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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
“ 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”.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
“ 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”.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.