American universities were able to hire the best and brightest long before very high tuition engendered by subsidized student loans became available.
In fact, they not only did that, but also hired a great number of “merely“ talented teaching professors and lectures as well.
In the era in which they’ve transitioned to student loan-driven tuition increases as a model for funding, they have instead squandered vast sums of money on useless shit, at the same time is cutting stable professor and lecture positions in favor of adjuncts paid peanuts.
The entire current student loan system needs to be done away with, and the massive administrative and lifestyle bloat that it allowed needs to be extirpated root and branch.
The only “someone” who wants this shit is the bureaucracy staffing it.
Define "crappy" - there's a difference between "boring" and "we're putting six students in one room and there are roaches in the hallway". I shudder to remember the dorm experience I had, and it was not cheap.
As someone teaching at an Ivy I say - great! If that’s their attitude then in all honesty it’s not the school for them and there are plenty of less spoiled and not less talented and deserving kids who’d be happy to take their place.
[in point of fact however, the ivies are full of upper middle class and quite a few upper class kids, so I suppose we shouldn’t generalize or alternatively despite liking to complain they weren’t this foolish when push comes to shove ?]
I think this is basically true - there was a Twitter thread from a professor at a good school a while ago, that basically said admin told them that basically none of the students were interested in meeting the professors, they cared about the dorms, the student center, etc.
Which makes sense - below the tippy top (ie. the Ivy's + a couple and) and above community college/5th tier state universities (nothing against them), the actual quality in professors isn't that different between Large State University X and Large State University Y in many cases, as both universities will be full of talented and smart faculty - so what does make up the difference? Everything else.
I disagree. You’d be surprised how shockingly different the academics actually are even at institutions that are peers on paper (that’s true at all levels btw). That of course actually varies by department and major perhaps even more than the school itself. Prospective students who are intellectually mature enough to have even a rough sense of their possible major would do well to talk to professors about it (as well as current students in that major!) to see if the school is a good fit for that. Moreover, while the best schools do probably have the best “median” faculty, they most certainly do *not* have all the superstars and in fact some amazing luminaries in all fields are spread quite widely in various schools. If you have a specific passion for x subject you may well discover that A state school has one of the leading researcher in that field whereas B state schools which you’re also considering does not. However that leading researcher perhaps is an a-hole who won’t give an undergrad the time of day, or on contrary may be the nicest and totally change your career trajectory. Not meeting them would be very foolish.
But I’m not surprised that admin *thinks* and wants faculty to think that they are useless , and that it is rather the superficial things that admin can manage, the college-as-hotel view, that matters. I don’t buy it.
We have too many kids going to college and too few going to trade schools or directly into the workforce. The result is an over-educated, under-skilled populace, and many of those people are now earning too little to pay back their loans for their education.
Until we stop sending the message to the vast majority of high school students that they should go to college, this problem won't be solved regardless of any loan forgiveness program.
It's a real chicken-and-egg issue, employers are happy to require college degrees for jobs that don't 100% need them because so many people are getting nudged toward four-year education, and the reason people are getting nudged toward four-year education is that so many jobs require a degree.
Why would a rational employer do this? If other employers needlessly require a BA, the employer who doesn’t can get a qualified candidate for a lower wage.
I don’t think a BA is necessary to be a paralegal and I also think a young woman can learn more working for me for four years than most learn in college.
Agreed. My suspicion at this point is that a real substantial cohort of debt financed students at the majority of institutions have expected productivity gains that are less than their tuition, let alone accounting for the opportunity cost of lost professional training.
Fortunately I think this is something the tighter labor market is helping with - college enrollments are down 5% this year, even with pandemic restrictions being lifted. As far as levers to get people directly in to the workforce, having skilled or semi-skilled jobs available for 18y/os with secondary education is a good one.
Even my circa-2000 high school auto shop teacher preached the gospel of "there are exactly two things you should ever go into debt for: a home and an education".
While I mostly agree with that message, dang, we've got a tough nut to crack if I'm hearing that in *auto shop*.
Honestly, though, that's just terrible advice. In both cases, you usually get a positive ROI from the debt-secured asset.
Not every home will appreciate in value over time far faster than the interest rate you're paying for the mortgage, but almost all will. And, just look around you at the double-digit inflation in home values in just the last few years! There are fewer and fewer areas where renting is a better deal, even if you account for the opportunity-cost of a down payment.
Similarly, not every higher education degree from every institution ensures you earnings high enough and career choices wide enough to justify the student loan debt payments, but most do. And some (esp. elite universities and STEM-type or professional degrees) pay off the investment in as short as a few years, increasing your lifetime earnings by a wide margin.
People say this, but how many college-educated people who make an upper middle class income or higher are willing to say it's their kids who should be (largely) lower paid trade school workers. Yes, there are plumbers who make $150k, but I'd also point out that $150k is made through far more hours of work much of the time than the college degreed $150k and even then, that $150k will be earned in a nice office, as opposed to the depths of a septic tank.
Until I'm sure Austin & Courtney will actually end up in trade school, and it just won't be a place to send Jerome & Maria, I'm OK, since as other people have pointed out, it's not like America's rate of college attendance is much different from Europe.
Like, yes, fine, fully fund trade schools and such, but just maybe, it's not surprising that the children of college educated people are not going to want to be plumbers.
We'd be better off if those upper middle class folks saw the trades as a path to a good life rather than having Austin or Jerome go to a middling college, major in Sociology or Criminal Justice and then struggle with loans and low-paying jobs.
I recognize that isn't where are today. But where we are today is not good for lots of recent college grads.
US college rates aren’t international outliers and it would seem weird if all countries were getting this wrong. Plus American trade schools *are* colleges, they’re mostly in CCs.
My experience as a professor at a state flagship University: I was teaching in Norway, where life quality is supposed to be fantastic. But the University in America offered me much more money and a better research network. Sure, there are more medical and educational expenses here, but taxes in Norway are insanely high. So I get paid much more and get more academic exposure.
I was really surprised to learn the net salaries of my European friends (a tenured physics professor and an architect). By all accounts, these people have “made it.” It would be a huge adjustment for me and my spouse with similar degrees to live on those salaries. So just to say the tax vs. take-home salary trade-off compared to our European peers is real, and people don’t really talk about it that much.
This is madness. None of the great American universities are that because of the boom in debt financing. Your whole whole take seems to be, "Well, people seem to be enjoying being given all that money." Of course they are, why wouldn't mediocre bureaucrats appreciate having a good paying career selling a government financed cruise to 17 year olds? What 17 year old isn't in to a 4 year cruise that everyone tells you will pay for itself?
You can't even begin to grapple honestly with this problem without looking at things like grade inflation, credentialism, return on investment, expected productivity gains, etc. The whole point of debt financed higher ed is to provide capable students an opportunity to attend a program that most effectively maximizes their productive capacity. Is that what we're doing!? I mean obviously not, but you didn't even try to grapple with what we are or are not doing in these areas.
It’s not at all obvious that loans do not enable students to maximize their productive capacity. Without them, virtually no middle- or lower-class students would be able to afford major-university undergrad, let alone med or law school, for example.
You are somewhat dismissive of the criticism of "administrative blast". After an over thirty years career in higher education, I can assure you that Administrative bloat is a very real phenomena. If you compared salary lists from 1990 and 2020, the proportion of high salaries paid for administrative positions has soared.
I think his stance is “someone argues for it, their arguments aren’t entirely garbage, so it’s not worth debating in the middle of everything else in this post”.
Your premise isn't fact-based because you just assumed (without validating) the conventional wisdom that American higher education is better because the top American universities are disproportionally overrepresented in the top global universities.
But most students don't go to Harvard. Most *elite* students globally don't even go to these few top well-known brand schools! There are *4,000* institutions of higher education in the United States, and plausibly 50-100 (the cutoff is somewhat arbitrary) could be considered "elite." How many of that longer list are the top in the world (at least according to QS World University Rankings: https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings)?
Well, firstly, it may shock readers to hear that merely half of the Top 10 universities in the world are American. The rest are English or Swiss. English universities charge higher tuition than most European ones do, but they're a fraction of the cost of even many American community colleges. And neither English nor Swiss universities have anywhere near the endowments that American elites do.
Go down the list from the Top 10, and you're in for even more of a shock, and contradiction to your argument here: The actual majority of the Top 20 schools aren't American. The rest are found in China, Singapore, and Scotland, joining the relatively more expensive English and Swiss elites at the top. Go down the list to the Top 30, and the American advantage erodes futher, with 17 out of 30 non-American schools, including now many Canadian elites. The same trend continues and accelerates when you look at Top 50, Top 100, and Top 1000 global universities. The American elites are, indeed, disproportionately represented relative to population, but they are far from the majority. And they are contested on their throne by non-American schools with little or no tuition costs, heavy public subsidy, and minuscule endowments.
As an example: I went to a very fancy, *extremely* expensive, private university in Washington, DC: Georgetown University. It's usually ranked somewhere in the American Top 20. So, it's elite, but not quite Ivy-League elite. Where I live in Sweden (population 10 million), there are not one but three universities ranked higher internationally than GU. Guess how much they cost students--even Americans studying there who aren't EU citizens or permanent resident here in Sweden? The answer makes me weep as I continue to pay my student loans every month in my 30s.
My son, who is Swedish-American, will have quite a choice to make in 15 years or so when he's applying to university. Whether our family can afford it or not, I'm just not convinced that encouraging him to go to an American university like me is worth it. Especially if he, like me, would have to take on debt to do so. Why not just attend Lund, ETH, or Chalmers here for free? Or, hell, even Oxford or Cambridge for a quarter of what it would cost him to attend even a mid- or low-tier American school. And for what? The "campus experience?" Yes, the alumni-professional network aspect that you're buying into is valuable. As is the status of your diploma in the place where you will work. But I know a hell of a lot of Europeans with European degrees who make the big bucks in New York or San Fransisco as much as in London or Frankfurt with their elite degrees.
And, again, most students aren't elite, and we betray a bias and a blind spot in focusing overmuch on the top 1% of elite students who mostly come from wealthy families anyway and won't have a hard time being successful, no matter their alma mater. Would you advise a middling student to take out $200K in debt to attend a mid-tier American school? It would be the height of negligence to do so, considering their future earning upside is far more modest than for their elite peer. Wouldn't they be so much better off just attending a European school for free or for a few thousand dollars?
Those big dollar figures are usually students borrowing for professional degrees in law or medicine, hardly the people deserving of the public’s largesse anyway.
1 million dollars / 45 years is like 20 grand a year. Most legal jobs pay between 40 and 75k. California minimum wage is like 30 grand a year stipulating 40 hours a week. So that all lines up, I guess, assuming the baseline is 15 dollars an hour.
That's not good, that's teacher money. But it costs more money and time for the license.
*Marginal* earning value, meaning that it increases your earnings by approximately $1m versus what they otherwise would have been, which is obviously not minimum wage for people with B.A.s.
