I spent a couple of years leading a for-profit graduate business school (we lost money, but we didn’t mean to). We targeted rich kids who were lousy students. We spent more money recruiting than teaching them. The schools were large, with no libraries, and we paid faculty by the course. We located campuses in nice cities. All signs of a scam, right?
Oddly, it worked. We invested heavily in helping students get visas and jobs after a year of training. We carefully tracked employment and income (outside of China, where tracking these things is harder). Most students doubled their incomes after a one-year program and those from poor countries often had life-changing pay increases.
Ultimately, these programs tend to over-reach. They over-promise and expand too quickly. They try to deliver undergraduate education, or they try to expand into data science. They dig far too deep into the talent barrel and admit people with little command of English or experience learning things in school.
Traditional nonprofit education can be just as scammy. As a student, I challenged Harvard Business School to release the names of students it admitted but who chose not to get an MBA so that we could determine whether the school added value or just selected people who were going to do well anyway. We know the answer, and a few years later, Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger demonstrated that this is true.
I still think that for-profit education works under lousy incentives that pull them toward scams. Ask Trump. But training programs focused on meeting the needs of local labor markets can work, even if they are for-profit.
I don't know about all the schools you praised, but Cooper Union is definitely a highly selective school. They only accept 22% of applicants, according to US News--
I attended Cooper in the 2000s, back when there was zero tuition. Nowadays there is very reasonable, but not quite zero, tuition. It was one of the most selective schools in the country in those days and is still quite competitive today. 'Typical' is the last word I would have used to describe the student body when I attended.
2 things I learned from 12+ years working for a private university (heavy on veteran students):
1. "Non-profit" really means "no shareholders that can cash out". That's it. Just means that a board or a trust runs it and, in accounting terms, there is $0 "shareholders' equity". It's all "retained earnings" - has to be reinvested. A university can make money hand over fist and just put it in the bank, into new buildings or programs, etc. There's nothing wrong with all of this. It just bears understanding.
2. The 2008 GI Bill was a disaster. We got so many veterans in our program and they came with *so much money* that they ran around campus like they could tell anyone to do anything and they'd have to dance. However, the incentives were also kinda perverse. They could *never* withdraw, as their funds would be pulled (cuz that's quitting). They had to "fail" - meaning they just wouldn't show up to class after a couple of weeks. This kept their living allowances flowing...even though they weren't attending class. If they were in a (fully paid) flight program, they could "fail" a course, only to have to retake the course...and build more flight time. Or maybe they just had a hard time passing a flight lesson - "oops, sorry, not such a great landing, huh. I'll try harder for the next 15 HOURS". Thankfully, Congress fixed this and capped the annual benefit at like $25K in tuition, and that *mostly* fixed it...but it still was pretty generous. And the living-allowance thing was still a problem. The whole experience working with that many veterans on this program left kind of a bad taste in my mouth about that bill.
How should we think about undergraduate liberal arts programs? Supposedly, they have a negative return on investment, even when they're good and rigorous. My son went to Kalamazoo College, a tiny little school that accepts not the tippy top students and gives them a terrific education. This is a school of 1300-1400 students. Last year they had six Fulbrights, and in previous years they were also punching way above their weight. But supposedly someone who gets a degree like English and history would have been better off not going to college.
Higher Ed seems to be an area that doesn't respond well to market demand. Once you've started, changing schools is complicated and could delay the time until you finish your degree. If you don't feel that you've gotten a good education then it's not like you want to go around talking about it while you are trying to convince companies to hire you.
I got a CS degree online while I was working full time and it was great to have this option since going to school while you have a family to provide for is obviously difficult. But the model that schools use is to have "shells" that are run by "facilitators" instead of professors. The facilitators don't create the shells and can't do that much to change them. I certainly don't feel that I got the same product I would have if I had gone in person but I finished the degree because what choice did I have?
Unbeknownst to me, getting a BS in CS in no way prepares you for getting a job. It positions also want certs, and coding jobs want language fluency that is well beyond what my school teaches. Maybe I am just a sucker and should have realized that I would need 4000 hours of extra work to build a portfolio so a company would even consider hiring me for an entry level position. But it doesn't take much to convince me that higher Ed is full of scams.
