you, they want your money.
Yeah, that has not been true for a few decades now, unless you change "four" to "seven" or so. The faculties of the absolute top departments, in the disciplines I know best, are staffed by people who took five, six, and more years to complete their degrees. And all of the top departments offer five or six years of free stipends. For me to advise a student to finish in four would be pedagogical malpractice: better for them to take another year on stipend, publish a few papers first, take some more seminars, revise the diss for publication, etc..
Yes, there is still some number of years after which a student should get a clue and change careers. But it is no longer four.
Admittedly my dad was in a hurry, having spent four years in a submarine, getting a late start, with a wife and two kids. He had little patience for 20-something grad students dithering around before they found their passion and and purpose in life.
In my field, even for most very precocious and focused students who have known exactly what they wanted to do and prepared for it since high school, 5 years is the absolute minimum amount of time it takes to learn enough to do original research. Research is harder these days, man...
EO Wilson started at age 3 after poking an eye out. Not suggesting you do the same, but knowing exactly what you want to do in high school isn't a sign of knowing what you want to do.
"can't get a PhD in four years" is not always the same as "doesn't get a PhD in four years."
Even now, if you want that academic field as your profession, you'd better have the capability/intellect/talent/work ethic sufficient to earn a PhD in four years.
Not that this is always the right choice: yes, there are many cases where, if paid, it's better long term to incubate in the doctoral program and improve your corpus of research/connections/publications for a few years. Apply for jobs... and if you don't get the right tenure track position or a postdoc with a rising star... stay and try again next year.
But as advice it's well framed: if you're not talented enough to excel, that's an early warning sign that you should go somewhere else.
My information is decades old, but if you're still slogging away in year 7, consider the possibility your faculty advisor and university are playing you. Lots of things were better 60 years ago including universities and faculty advisors.
The "your advisor is playing you" risk is real, but the truth is that it can take a really really long time to set up an experiment and gather data in Physics and Bio. and I'm sure it's also true in some other disciplines I'm less knowledgeable about. 4-5 years is a legitimate time frame, and then you tack on the couple years of "classroom" education at the front. I think the big red flag is if you're there for more than 5 and you aren't getting paid - then you are probably being taken advantage of. If you are getting a stipend that covers "tuition" and living expenses, there's skin in the game on the other side and they probably aren't just keeping you around because they can.
Next month I will graduate my 17th PhD student (in Chemistry) almost four years to they day they started. The longest any of them have taken is 4 years, 10 months, but that was pandemic-related.
Of course, this is in Europe, where we have to fund the entire PhD salary up front and the students sign four-year employment contracts. But it's certainly true that having skin in the game forces us to get them out the door in four (we also get a kickback from the government for graduating the on time).
The downside is that there is no flexibility. If, as is sometimes the case, a project catches fire in the fourth year, the PhD student can either graduate and miss out on a bunch of first-author papers or go on a zero-hour contract and self-fund.
Money is very tight and virtually no grant will let you spend on salary past what was initially asked for in the proposal. If you are lucky enough to have tens of thousands of Euros of unrestricted funds lying around, you could blow it on a few months worth of salary, but labor costs are insane and unrestricted funds (e.g., the kickbacks you get for graduating students on time) are usually doled out in four-digit sums. You also have to pay all kinds of overhead and maintenance out of those funds including, these days, author publication charges, since we are now forced to publish everything open-access.
At the other extreme, if a student is so good as to deserve graduating early, we are incentivized to keep them around because unpaid salary returns to the granting organization. So we target graduating students in exactly four (or in France and a few other countries three) years and are, in my opinion, remarkably successful at hitting that target.
The flexibility of the American system certainly creates a lot of opportunity for exploitation, but the rigid European systems treat PhD thesis research like a construction project, complete with Gantt charts and milestones. I'm not advocating for one system or the other, just sharing my experience in a one-size-fits-all system that is almost impossible to run a scam in.
I still have trouble imagining the European system; my (no doubt unfair :) assumption is always that European PhDs, having taken 3-4 years, can't be as good as US ones. Personally, I haven't graduated as many PhD students as you have, but all of them worked on some things not originally proposed, much to their benefit (at least in terms of good papers). And I don't keep anyone past six years at most (so far at least), figuring by then either they have been so productive that it's unfair to keep them longer, or they aren't productive enough to want to keep longer anyway. We have regular discussions about their career goals and then try to time things such that the end of the PhD dovetails with their job/postdoc offer (or I keep them as a short-term postdoc to bridge the gap). This requires fungible money, of course.
I have seen others let students languish indefinitely, aided by TA slots so they don't have to pay them out of grants. The graduate program chair should step in at that point, but they are often useless for actually protecting students. The flip side is that I have heard of students who exploit the European system, at least from a French colleague who's had some lazy students who know just how much they can get away with.
"What I don’t know is a lot of people who feel they learned a ton from their journalism MA program. . . But the positive experiences people have described to me about journalism school aren’t really about delivering education — they’re taking advantage of the collapse of career paths that used to run through regional newspapers to do some rent-seeking."
Thought: A practical journalism masters program in which the program produces a local/regional newspaper staffed by the students.
Do you guys think this will get actual applicants?
Like, do people who go to Northwestern's ridiculously expensive journalism masters program want to do local reporting in the markets that don't have good local reporting?
Honestly, depends on how it's pitched and who it's pitched at.
If it's pitched at people who want to be reporters and at newspapers that want actual reporters who can work to a deadline and make something interesting out of a local school board meeting, then graduates will get jobs out of it, and that will attract the right sort of people.
If the people it pulls in are students who would like to be sitting in a fancy office in New York or Washington and writing opinion columns, then it won't work out.
Depends on whether big newsrooms come to accept the work they do as a good substitute for prior experience or for J school. I suspect they might from what I’ve heard about newsrooms—not so much as a substitute for J school but as for putting in your years at the Podunk Record before moving to bigger and better things.
seems like the people making hiring decisions at national outlets (Atlantic, NYMag, Vox, WaPo, etc.) are more likely to come out of fancy grad schools themselves rather than paying their dues at the Podunk Record
Maybe? The impression I get from MY is that they didn't go to fancy grad schools, they went to fancy undergrads and worked on the school paper. I don't know TBH. But I suspect that the older outlets (especially NYT and WaPo) would still have some residual attunement to the old-school system of Podunk Record->Obscure State Capital State Journal->Baltimore Sun/Philadelphia Inquirer/Etc->National paper.
This is sort of like the Report for America fellowship, where they help you find a local reporting job to start your journalism career https://www.reportforamerica.org/
More communities have universities than have functioning commercial local papers, though. It could put a dent in the problem even if it isn't a panacea.
Not even sure there are any - here in California being 200,000 in population basically guarantees you a CSU campus. Stockton excepted but they have U of the Pacific.
I think your point about community colleges having generally poor graduation rates is an important one. My wife and I attended the same community college prior to transferring out to 4-year institutions, she did her two years and got out, I took the more meandering path of the 6-year CC student before finishing my AA and transferring to another school. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where I never finished my associate's degree and just stopped going, because I saw lots of people I went to high school with do it.
My observation during my experience is that a lot of students don't graduate because you're kind of operating at half-engagement much of the time, and so are many of your peers. You take a class or two a semester, however it fits into your work schedule, maybe next semester the class you need isn't offered at a time that works for you, so you take that one off, then you come back the next one, and so on and so forth. You live in the same area you did in high school, so your HS friends who didn't go away to college are around, you hang out with them, maybe you get a S/O and move in together, and before you look up you're 24 or 25 years old, thinking about marriage/kids in the next few years, not done with CC, but maybe you've been promoted at work once or twice, and it's not hard to imagine seeing CC as unecessary.
I'd be really interested in seeing a closer look at what the community colleges with higher rates of graduation are doing differently than the rest. My experience was that the staff and administration was very helpful in keeping you on track if you sought them out, but it's pretty easy to just kind of float along unbothered by them if you're not actively looking for it. When I went to get my BA, there were required meetings with the counselors (or whatever they were called, I don't recall) at certain checkpoints to keep you on track.
The big reform now in community colleges is something called Guided Pathways, and the idea is to get students into a general program immediately and tell them exactly what courses to take in what order. It doesn’t solve the part-time problem—a part-time associates still takes four years, and a lot can happen in four years—but at least it’s more structure.