It also just isn't anywhere near true that most legal jobs pay between $40k and $75k--it's very unusual to find a mid-career lawyer who does not make six figures, even in the public sector. And I don't know where you could find a lawyer who makes $40k, that's low for a legal assistant. According to BLS, the median lawyer makes $130k, which sounds about right to me.
Notably, lawyers have exceptionally low loan default rates, and there is even a specialized industry of loan refinancers for lawyers that provide extra-low interest rates in light of lawyers' very low probability of default.
The legal job market was very poor circa 2010, and that was the last time when there was a lot of public attention to the legal job market, so many people haven't updated their views on it since. But law has been in a ferocious bull market with intense salary competition for quite a while now, and the picture is nothing like 2010.
“ Private colleges and universities significantly discounted listed tuition and fee prices for most students in 2020-21—continuing a long upward march in discount rates that only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
I know some people who did that because they were idiots who wanted to go to, like, University of Alabama for the football team instead of staying in-state but that’s not exactly a public policy problem
Now, of course, there's student aid (both federal and institutional... the latter depending upon the school's endowment and priorities), but the majority of those aid packages are loans with very high interest rates. So, yeah, you're staring down the barrel at a tab of $200K, paid now or over the next few decades. For a degree that isn't worth anywhere near what a Harvard, Stanford, or MIT degree is worth.
But let's say you're less profligate than that. Maybe you attend a mid-tier state school. Maybe you even live off campus cheaper than at the dorms. You're still looking at $25-35K/year just for tuition alone! And, again, you can get financial aid, but most of it is going to be high-interest loans rather than Pell Grants or outright scholarships.
Most of my peers at my alma mater were rich. A shocking 70% of them came from the top economic quintile. So their parents were generally able to subsidize that (less hyper-inflated) bill back when I attended almost two decades ago. But kids like me who were merely middle-class didn't have that advantage, and faced pricey bills, even after hustling up a lot of scholarships. It wasn't an unreasonable amount, in the scheme of things, since my degree had a very favorable ROI. But my brother had the same cost burden and hasn't graduated into a high-paying career, and his situation is more typical than mine.
Nothing you said is accurate as the list prices are essentially meaningless. They are at least discounted by 50%. And that a straight discount - that’s not a loan.
To quote my link, “ By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price.”
Your link stated that many (but definitely not all) *private* universities cut their tuition by half *for the 2020-21 academic year, only.* This is not a typical situation, and not evidence at all of usual operating practice or costs to most students. Pretending like that's standard practice is extremely deceiving. Also, that was just a (extraordinary) discount on tuition, alone, which isn't the overall cost of attending a university, especially as a resident.
This doesn't prove the point you seem to think it does.
Revealed preferences suggest that people have equal opportunities to satisfy their preferences and the knowledge about those options. And, in this case, they don’t.
Firstly, did you know that studying in English in Europe is even an option for Americans? I certainly didn’t when I was college age! Maybe I know about studying abroad, but it wasn’t even on my radar that I could actually study for my entire degree program in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, or the UK for little or even no cost (at least tuition-wise).
Secondly, just because the tuition is cheap or free doesn’t mean that attending a university internationally is—or that the other logistics of it are straightforward. It’s much more expensive for Americans to travel to Europe than vice-versa. My flights home to the US cost half of what my families’ flights here cost. And how to arrange for housing, etc. while you’re here: it’s all bewildering for young (generally non-travelled) Americans in a way that it isn’t for international students to the US who find a more paternal, one-stop-shop approach to student services. Americans are very intimidated by having to exist in a context where English might be spoken, but not as the primary language. Most educated Western Europeans, by contrast, are going to speak English pretty fluently.
Lastly, this revealed preference doesn’t even really seem to exist in the way you’ve assumed (again, without the data). Sweden has 1/33rd the population as the United States does. So, obviously, it has far fewer universities and seats at those campuses than you can find in a huge country like the United States. It would be impossible for Americans to send the same proportion of international students to a small-population country like Sweden as Sweden sends to the United States. But even so, there are tens of thousands of Americans studying here! There are about 350,000 Americans studying abroad in a normal year. I can’t find stats on how many of them study here, but anecdotally, it’s a lot.
Those Americans are studying in Sweden as a “let’s have a cool experience” program, not to earn their degree. In fact, aren’t those study abroad programs another product of the increased subsidies Matt is discussing?
The US News rankings so prominent in American higher education discourse are rather dubious in many of their metrics, and easy enough to game out in a way that arguably decreases the actual efficacy of education on American campuses today.
Your USN ranking used to go up for student selectivity—i.e. rejecting more applicants. Does that mean you’re better? More students want to go to your school—even if it’s because you offer, as another commenter hilariously put it, the Cruise Ship Experience! Or you were courting more students whom you don’t want to admit into applying, just to increase the ratio! This isn’t actually part of the rankings anymore—though they still maintain a ranking list based on only acceptance rates, and universities still wear their <5% acceptance rates as proof of their status and quality.
There are aspects of the USN methodology that even actively undermine academic rigor: a fifth of the ranking is based on graduation and retention rates. So, you get a high score for grade inflation and retaining mediocre students instead of booting them. Everyone at Harvard gets an A and Harvard is ranked even higher!
Then, perhaps more corrosive to meritocracy, you have a perverse incentive as a ranking-chasing university to reject lower income or minority candidates who don’t test as well.
And, your student selectivity ranking also arbitrarily force-ranks students based on what percentile of their high school class they landed. Sucks for any student who is second-best at their top-tier magnet high school, even if they outshine the valedictorian at a tiny, low-performance school elsewhere.
Lastly, why is alumni giving rate even included!? What does this have to do with ranking or quality?
The Times world rankings are much closer to intuitively correct—Princeton is 8, not 20–and are completely dominated by American and British institutions.
But even THE is only totally dominated by US and UK universities in the Top 10. By the Top 20, you have Chinese and Canadian universities entering the fray. So, we're to come away with the conclusion that at least four countries can create globally elite-class universities without resorting to the American financing model, in complete contradiction to Matt's take. One country producing elite universities (China) is as wealthy at the aggregate than the US and more populous, but very per-capita poor and a still-developing country whose universities are much younger than American, British, or European institutions. And two out of those three punch way above their weight in terms of population and wealth, suggesting that they've settled on a model that is arguably *superior* to the American one, with limited means to do so!
So my question, then, would be: why is a large, rich, powerful, English-speaking US where private resources available to universities are exponentially more than elsewhere not dominating any such list *much more?*
China dumps a staggering amount of money into its top couple of universities. They're not underdogs at all. They're also not young--Peking is roughly as old as the University of Chicago.
Canadian universities share the American/British financing model, with large endowments, in-state fees comparable to American public schools', very high international tuition, and student loans.
I don’t know what the world would look like in 15 years. I also realize there are many considerations in choosing a school. Finally, I am not familiar with the Swedish higher education system. I am however familiar with the elite American and British systems (especially in the Humanities, but I talk to people from other fields). I can only tell you that from the purely academic perspective, that currently Oxford and Cambridge offer an undergraduate experience that is miles and leagues beyond anything the American higher education system can offer. It’s almost an offense to call both an Oxford undergraduate degree and a Harvard undergraduate degree “BA” , as the former is at such significantly higher level that only a couple of years of grad school can fill the gap. If I were to advise a prospective student with the unique privilege of choosing between Oxford (or Cambridge) or Harvard (or any other Ivy+) and that student would care about academics as a significant factor, I would advise chooosing Oxbridge without question. I believe there are probably also good social and financial reasons to do so, but can speak less confidently about that (and that can also obviously vary by individual circumstances).
My wife attended both Swedish and American universities (of equivalent rankings) and this was her impression, too: That the rigor of the academics and the maturity of the student body in her American university just weren’t at the same level. In the latter, it was much more about the experience and socializing.
And the students were strangely infantalized in a way that was really odd for a European who was living more or less autonomously since she was 16. Even the way financing worked (that the assessed need for a legal adult was based on their parents’ means) stuck her as very odd and inappropriate. Scandinavian youths are expected to move out and take care of themselves without any parental subsidy after they’re legal adults—an arrangement very much aided by the more generous state subsidy they receive at student age.
I agree re: maturity. I would clarify what I said earlier to note that I am engaging in super-elitist discourse here of course. Ivy League students are generally a joy to teach. They are overwhelmingly very well behaved. Even those that don’t do the work almost always have the decency/cheek to *pretend* to do the work (thinking they’re smart enough to get away with it…). They’re not all geniuses by any means but you get a couple of very bright ones in virtually every single class which is obviously not a random fact, and even the average ones are mostly fine. However, *considering* the insane selectivity you could have expected more had the process centered primarily on academics, as it does at Oxbridge. Accordingly, while the academic level is good, it could be even better, and at Oxbridge they do amazing things intellectually that we simply can’t do at the Ivy League system as it is currently set up (even though probably the top half of the students could have managed it).
That doesn't make any sense. How is one independent if they depend on state subsidy? And even if so, how is being subsidized by parents any different, except for the fact that parents (should) love and care for their child more than the state ever could?
The point being that Swedish teens are generally more autonomous within the structure of a stronger state and equal society and a different culture. My wife wasn’t unusual in traveling all by herself to another country to live at the age of 16–something that I would never have dreamed or doing or been allowed to do.
Is this a good thing? To your point, is having a Nanny State instead of a parent taking care of you good? Well, the problem with a parent knowing best and taking care of you is that you don’t choose your parents, do you? Some parents definitely don’t fit that ideal model, do they? You also don’t get to decide how rich or poor they are and whether or not they’re willing to pay for your school or not. The FAFSA methodology assumes a given expectation for parental subsidy—an Expected Family Contribution. What if your rich dad is estranged, like the father of one of my friends in school, who ended up with six figures in debt for his undergrad because of it? Or, maybe parents have tons of credit card debts that don’t show up on the assessment? What if you can’t even get your parents to sign the FAFSA form, like so many of the lower income kids whom my mom taught in community college? Students don’t get to decide what their own home life is, but it totally affects how your university financing is assessed!
The British model works if you are happy for the laser focus on your course to the exclusion of flexibility.
I did a year abroad, half the year in English and half the year in Biology, I had to switch campuses and no British student ever did what I did. A 17 year old from a small town on my dorm floor dropped out of medical school after the first semester and he was disliked for his departure because turns out most of the biology students had been trying for a medical school spot, a spot he just wasted.
Agreed. However I feel that currently the American model is too general hence too superficial. If you’re too laser focused at least you come out with some substantial knowledge in a field. If you’re too generic you come out with only superficiality and worse still, in the case of ivies, perhaps over confidence and arrogance that you actually know everything. I prefer the British way if forced between these two sub optimal polar opposites. I would argue that studying any one field deeply gives you something more than the specific knowledge (valuable in itself) it gives you exposure to intellectual rigor and respect for expertise. I realize that the American college ideal claims to be about more than “mere” academics, but I dispute this ideal.