I went to Chicago and yeah MAPSS/MAPH really are that bad. Some students do get into good Ph.D. programs, but most don't, and faculty get fed up with them partially out of snobbery but mostly because there are a ton of them and quality control isn't the best. I had some seminars where the MAPSS students did not talk for the entire class--not for one class period, like over a whole quarter. A lot of them are nice but just have no business trying to get into academia.
There are some really good terminal MA programs, but they tend to be (a) fully funded and (b) at non-brand name universities. Like the Northern Illinois and Wisconsin-Milwaukee MAs in philosophy are much better programs than the UChicago one.
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.
University degree programs should have some skin in the game giving them the incentive to contribute value instead of extracting it. They should be betting their own money on the aggregate of the careers of their students. This policy could take the form of having the government endow the programs with a one-time wad of cash to invest via a combination of admissions and lending decisions. Bad decisions run down the endowment; good decisions keep the endowment cycling to attract promising new students.
"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.
How much of this applies to business schools, especially the fancy ones? “This” = costs a lot, you don’t learn a lot, sometimes it’s necessary signaling to make partner, sometimes it’s not
I think the one major difference is the employment statistics are way more transparent for business schools so the ROI vs. current salary and career path - seems easier to calculate.
" They should get more money aimed specifically at increasing completion rates."
Doesn't that then weaken the value of a degree? If you have someone who is struggling in community college, they will also struggle in a job that requires a decent amount of initial and/or ongoing training. If you simply hold their hand more and provide more support they will still struggle and often fail in Acme Inc's corporate training program.
Top to bottom Ed is possibly the most broken thing in the entire country. Sooooo much money dumped into the pockets of administrative staff and spent on fancy building for absolutely zero value returned. All while dumping this massive and obviously unsustainable student loan burden on entire generations of young adults. It's a catastrophe of ever growing proportions.
And the diagnosis is easy, if rarely identified. The problem is that a high school diploma is meaningless. We've abandoned standards and accountability in the name of inflating graduation rates and sending every kid to college. Go spend time on a generic college campus. Half the students have no business whatsoever expending a single red cent in higher ed. There's no damn way a lot of these kids should even be graduating high school.
This is where the line has to be drawn. There's no incentive at all for colleges outside the prestigious elite to maintain even minimal admissions standards as long as the feds are providing the endless firehose of cash for even the most marginal students to attend the most marginal programs.
Until we have an ed system where a high school diploma provides real, tangible, economic value again we're going to be trapped in this endless credentialism ponzi scheme until the whole thing comes crashing down.
Right but under you plan we'd have vastly more high school dropouts. The problem isn't the schools after all, it's 50% of the population having an IQ below 100. And other than Freddie DeBoer the political will do deal with that fact is essentially zero.
Right, which is why alternative tracks that promote work experience and trade skills is where we should be investing instead of pushing marginal students into liberal arts programs.
I agree with this but at the end of the day we still need millions of "unskilled" workers in this country too (I put unskilled in quotes because things like customer service are skills as well. Many "skilled" workers would be terrible at it). If you're going to work at Target you don't need trade skills. But yes, we should also do more to promote those skills.
Sure, for some people seniority/experience will always provide greater value than academics, the goal is to help people sort into what they feel is right for them by providing well tailored opportunities.
But if lots of blue-collar jobs stop requiring high school degrees (and there's no real reason they need to, except as a way to show that their employees know how to put in some minimal amount of work), that isn't necessarily a problem either. Joe X gets to work at Target a year or two sooner when he wasn't going to use anything he learned in 11th/12th grade in the future.
Meanwhile HR departments no longer need to require college degrees in order to prove the people they hire are competent, because it takes some amount of competence to get a diploma. This increases the number of people in the workforce, and also increases the number of earnings years for HR workers.
Exactly, the goal of escaping credentialism is a world where fewer people derive value from expensive credentials. People have been so brainwashed by HR/Job listings that they can't even comprehend that it might not have to be this way.
The problem with this is that colleges will have an incentive to avoid students from lower income areas since, statistically, their earning potential is lower after college on average.
I think the distribution would look different. Being "saddled with unrepayable debt" is the rare exception not the norm. Remember just 14% even have student loans and then just 6% have > $100k. In Andrew's scenario all lower income potential students could be negatively impacted.
"...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.... And the Harvard Graduate School of Education is definitely not Harvard...."
Boy, did I learn this to my own chagrin. People say Princeton is so great and exclusive and everything, but I get zero prestige from my Princeton Law School degree.