Community colleges are in a bit of a weird place right now. One of their original missions was to offer classes on a variety of subjects to anyone that wanted to take them (i.e. the community). The goal was not necessarily to earn a degree or move on to a 4 year university. I know people that take classes at the local CC just for fun every semester.
Now many are being tasked with essentially being a remedial program to feed in to 4 year colleges, and offering a lot of intro-level courses that will transfer to the 4 years if articulation agreements are in place. I think some of them struggle with this part of the mission because it's new, and quite honestly some of the 4 year institutions don't want too many credits to transfer because it takes butts out of their intro course seats. It's a weird time for a lot of CCs.
There are plenty of non-degree seeking students at CCs still (we often remove them or analyze them separately), but my two of my grandparents met at a community college before they both transferred to a 4-year—and this would have been in the early fifties. Transfer to a university has always been a common goal for CC students.
I think that now community colleges are expected to monitor how well they do—which means having tough conversations about what the purposes of community colleges are and how to measure up. Part of that means accurately understanding student goals—it’s unfair to judge the non-graduation of someone who is taking a class for fun, but we do need to be accountable for giving the students who want a credential or a successful transfer the best chance to succeed.
I think the problem is even higher level than this. The core failing is that we have devalued the high school diploma by incentivizing graduation rates over everything. Public schools are throwing wildly unqualified students to the wolves.
Cutting off the credentialism treadmill that higher Ed has become means ensuring there's real tangible economic value in a highschool diploma.
My wife is in her early 30's and started community college after finishing her dance career. She's juggling a full time job along with college and faces many of the challenges you laid out.
She had one class in particular she needed to take for her program that was only offered during a night when she had to work. The college couldn't offer any flexibility on that, so we began seriously talking about her cutting down her hours at work just to take that one class - something many people would not be in a position to do.
Then covid hit, and the class shifted to fully online. She was able to take that class without cutting her work hours because she didn't have to show up in a classroom during that time. That flexibility allowed her to stay on track without sacrificing our family's income.
When I decided to go back to school, I picked an online masters program. I could continue working and paid about 10k in loans, and was able to get a job in my new field within a few months of graduating.
I didn’t even bother to screw around with the local public schools, which were (a) the community college I worked at, where my job meant that I had to work during the most common class times and (b) a satellite campus of a flagship campus that had limited programs and wasn’t even on the same term schedule as the community college. I probably would have gone back to school earlier if the local university had terms that matched my work terms.
My girlfriend has a similar experience (she's in her late 20s and she didn't so much have a career before as decide not to try to be an academic after all). Online classes have given her a lot of flexibility to take required courses she would otherwise have had to wait to do. We're actually kinda worried about what'll happen a few years from now when she's transitioned to the bachelor's institution for her main program (engineering); her current job (call center for a utility) gives some flexibility on work schedules, but whether it'll be enough is unclear.
I think the scam is even bigger and more widespread, and deeper. Even at Ivy Leagues, which generally don't saddle undergraduates with debt they could never pay off, there is a sort of scam going on constantly that is the college administration. These administrations are unbelievably bloated, their salaries gigantic, and they don't really provide anything for students. Each year, the administrations expand, their salaries go up (with tuition), and the product doesn't get any better, and there isn't really an expectation that it would. They're just stealing from (in this case mostly) parents who spent tens of thousands of work hours to save up for these schools, and I'm not sure I totally understand why it's necessary for that sort of theft to be legal. Dartmouth spends 76 million annually on administration salaries, over 1 million of which goes to our president. The endowment rose $400 million last year. Why do kids ever graduate with debt (I would put the total debt of one year of undergrads at about $12 million)? Why is there not enough student housing? Why are some profs and lecturers underpaid? Why aren't there enough counselors to give long-term therapy to students (even though 3 freshmen committed suicide last year)? Because the administration doesn't care enough about fixing any of these problems, which it would be easy to do if they'd spend some more of their essentially infinite money on it, which they'd usually rather spend on themselves.
Coming at this issue from the other end- I recall working as a union steward shortly after the University of California postdocs organized, and discovering that the administration was by far the worst actor among everyone involved when it came to improving working conditions.
This was really bad at the time- people with Ph.D’s making 18k/year to live in San Francisco, extremely meager healthcare despite working at world class hospitals, etc., all essentially because the university could play a completely confiscatory role and pit the professors against their employees. They would take a non-negotiable flat rate cut out of every grant, and wouldn’t budge if the grants were redefined or a lab happened to have a funding gap. It was just “fuck you, pay me.”
Back in 2018 Shankar Vendantam’s Hidden Brain podcast did a story on “Bull*** Jobs”—meaning jobs that were apparently pointless, where the person doing the job might have a good title and be well paid but the work was meaningless and thus mentally draining. It seemed that an awful lot of these jobs were in college/university administration and had something to do with the absurd increases in the cost of higher education.
I swear this particular avalanche started out as a snowball that could loosely be summed up as “guaranteed decent employment for alumni”.
A huge fraction of these people began as graduates of the universities in question; to the extent that they aren’t anymore, it’s partly because they’ve been “swapped” from another similar university.
But yes, the average university could eliminate half of more of its staffing without actually affecting the end product a whit.
Great article, to add an extra element of depth: something that I think is poorly understood outside of universities is how much there is a wall between faculty/departments and administrative staff.
I am a post doc in biology now, where things are actually relatively not scammy as a whole. That being said, I've interacted quite a bit with faculty and specifically department chairs, and it is amazing how much they (probably correctly!) feel as though they have almost no agency when it comes to financial matters outside their direct purview.
For we example, I am at Harvard now, and recently put together a town hall for members of our department to talk about issues. One thing that came up was the phenomenal cost of housing in the Boston area and how this makes it difficulty for people who don't have much in the way of savings to take even fully funded PhD and post doc positions.
Professors in the meeting threw off some objectively radical and most likely insane ideas, like bargaining to get Harvard to just construct housing for it's academic staff, but at the same time we were told that our department chair had pushed to raises salaries and get finding for child care and was basically completely shut down.
I gave this anecdote mostly to illustrate the sort of hiding how the sausage is made that goes on. Faculty are given very little control over or insight into how anything related to funding works, and in return they are able to intellectually separate their academic pursuits from the more exploitative parts of academia.
The U Chicago example where professors actively work against the master's students makes perfect sense in this light, the faculty probably were not even remotely involved in the decision to expand this program they think is dumb in the first place. At the same time, they are happy to get the funding for their PhD students.
Biology is not super-scammy, but only about 20% of PhDs will end up as professors. That wouldn't be a problem if everyone operated as if they knew that fact, but instead it's largely ignored and graduate students / postdocs are only trained to do academic research. Profs benefit from the system because they get cheap labor to do the research. Universities overall benefit because it helps bring in indirects from research grants, provides a steady stream of cheap instructors for undergraduate courses, and there is prestige from having large graduate programs.
The benefits to the students themselves are often low priority. Masters programs are even worse, especially if students have to take loans to complete them. A Masters in biology doesn't provide much value beyond making it marginally more likely you will be admitted to a PhD program (same problem Yglesias identifies above), but can be quite expensive. Beyond the cheap labor for labs, I have personally witnessed professors (my colleagues) arguing that we shouldn't mess with a graduate program because then they would have to teach undergrads.
While it is true that biology is a pretty bad pipeline to academia, the PhD (at least for the last decade) is a pretty solid pipeline to very good/well-paid jobs in industry. Most of my friends from grad school got great jobs that use the skills from their PhDs. My experience was more that most people decided they didn't really like the academic trajectory for life reasons, rather than many of them applying for faculty jobs and not getting any/getting trapped in an adjunct cycle like happens to the humanities.
I agree that industry is a good alternative outcome for biology PhDs. That said, as I commented below, ~6 years is a long time to indirectly prep for an industry job. Big opportunity costs...
This is also a serious problem at all levels of computer science education, where many otherwise prestigious universities run CS programs that are completely focused on academic research and kind of ignore the reality that most of the graduates are going into industry by eschewing teaching of skills like design, maintenance, testing practice, specific technologies, etc. which students need to actually succeed in industry. This wouldn't be so bad if the programs were up front about it (there are plenty of industry-focused programs in the rest of higher ed outside of the big names), but they're really not, and it's a bad deal for a lot of students and honestly a bit scammy.