I fundamentally disagree with this. I spent four years studying a wide variety of humanities at an Ivy League University in the early 70's and then got a law degree at Stanford. In 1981, I was a research fellow in the law department at the European University Institute in Florence which was a graduate program for students from all over the European Union. Both the continental systems and the British system which produced these graduate students treated law as an undergraduate program, usually three years, with the laser focus you describe. I can tell you, compared to an American law graduate, they were woefully uneducated.
You do realize these are apples and oranges, yes? I was comparing American undergrad program to English undergraduate program , you’re comparing European undergrad progra (3 years) to American undergrad +grad school (6? Years). How is that the same comparison?
I do realize that (7 years actually, not 6). My point was taking 18-year olds and making them study one subject intensively is a poor way to end up with an educated 21-year old, and further graduate study isn't likely to remedy the deficit. My wife has a DEA (law) from the Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris (3 years) and a graduate degree also in law from the University of Strasbourg (another 3 years) for which she had to write a thesis. At the end she knew all about Hegelian dialectics, but couldn't have reasoned her way through a legal issue if her life depended on it.
That's pretty damning, and I trust your impressions based on your experience. Could you elaborate on how those differences in educational results manifest themselves? It would be great to link to any documented research on this.
From the narrow perspective of people who go on to grad school, in the British system they can finish their PhD sooner as a result, since they have better preparation from undergrad, whereas in the American system grad school is longer which allows to basically close the gap that way. Thus the Brits probably get their PhDs on average 2 or more years sooner on average (depending on field), I’m sure there is data to show this. However, I have no idea what the implications are for the majority who don’t go on to PhD, nor do I know if there is research on this. My guess is that for some - the substantial subsection of Americans going for professional grad school (law etc) that helps or perhaps gives an advantage even (as these are undergrad in uk), but for the rest hard to say what consequences actually are.
I mean, who knows what the situation will be in 15 years. Maybe Europeans move more in the American, neoliberal direction (already started in the UK).
Maybe American higher education is overhauled somehow, to bring down the eye-watering rates of hyper-inflation.
Maybe non-American universities continue to attract more international students (and professors) away from the US, since migration there has continued to be more restrictive and difficult (even through the Biden Administration). I don’t think Americans appreciate how fragile this “Brain Drain” benefit is, and how much it has benefited our country, historically.
Maybe “the West,” generally continues to decline relative to other, rising powers and the new thing is studying at prestige campuses in East Asia, or something.
Or, maybe, the long forecast sunset of the physical campus itself finally settles on the future, rendering the benefit of artificially restricted slots at a handful of selective campuses in a particular location moot? Who knows!
Any ranking that puts Princeton 20th or Duke 52nd obviously has massive methodological problems, but in any case, even on it Wisconsin is ranked above the best university in Sweden. Wisconsin is a great school, but it’s not exactly most people’s idea of an “elite” university. There are no countries besides Britain that are even close to having the US’s depth of top research institutions beyond the tippy top tier. Unfashionable places like Iowa State regularly poach faculty from Europe and Asia.
"People's idea of an elite school" is totally arbitrary. Especially when you're talking about only *American" people's idea of an elite school. Could most Americans even name an elite non-American school outside of the UK? Does that mean they don't exist? That works both ways: my university is well-known and considered elite in the US, but most Europeans haven't even heard of it!
This QS ranking has different criteria than US News, for example, but both of them make normative judgements on what the elements of an elite university are. For example, QS emphasizes the role of a research university more than USN does (which should, actually, bias the list in favor of American universities, given the aggregation of the teaching function and the research function Stateside, which is often disaggregated into standalone research institutions in Western Europe).
So, your statement that "There are no countries besides Britain that are even close to having the US’s depth of top research institutions beyond the tippy top tier" is unsubstantiated and contradicted by the QS methodology on display here, which credits English and Swiss universities, especially, for having top-tier research superior to many American elites.
Also, this is similarly unsubstantiated: "Unfashionable places like Iowa State regularly poach faculty from Europe and Asia." Iowa State might be "unfashionable" (how are you defining that?) to you, but it's an elite state school with some of the most premier programs in the world. I mean, ever heard of the Iowa Writers' Workshop? It's no slouch! It's the top MFA writing program in the United States, with 17 Pulitzer Prize winners under its belt. Iowa State also lays claim to the second best agricultural PhD program in the country, ranked in the Top 10 worldwide for a decade now (https://www.cals.iastate.edu/news/releases/iowa-state-university-agricultural-programs-top-4-worldwide-2020)! Any wonder that it attracts international faculty?
And you've begged the question, do non-American schools attract American or other foreign faculty? Do you imagine they don't? That's pretty easily disproven by statistic and anecdote, alike: I know of personally a dozen American academics working here in Sweden, and I'm not an academic myself or especially well-connected to that field.
I'm afraid that you're speaking from a totally American POV here, without much familiarity or curiosity on what's happening in outside.
At the point at which you're arguing that ISU is an "elite state school," you need to reassess your argument. ISU has a 90% acceptance rate and is the second-most-prestigious public university in Iowa. That it nevertheless has some programs with worldwide recognition, like agriculture and statistics, shows the depth of American higher ed.
While some American academics work in Europe, outside of a few British universities and the European Union Institute that's largely a result of the exceptional competitiveness of the American academic job market. Unlike you, I am well-connected in academia, and it's just not true that the poaching goes both ways at the top level.
Could say the same for England/Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, couldn’t you?
None of them have the American higher education financing model, but still create disproportionately high-ranked universities, despite their relatively small percentage of global population.
What all of them do have in common is that they’re rich. And the US being the richest country, you’d expect among the best universities.
This is a complex question. But the short answer is yes, it is, overall, the richest, still.
It's not the richest *per capita* (that would be dominated by small microstates/city-states like Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Singapore). But it's the richest large country per capita.
And it is the richest by overall GDP (nominal) and Net National Wealth.
China is the richest country my overall GDP (PPP). But very far down the list when it comes to per capita GDP or wealth (either nominal or PPP).
I wish people would simply talk more about income-based repayment. For some reason I never see it mentioned in The Discourse. How government student loans work is you pay 10% of your discretionary income a year until they are paid off. If they don’t get paid off after 20 years the balance is forgiven. Discretionary income is defined as income above the federal poverty line, so for example someone making $60k a year will pay around $320/month in loan payments.
This is annoying but I don’t really understand why it’s considered such a big burden. It’s not really that big a deal in exchange for the college wage premium. Why don’t Student Debt Cancellers just try to lobby to make the forgiveness period 10 years? Or reduce the monthly payments?
There's actually, to my mind, an extremely simple solution to all of this. We should move up the forgiveness timeline to more like 8 years, and then instead of forgiving the balance the remaining liability should fall onto the school. This preserves the purpose of the loan program, while realigning the toxic incentives of the institutions, and limiting the threat of unserviceable debts.
Income based repayment, effectively an income tax surcharge on people whose parents and families were not wealthy enough to pay for their college education, would more clearly reveal student loans for what they are: a regressive tax on people smart enough to graduate from college but not lucky enough to come from a well-to-do background.
That's true of paying a mortgage on a house instead of having your parents buy it for you, or any other financial help one gets from their parents. It's not a student loan specific issue.
Well yes, but then again nobody is proposing a federal mortgage loan program with income-based repayment, where anyone can borrow large amounts of money to buy a house, and repay the loan as a percentage of their income, and if they haven't paid it off in 10 or 20 years, or if they choose to work in a certain types of jobs, the govt pays off the balance.
Which suggests people see, rightly or wrongly, a difference between education and some of those other examples.
I'm not saying income-based repayment is worse - from the perspective of the student it isn't though it might be from a structural incentive perspective.
I'm just saying it more clearly lays bare the inequity and regressiveness of requiring students from poor backgrounds to bear the cost of their own education. Whether that happens in the form of separate loan payments or additional income-based payments, it violates fundamental tenets of an equal opportunity society.
The veneer of student loans now is that you made an informed, private decision to purchase something on credit, and now you're repaying the loan.
Income-based repayment strips that away and simply says, if you come from a poor family or modest background, and nonetheless managed to get through college, now as reward for your extra initiative, you have to pay a higher income tax for the first decade or two of your working life, than similarly situated coworkers who had wealthy families.
Except the advantage of it being a percentage tax rather than a flat rate is that the kids who can’t use family connections to get a high paying job out of the gate end up getting subsidized compared to the people who do hit the employment jackpot.
Furthermore, it simply isn't the case that only rich kids can hit the 'employment jackpot'.
Rich kids with connections that get normally non-remunerative degrees may still be able to get good paying jobs....but so can non-rich kids that get a certain degrees.
There's also the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program where if you work as a federal/state/qualified non-profit employee for ten years while making payments the rest of your debt is forgiven.
I think it takes too long to get forgiveness through either IBR or the PSLF but both programs are pretty great...
Hmm. I have a question about IBR vs. paying flat out.
Suppose your expenses is $200k for a 4 year college and you can _afford_ to pay that but you really want to go work for job afterwards that happens to be lower paying.
Right now you can take a loan for $200k or pay the $200k outright, and you mostly just pay it outright I think rather than the interest. But either way the university is probably ok with it.
If it's IBR then you take the IBR loan and pay it back that way, paying a lot less total.
Although this is almost certainly a small enough chunk of people in this situation that you just don't worry about it if you otherwise think IBR is a good idea.
How does that account for the amount being borrowed? If you're just paying 10% of you discretionary income for 20 years what incentive would you have to take out $20,000 in loans instead of $200,000? Why pay a cent our of pocket?
There's a limit to how much you can borrow from the feds per year, and for standard loans there's a max of like 60k you can borrow from the feds at all.
And with repaye there is even a cap on the total dollar figure! This is sometimes called the doctor’s loophole because they don’t even end up paying 10% of their monthly income.
What's the rationale for banning debt-based repayment? If I think I'm smart and going to make good money, why should I be forced to do the more expensive equity-based repayment?
If you end up making a lot more than the average graduate, then paying the same fraction of your income means you’re subsidizing them, while just taking a loan means that whatever you pay is your own costs.
This piece really misses the mark. MY premise that higher Ed in America is great is based on a few pieces of evidence. First the sort of anecdotes that star professors want to come here. But that’s not very different from noting that people with means and horrible diseases would like to come to US from all over the world to have their complex operation. That by no means proves us has a good healthcare system!
Second, the rankings. MY mentions the recent uk visa program. Readers are probably curious why the uk chose the seemingly random number 38 top universities? In fact the number is 50 but out of them a full 12 are uk universities! Why is it that the vastly smaller and poorer uk, which also charged relatively lower tuition at its prestige universities compared to US, manages to be so successful *with vastly smaller resources*?
The truth is that both US and UK have one major advantage over most of Europe and Asia: English. A factor in rankings is number of foreign students and the English speaking environment (not just at schools but in the country at large) is a pull factor that peer countries (e.g Germany, Japan) cannot compete with.
At the end of the day one must account for how HUGE the US actually is in population, in the size of its high Ed sector, and in the disproportionate resources pulled in to it. Compared to these, the sector is actually severely *underperforming* and the number of top ranking institutions is actually smaller than you would expect. The system is extremely wasteful and inefficient and -importantly becoming increasingly so while producing increasingly worse results and higher price tags.