1. Textbooks. This was bad when I was a student 10 years ago, but wow has it gotten worse. I was able to buy used books for most of my classes, but many professors insisted on using the newest version of textbooks even though the only difference was the questions. Now they've gone a step further in many classes by requiring you to buy a $150+ "online code" just to do your homework!
2. "Well rounded liberal arts education." I get it. I love to read and learn about diverse topics. It stimulates me intellectually. But higher education is no longer supposed to just serve young adults whose rich parents want them to study the classics. It's supposed to help everyone - rich and poor. Why are colleges still insisting on forcing students through irrelevant classes that just lengthen the amount of time and increase the cost before they can get their degree and launch their careers?
3. Lack of real assessment. When you finish college you get to put your degree on your resume, and many people also put their grade point average. But what does this really tell a potential employer? You can play the game and get a high GPA without actually becoming competent in anything an employer might be interested in. Outside of a few professions there's really no way to assess new graduate's skills, so instead a college degree is often an abstract signaling mechanism that works for some people but not for most.
The American education system is generalist to quite a late age. IDK if the "liberal arts" curriculum as part of a wide variety of degrees really exists in other countries.
"Why are colleges still insisting on forcing students through irrelevant classes that just lengthen the amount of time and increase the cost before they can get their degree and launch their careers?"
To filter for the types of folks who will dutifully attach the new cover sheets to the TPS reports. Corporate America wasn't to know you're ok with beurocratic bull$hit. A college degree demonstrates that.
I spent a couple of years leading a for-profit graduate business school (we lost money, but we didn’t mean to). We targeted rich kids who were lousy students. We spent more money recruiting than teaching them. The schools were large, with no libraries, and we paid faculty by the course. We located campuses in nice cities. All signs of a scam, right?
Oddly, it worked. We invested heavily in helping students get visas and jobs after a year of training. We carefully tracked employment and income (outside of China, where tracking these things is harder). Most students doubled their incomes after a one-year program and those from poor countries often had life-changing pay increases.
Ultimately, these programs tend to over-reach. They over-promise and expand too quickly. They try to deliver undergraduate education, or they try to expand into data science. They dig far too deep into the talent barrel and admit people with little command of English or experience learning things in school.
Traditional nonprofit education can be just as scammy. As a student, I challenged Harvard Business School to release the names of students it admitted but who chose not to get an MBA so that we could determine whether the school added value or just selected people who were going to do well anyway. We know the answer, and a few years later, Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger demonstrated that this is true.
I still think that for-profit education works under lousy incentives that pull them toward scams. Ask Trump. But training programs focused on meeting the needs of local labor markets can work, even if they are for-profit.
I don't know about all the schools you praised, but Cooper Union is definitely a highly selective school. They only accept 22% of applicants, according to US News--
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cooper-union-2710/applying
I attended Cooper in the 2000s, back when there was zero tuition. Nowadays there is very reasonable, but not quite zero, tuition. It was one of the most selective schools in the country in those days and is still quite competitive today. 'Typical' is the last word I would have used to describe the student body when I attended.
2 things I learned from 12+ years working for a private university (heavy on veteran students):
1. "Non-profit" really means "no shareholders that can cash out". That's it. Just means that a board or a trust runs it and, in accounting terms, there is $0 "shareholders' equity". It's all "retained earnings" - has to be reinvested. A university can make money hand over fist and just put it in the bank, into new buildings or programs, etc. There's nothing wrong with all of this. It just bears understanding.
2. The 2008 GI Bill was a disaster. We got so many veterans in our program and they came with *so much money* that they ran around campus like they could tell anyone to do anything and they'd have to dance. However, the incentives were also kinda perverse. They could *never* withdraw, as their funds would be pulled (cuz that's quitting). They had to "fail" - meaning they just wouldn't show up to class after a couple of weeks. This kept their living allowances flowing...even though they weren't attending class. If they were in a (fully paid) flight program, they could "fail" a course, only to have to retake the course...and build more flight time. Or maybe they just had a hard time passing a flight lesson - "oops, sorry, not such a great landing, huh. I'll try harder for the next 15 HOURS". Thankfully, Congress fixed this and capped the annual benefit at like $25K in tuition, and that *mostly* fixed it...but it still was pretty generous. And the living-allowance thing was still a problem. The whole experience working with that many veterans on this program left kind of a bad taste in my mouth about that bill.