I worked as a research assistant in medical biochemistry for several years after my undergrad so I saw how academia worked and actually got a salary. I saw how a number of grad students did not graduate. Yes, most who got their PhD's went into industry. A couple went for academia. I ended up getting an M.S. in Science Education and taught Chemistry at a selective enrollment high school for over 25 years. Actually that turned out to be a good gig, a steady job with benefits. I am glad I didn't have the headaches of grant writing or being an endless adjunct.
"Professors in the meeting threw off some objectively radical and most likely insane ideas, like bargaining to get Harvard to just construct housing for it's academic staff"
I'm kind of confused if you are saying Harvard constructing housing just for academic staff is radical or if universities constructing housing for academic staff is radical. Because universities constructing or buying housing just for their own academic staff is very normal and many of them do it.
UC Irvine, for instance, has an entire 300 acre neighborhood it built for full-time employees. It's not only academics; any full-time employee qualifies. I know library workers who lived there. It's very popular. (https://icha.uci.edu/)
I was more saying it was insane that a small group of us in a single department would be able to demand Harvard begin a massive new construction project, when the faculty chair couldn't even swing a small childcare subsidy.
Yeah good luck with the ol' citizens of Cambridge with that proposal for housing. Maybe they could buy some land in Westminster or something and build a high speed maglev tunnel with all that endowment cash.
“ Harvard is Harvard. And to a great extent Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Medical School are also Harvard. But the Kennedy School of Government is not quite Harvard”
A minor point but I think this example is not quite fair to the Kennedy School (or the Grad School of Education) - these may not be as “prestigious” however defined as Harvard Law but they are fairly prestigious in their own domains. A better illustration is the distinction within Harvard Business School between the MBA program (elite pipeline to top careers) and Exec Ed program (cynical cash grab from mid-career middle management). Harvard Extension School is a similar example that seems to awkwardly balance between “good-faith way to extend the Harvard academic experience to a broader population” with “crass effort to monetize the brand”.
Big difference is that the exec Ed programs are pretty harmless. I took one which my company paid for. It’s win-win for university, company and individual and no loans are taken.
Much more concerning are the PhD programs and MAs which attract those that are diligent, but often of mediocre intelligence. Folks who are scared of leaving the structured world of education after having lived in it for the first ~18 years of their lives and who are the shrillest voices on Twitter.
Right on the mark. I taught in a very prestigious business school in Europe that offered absolutely first class education to undergrads and also an executive MBA based on taking a dozen or so courses that were condensed into 4-day, 10-hour-per-day sessions spaced every two months or so. Guess which program students learned more in? Guess which program had the higher tuition?
On the cost side were faced with ever growing costs that are mostly not coming from instruction. Professor compensation hasn't increased beyond inflation and class sizes haven't gotten smaller. But administration, non-academic services and research all have been going up faster than inflation. To the extent that those increases are being subsidized by federal loans there needs to be reform. And I include research because, even though in general research is good, but it's a weird system where research is subsidized by a tax on undergraduate students, and so much of it is of low quality.
Agreed about research. It has become the main (often sole) metric by which professors are evaluated, even at schools that putatively have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. It creates a lot of bad incentives to pump out more papers rather than develop research ideas fully. In my field the strategy is often called Minimum Publishable Units (MPUs) or salami slicing.
What Matt describes here truly is an enormous problem.
One explanatory factor is that many people outside the system have a very poor understanding of exactly the kind if distinctions that Matt describe. They have a rough idea of which universities are more or less prestigious, but not which majors and which programs actually carry weight for potential employers and train you in actually useful skills.
The other factor, which is particularly strong in regards to students supported by GI bills and the like, is the usual problem with a third party picking up the bill. Then of course neither the seller nor the buyer has much of an interest in reining in costs. For the larger student population, this effect is weaker; but with parents paying, readily available loans, etc., the effect is still quite strong.
I feel as if there's also a certain amount of blame to be placed upon corporate HR departments (perhaps for good reasons related to regulatory burden, I'm not sure as I'm not an HR professional). I have to actively request the removal of language such as "MBA preferred" in job reqs for relatively junior analyst roles in which the comp would not make sense for someone debt burdened by a graduate program, and it's generally understood within the org that these degrees are no longer necessary for a vast majority of roles (including senior management track positions). I could easily see a feedback loop in which recent graduates view masters programs as their ticket into prosperous careers due to this language being all over job postings, investing in a mediocre degree, and then not realizing the return. (Not to mention the fact that some degrees such as for profit MBAs act as a negative credential since they cause a hiring manager to question the decision making of the applicant)
Exactly. It's been a joke for a while that job postings ask for qualifications wildly incommensurate with what the job actually entails. I fought this recently with my own department, where the department head wrote a job description and I pointed out to him that he had things on there that he himself didn't understand and couldn't do, to the point where he was using terms incorrectly. I kept having the classic, "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means," conversation with him.
I work in the public sector for a very large and very rich city. This is a chronic problem.
The hiring process works as follows.
1. Prospective employees are screened for meeting the minimum qualifications
2. Those that meet the minimum qualifications are ranked.
3. Depending on the position, employers can interview anyone from the top 3, 5 or 10.
The biggest problem is the minimum qualifications section requires experience too specific to the City and too specific to the position. Basically you're only qualified for the position if you already held it within the City or coming from the outside.
So the advice everyone gives in the City, including HR informally, is to lie. Blatant lies that the reviewer knows are lies.
It could be easily solved if people just asked for reasonable requirements for the position.
I had my epiphany on this issue while doing a master's in a public policy field I won't identify at an Ivy League school I won't name.
We were able to satisfy one of the program's distribution requirements by taking Introduction to Corporate Finance, which was mandatory for all students at the school's extremely selective business school. On the first day of class the professor explained to us that we shouldn't feel bad about ourselves just because we were taught in a separate section. It turns out he'd decided to group all his public-policy students in one class, because we were dumber than the MBA candidates.
I'm pretty sure my test scores would have gotten me into the MBA program if I'd applied, so this was the moment I realized I'd made a huge mistake.
I'm not blaming the professor. The public-policy students *were* dumber than the MBAs. People asked questions in that class which indicated near-total math illiteracy, and I appreciate that the MBA candidates wouldn't have wanted to pay to sit through that.
Enrolling in a degree program whose subject excites you isn't going to help your job prospects if your fellow students aren't particularly stellar, and you can't assume they will be stellar just because the school has a famous brand.
Enjoyed your comments and have similar thoughts from my experience. I think another important part here in the policy school and MBA school programs (many universities offer both like this) is that these are "professional" degree programs that in practice take many students direct from undergrad. I'd guess this is a major source of the wide variation in outcomes these programs have RE future salaries, and I suspect it is hard for students to tease out whether they really can be among those making 6-figures incomes on the other side of what are usually two-year full-time programs.
Another poster said they had the sage advice of "if a grad school doesn't give you a full ride, they don't want you." I think this seems right. I got what I thought was a good merit scholarship offer and they upped my offer when I asked for more. I am kicking myself for not asking for yet more, though you never know where the line is. If one had insight on how the schools are viewing students with a lot of professional experience (that they suspect can get those good jobs and reliably boost their 'outcomes' profiles for advertising purposes) versus the direct-from-undergrads who are likely on the "cash cow" side (not to knock all undergrads, but their salaries won't jump the way a professional's could I'd guess), then maybe it would be easier to make these decisions, especially at elite schools.
Was interested to see if anything had changed since I attended but the average work experience for the Kellogg 2022 class is five years. I don't remember any direct from undergrad students. Maybe there were but I feel like this path is exceedingly rare. Or maybe it's different for the top MBA programs.
Top MBA programs I suspect require some, but policy programs may be more prone to that. And I know people that have gone straight into MBA from undergrad, but not at a top program. Finally, averages can distort things, or mask decent amount of no or 1-to-2-year experience folks.
Good article Matt. The higher education system in America is fundamentally broken in so many ways.