This is but one point. I haven’t even discussed:
1. Disappearance of middle class from top institutions due to funding models
2.Adjunctification and loss of academic freedom due to administrative takeover
3. falling standards, including at the very top institutions (I teach at one and talk to colleagues)
4. Rising intolerance and “McCarthistic” atmosphere in past couple of years
EDIT: I made a mistake on the way UK visa system works (as I now understand it, 38 is the number of universities appearing on at least two out of I believe three approved rankings of the top-50 non UK and non Ireland ranked universities). The actual number of UK universities in top 50 is on range of 7 or 8, depending on ranking and year, with greater proportion towards the top (e.g. 2/10 and 3/15 in THE). However this doesn't really change my general point on the relative success of the UK HE sector compared to US despite vastly smaller resources (and the advantage both probably gain in ranking relative to much of Europe and Asia due to English).
What is the real story of adjunctification? I hear a lot about it, but don’t actually directly see much evidence of it. Is it mainly language classes? Are some disciplines doing it extremely extensively and others not at all? In philosophy departments I’ve known, there are sometimes a couple people on a professional teaching track that isn’t tenure track but isn’t adjunct, and we’ve only had an adjunct or two at times when we need to fill in for last minute deaths or research leaves.
The simple majority of my undergrad professors at an elite university were adjuncts. These were Ivy League-educated PhDs with well-regarded published works offering better education to us, frankly, than the much better paid tenured professors or "celebrity guests" making six-figures to teach a single course.
That those adjuncts had to hustle between campuses semester-to-semester to get work and ended up making basically minimum wage was unconscionable, especially considering what we paid for that education. It all went to the bloated administration that MY doesn't think is so bad, actually.
As far as I can tell, full-time numbers actually *increase* in every single year in that chart, other than small drops in 1976, 1979, and 1985 (and those years are all in the set that are listed as estimates based on enrollment, rather than actual surveys). The part-time numbers are increasing dramatically during this period, but the part-time numbers are much harder to interpret. Six people each teaching one class a semester at the same institution and one person teaching six classes at the same institution will show up very differently in the charts, but it's not immediately obvious which is more exploitative. One person teaching six classes at six different institutions is clearly the most exploitative situation, but I don't know whether that shows up as one person or six people in this chart.
I wish ! Don’t have time to elaborate right now. Off top of my head recall data from a few years ago, something like only 30% of faculty nowadays are tenured or tenure track combined. Getting worse from year to year, used to be overwhelming majority. The rest are not all adjuncts but increasingly so. This is not always so transparen to students, but they are harmed by it in myriad of ways. It also is slowly killing the research university, though it will take decades to be extremely noticeable as older tenured faculty tend to retire later and later (and are also hired later and later). May find time later to elaborate. You can also google it and easily find much data and discussion.
I’ve seen that 30% number a lot but that’s what I’ve never found an explanation for. Does that mean there are lots of people adjuncting an occasional class while doing something else with their life, keeping that number up? (For instance, Joe Biden was adjuncting a class at Penn occasionally pre-2021.) Or are there really as many classes taught by adjuncts as by lecturers as by tenure track faculty? And I haven’t found discussion of whether this is disproportionately driven by one or two disciplines, like foreign languages or calculus or something, or by lower tier bachelors only state institutions or some other particular set. Everyone I see who cites the numbers is using the numbers to drive some other argument they have, so they don’t give me a dive on what these numbers actually *mean* and why it is that it isn’t obvious in my parts of the university world.
Good point. I would say mostly the latter. Adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s horrible. Why do they do it? For the meager chance of eventually landing one of the decreasing number of tenure track jobs. Sunk Costs syndrom if you will. I imagine you’ll find statistical variation by discipline (and institutions of course) on how bad it is but it seems to be a general trend across the board, not a handful of disciplines creating a misimpression. The Biden example is what adjuncting used to be back in the day and why it was invented. That’s not what’s happening now. It’s replacing normal faculty at alarming rates.
Very frustrated with this take! Fine to defend higher education but you owe us a bit more steel-manning. Not going to use the "neoliberal" word, but it's important to engage with how labor and debt markets are actually working here. Two points in particular:
1] The primary critique of US higher ed as I understand it is that the loan/subsidy system has removed all the price control mechanisms that would be present in a normal market (similar to healthcare, if you like), which drives skyrocketing tuition from the demand side. Massive student debt is the externality of this system, saddled onto federal lenders and graduated students but largely not a problem for the institutions who set tuition. I don't think you can really address the debt/subsidy question without addressing this.
2] The profitable nature of US higher ed institutions is a direct result of that loan/subsidy system, so you can't wave away the problem by pointing to all the nice stuff we have. If I ran a theater where stage-hands mugged every tenth ticket-holder, I could use those profits to put on a heck of a show! But if we believe education is a social service, we have to engage with how students are actually being served by these institutions.
"If I ran a theater where stage-hands mugged every tenth ticket-holder, I could use those profits to put on a heck of a show!"
That *would* be a heck of a show, already. Though I prefer a more naturalistic style of acting -- if you encourage too much mugging then they all start upstaging each other.
Some part of the bad comparisons to Europe may be that folks underplay how much even large research universities in the US are influenced by "the liberal arts tradition". In my understanding from relatives, university in Europe is generally more like just being an adult and getting some professional training and less like four years in which you get to spend your time Thinking about Big Ideas and Exploring Yourself.
It takes a lot of work and effort on the part of working adults at the campus to maintain a safe enough, fun enough environment for a bunch of 18-22 year olds to self-express in! I actually went to a liberal arts college and endorse this heavily, it was a great experience, but it can be a little bit of a cold shower when you realize that the rest of life is not just thinking about interesting things.
The experience I remember from being affiliated with the Berkeley math department is that incoming PhD students from Europe or Asia always knew a lot more math already than the incoming PhD students from the US, because the foreign students did math for nearly every undergrad class after a few science classes early on while the US students usually had 1.5 math classes a semester. But by the third year of the PhD program, the American students were as successful at their research. Probably the foreign students had deep knowledge of a broader range of topics in math, while the American students had moderate knowledge of a broader range of topics outside of math, and both of these are a fine foundation for a research career. The American one probably provides a better foundation for things other than academic research.
Right, although it's never been clear to me how much infrastructure was needed to support that concept (like were there businesses who mainly catered to people on a Grand Tour? Conventional itineraries?).
That said, my main point here is that at the moment the American and European systems are really trying to accomplish different things, even if those things are related and we call them both "university".
I’ve long been a fan of reinstating the gainful employment test and this time including non-profit universities in addition to for-profit ones. It’s obscene that we continue to enable these predatory programs by sadling their students with unserviceable levels of debt through federally-subsidized student loans.
I understand our coalition concerns about aggrieving higher education professionals, but I don’t think we can continue to ignore this problem. We need to work with them to reform their programs so that they are economically sound. We’d need to do this even if we replaced student loans with direct subsidies so as to not squander taxpayer funds.
I’ve seen several analyses over the years about the extent to which the gainful employment test would exclude financially-exploitative non-profit programs. A quick search for up-to-date stats turned up this 2020 article, “Many Nonprofit College Programs Would Fail Gainful Test”. [1]
> Only about 60 percent of programs at private nonprofit institutions, and 70 percent of those at public colleges and universities, would pass the Obama administration’s gainful-employment test, if it were in place and applied to them, according to an online tool developed by a conservative Texas policy group.
> Only 5,646 of 10,147, or 55.6 percent, of private, for-profit programs for which income and debt data were available would have passed the standard. Another 2,071, or a fifth, would have failed. And 2,430, or 24 percent, of the programs would have been on probation.
> But private nonprofits didn’t do much better. Only 6,262 of 10,585 programs, or 59 percent, would have passed. Another 1,916, or 18 percent, would have failed. And 2,407, or 22.7 percent, would have been on probation.
> This indicates that a lot of the people asserting that for-profits are uniquely bad actors are wrong -- as a group, their performance is quite similar to that of nonprofits. Publics do noticeably better than either nonprofit private or for-profit colleges, no doubt because they generally cost less to attend and therefore their graduates have less debt.
As a physician (who works at a university hospital too), I just feel like the coalition concerns are a huge red flag that we're about to give up on healthcare reform entirely once we realize how liberal the current generation of doctors and nurses is becoming thanks to educational polarization/covid. Doctors, nurses, and professors are great! But that doesn't mean we aren't selfish human beings sometimes just like everyone else in the world.
Tbh the converse might be true - if we're getting Bashar Al-Assad numbers with the doctors (this used to be a Lean R profession) then maybe we can convince them to take a 40% haircut for the greater good (I'd even forgive all their loans for being good sports)
If this tells you anything, the head of the main single payer physicians advocacy group (a big Bernie guy) thinks that all the extra money in healthcare is going to CEOs, and we don’t need to cut any doctor’s paycheck ever. Refusing to push back against upper middle class privilege has consequences (even Bernie doesn’t ask anything of the 98th percentile of wealth)
I have no clue. Just know that Yglesias explained that this was the reason that the Obama administration only applied this rule to for-profits. [1]
> But it was also a limited idea. Obama didn’t want to take on the incredible lobbying clout of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, so the rule only applied to for-profit colleges.
Mostly agree, only thing I would add is that I’d love to see some federally enforced accountability for individual college programs (both college majors and specific graduate programs). My liberal arts college basically lied to kids entering unmarketable majors and told them that they could get jobs. As an affluent kid of college educated parents I knew better because my parents told me to major in something useful, but not everyone had that advantage. And while a bachelors degree from a decent school is still mostly a useful credential even if the major is useless (I think just forcing more transparency from colleges is reasonable for college majors), predatory grad programs are not useful credentials. The government should be able to shut down a bad Harvard master’s program without shutting down Harvard as a whole.
Is it entirely the fault of the major? Could it be that impractical majors attract impractical people? Take some 18 year old who really wants to major in finance and offer him a full ride if he majors in history. I’m willing to bet he doesn’t struggle to find a job nearly as much as the kids who really want to major in history.
It looks to me as though you are using misrepresentation as a stand-in for quality. I'm not sure that any liberal arts major is "unmarketable," but advisors who steer students into, say, English or History, by telling them they could get good jobs by choosing those majors is misrepresenting what those majors are about. (Although that's not true for a lot of liberal arts majors in the sciences and some social sciences.)
A liberal arts major, especially in the humanities, is about providing high flexibility in career paths with lower specialized career training (unless the path is towards being an historian); a professional school major, say, Finance, is about more competitive career training with low flexibility in career choice (at least growing out of the major). A History major can buffer that contrast by doing some professional school coursework, and Finance majors generally are required to broaden their options by taking a pretty large number of liberal arts courses as a core curriculum requirement. Unless a History major goes on to grad school, graduation will generally involve a period of career uncertainty/shifting that matches college training to a long term job role, while Finance majors are more likely to be directly recruited for finance-related positions by corporations. Humanities students are taking on greater responsibility for finding their way professionally after graduation, but there is supposed to be a trade-off, in that they have greater freedom to build a range of more universally applicable skills. How well that trade-off works depends more on the type of job market they graduate into than on the major they choose (and the principal factor is in any event the quality of their academic record).