How should we think about undergraduate liberal arts programs? Supposedly, they have a negative return on investment, even when they're good and rigorous. My son went to Kalamazoo College, a tiny little school that accepts not the tippy top students and gives them a terrific education. This is a school of 1300-1400 students. Last year they had six Fulbrights, and in previous years they were also punching way above their weight. But supposedly someone who gets a degree like English and history would have been better off not going to college.
Higher Ed seems to be an area that doesn't respond well to market demand. Once you've started, changing schools is complicated and could delay the time until you finish your degree. If you don't feel that you've gotten a good education then it's not like you want to go around talking about it while you are trying to convince companies to hire you.
I got a CS degree online while I was working full time and it was great to have this option since going to school while you have a family to provide for is obviously difficult. But the model that schools use is to have "shells" that are run by "facilitators" instead of professors. The facilitators don't create the shells and can't do that much to change them. I certainly don't feel that I got the same product I would have if I had gone in person but I finished the degree because what choice did I have?
Unbeknownst to me, getting a BS in CS in no way prepares you for getting a job. It positions also want certs, and coding jobs want language fluency that is well beyond what my school teaches. Maybe I am just a sucker and should have realized that I would need 4000 hours of extra work to build a portfolio so a company would even consider hiring me for an entry level position. But it doesn't take much to convince me that higher Ed is full of scams.
I went to Chicago and yeah MAPSS/MAPH really are that bad. Some students do get into good Ph.D. programs, but most don't, and faculty get fed up with them partially out of snobbery but mostly because there are a ton of them and quality control isn't the best. I had some seminars where the MAPSS students did not talk for the entire class--not for one class period, like over a whole quarter. A lot of them are nice but just have no business trying to get into academia.
There are some really good terminal MA programs, but they tend to be (a) fully funded and (b) at non-brand name universities. Like the Northern Illinois and Wisconsin-Milwaukee MAs in philosophy are much better programs than the UChicago one.
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.
Exactly right!
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.
University degree programs should have some skin in the game giving them the incentive to contribute value instead of extracting it. They should be betting their own money on the aggregate of the careers of their students. This policy could take the form of having the government endow the programs with a one-time wad of cash to invest via a combination of admissions and lending decisions. Bad decisions run down the endowment; good decisions keep the endowment cycling to attract promising new students.
"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.
Since this ROI on college keeps coming up in the threads here, this may be of interest to some:
Skip college? Not if you want to make more money
By ANNA HELHOSKI of NerdWallet
July 14, 2021
https://apnews.com/article/business-lifestyle-race-and-ethnicity-97907268b3a287301d2ba7ca2a7b18e5
How much of this applies to business schools, especially the fancy ones? “This” = costs a lot, you don’t learn a lot, sometimes it’s necessary signaling to make partner, sometimes it’s not
I think the one major difference is the employment statistics are way more transparent for business schools so the ROI vs. current salary and career path - seems easier to calculate.
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/career/employer/employment-statistics.aspx
https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/employment-data/Pages/default.aspx
" They should get more money aimed specifically at increasing completion rates."
Doesn't that then weaken the value of a degree? If you have someone who is struggling in community college, they will also struggle in a job that requires a decent amount of initial and/or ongoing training. If you simply hold their hand more and provide more support they will still struggle and often fail in Acme Inc's corporate training program.
Top to bottom Ed is possibly the most broken thing in the entire country. Sooooo much money dumped into the pockets of administrative staff and spent on fancy building for absolutely zero value returned. All while dumping this massive and obviously unsustainable student loan burden on entire generations of young adults. It's a catastrophe of ever growing proportions.
And the diagnosis is easy, if rarely identified. The problem is that a high school diploma is meaningless. We've abandoned standards and accountability in the name of inflating graduation rates and sending every kid to college. Go spend time on a generic college campus. Half the students have no business whatsoever expending a single red cent in higher ed. There's no damn way a lot of these kids should even be graduating high school.
This is where the line has to be drawn. There's no incentive at all for colleges outside the prestigious elite to maintain even minimal admissions standards as long as the feds are providing the endless firehose of cash for even the most marginal students to attend the most marginal programs.