I wish there was more discussion about how higher education relates to older adults. Since so many good paying jobs list a bachelors degree as a requirement to even look at your resume, a 40 year old with kids and a mortgage needs to somehow carve out time over 4 years to take foreign language, science and humanities classes just so they can become, say, a dental hygienist. It’s crazy!
"But it seems to me they tend to turn a blind eye ... to dubious business practices at their own institutions"
The growth in these scams coincides with the erosion of faculty governance across the industry. Plenty of faculty have very well-informed, pointed critiques of the way their institutions are run, and the ways they make and spend money. But these faculty haven't have power at their own institutions for a while.
Very telling, someone I know on the faculty senate said the president would ask for input on various points but not even wait for the 30 seconds lag on the video conference before moving on.
As someone who is retired military, and has the GI Bill, I have several issues. First of all, it limits itself to studying people who were in the Army. Even though its a larger branch, I suspect the effects may have been different if they had studied people from the USAF or US Navy. Especially since the effects are more pronounced for those who score worse on the AFQB. The Army has the lowest score cutoff. The USAF I know requires all recruits to score at least in the top 50 percentile.
Next, I think a question has to be asked about happiness and job satisfaction. Do the people who earn less have more satisfying jobs? Maybe not, but it should be addressed.
Really, the take away from the GI Bill study should be that college is not for everybody... we should stop pretending it is.
One other thing that should be mentioned is that the Post 911 GI Bill is transferrable to dependents after a certain amount of time. Right now my 21-year old daughter is using it to go school to become a Robot technician. She will definitely get some value added out of it.
Next point. Matt uses this line which I take issue with.
"It’s extremely human, and most specifically extremely American to believe that with hard work and determination you can make your dreams come true."
I dislike this attitude so much. It reeks of entitlement. What the American dream is that with hard work and determination you can be successful. Being successful is independent from realizing your "dream". I am not sure where the idea of follow your dreams and passions came from, but it is fundamentally damaging. The simple fact is most people aren't going to realize their dreams, because there dreams are unrealistic. Unfortunately there are too many people who conflate people not achieving their dreams with hard work and determination being not being valuable. People who work hard are going to have better outcomes than people who don't work hard, full stop. Maybe there is an argument to be made about whether the difference is worth it... but that's a different argument. And one in which I think conservatives have the upper hand in.
Look, I inspect power plants. This was not my dream. Even now, I can think of half a dozen jobs I think might be more interesting (who wouldn't like to be a pro-athlete)... however... I am successful, make a good living, and enjoy my job.
Finally, I wasn't aware of the value added for non-profit school thing. Everything that Matt says is true.
My suggestion is that we need to directly tie colleges to the outcomes of their students. My idea is to make student loans dischargeable under bankruptcy, but then put at least 50% of the loss onto the colleges. If colleges had skin in the game, you would be they would become a lot more selective in their programs... and who they admitted. This would probably shrink out college cartel, but quite frankly this would be a good thing.
Also, I wonder how many of Matts peers are made uncomfortable by this post, or do they all view themselves as an exception to the rule.
Anyway, articles like this are why I read Slow Boring.
And a personal message to Matt Yglesias. Lettuce doesn't belong on Tacos. All the way to Texas and you go to to Taco Cabana! Dude.
One potential problem with this idea: "My suggestion is that we need to directly tie colleges to the outcomes of their students. My idea is to make student loans dischargeable under bankruptcy, but then put at least 50% of the loss onto the colleges."
It would incentivize colleges to admit people from wealthy families as those people would be less likely to end up bankrupt, and less likely to admit first-generation college students. That's good if the program is Scam U but very very bad if it impacts admissions across the board at colleges.
I agree with everything in this post and believe we should pursue reforms to make graduate education fairer: e.g., make universities have skin in the game so they're on the hook for debt for students unable to complete the program; strict payment limits (% of future income) *plus* total forgiveness after X years, and so forth.
But I also think we should focus on ways to make the market work better. In the middle aughts, people started becoming more aware of what a scam most law schools were; writers like Paul Campos laid that out in great detail. And the market did work: from 2004 to 2015, law school applications dropped by 46% (https://report.lsac.org/View.aspx?Report=AdmissionTrendsApplicantsAdmitApps). I suspect that over time, heavily debt-driven scam programs like Matt describes here will become less popular as people realize just what a bad deal they are. What can help that market work better is far more transparency. We should regulate them by forcing them to provide reliable and timely data on student debt levels, percent getting a degree, and jobs their grads get x, y, and z years after the degree. This might be hard data for the universities to acquire to which I say: yup -- too bad. Do it anyway. (And every ex-student they can't get information for counts as someone who couldn't get a job in the field.)
Time for some tough love for these programs.(*)
(*) Next up: PhD programs which don't place at least X% of their candidates in acceptable post-doctoral jobs should be shut down.
Many of these decisions are made at the wrong level though. In my department, there had long been a funded Masters program. About 15 years ago, I understand, the university requested the department to create a PhD program. Then about 5 years ago, the university stopped funding Masters programs. Because we didn't want to stick Masters students in the trap mentioned in the OP, we've basically shut down the Masters program now. I don't know how many faculty in the department would prefer a funded Masters program over a funded PhD program, but we really didn't have a lot of say in the decision.
The law school thing was probably an overreaction to a short-term problem created by the recession, the median lifetime marginal value of a law degree is something like a million bucks. There are some very predatory law schools but most of the top 100 or so are fine.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 09.
The incoming LSAT/GPA or lower now than 15 years ago and the acceptance rate is higher. I'm still skeptical it is valuable.
The burden of debt in your 20s and 30s matters a lot due to the limits it places on family formation.
The debt upon graduation is crippling. I couldn't find an attorney job. The JD actually made it harder to get a non-legal job because everyone could thought I was going to jump ship. I basically couldn't afford to date or start thinking about forming a family the first 6 years after graduation because of the debt.
Now, I'm making 125k in a high COLA City. The law degree probably helped get into a mid management position. But I'm having to rush finding a family, if I am fortunate to find a spouse in time, I'm only going to have 1 kid at most.
I wouldn't consider it worth it. And most of my classmates feel the same.
Tbh the legal market is now nothing like 2009, Minnesota's recent placement rates have been in the 80s not the 60s and there's an ongoing salary war in Minneapolis sparked by Faegre recently raising first-years to $180,000. And the huge increase in law school transparency and scholarship warring among schools has made it much easier to avoid debt.
The scamminess of law schools has been written about for more than a decade - Paul Campos' Inside the Law School scam blog was wound up in 2014 because he'd written all he needed to say on the topic.
The law school scam conventional wisdom is actually definitely wrong now, and may have been at the time. But the legal job market has been red hot for quite a while now. The big problem is at the really low-end schools, mostly in California, that take lots of people who won't pass the bar. But the panic did make students more debt-conscious which is a very good thing even if it went a bit over the top.
Most of them have long residency-like programs instead, an undergrad degree just isn't enough training to be a lawyer. E.g. decent law schools don't really teach you how to write, they assume you're good already and just teach the quirks of legal writing.
I’m part of the ivory tower. The advice I give undergrads who want to get a grad degree is varied depending on the student and the degree. But the one piece of advice they all get is this. Look at the program’s webpage. If the program has been around more than 5 years, and they are not showing where every single student ended up after graduation, you need to do a lot more homework. That lack of basic info doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scam but a program that is not proud of its product ought to worry you.
My father, born 1915, went to a nowhere college in his Missouri hometown for a math degree, spent four years in a submarine and then used the GI bill to get a PhD in economics from the U of Chicago. It all worked out well for him and a long career at Cornell. One of the best pieces of advice he gave us children is a graduate program that isn't offering you a free ride doesn't really want you, they want your money.
His other useful piece of advice was, if you're a grad student who can't get your PhD in four years, you're in the wrong profession.
Yeah, that has not been true for a few decades now, unless you change "four" to "seven" or so. The faculties of the absolute top departments, in the disciplines I know best, are staffed by people who took five, six, and more years to complete their degrees. And all of the top departments offer five or six years of free stipends. For me to advise a student to finish in four would be pedagogical malpractice: better for them to take another year on stipend, publish a few papers first, take some more seminars, revise the diss for publication, etc..
Yes, there is still some number of years after which a student should get a clue and change careers. But it is no longer four.