So I think there is a host of problems with expecting a uniform federal metric to measure success rates for majors. The main problem, in my view, is likely the low budgets and poor performance of undergraduate advising, especially at large public universities, especially outside of professional schools. For bachelor degree programs, students are investing four years and a ton of (their parents' or their own) money/debt: that should buy individualized guidance that clarifies what the trade-offs are before majors are chosen, and monitors the way best advice can change as students mature over those years.
Masters programs may be better suited to placement-based accountability metrics, based on employment in the field, but the people enrolling in them are college graduate adults. I'm not sure there is as much to gain by imposing a federal standard. And I'm really wary of the idea that "the government should be able to shut down" any program. If its staff is committing fraud in recruitment statements, that can be dealt with by the justice system now.
I agree that measurement would be difficult, but throwing up our hands and saying that we just need to stop trying to regulate things because it's hard would read as an ultra-libertarian stance if it was about anything other than college. I work in healthcare and no progressive would ever say that we should stop trying to reform healthcare because healthcare outcomes are hard to measure. I just want Elizabeth Warren's former employer subject to the same consumer standards that she expects of everyone else who sells large financial products to sometimes naive customers.
To put this another way - if our healthcare system is putting people in a high amount of debt, shouldn't we be trying to reform healthcare to prevent this? And not just hand-waving away the problem by saying that the president should just cancel everyone's medical debts and give the money to the hospitals (which is basically progressives want to happen to student debts, since the colleges already got paid)? Again, I think the amount of deference progressives have to universities would come across as beyond naive if it was applied to literally any other industry.
I don’t think anyone is talking about directly shutting down programs. They are saying if more than X% of grads of a given program default on their loans then the program looses access to the federal student loan program.
For both Mark and BronxZooCobra: The problem I see with the approach you're taking is that it assumes that the mission of a college program is to impart employable skills, so outcome success can be measured by postgraduate income. That's a reasonable standard for a school of business, but it's not central to the mission of an English department--you could build a spectrum of programs from those with missions fully career-oriented to those that are oriented towards general intellect. Business schools typically advertise themselves as career pathways. English departments typically don't--if one does, it's a problem, although a high-performing student in English develops skills that could be more valuable to a business career than a specialized business degree that is not strong in developing generalized analytical skills (as corporate employers frequently note).
Moreover, assessing a program's performance on the basis of output measures has to include assessing inputs. Harvard Math students may be wildly more successful than students graduating from Podunk State, but Podunk may be superior in focusing on student learning and actually adding educational value; its output problem may simply be that it serves students who couldn't get in to more prestigious schools, or whose family and precollege backgrounds placed them at a disadvantage--or simply that employers of all sorts will be better networked or more impressed with Harvard than Podunk. Podunk will surely charge less, but its students may out-borrow Harvard students because of far lower family resources.
I think that in general every dollar we might invest in federal program-based assessment would be better spent invested in adding advisors and improving individual advising protocols, particularly for general admissions undergrads who have yet to be admitted into a major. (That would go double for high school counselors, but that's another conversation.) In my experience, college advising now is largely focused on the fulfillment of graduation requirements. Guidance on choice of major based on individualized interactions that assess student interest and potential, and that educates students about career paths for liberal arts majors outside the sciences is very expensive.
This suggests that all education is vocational, which it isn't and shouldn't be. It also totally disregards the social importance of low-paid professions like teaching, social work, etc.
I don't disagree that education is valuable, but subsidizing super expensive programs via debt is a terrible way to fund education for low-paid professions. And education has negative externalities in addition to positive - the top universities accept overwhelmingly rich kids and tuition is expensive, so education entrenches inequality right as people are starting life.
I think it's actually an argument that most school should happen via the up-front subsidization European model that Matt is arguing against here. Does anyone seriously think the US is more cultured than Finland or France just because a few more people go to college?
Totally in agreement there. As an American who lives in Europe (across the Baltic from Helsinki whose titular university that Matt was so unimpressed by because it has... multiple campuses...?) think he is 100% wrong on this take.
The European model of middle-skills training, especially is far superior to the American one. And the median student is far better off studying at Western European universities than at middling American ones.
Even many elite students would be better served at the elite European universities than American ones, given the relative cost and academic/intellectual/cultural/vocational benefits thereof. Frankly, had I to do it over again myself, I probably would have studied in Europe instead of at my very expensive private elite American university, for which I had to take out a lot of student loan debt for and which caused me significant financial strain in my 20s (also because of the personal debts I had to take up to supplement my HCOL city non-tuition costs in the absence of parental subsidy).
But, given an American student is generally faced with only two basic options--college vs. no college--I argue that they're still marginally better off with college, despite the eye-watering cost, debt burden, and unsuitability of the tool for its purpose in many cases.
Maybe make posting post-graduation employment statistics mandatory? But I think most people that end up in a useless ivy master's know what they're getting into. At least that was my experience.
I'm guessing that's true - I think just shutting programs down if students can't pay their debts is reasonable, the same way that we no longer allow predatory mortgage products without shutting down the entire mortgage industry.
I would require bachelor's degrees overall to meet the same consumer standard as Obama's old for-profit standard (which should also apply to specific grad programs, so that otherwise reputable schools can't run a scam business on the side). I think the college major transparency requirement would just be an extra level of protection since it's mostly naive 18-year-olds making these decisions. And because I think media coverage could amplify these effects - if local TV news stations keep running segments on degrees from State U where everyone earns $15,000 a year 10 years after graduation, it might provide a good incentive to universities to invest less money in useless programs.
Yeah, but if people know the employment outcomes and they still want to enroll for the fun/prestige/networking then I don't see the issue, they're essentially subsidizing research/scholarships. I do think a high tax on University advertisement spending would help everyone, since it's mostly a zero sum game anyways. We can then redirect that tax income to the education system in a more egalitarian way.
Since college degrees are a large but often relatively good debt comparable to mortgage debt, maybe it would be best to treat college somewhat like mortgage debt (dischargeable in bankruptcy, with at least some level of consumer protection, and requirements that people qualify in some way...this could ensure that rich trust fund babies with wealth to burn could still get an NYU film degree, the same way as rich people can buy a uselessly large but cool house).
Unfortunately we seem to have an aversion to treating education like the consumer product that it is, which is why I would like stricter regulation, but I'm open to finding a way to preserve access to useless programs for rich people who want to waste money.
The trick about higher ed debt is that we (I think correctly) treat an education credential as completely non-revocable except for academic misdeeds.
If policy ever existed such that "go to Hahhvahd, get a killer education on loans, discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and end off better for it" was obviously a good plan before a student embarked on it, that would be bad policy and we would need to fix it.
If you substitute “hospital” for “university”, isn’t this functionally a defense of the US healthcare system just because the best few hospitals in the world are here? Mayo Clinic doesn’t justify the waste of the entire healthcare system and Harvard doesn’t justify the waste of the entire higher education system.
Or if this argument is correct, then isn’t a lower-spending single payer system a bad idea and we should figure out how to reform our healthcare system in a way that allows Mayo to thrive? Hospitals put money into cancer and vaccine research, so they have good externalities too.
Yes, in both healthcare and education, the more free market, consumer-driven, fistfuls-of-money-sloshing-around American model allows for higher peaks of top performance. And that's enormously valuable, to Americans and the world. In both cases, we could do a better job with distributional equity and creating better structural incentives for efficient allocation of resources (such as forcing key institutions to internalize costs of inefficiency). But would be a serious mistake to try to cut costs with crude spending caps and controls that truncate and eliminate the peaks of high performance. We're a wealthy society and there's no inherent reason why we shouldn't spend lots of money on our health, wellbeing and education.
Basically agree with this. I do find it funny that people who support this model for education spending think it's evil for healthcare (and vice versa) when it's almost literally the same exact funding model
I would be interested in taking a harder look at the criteria that are used to evaluate the world's "best" universities. My hunch is that it has nothing to do with the quality of instruction and is instead some combination of 1) factors that tightly correlate with the elitism of the student body and 2) the research that the university produces. By those standards, of course Anglo and American institutions are gonna outperform; Yale's student body will always be better off than the student body of some other country's system of publicly financed schools. And even the research a university isn't a good basis of comparison because it falsely assumes that other countries adopt the (not obviously good) American practice of centering their research on college campuses. (Teaching undergrads the second law of thermodynamics is a fundamentally different task than performing experiments with a particle accelerators.)
In a lot of countries (like Germany where I live), basic research is conducted without a university affiliation, which means that no university basks in the reputational benefits from that research. If you were to snap your fingers and call the Max Planck Institut part of Humboldt University, Humboldt would instantaneously become one of the greatest research universities in the world through nothing but an administrative trick. My friend's husband is a mathematician who does pure research. He teaches no classes, has no university affiliation. Also, he works at an institute that is literally a couple of blocks away from a university. In the US, that institute would clearly be part of the university.
There's no doubt the US does a lot of research and has some great schools, but the positive impacts are greatly skewed by the false assumption that higher education in Europe and elsewhere operates on the same basic UK-US model.
I think it is difficult to really compare to the European system for a few reasons:
(1) European degrees are typically three years.
(2) European degrees are typically centered entirely around the field of study, rather than the liberal arts education people receive in the US.
(3) European countries don't feel a need to send everyone to college. People whose career goals don't require a college degree don't go to college.
Look, it's great to get an education, but not worth accumulating six figures in debt just for some personal growth. In addition, in the US, a college degree is a de facto requirement for the vast majority of white-collar employment; most of these people really don't need a college degree. The loan system has created an environment where employers can insist on an extraneous credential (for the job), which is however prohibitively expensive.
American universities were able to hire the best and brightest long before very high tuition engendered by subsidized student loans became available.
In fact, they not only did that, but also hired a great number of “merely“ talented teaching professors and lectures as well.
In the era in which they’ve transitioned to student loan-driven tuition increases as a model for funding, they have instead squandered vast sums of money on useless shit, at the same time is cutting stable professor and lecture positions in favor of adjuncts paid peanuts.
The entire current student loan system needs to be done away with, and the massive administrative and lifestyle bloat that it allowed needs to be extirpated root and branch.
The only “someone” who wants this shit is the bureaucracy staffing it.
Yeah, the only thing I can really agree with in this blog entry is that we need to keep the labor market hot to strangle the bad-actors in higher ed.
Evidence of the Acela Corridor Ivy+ Alumni echo-chamber muddling thinking.
What? There’s quite a bit about non-research universities in there
And elite universities do matter a lot, because they do most of the research
Define "crappy" - there's a difference between "boring" and "we're putting six students in one room and there are roaches in the hallway". I shudder to remember the dorm experience I had, and it was not cheap.