Until we have an ed system where a high school diploma provides real, tangible, economic value again we're going to be trapped in this endless credentialism ponzi scheme until the whole thing comes crashing down.
Right but under you plan we'd have vastly more high school dropouts. The problem isn't the schools after all, it's 50% of the population having an IQ below 100. And other than Freddie DeBoer the political will do deal with that fact is essentially zero.
The whole concept that everyone needs a generalist education until they're 18 is part of the problem.
Right, which is why alternative tracks that promote work experience and trade skills is where we should be investing instead of pushing marginal students into liberal arts programs.
I agree with this but at the end of the day we still need millions of "unskilled" workers in this country too (I put unskilled in quotes because things like customer service are skills as well. Many "skilled" workers would be terrible at it). If you're going to work at Target you don't need trade skills. But yes, we should also do more to promote those skills.
Sure, for some people seniority/experience will always provide greater value than academics, the goal is to help people sort into what they feel is right for them by providing well tailored opportunities.
But if lots of blue-collar jobs stop requiring high school degrees (and there's no real reason they need to, except as a way to show that their employees know how to put in some minimal amount of work), that isn't necessarily a problem either. Joe X gets to work at Target a year or two sooner when he wasn't going to use anything he learned in 11th/12th grade in the future.
Meanwhile HR departments no longer need to require college degrees in order to prove the people they hire are competent, because it takes some amount of competence to get a diploma. This increases the number of people in the workforce, and also increases the number of earnings years for HR workers.
Exactly, the goal of escaping credentialism is a world where fewer people derive value from expensive credentials. People have been so brainwashed by HR/Job listings that they can't even comprehend that it might not have to be this way.
Colleges need to be at least partially responsible for the loans.
If loans go bad, they need to pay. 8ts the only way you bring tuition costs down to earth
The problem with this is that colleges will have an incentive to avoid students from lower income areas since, statistically, their earning potential is lower after college on average.
That would be better thank 100k in debt for a worthless degree
But isn't the alternative having those same potential students will be saddled with un-repayable debt burdens?
I think the distribution would look different. Being "saddled with unrepayable debt" is the rare exception not the norm. Remember just 14% even have student loans and then just 6% have > $100k. In Andrew's scenario all lower income potential students could be negatively impacted.
https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/who-owes-all-that-student-debt-and-whod-benefit-if-it-were-forgiven/
"...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.... And the Harvard Graduate School of Education is definitely not Harvard...."
Boy, did I learn this to my own chagrin. People say Princeton is so great and exclusive and everything, but I get zero prestige from my Princeton Law School degree.
I bet normies are impressed though.
Liked for the lol.
3 more scams in higher education.
1. Textbooks. This was bad when I was a student 10 years ago, but wow has it gotten worse. I was able to buy used books for most of my classes, but many professors insisted on using the newest version of textbooks even though the only difference was the questions. Now they've gone a step further in many classes by requiring you to buy a $150+ "online code" just to do your homework!
2. "Well rounded liberal arts education." I get it. I love to read and learn about diverse topics. It stimulates me intellectually. But higher education is no longer supposed to just serve young adults whose rich parents want them to study the classics. It's supposed to help everyone - rich and poor. Why are colleges still insisting on forcing students through irrelevant classes that just lengthen the amount of time and increase the cost before they can get their degree and launch their careers?
3. Lack of real assessment. When you finish college you get to put your degree on your resume, and many people also put their grade point average. But what does this really tell a potential employer? You can play the game and get a high GPA without actually becoming competent in anything an employer might be interested in. Outside of a few professions there's really no way to assess new graduate's skills, so instead a college degree is often an abstract signaling mechanism that works for some people but not for most.
Textbook prices had been increasing rapidly but in the last two years or so, they have sort-of stablized, I believe. See, for example, https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4f/75/fc/4f75fcbdc84b48f698a35b9836d0e839.jpg
With OER (open educational resources) becoming a big deal, the pricing of textbooks may change.
The American education system is generalist to quite a late age. IDK if the "liberal arts" curriculum as part of a wide variety of degrees really exists in other countries.
"Why are colleges still insisting on forcing students through irrelevant classes that just lengthen the amount of time and increase the cost before they can get their degree and launch their careers?"
To filter for the types of folks who will dutifully attach the new cover sheets to the TPS reports. Corporate America wasn't to know you're ok with beurocratic bull$hit. A college degree demonstrates that.