Admittedly my dad was in a hurry, having spent four years in a submarine, getting a late start, with a wife and two kids. He had little patience for 20-something grad students dithering around before they found their passion and and purpose in life.
In my field, even for most very precocious and focused students who have known exactly what they wanted to do and prepared for it since high school, 5 years is the absolute minimum amount of time it takes to learn enough to do original research. Research is harder these days, man...
EO Wilson started at age 3 after poking an eye out. Not suggesting you do the same, but knowing exactly what you want to do in high school isn't a sign of knowing what you want to do.
Sure, but you can't reasonably accuse someone like that of "dithering around in their 20s looking for their passion and purpose in life"...
"can't get a PhD in four years" is not always the same as "doesn't get a PhD in four years."
Even now, if you want that academic field as your profession, you'd better have the capability/intellect/talent/work ethic sufficient to earn a PhD in four years.
Not that this is always the right choice: yes, there are many cases where, if paid, it's better long term to incubate in the doctoral program and improve your corpus of research/connections/publications for a few years. Apply for jobs... and if you don't get the right tenure track position or a postdoc with a rising star... stay and try again next year.
But as advice it's well framed: if you're not talented enough to excel, that's an early warning sign that you should go somewhere else.
Well, in the sciences, it can take longer, like 5 or 6 if you don't enter with a masters.
My information is decades old, but if you're still slogging away in year 7, consider the possibility your faculty advisor and university are playing you. Lots of things were better 60 years ago including universities and faculty advisors.
The "your advisor is playing you" risk is real, but the truth is that it can take a really really long time to set up an experiment and gather data in Physics and Bio. and I'm sure it's also true in some other disciplines I'm less knowledgeable about. 4-5 years is a legitimate time frame, and then you tack on the couple years of "classroom" education at the front. I think the big red flag is if you're there for more than 5 and you aren't getting paid - then you are probably being taken advantage of. If you are getting a stipend that covers "tuition" and living expenses, there's skin in the game on the other side and they probably aren't just keeping you around because they can.
Next month I will graduate my 17th PhD student (in Chemistry) almost four years to they day they started. The longest any of them have taken is 4 years, 10 months, but that was pandemic-related.
Of course, this is in Europe, where we have to fund the entire PhD salary up front and the students sign four-year employment contracts. But it's certainly true that having skin in the game forces us to get them out the door in four (we also get a kickback from the government for graduating the on time).
The downside is that there is no flexibility. If, as is sometimes the case, a project catches fire in the fourth year, the PhD student can either graduate and miss out on a bunch of first-author papers or go on a zero-hour contract and self-fund.
Money is very tight and virtually no grant will let you spend on salary past what was initially asked for in the proposal. If you are lucky enough to have tens of thousands of Euros of unrestricted funds lying around, you could blow it on a few months worth of salary, but labor costs are insane and unrestricted funds (e.g., the kickbacks you get for graduating students on time) are usually doled out in four-digit sums. You also have to pay all kinds of overhead and maintenance out of those funds including, these days, author publication charges, since we are now forced to publish everything open-access.
At the other extreme, if a student is so good as to deserve graduating early, we are incentivized to keep them around because unpaid salary returns to the granting organization. So we target graduating students in exactly four (or in France and a few other countries three) years and are, in my opinion, remarkably successful at hitting that target.
The flexibility of the American system certainly creates a lot of opportunity for exploitation, but the rigid European systems treat PhD thesis research like a construction project, complete with Gantt charts and milestones. I'm not advocating for one system or the other, just sharing my experience in a one-size-fits-all system that is almost impossible to run a scam in.
I still have trouble imagining the European system; my (no doubt unfair :) assumption is always that European PhDs, having taken 3-4 years, can't be as good as US ones. Personally, I haven't graduated as many PhD students as you have, but all of them worked on some things not originally proposed, much to their benefit (at least in terms of good papers). And I don't keep anyone past six years at most (so far at least), figuring by then either they have been so productive that it's unfair to keep them longer, or they aren't productive enough to want to keep longer anyway. We have regular discussions about their career goals and then try to time things such that the end of the PhD dovetails with their job/postdoc offer (or I keep them as a short-term postdoc to bridge the gap). This requires fungible money, of course.
I have seen others let students languish indefinitely, aided by TA slots so they don't have to pay them out of grants. The graduate program chair should step in at that point, but they are often useless for actually protecting students. The flip side is that I have heard of students who exploit the European system, at least from a French colleague who's had some lazy students who know just how much they can get away with.
The same for history, assuming you aren’t that close to whatever archives you need to visit
"What I don’t know is a lot of people who feel they learned a ton from their journalism MA program. . . But the positive experiences people have described to me about journalism school aren’t really about delivering education — they’re taking advantage of the collapse of career paths that used to run through regional newspapers to do some rent-seeking."
Thought: A practical journalism masters program in which the program produces a local/regional newspaper staffed by the students.
Now, that is a great idea. Would replace some of the lost local reporting.
Do you guys think this will get actual applicants?
Like, do people who go to Northwestern's ridiculously expensive journalism masters program want to do local reporting in the markets that don't have good local reporting?
Honestly, depends on how it's pitched and who it's pitched at.
If it's pitched at people who want to be reporters and at newspapers that want actual reporters who can work to a deadline and make something interesting out of a local school board meeting, then graduates will get jobs out of it, and that will attract the right sort of people.
If the people it pulls in are students who would like to be sitting in a fancy office in New York or Washington and writing opinion columns, then it won't work out.
Depends on whether big newsrooms come to accept the work they do as a good substitute for prior experience or for J school. I suspect they might from what I’ve heard about newsrooms—not so much as a substitute for J school but as for putting in your years at the Podunk Record before moving to bigger and better things.
seems like the people making hiring decisions at national outlets (Atlantic, NYMag, Vox, WaPo, etc.) are more likely to come out of fancy grad schools themselves rather than paying their dues at the Podunk Record
Maybe? The impression I get from MY is that they didn't go to fancy grad schools, they went to fancy undergrads and worked on the school paper. I don't know TBH. But I suspect that the older outlets (especially NYT and WaPo) would still have some residual attunement to the old-school system of Podunk Record->Obscure State Capital State Journal->Baltimore Sun/Philadelphia Inquirer/Etc->National paper.
the people who start at the podunk record rarely make it to national papers. but if you start(ed) at the state capitol record, you had a chance
This is sort of like the Report for America fellowship, where they help you find a local reporting job to start your journalism career https://www.reportforamerica.org/
Not all communities that have news have universities.
More communities have universities than have functioning commercial local papers, though. It could put a dent in the problem even if it isn't a panacea.
How many communities of over 200,000 people have no university within an hour drive of them? (I'm sure there are some, but I suspect not many.)
Not even sure there are any - here in California being 200,000 in population basically guarantees you a CSU campus. Stockton excepted but they have U of the Pacific.
I think your point about community colleges having generally poor graduation rates is an important one. My wife and I attended the same community college prior to transferring out to 4-year institutions, she did her two years and got out, I took the more meandering path of the 6-year CC student before finishing my AA and transferring to another school. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where I never finished my associate's degree and just stopped going, because I saw lots of people I went to high school with do it.
My observation during my experience is that a lot of students don't graduate because you're kind of operating at half-engagement much of the time, and so are many of your peers. You take a class or two a semester, however it fits into your work schedule, maybe next semester the class you need isn't offered at a time that works for you, so you take that one off, then you come back the next one, and so on and so forth. You live in the same area you did in high school, so your HS friends who didn't go away to college are around, you hang out with them, maybe you get a S/O and move in together, and before you look up you're 24 or 25 years old, thinking about marriage/kids in the next few years, not done with CC, but maybe you've been promoted at work once or twice, and it's not hard to imagine seeing CC as unecessary.
I'd be really interested in seeing a closer look at what the community colleges with higher rates of graduation are doing differently than the rest. My experience was that the staff and administration was very helpful in keeping you on track if you sought them out, but it's pretty easy to just kind of float along unbothered by them if you're not actively looking for it. When I went to get my BA, there were required meetings with the counselors (or whatever they were called, I don't recall) at certain checkpoints to keep you on track.