As someone teaching at an Ivy I say - great! If that’s their attitude then in all honesty it’s not the school for them and there are plenty of less spoiled and not less talented and deserving kids who’d be happy to take their place.
[in point of fact however, the ivies are full of upper middle class and quite a few upper class kids, so I suppose we shouldn’t generalize or alternatively despite liking to complain they weren’t this foolish when push comes to shove ?]
I think this is basically true - there was a Twitter thread from a professor at a good school a while ago, that basically said admin told them that basically none of the students were interested in meeting the professors, they cared about the dorms, the student center, etc.
Which makes sense - below the tippy top (ie. the Ivy's + a couple and) and above community college/5th tier state universities (nothing against them), the actual quality in professors isn't that different between Large State University X and Large State University Y in many cases, as both universities will be full of talented and smart faculty - so what does make up the difference? Everything else.
I disagree. You’d be surprised how shockingly different the academics actually are even at institutions that are peers on paper (that’s true at all levels btw). That of course actually varies by department and major perhaps even more than the school itself. Prospective students who are intellectually mature enough to have even a rough sense of their possible major would do well to talk to professors about it (as well as current students in that major!) to see if the school is a good fit for that. Moreover, while the best schools do probably have the best “median” faculty, they most certainly do *not* have all the superstars and in fact some amazing luminaries in all fields are spread quite widely in various schools. If you have a specific passion for x subject you may well discover that A state school has one of the leading researcher in that field whereas B state schools which you’re also considering does not. However that leading researcher perhaps is an a-hole who won’t give an undergrad the time of day, or on contrary may be the nicest and totally change your career trajectory. Not meeting them would be very foolish.
But I’m not surprised that admin *thinks* and wants faculty to think that they are useless , and that it is rather the superficial things that admin can manage, the college-as-hotel view, that matters. I don’t buy it.
We have too many kids going to college and too few going to trade schools or directly into the workforce. The result is an over-educated, under-skilled populace, and many of those people are now earning too little to pay back their loans for their education.
Until we stop sending the message to the vast majority of high school students that they should go to college, this problem won't be solved regardless of any loan forgiveness program.
It's a real chicken-and-egg issue, employers are happy to require college degrees for jobs that don't 100% need them because so many people are getting nudged toward four-year education, and the reason people are getting nudged toward four-year education is that so many jobs require a degree.
And the student loan program is the government pushing the swing a little higher every time it passes by.
Stop allowing labor-market conditions that lead to credential inflation and wage deflation.
Why would a rational employer do this? If other employers needlessly require a BA, the employer who doesn’t can get a qualified candidate for a lower wage.
I don’t think a BA is necessary to be a paralegal and I also think a young woman can learn more working for me for four years than most learn in college.
Agreed. My suspicion at this point is that a real substantial cohort of debt financed students at the majority of institutions have expected productivity gains that are less than their tuition, let alone accounting for the opportunity cost of lost professional training.
Fortunately I think this is something the tighter labor market is helping with - college enrollments are down 5% this year, even with pandemic restrictions being lifted. As far as levers to get people directly in to the workforce, having skilled or semi-skilled jobs available for 18y/os with secondary education is a good one.
Even my circa-2000 high school auto shop teacher preached the gospel of "there are exactly two things you should ever go into debt for: a home and an education".
While I mostly agree with that message, dang, we've got a tough nut to crack if I'm hearing that in *auto shop*.
Honestly, though, that's just terrible advice. In both cases, you usually get a positive ROI from the debt-secured asset.
Not every home will appreciate in value over time far faster than the interest rate you're paying for the mortgage, but almost all will. And, just look around you at the double-digit inflation in home values in just the last few years! There are fewer and fewer areas where renting is a better deal, even if you account for the opportunity-cost of a down payment.
Similarly, not every higher education degree from every institution ensures you earnings high enough and career choices wide enough to justify the student loan debt payments, but most do. And some (esp. elite universities and STEM-type or professional degrees) pay off the investment in as short as a few years, increasing your lifetime earnings by a wide margin.
People say this, but how many college-educated people who make an upper middle class income or higher are willing to say it's their kids who should be (largely) lower paid trade school workers. Yes, there are plumbers who make $150k, but I'd also point out that $150k is made through far more hours of work much of the time than the college degreed $150k and even then, that $150k will be earned in a nice office, as opposed to the depths of a septic tank.
Until I'm sure Austin & Courtney will actually end up in trade school, and it just won't be a place to send Jerome & Maria, I'm OK, since as other people have pointed out, it's not like America's rate of college attendance is much different from Europe.
Like, yes, fine, fully fund trade schools and such, but just maybe, it's not surprising that the children of college educated people are not going to want to be plumbers.
We'd be better off if those upper middle class folks saw the trades as a path to a good life rather than having Austin or Jerome go to a middling college, major in Sociology or Criminal Justice and then struggle with loans and low-paying jobs.
I recognize that isn't where are today. But where we are today is not good for lots of recent college grads.
US college rates aren’t international outliers and it would seem weird if all countries were getting this wrong. Plus American trade schools *are* colleges, they’re mostly in CCs.
My experience as a professor at a state flagship University: I was teaching in Norway, where life quality is supposed to be fantastic. But the University in America offered me much more money and a better research network. Sure, there are more medical and educational expenses here, but taxes in Norway are insanely high. So I get paid much more and get more academic exposure.
I was really surprised to learn the net salaries of my European friends (a tenured physics professor and an architect). By all accounts, these people have “made it.” It would be a huge adjustment for me and my spouse with similar degrees to live on those salaries. So just to say the tax vs. take-home salary trade-off compared to our European peers is real, and people don’t really talk about it that much.
Exactly, I get the free healthcare and education but it is just not worth more than 100k per year.
“people don’t talk about it that much.”
why would they? most of the Elite Left Twitter Discourse© is lead by left leaning academics who benefit directly from the status quo.
Even the British universities, by a distance the best in Europe, pay much less than American ones
This is madness. None of the great American universities are that because of the boom in debt financing. Your whole whole take seems to be, "Well, people seem to be enjoying being given all that money." Of course they are, why wouldn't mediocre bureaucrats appreciate having a good paying career selling a government financed cruise to 17 year olds? What 17 year old isn't in to a 4 year cruise that everyone tells you will pay for itself?
You can't even begin to grapple honestly with this problem without looking at things like grade inflation, credentialism, return on investment, expected productivity gains, etc. The whole point of debt financed higher ed is to provide capable students an opportunity to attend a program that most effectively maximizes their productive capacity. Is that what we're doing!? I mean obviously not, but you didn't even try to grapple with what we are or are not doing in these areas.
It’s not at all obvious that loans do not enable students to maximize their productive capacity. Without them, virtually no middle- or lower-class students would be able to afford major-university undergrad, let alone med or law school, for example.
You are somewhat dismissive of the criticism of "administrative blast". After an over thirty years career in higher education, I can assure you that Administrative bloat is a very real phenomena. If you compared salary lists from 1990 and 2020, the proportion of high salaries paid for administrative positions has soared.
I think his stance is “someone argues for it, their arguments aren’t entirely garbage, so it’s not worth debating in the middle of everything else in this post”.
Not every post has to be about everything
Your premise isn't fact-based because you just assumed (without validating) the conventional wisdom that American higher education is better because the top American universities are disproportionally overrepresented in the top global universities.
But most students don't go to Harvard. Most *elite* students globally don't even go to these few top well-known brand schools! There are *4,000* institutions of higher education in the United States, and plausibly 50-100 (the cutoff is somewhat arbitrary) could be considered "elite." How many of that longer list are the top in the world (at least according to QS World University Rankings: https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings)?
Well, firstly, it may shock readers to hear that merely half of the Top 10 universities in the world are American. The rest are English or Swiss. English universities charge higher tuition than most European ones do, but they're a fraction of the cost of even many American community colleges. And neither English nor Swiss universities have anywhere near the endowments that American elites do.
Go down the list from the Top 10, and you're in for even more of a shock, and contradiction to your argument here: The actual majority of the Top 20 schools aren't American. The rest are found in China, Singapore, and Scotland, joining the relatively more expensive English and Swiss elites at the top. Go down the list to the Top 30, and the American advantage erodes futher, with 17 out of 30 non-American schools, including now many Canadian elites. The same trend continues and accelerates when you look at Top 50, Top 100, and Top 1000 global universities. The American elites are, indeed, disproportionately represented relative to population, but they are far from the majority. And they are contested on their throne by non-American schools with little or no tuition costs, heavy public subsidy, and minuscule endowments.
As an example: I went to a very fancy, *extremely* expensive, private university in Washington, DC: Georgetown University. It's usually ranked somewhere in the American Top 20. So, it's elite, but not quite Ivy-League elite. Where I live in Sweden (population 10 million), there are not one but three universities ranked higher internationally than GU. Guess how much they cost students--even Americans studying there who aren't EU citizens or permanent resident here in Sweden? The answer makes me weep as I continue to pay my student loans every month in my 30s.
My son, who is Swedish-American, will have quite a choice to make in 15 years or so when he's applying to university. Whether our family can afford it or not, I'm just not convinced that encouraging him to go to an American university like me is worth it. Especially if he, like me, would have to take on debt to do so. Why not just attend Lund, ETH, or Chalmers here for free? Or, hell, even Oxford or Cambridge for a quarter of what it would cost him to attend even a mid- or low-tier American school. And for what? The "campus experience?" Yes, the alumni-professional network aspect that you're buying into is valuable. As is the status of your diploma in the place where you will work. But I know a hell of a lot of Europeans with European degrees who make the big bucks in New York or San Fransisco as much as in London or Frankfurt with their elite degrees.
And, again, most students aren't elite, and we betray a bias and a blind spot in focusing overmuch on the top 1% of elite students who mostly come from wealthy families anyway and won't have a hard time being successful, no matter their alma mater. Would you advise a middling student to take out $200K in debt to attend a mid-tier American school? It would be the height of negligence to do so, considering their future earning upside is far more modest than for their elite peer. Wouldn't they be so much better off just attending a European school for free or for a few thousand dollars?
“ Would you advise a middling student to take out $200K in debt to attend a mid-tier American school?”
I don’t believe “anyone” is doing that. The median debt is something like $25k.
Those big dollar figures are usually students borrowing for professional degrees in law or medicine, hardly the people deserving of the public’s largesse anyway.
I know someone who did law school but teaches at community college and is just planning on nursing that quarter million in debt to the bitter end.
Law and medicine seem like increasingly bad career bets, given the income distributions in those fields and the cost of entry.
The median lifetime lifetime marginal earning value of a law degree is something like a million dollars.
1 million dollars / 45 years is like 20 grand a year. Most legal jobs pay between 40 and 75k. California minimum wage is like 30 grand a year stipulating 40 hours a week. So that all lines up, I guess, assuming the baseline is 15 dollars an hour.
That's not good, that's teacher money. But it costs more money and time for the license.