The big reform now in community colleges is something called Guided Pathways, and the idea is to get students into a general program immediately and tell them exactly what courses to take in what order. It doesn’t solve the part-time problem—a part-time associates still takes four years, and a lot can happen in four years—but at least it’s more structure.
Community colleges are in a bit of a weird place right now. One of their original missions was to offer classes on a variety of subjects to anyone that wanted to take them (i.e. the community). The goal was not necessarily to earn a degree or move on to a 4 year university. I know people that take classes at the local CC just for fun every semester.
Now many are being tasked with essentially being a remedial program to feed in to 4 year colleges, and offering a lot of intro-level courses that will transfer to the 4 years if articulation agreements are in place. I think some of them struggle with this part of the mission because it's new, and quite honestly some of the 4 year institutions don't want too many credits to transfer because it takes butts out of their intro course seats. It's a weird time for a lot of CCs.
There are plenty of non-degree seeking students at CCs still (we often remove them or analyze them separately), but my two of my grandparents met at a community college before they both transferred to a 4-year—and this would have been in the early fifties. Transfer to a university has always been a common goal for CC students.
I think that now community colleges are expected to monitor how well they do—which means having tough conversations about what the purposes of community colleges are and how to measure up. Part of that means accurately understanding student goals—it’s unfair to judge the non-graduation of someone who is taking a class for fun, but we do need to be accountable for giving the students who want a credential or a successful transfer the best chance to succeed.
When I was in high school the local CC was derogatorily joked about as "13th Grade", now apparently a bunch of people want it to actually be that.
I think the problem is even higher level than this. The core failing is that we have devalued the high school diploma by incentivizing graduation rates over everything. Public schools are throwing wildly unqualified students to the wolves.
Cutting off the credentialism treadmill that higher Ed has become means ensuring there's real tangible economic value in a highschool diploma.
At least it's something, absolutely. Thanks!
My wife is in her early 30's and started community college after finishing her dance career. She's juggling a full time job along with college and faces many of the challenges you laid out.
She had one class in particular she needed to take for her program that was only offered during a night when she had to work. The college couldn't offer any flexibility on that, so we began seriously talking about her cutting down her hours at work just to take that one class - something many people would not be in a position to do.
Then covid hit, and the class shifted to fully online. She was able to take that class without cutting her work hours because she didn't have to show up in a classroom during that time. That flexibility allowed her to stay on track without sacrificing our family's income.
When I decided to go back to school, I picked an online masters program. I could continue working and paid about 10k in loans, and was able to get a job in my new field within a few months of graduating.
I didn’t even bother to screw around with the local public schools, which were (a) the community college I worked at, where my job meant that I had to work during the most common class times and (b) a satellite campus of a flagship campus that had limited programs and wasn’t even on the same term schedule as the community college. I probably would have gone back to school earlier if the local university had terms that matched my work terms.
(Western Governors University, Data Analytics.)
My girlfriend has a similar experience (she's in her late 20s and she didn't so much have a career before as decide not to try to be an academic after all). Online classes have given her a lot of flexibility to take required courses she would otherwise have had to wait to do. We're actually kinda worried about what'll happen a few years from now when she's transitioned to the bachelor's institution for her main program (engineering); her current job (call center for a utility) gives some flexibility on work schedules, but whether it'll be enough is unclear.
I think the scam is even bigger and more widespread, and deeper. Even at Ivy Leagues, which generally don't saddle undergraduates with debt they could never pay off, there is a sort of scam going on constantly that is the college administration. These administrations are unbelievably bloated, their salaries gigantic, and they don't really provide anything for students. Each year, the administrations expand, their salaries go up (with tuition), and the product doesn't get any better, and there isn't really an expectation that it would. They're just stealing from (in this case mostly) parents who spent tens of thousands of work hours to save up for these schools, and I'm not sure I totally understand why it's necessary for that sort of theft to be legal. Dartmouth spends 76 million annually on administration salaries, over 1 million of which goes to our president. The endowment rose $400 million last year. Why do kids ever graduate with debt (I would put the total debt of one year of undergrads at about $12 million)? Why is there not enough student housing? Why are some profs and lecturers underpaid? Why aren't there enough counselors to give long-term therapy to students (even though 3 freshmen committed suicide last year)? Because the administration doesn't care enough about fixing any of these problems, which it would be easy to do if they'd spend some more of their essentially infinite money on it, which they'd usually rather spend on themselves.
Coming at this issue from the other end- I recall working as a union steward shortly after the University of California postdocs organized, and discovering that the administration was by far the worst actor among everyone involved when it came to improving working conditions.
This was really bad at the time- people with Ph.D’s making 18k/year to live in San Francisco, extremely meager healthcare despite working at world class hospitals, etc., all essentially because the university could play a completely confiscatory role and pit the professors against their employees. They would take a non-negotiable flat rate cut out of every grant, and wouldn’t budge if the grants were redefined or a lab happened to have a funding gap. It was just “fuck you, pay me.”
Anyway, not in academia anymore.
Back in 2018 Shankar Vendantam’s Hidden Brain podcast did a story on “Bull*** Jobs”—meaning jobs that were apparently pointless, where the person doing the job might have a good title and be well paid but the work was meaningless and thus mentally draining. It seemed that an awful lot of these jobs were in college/university administration and had something to do with the absurd increases in the cost of higher education.
I swear this particular avalanche started out as a snowball that could loosely be summed up as “guaranteed decent employment for alumni”.
A huge fraction of these people began as graduates of the universities in question; to the extent that they aren’t anymore, it’s partly because they’ve been “swapped” from another similar university.
But yes, the average university could eliminate half of more of its staffing without actually affecting the end product a whit.
Exactly right!
Great article, to add an extra element of depth: something that I think is poorly understood outside of universities is how much there is a wall between faculty/departments and administrative staff.
I am a post doc in biology now, where things are actually relatively not scammy as a whole. That being said, I've interacted quite a bit with faculty and specifically department chairs, and it is amazing how much they (probably correctly!) feel as though they have almost no agency when it comes to financial matters outside their direct purview.
For we example, I am at Harvard now, and recently put together a town hall for members of our department to talk about issues. One thing that came up was the phenomenal cost of housing in the Boston area and how this makes it difficulty for people who don't have much in the way of savings to take even fully funded PhD and post doc positions.
Professors in the meeting threw off some objectively radical and most likely insane ideas, like bargaining to get Harvard to just construct housing for it's academic staff, but at the same time we were told that our department chair had pushed to raises salaries and get finding for child care and was basically completely shut down.
I gave this anecdote mostly to illustrate the sort of hiding how the sausage is made that goes on. Faculty are given very little control over or insight into how anything related to funding works, and in return they are able to intellectually separate their academic pursuits from the more exploitative parts of academia.
The U Chicago example where professors actively work against the master's students makes perfect sense in this light, the faculty probably were not even remotely involved in the decision to expand this program they think is dumb in the first place. At the same time, they are happy to get the funding for their PhD students.
Biology is not super-scammy, but only about 20% of PhDs will end up as professors. That wouldn't be a problem if everyone operated as if they knew that fact, but instead it's largely ignored and graduate students / postdocs are only trained to do academic research. Profs benefit from the system because they get cheap labor to do the research. Universities overall benefit because it helps bring in indirects from research grants, provides a steady stream of cheap instructors for undergraduate courses, and there is prestige from having large graduate programs.
The benefits to the students themselves are often low priority. Masters programs are even worse, especially if students have to take loans to complete them. A Masters in biology doesn't provide much value beyond making it marginally more likely you will be admitted to a PhD program (same problem Yglesias identifies above), but can be quite expensive. Beyond the cheap labor for labs, I have personally witnessed professors (my colleagues) arguing that we shouldn't mess with a graduate program because then they would have to teach undergrads.
While it is true that biology is a pretty bad pipeline to academia, the PhD (at least for the last decade) is a pretty solid pipeline to very good/well-paid jobs in industry. Most of my friends from grad school got great jobs that use the skills from their PhDs. My experience was more that most people decided they didn't really like the academic trajectory for life reasons, rather than many of them applying for faculty jobs and not getting any/getting trapped in an adjunct cycle like happens to the humanities.
I agree that industry is a good alternative outcome for biology PhDs. That said, as I commented below, ~6 years is a long time to indirectly prep for an industry job. Big opportunity costs...
It may not be the most cost effective path, but do many people in industry regret their PhDs?
This is also a serious problem at all levels of computer science education, where many otherwise prestigious universities run CS programs that are completely focused on academic research and kind of ignore the reality that most of the graduates are going into industry by eschewing teaching of skills like design, maintenance, testing practice, specific technologies, etc. which students need to actually succeed in industry. This wouldn't be so bad if the programs were up front about it (there are plenty of industry-focused programs in the rest of higher ed outside of the big names), but they're really not, and it's a bad deal for a lot of students and honestly a bit scammy.
I worked as a research assistant in medical biochemistry for several years after my undergrad so I saw how academia worked and actually got a salary. I saw how a number of grad students did not graduate. Yes, most who got their PhD's went into industry. A couple went for academia. I ended up getting an M.S. in Science Education and taught Chemistry at a selective enrollment high school for over 25 years. Actually that turned out to be a good gig, a steady job with benefits. I am glad I didn't have the headaches of grant writing or being an endless adjunct.
"Professors in the meeting threw off some objectively radical and most likely insane ideas, like bargaining to get Harvard to just construct housing for it's academic staff"
I'm kind of confused if you are saying Harvard constructing housing just for academic staff is radical or if universities constructing housing for academic staff is radical. Because universities constructing or buying housing just for their own academic staff is very normal and many of them do it.
UC Irvine, for instance, has an entire 300 acre neighborhood it built for full-time employees. It's not only academics; any full-time employee qualifies. I know library workers who lived there. It's very popular. (https://icha.uci.edu/)
I was more saying it was insane that a small group of us in a single department would be able to demand Harvard begin a massive new construction project, when the faculty chair couldn't even swing a small childcare subsidy.
Yeah good luck with the ol' citizens of Cambridge with that proposal for housing. Maybe they could buy some land in Westminster or something and build a high speed maglev tunnel with all that endowment cash.
“ Harvard is Harvard. And to a great extent Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Medical School are also Harvard. But the Kennedy School of Government is not quite Harvard”
A minor point but I think this example is not quite fair to the Kennedy School (or the Grad School of Education) - these may not be as “prestigious” however defined as Harvard Law but they are fairly prestigious in their own domains. A better illustration is the distinction within Harvard Business School between the MBA program (elite pipeline to top careers) and Exec Ed program (cynical cash grab from mid-career middle management). Harvard Extension School is a similar example that seems to awkwardly balance between “good-faith way to extend the Harvard academic experience to a broader population” with “crass effort to monetize the brand”.
Big difference is that the exec Ed programs are pretty harmless. I took one which my company paid for. It’s win-win for university, company and individual and no loans are taken.
Much more concerning are the PhD programs and MAs which attract those that are diligent, but often of mediocre intelligence. Folks who are scared of leaving the structured world of education after having lived in it for the first ~18 years of their lives and who are the shrillest voices on Twitter.
Right on the mark. I taught in a very prestigious business school in Europe that offered absolutely first class education to undergrads and also an executive MBA based on taking a dozen or so courses that were condensed into 4-day, 10-hour-per-day sessions spaced every two months or so. Guess which program students learned more in? Guess which program had the higher tuition?
Good piece. There is a huge need for reform here.
On the cost side were faced with ever growing costs that are mostly not coming from instruction. Professor compensation hasn't increased beyond inflation and class sizes haven't gotten smaller. But administration, non-academic services and research all have been going up faster than inflation. To the extent that those increases are being subsidized by federal loans there needs to be reform. And I include research because, even though in general research is good, but it's a weird system where research is subsidized by a tax on undergraduate students, and so much of it is of low quality.
Agreed about research. It has become the main (often sole) metric by which professors are evaluated, even at schools that putatively have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. It creates a lot of bad incentives to pump out more papers rather than develop research ideas fully. In my field the strategy is often called Minimum Publishable Units (MPUs) or salami slicing.
What Matt describes here truly is an enormous problem.
One explanatory factor is that many people outside the system have a very poor understanding of exactly the kind if distinctions that Matt describe. They have a rough idea of which universities are more or less prestigious, but not which majors and which programs actually carry weight for potential employers and train you in actually useful skills.
The other factor, which is particularly strong in regards to students supported by GI bills and the like, is the usual problem with a third party picking up the bill. Then of course neither the seller nor the buyer has much of an interest in reining in costs. For the larger student population, this effect is weaker; but with parents paying, readily available loans, etc., the effect is still quite strong.
I feel as if there's also a certain amount of blame to be placed upon corporate HR departments (perhaps for good reasons related to regulatory burden, I'm not sure as I'm not an HR professional). I have to actively request the removal of language such as "MBA preferred" in job reqs for relatively junior analyst roles in which the comp would not make sense for someone debt burdened by a graduate program, and it's generally understood within the org that these degrees are no longer necessary for a vast majority of roles (including senior management track positions). I could easily see a feedback loop in which recent graduates view masters programs as their ticket into prosperous careers due to this language being all over job postings, investing in a mediocre degree, and then not realizing the return. (Not to mention the fact that some degrees such as for profit MBAs act as a negative credential since they cause a hiring manager to question the decision making of the applicant)
Exactly. It's been a joke for a while that job postings ask for qualifications wildly incommensurate with what the job actually entails. I fought this recently with my own department, where the department head wrote a job description and I pointed out to him that he had things on there that he himself didn't understand and couldn't do, to the point where he was using terms incorrectly. I kept having the classic, "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means," conversation with him.
One iron rule of job postings is if you meet all the requirements, you are overqualified.
I work in the public sector for a very large and very rich city. This is a chronic problem.
The hiring process works as follows.
1. Prospective employees are screened for meeting the minimum qualifications
2. Those that meet the minimum qualifications are ranked.
3. Depending on the position, employers can interview anyone from the top 3, 5 or 10.
The biggest problem is the minimum qualifications section requires experience too specific to the City and too specific to the position. Basically you're only qualified for the position if you already held it within the City or coming from the outside.
So the advice everyone gives in the City, including HR informally, is to lie. Blatant lies that the reviewer knows are lies.
It could be easily solved if people just asked for reasonable requirements for the position.
I had my epiphany on this issue while doing a master's in a public policy field I won't identify at an Ivy League school I won't name.
We were able to satisfy one of the program's distribution requirements by taking Introduction to Corporate Finance, which was mandatory for all students at the school's extremely selective business school. On the first day of class the professor explained to us that we shouldn't feel bad about ourselves just because we were taught in a separate section. It turns out he'd decided to group all his public-policy students in one class, because we were dumber than the MBA candidates.
I'm pretty sure my test scores would have gotten me into the MBA program if I'd applied, so this was the moment I realized I'd made a huge mistake.
Or when they put you on a different campus. Or in a portable building. It is hard to recover from bad education mistakes.
I'm not blaming the professor. The public-policy students *were* dumber than the MBAs. People asked questions in that class which indicated near-total math illiteracy, and I appreciate that the MBA candidates wouldn't have wanted to pay to sit through that.
Enrolling in a degree program whose subject excites you isn't going to help your job prospects if your fellow students aren't particularly stellar, and you can't assume they will be stellar just because the school has a famous brand.
Enjoyed your comments and have similar thoughts from my experience. I think another important part here in the policy school and MBA school programs (many universities offer both like this) is that these are "professional" degree programs that in practice take many students direct from undergrad. I'd guess this is a major source of the wide variation in outcomes these programs have RE future salaries, and I suspect it is hard for students to tease out whether they really can be among those making 6-figures incomes on the other side of what are usually two-year full-time programs.
Another poster said they had the sage advice of "if a grad school doesn't give you a full ride, they don't want you." I think this seems right. I got what I thought was a good merit scholarship offer and they upped my offer when I asked for more. I am kicking myself for not asking for yet more, though you never know where the line is. If one had insight on how the schools are viewing students with a lot of professional experience (that they suspect can get those good jobs and reliably boost their 'outcomes' profiles for advertising purposes) versus the direct-from-undergrads who are likely on the "cash cow" side (not to knock all undergrads, but their salaries won't jump the way a professional's could I'd guess), then maybe it would be easier to make these decisions, especially at elite schools.