*Marginal* earning value, meaning that it increases your earnings by approximately $1m versus what they otherwise would have been, which is obviously not minimum wage for people with B.A.s.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2250585
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2742674
It also just isn't anywhere near true that most legal jobs pay between $40k and $75k--it's very unusual to find a mid-career lawyer who does not make six figures, even in the public sector. And I don't know where you could find a lawyer who makes $40k, that's low for a legal assistant. According to BLS, the median lawyer makes $130k, which sounds about right to me.
Notably, lawyers have exceptionally low loan default rates, and there is even a specialized industry of loan refinancers for lawyers that provide extra-low interest rates in light of lawyers' very low probability of default.
The legal job market was very poor circa 2010, and that was the last time when there was a lot of public attention to the legal job market, so many people haven't updated their views on it since. But law has been in a ferocious bull market with intense salary competition for quite a while now, and the picture is nothing like 2010.
Private loans or for-profit community college? Public loans would be forgiven after 10 years, not a bad gig at all.
I didn't ask. He seemed to think they wouldn't be forgiven at any point, so I guess private loans.
“My undergrad’s current tuition is $35k.”
Is that before or after the average 53.9% discount?
I believe on average tuition is discounted 54%.
“ Private colleges and universities significantly discounted listed tuition and fee prices for most students in 2020-21—continuing a long upward march in discount rates that only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2021/Private-College-Tuition-Discounting-Continued-Upward-Trend-During-COVID19-Pandemic
You don’t understand American ed finance at all if you don’t understand that very few students pay full freight.
I know some people who did that because they were idiots who wanted to go to, like, University of Alabama for the football team instead of staying in-state but that’s not exactly a public policy problem
These are extreme examples, but most of the schools on this list are middling, private universities, costing students around $75K per year (or a shocking $300K for a 4-year degree): https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-50-most-expensive-colleges-in-america/51/
Now, of course, there's student aid (both federal and institutional... the latter depending upon the school's endowment and priorities), but the majority of those aid packages are loans with very high interest rates. So, yeah, you're staring down the barrel at a tab of $200K, paid now or over the next few decades. For a degree that isn't worth anywhere near what a Harvard, Stanford, or MIT degree is worth.
But let's say you're less profligate than that. Maybe you attend a mid-tier state school. Maybe you even live off campus cheaper than at the dorms. You're still looking at $25-35K/year just for tuition alone! And, again, you can get financial aid, but most of it is going to be high-interest loans rather than Pell Grants or outright scholarships.
Most of my peers at my alma mater were rich. A shocking 70% of them came from the top economic quintile. So their parents were generally able to subsidize that (less hyper-inflated) bill back when I attended almost two decades ago. But kids like me who were merely middle-class didn't have that advantage, and faced pricey bills, even after hustling up a lot of scholarships. It wasn't an unreasonable amount, in the scheme of things, since my degree had a very favorable ROI. But my brother had the same cost burden and hasn't graduated into a high-paying career, and his situation is more typical than mine.
Nothing you said is accurate as the list prices are essentially meaningless. They are at least discounted by 50%. And that a straight discount - that’s not a loan.
To quote my link, “ By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price.”
Your link stated that many (but definitely not all) *private* universities cut their tuition by half *for the 2020-21 academic year, only.* This is not a typical situation, and not evidence at all of usual operating practice or costs to most students. Pretending like that's standard practice is extremely deceiving. Also, that was just a (extraordinary) discount on tuition, alone, which isn't the overall cost of attending a university, especially as a resident.
This doesn't prove the point you seem to think it does.
It is standard practice and has been for years. Why do you strangely keep insisting it’s not?
Aren't Swedes much more likely to go to college in America than Americans are likely to go to college in Sweden? Like, by a lot?
Revealed preferences >>> some list you cited
Revealed preferences suggest that people have equal opportunities to satisfy their preferences and the knowledge about those options. And, in this case, they don’t.
Firstly, did you know that studying in English in Europe is even an option for Americans? I certainly didn’t when I was college age! Maybe I know about studying abroad, but it wasn’t even on my radar that I could actually study for my entire degree program in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, or the UK for little or even no cost (at least tuition-wise).
Secondly, just because the tuition is cheap or free doesn’t mean that attending a university internationally is—or that the other logistics of it are straightforward. It’s much more expensive for Americans to travel to Europe than vice-versa. My flights home to the US cost half of what my families’ flights here cost. And how to arrange for housing, etc. while you’re here: it’s all bewildering for young (generally non-travelled) Americans in a way that it isn’t for international students to the US who find a more paternal, one-stop-shop approach to student services. Americans are very intimidated by having to exist in a context where English might be spoken, but not as the primary language. Most educated Western Europeans, by contrast, are going to speak English pretty fluently.
Lastly, this revealed preference doesn’t even really seem to exist in the way you’ve assumed (again, without the data). Sweden has 1/33rd the population as the United States does. So, obviously, it has far fewer universities and seats at those campuses than you can find in a huge country like the United States. It would be impossible for Americans to send the same proportion of international students to a small-population country like Sweden as Sweden sends to the United States. But even so, there are tens of thousands of Americans studying here! There are about 350,000 Americans studying abroad in a normal year. I can’t find stats on how many of them study here, but anecdotally, it’s a lot.
Those Americans are studying in Sweden as a “let’s have a cool experience” program, not to earn their degree. In fact, aren’t those study abroad programs another product of the increased subsidies Matt is discussing?
I’m very skeptical about relying on these QS ratings for much of anything.
Any ranking is pretty arbitrary.
The US News rankings so prominent in American higher education discourse are rather dubious in many of their metrics, and easy enough to game out in a way that arguably decreases the actual efficacy of education on American campuses today.
Your USN ranking used to go up for student selectivity—i.e. rejecting more applicants. Does that mean you’re better? More students want to go to your school—even if it’s because you offer, as another commenter hilariously put it, the Cruise Ship Experience! Or you were courting more students whom you don’t want to admit into applying, just to increase the ratio! This isn’t actually part of the rankings anymore—though they still maintain a ranking list based on only acceptance rates, and universities still wear their <5% acceptance rates as proof of their status and quality.
There are aspects of the USN methodology that even actively undermine academic rigor: a fifth of the ranking is based on graduation and retention rates. So, you get a high score for grade inflation and retaining mediocre students instead of booting them. Everyone at Harvard gets an A and Harvard is ranked even higher!
Then, perhaps more corrosive to meritocracy, you have a perverse incentive as a ranking-chasing university to reject lower income or minority candidates who don’t test as well.
And, your student selectivity ranking also arbitrarily force-ranks students based on what percentile of their high school class they landed. Sucks for any student who is second-best at their top-tier magnet high school, even if they outshine the valedictorian at a tiny, low-performance school elsewhere.
Lastly, why is alumni giving rate even included!? What does this have to do with ranking or quality?
I’d say that given the huge weaknesses of the US News methodology, the QS methodology is arguably superior, based more, as it is on academic rep, employer rep, research performance, and faculty/student ratio: https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings/methodology
The Times world rankings are much closer to intuitively correct—Princeton is 8, not 20–and are completely dominated by American and British institutions.
Like your last comment "intuitively correct" is a biased statement that literally means that this ranking confirms your priors. Do you know what the Times Higher Education world ranking's methodology is and how it differs from QS, US News, etc.? (Here it is: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/world-university-rankings-2022-methodology).
But even THE is only totally dominated by US and UK universities in the Top 10. By the Top 20, you have Chinese and Canadian universities entering the fray. So, we're to come away with the conclusion that at least four countries can create globally elite-class universities without resorting to the American financing model, in complete contradiction to Matt's take. One country producing elite universities (China) is as wealthy at the aggregate than the US and more populous, but very per-capita poor and a still-developing country whose universities are much younger than American, British, or European institutions. And two out of those three punch way above their weight in terms of population and wealth, suggesting that they've settled on a model that is arguably *superior* to the American one, with limited means to do so!
So my question, then, would be: why is a large, rich, powerful, English-speaking US where private resources available to universities are exponentially more than elsewhere not dominating any such list *much more?*
China dumps a staggering amount of money into its top couple of universities. They're not underdogs at all. They're also not young--Peking is roughly as old as the University of Chicago.
Canadian universities share the American/British financing model, with large endowments, in-state fees comparable to American public schools', very high international tuition, and student loans.
I don’t know what the world would look like in 15 years. I also realize there are many considerations in choosing a school. Finally, I am not familiar with the Swedish higher education system. I am however familiar with the elite American and British systems (especially in the Humanities, but I talk to people from other fields). I can only tell you that from the purely academic perspective, that currently Oxford and Cambridge offer an undergraduate experience that is miles and leagues beyond anything the American higher education system can offer. It’s almost an offense to call both an Oxford undergraduate degree and a Harvard undergraduate degree “BA” , as the former is at such significantly higher level that only a couple of years of grad school can fill the gap. If I were to advise a prospective student with the unique privilege of choosing between Oxford (or Cambridge) or Harvard (or any other Ivy+) and that student would care about academics as a significant factor, I would advise chooosing Oxbridge without question. I believe there are probably also good social and financial reasons to do so, but can speak less confidently about that (and that can also obviously vary by individual circumstances).
My wife attended both Swedish and American universities (of equivalent rankings) and this was her impression, too: That the rigor of the academics and the maturity of the student body in her American university just weren’t at the same level. In the latter, it was much more about the experience and socializing.
And the students were strangely infantalized in a way that was really odd for a European who was living more or less autonomously since she was 16. Even the way financing worked (that the assessed need for a legal adult was based on their parents’ means) stuck her as very odd and inappropriate. Scandinavian youths are expected to move out and take care of themselves without any parental subsidy after they’re legal adults—an arrangement very much aided by the more generous state subsidy they receive at student age.
I agree re: maturity. I would clarify what I said earlier to note that I am engaging in super-elitist discourse here of course. Ivy League students are generally a joy to teach. They are overwhelmingly very well behaved. Even those that don’t do the work almost always have the decency/cheek to *pretend* to do the work (thinking they’re smart enough to get away with it…). They’re not all geniuses by any means but you get a couple of very bright ones in virtually every single class which is obviously not a random fact, and even the average ones are mostly fine. However, *considering* the insane selectivity you could have expected more had the process centered primarily on academics, as it does at Oxbridge. Accordingly, while the academic level is good, it could be even better, and at Oxbridge they do amazing things intellectually that we simply can’t do at the Ivy League system as it is currently set up (even though probably the top half of the students could have managed it).
That doesn't make any sense. How is one independent if they depend on state subsidy? And even if so, how is being subsidized by parents any different, except for the fact that parents (should) love and care for their child more than the state ever could?
The point being that Swedish teens are generally more autonomous within the structure of a stronger state and equal society and a different culture. My wife wasn’t unusual in traveling all by herself to another country to live at the age of 16–something that I would never have dreamed or doing or been allowed to do.