Was interested to see if anything had changed since I attended but the average work experience for the Kellogg 2022 class is five years. I don't remember any direct from undergrad students. Maybe there were but I feel like this path is exceedingly rare. Or maybe it's different for the top MBA programs.
Top MBA programs I suspect require some, but policy programs may be more prone to that. And I know people that have gone straight into MBA from undergrad, but not at a top program. Finally, averages can distort things, or mask decent amount of no or 1-to-2-year experience folks.
Good article Matt. The higher education system in America is fundamentally broken in so many ways.
I wish there was more discussion about how higher education relates to older adults. Since so many good paying jobs list a bachelors degree as a requirement to even look at your resume, a 40 year old with kids and a mortgage needs to somehow carve out time over 4 years to take foreign language, science and humanities classes just so they can become, say, a dental hygienist. It’s crazy!
"But it seems to me they tend to turn a blind eye ... to dubious business practices at their own institutions"
The growth in these scams coincides with the erosion of faculty governance across the industry. Plenty of faculty have very well-informed, pointed critiques of the way their institutions are run, and the ways they make and spend money. But these faculty haven't have power at their own institutions for a while.
Very telling, someone I know on the faculty senate said the president would ask for input on various points but not even wait for the 30 seconds lag on the video conference before moving on.
Bom Dia from Brazil.
1st what a great article. Random observations:
As someone who is retired military, and has the GI Bill, I have several issues. First of all, it limits itself to studying people who were in the Army. Even though its a larger branch, I suspect the effects may have been different if they had studied people from the USAF or US Navy. Especially since the effects are more pronounced for those who score worse on the AFQB. The Army has the lowest score cutoff. The USAF I know requires all recruits to score at least in the top 50 percentile.
Next, I think a question has to be asked about happiness and job satisfaction. Do the people who earn less have more satisfying jobs? Maybe not, but it should be addressed.
Really, the take away from the GI Bill study should be that college is not for everybody... we should stop pretending it is.
One other thing that should be mentioned is that the Post 911 GI Bill is transferrable to dependents after a certain amount of time. Right now my 21-year old daughter is using it to go school to become a Robot technician. She will definitely get some value added out of it.
Next point. Matt uses this line which I take issue with.
"It’s extremely human, and most specifically extremely American to believe that with hard work and determination you can make your dreams come true."
I dislike this attitude so much. It reeks of entitlement. What the American dream is that with hard work and determination you can be successful. Being successful is independent from realizing your "dream". I am not sure where the idea of follow your dreams and passions came from, but it is fundamentally damaging. The simple fact is most people aren't going to realize their dreams, because there dreams are unrealistic. Unfortunately there are too many people who conflate people not achieving their dreams with hard work and determination being not being valuable. People who work hard are going to have better outcomes than people who don't work hard, full stop. Maybe there is an argument to be made about whether the difference is worth it... but that's a different argument. And one in which I think conservatives have the upper hand in.
Look, I inspect power plants. This was not my dream. Even now, I can think of half a dozen jobs I think might be more interesting (who wouldn't like to be a pro-athlete)... however... I am successful, make a good living, and enjoy my job.
Finally, I wasn't aware of the value added for non-profit school thing. Everything that Matt says is true.
My suggestion is that we need to directly tie colleges to the outcomes of their students. My idea is to make student loans dischargeable under bankruptcy, but then put at least 50% of the loss onto the colleges. If colleges had skin in the game, you would be they would become a lot more selective in their programs... and who they admitted. This would probably shrink out college cartel, but quite frankly this would be a good thing.
Also, I wonder how many of Matts peers are made uncomfortable by this post, or do they all view themselves as an exception to the rule.
Anyway, articles like this are why I read Slow Boring.
And a personal message to Matt Yglesias. Lettuce doesn't belong on Tacos. All the way to Texas and you go to to Taco Cabana! Dude.
One potential problem with this idea: "My suggestion is that we need to directly tie colleges to the outcomes of their students. My idea is to make student loans dischargeable under bankruptcy, but then put at least 50% of the loss onto the colleges."
It would incentivize colleges to admit people from wealthy families as those people would be less likely to end up bankrupt, and less likely to admit first-generation college students. That's good if the program is Scam U but very very bad if it impacts admissions across the board at colleges.
You know. That’s actually a very good point. Perhaps pair it with blind admissions. Which I know is a fantasy.
I agree with everything in this post and believe we should pursue reforms to make graduate education fairer: e.g., make universities have skin in the game so they're on the hook for debt for students unable to complete the program; strict payment limits (% of future income) *plus* total forgiveness after X years, and so forth.
But I also think we should focus on ways to make the market work better. In the middle aughts, people started becoming more aware of what a scam most law schools were; writers like Paul Campos laid that out in great detail. And the market did work: from 2004 to 2015, law school applications dropped by 46% (https://report.lsac.org/View.aspx?Report=AdmissionTrendsApplicantsAdmitApps). I suspect that over time, heavily debt-driven scam programs like Matt describes here will become less popular as people realize just what a bad deal they are. What can help that market work better is far more transparency. We should regulate them by forcing them to provide reliable and timely data on student debt levels, percent getting a degree, and jobs their grads get x, y, and z years after the degree. This might be hard data for the universities to acquire to which I say: yup -- too bad. Do it anyway. (And every ex-student they can't get information for counts as someone who couldn't get a job in the field.)
Time for some tough love for these programs.(*)
(*) Next up: PhD programs which don't place at least X% of their candidates in acceptable post-doctoral jobs should be shut down.
Many of these decisions are made at the wrong level though. In my department, there had long been a funded Masters program. About 15 years ago, I understand, the university requested the department to create a PhD program. Then about 5 years ago, the university stopped funding Masters programs. Because we didn't want to stick Masters students in the trap mentioned in the OP, we've basically shut down the Masters program now. I don't know how many faculty in the department would prefer a funded Masters program over a funded PhD program, but we really didn't have a lot of say in the decision.
The law school thing was probably an overreaction to a short-term problem created by the recession, the median lifetime marginal value of a law degree is something like a million bucks. There are some very predatory law schools but most of the top 100 or so are fine.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 09.
The incoming LSAT/GPA or lower now than 15 years ago and the acceptance rate is higher. I'm still skeptical it is valuable.
The burden of debt in your 20s and 30s matters a lot due to the limits it places on family formation.
The debt upon graduation is crippling. I couldn't find an attorney job. The JD actually made it harder to get a non-legal job because everyone could thought I was going to jump ship. I basically couldn't afford to date or start thinking about forming a family the first 6 years after graduation because of the debt.
Now, I'm making 125k in a high COLA City. The law degree probably helped get into a mid management position. But I'm having to rush finding a family, if I am fortunate to find a spouse in time, I'm only going to have 1 kid at most.
I wouldn't consider it worth it. And most of my classmates feel the same.
Tbh the legal market is now nothing like 2009, Minnesota's recent placement rates have been in the 80s not the 60s and there's an ongoing salary war in Minneapolis sparked by Faegre recently raising first-years to $180,000. And the huge increase in law school transparency and scholarship warring among schools has made it much easier to avoid debt.
Applications to law school don't seem to be bouncing back that much, though.
The scamminess of law schools has been written about for more than a decade - Paul Campos' Inside the Law School scam blog was wound up in 2014 because he'd written all he needed to say on the topic.
The law school scam conventional wisdom is actually definitely wrong now, and may have been at the time. But the legal job market has been red hot for quite a while now. The big problem is at the really low-end schools, mostly in California, that take lots of people who won't pass the bar. But the panic did make students more debt-conscious which is a very good thing even if it went a bit over the top.
In most countries, a law degree is an undergraduate degree. It should be in the US as well.
Most of them have long residency-like programs instead, an undergrad degree just isn't enough training to be a lawyer. E.g. decent law schools don't really teach you how to write, they assume you're good already and just teach the quirks of legal writing.
I’m part of the ivory tower. The advice I give undergrads who want to get a grad degree is varied depending on the student and the degree. But the one piece of advice they all get is this. Look at the program’s webpage. If the program has been around more than 5 years, and they are not showing where every single student ended up after graduation, you need to do a lot more homework. That lack of basic info doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scam but a program that is not proud of its product ought to worry you.