Is this a good thing? To your point, is having a Nanny State instead of a parent taking care of you good? Well, the problem with a parent knowing best and taking care of you is that you don’t choose your parents, do you? Some parents definitely don’t fit that ideal model, do they? You also don’t get to decide how rich or poor they are and whether or not they’re willing to pay for your school or not. The FAFSA methodology assumes a given expectation for parental subsidy—an Expected Family Contribution. What if your rich dad is estranged, like the father of one of my friends in school, who ended up with six figures in debt for his undergrad because of it? Or, maybe parents have tons of credit card debts that don’t show up on the assessment? What if you can’t even get your parents to sign the FAFSA form, like so many of the lower income kids whom my mom taught in community college? Students don’t get to decide what their own home life is, but it totally affects how your university financing is assessed!
The British model works if you are happy for the laser focus on your course to the exclusion of flexibility.
I did a year abroad, half the year in English and half the year in Biology, I had to switch campuses and no British student ever did what I did. A 17 year old from a small town on my dorm floor dropped out of medical school after the first semester and he was disliked for his departure because turns out most of the biology students had been trying for a medical school spot, a spot he just wasted.
Agreed. However I feel that currently the American model is too general hence too superficial. If you’re too laser focused at least you come out with some substantial knowledge in a field. If you’re too generic you come out with only superficiality and worse still, in the case of ivies, perhaps over confidence and arrogance that you actually know everything. I prefer the British way if forced between these two sub optimal polar opposites. I would argue that studying any one field deeply gives you something more than the specific knowledge (valuable in itself) it gives you exposure to intellectual rigor and respect for expertise. I realize that the American college ideal claims to be about more than “mere” academics, but I dispute this ideal.
I fundamentally disagree with this. I spent four years studying a wide variety of humanities at an Ivy League University in the early 70's and then got a law degree at Stanford. In 1981, I was a research fellow in the law department at the European University Institute in Florence which was a graduate program for students from all over the European Union. Both the continental systems and the British system which produced these graduate students treated law as an undergraduate program, usually three years, with the laser focus you describe. I can tell you, compared to an American law graduate, they were woefully uneducated.
You do realize these are apples and oranges, yes? I was comparing American undergrad program to English undergraduate program , you’re comparing European undergrad progra (3 years) to American undergrad +grad school (6? Years). How is that the same comparison?
I do realize that (7 years actually, not 6). My point was taking 18-year olds and making them study one subject intensively is a poor way to end up with an educated 21-year old, and further graduate study isn't likely to remedy the deficit. My wife has a DEA (law) from the Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris (3 years) and a graduate degree also in law from the University of Strasbourg (another 3 years) for which she had to write a thesis. At the end she knew all about Hegelian dialectics, but couldn't have reasoned her way through a legal issue if her life depended on it.
That's pretty damning, and I trust your impressions based on your experience. Could you elaborate on how those differences in educational results manifest themselves? It would be great to link to any documented research on this.
From the narrow perspective of people who go on to grad school, in the British system they can finish their PhD sooner as a result, since they have better preparation from undergrad, whereas in the American system grad school is longer which allows to basically close the gap that way. Thus the Brits probably get their PhDs on average 2 or more years sooner on average (depending on field), I’m sure there is data to show this. However, I have no idea what the implications are for the majority who don’t go on to PhD, nor do I know if there is research on this. My guess is that for some - the substantial subsection of Americans going for professional grad school (law etc) that helps or perhaps gives an advantage even (as these are undergrad in uk), but for the rest hard to say what consequences actually are.
I'm thinking exactly the same way, plus they have the Erasmus program in Europe.
I mean, who knows what the situation will be in 15 years. Maybe Europeans move more in the American, neoliberal direction (already started in the UK).
Maybe American higher education is overhauled somehow, to bring down the eye-watering rates of hyper-inflation.
Maybe non-American universities continue to attract more international students (and professors) away from the US, since migration there has continued to be more restrictive and difficult (even through the Biden Administration). I don’t think Americans appreciate how fragile this “Brain Drain” benefit is, and how much it has benefited our country, historically.
Maybe “the West,” generally continues to decline relative to other, rising powers and the new thing is studying at prestige campuses in East Asia, or something.
Or, maybe, the long forecast sunset of the physical campus itself finally settles on the future, rendering the benefit of artificially restricted slots at a handful of selective campuses in a particular location moot? Who knows!
“the new thing is studying at prestige campuses in East Asia”
Lol. First time I get to set the trend!
Any ranking that puts Princeton 20th or Duke 52nd obviously has massive methodological problems, but in any case, even on it Wisconsin is ranked above the best university in Sweden. Wisconsin is a great school, but it’s not exactly most people’s idea of an “elite” university. There are no countries besides Britain that are even close to having the US’s depth of top research institutions beyond the tippy top tier. Unfashionable places like Iowa State regularly poach faculty from Europe and Asia.
"People's idea of an elite school" is totally arbitrary. Especially when you're talking about only *American" people's idea of an elite school. Could most Americans even name an elite non-American school outside of the UK? Does that mean they don't exist? That works both ways: my university is well-known and considered elite in the US, but most Europeans haven't even heard of it!
This QS ranking has different criteria than US News, for example, but both of them make normative judgements on what the elements of an elite university are. For example, QS emphasizes the role of a research university more than USN does (which should, actually, bias the list in favor of American universities, given the aggregation of the teaching function and the research function Stateside, which is often disaggregated into standalone research institutions in Western Europe).
So, your statement that "There are no countries besides Britain that are even close to having the US’s depth of top research institutions beyond the tippy top tier" is unsubstantiated and contradicted by the QS methodology on display here, which credits English and Swiss universities, especially, for having top-tier research superior to many American elites.
Also, this is similarly unsubstantiated: "Unfashionable places like Iowa State regularly poach faculty from Europe and Asia." Iowa State might be "unfashionable" (how are you defining that?) to you, but it's an elite state school with some of the most premier programs in the world. I mean, ever heard of the Iowa Writers' Workshop? It's no slouch! It's the top MFA writing program in the United States, with 17 Pulitzer Prize winners under its belt. Iowa State also lays claim to the second best agricultural PhD program in the country, ranked in the Top 10 worldwide for a decade now (https://www.cals.iastate.edu/news/releases/iowa-state-university-agricultural-programs-top-4-worldwide-2020)! Any wonder that it attracts international faculty?
And you've begged the question, do non-American schools attract American or other foreign faculty? Do you imagine they don't? That's pretty easily disproven by statistic and anecdote, alike: I know of personally a dozen American academics working here in Sweden, and I'm not an academic myself or especially well-connected to that field.
I'm afraid that you're speaking from a totally American POV here, without much familiarity or curiosity on what's happening in outside.
At the point at which you're arguing that ISU is an "elite state school," you need to reassess your argument. ISU has a 90% acceptance rate and is the second-most-prestigious public university in Iowa. That it nevertheless has some programs with worldwide recognition, like agriculture and statistics, shows the depth of American higher ed.
While some American academics work in Europe, outside of a few British universities and the European Union Institute that's largely a result of the exceptional competitiveness of the American academic job market. Unlike you, I am well-connected in academia, and it's just not true that the poaching goes both ways at the top level.
This is months old, but: the Iowa Writer's Workshop is at U of Iowa, not Iowa State.
Why am I supposed to be abashed by my country having a disproportionately large share of the top universities in the world?
Could say the same for England/Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, couldn’t you?
None of them have the American higher education financing model, but still create disproportionately high-ranked universities, despite their relatively small percentage of global population.
What all of them do have in common is that they’re rich. And the US being the richest country, you’d expect among the best universities.
Is the US the richest country in 2022? Richest middle class or what definition?
This is a complex question. But the short answer is yes, it is, overall, the richest, still.
It's not the richest *per capita* (that would be dominated by small microstates/city-states like Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Singapore). But it's the richest large country per capita.
And it is the richest by overall GDP (nominal) and Net National Wealth.
China is the richest country my overall GDP (PPP). But very far down the list when it comes to per capita GDP or wealth (either nominal or PPP).
I wish people would simply talk more about income-based repayment. For some reason I never see it mentioned in The Discourse. How government student loans work is you pay 10% of your discretionary income a year until they are paid off. If they don’t get paid off after 20 years the balance is forgiven. Discretionary income is defined as income above the federal poverty line, so for example someone making $60k a year will pay around $320/month in loan payments.
This is annoying but I don’t really understand why it’s considered such a big burden. It’s not really that big a deal in exchange for the college wage premium. Why don’t Student Debt Cancellers just try to lobby to make the forgiveness period 10 years? Or reduce the monthly payments?
There's actually, to my mind, an extremely simple solution to all of this. We should move up the forgiveness timeline to more like 8 years, and then instead of forgiving the balance the remaining liability should fall onto the school. This preserves the purpose of the loan program, while realigning the toxic incentives of the institutions, and limiting the threat of unserviceable debts.
Income based repayment, effectively an income tax surcharge on people whose parents and families were not wealthy enough to pay for their college education, would more clearly reveal student loans for what they are: a regressive tax on people smart enough to graduate from college but not lucky enough to come from a well-to-do background.
That's true of paying a mortgage on a house instead of having your parents buy it for you, or any other financial help one gets from their parents. It's not a student loan specific issue.
Well yes, but then again nobody is proposing a federal mortgage loan program with income-based repayment, where anyone can borrow large amounts of money to buy a house, and repay the loan as a percentage of their income, and if they haven't paid it off in 10 or 20 years, or if they choose to work in a certain types of jobs, the govt pays off the balance.
Which suggests people see, rightly or wrongly, a difference between education and some of those other examples.
Ok but.... those are the same people who take loans right now - so they're paying either way.
I was lucky enough not to have student debt (although it was close) so neither scheme affects me since I was "smart enough AND lucky enough"
I'm more interested in critiques where this is _worse_ than the current system.
I'm not saying income-based repayment is worse - from the perspective of the student it isn't though it might be from a structural incentive perspective.
I'm just saying it more clearly lays bare the inequity and regressiveness of requiring students from poor backgrounds to bear the cost of their own education. Whether that happens in the form of separate loan payments or additional income-based payments, it violates fundamental tenets of an equal opportunity society.
The veneer of student loans now is that you made an informed, private decision to purchase something on credit, and now you're repaying the loan.
Income-based repayment strips that away and simply says, if you come from a poor family or modest background, and nonetheless managed to get through college, now as reward for your extra initiative, you have to pay a higher income tax for the first decade or two of your working life, than similarly situated coworkers who had wealthy families.
It's not an income tax. Stop trying to frame it that way.
Are Social Security deductions an income tax, or pension contributions? Or maybe both?
I'd say that it is an income tax that was sold as (and is still perceived as) a pension contribution.
But you don't have a choice about paying into SS.
You do with student loans.
Except the advantage of it being a percentage tax rather than a flat rate is that the kids who can’t use family connections to get a high paying job out of the gate end up getting subsidized compared to the people who do hit the employment jackpot.
The people who come from richer families often aren't taking out loans in the first place.
The whole point of student loans is to allow students from non-wealthy parents to be able to afford a university education.
So of course those are the ones that will be (voluntarily) 'saddled with student loan debt'.
Furthermore, it simply isn't the case that only rich kids can hit the 'employment jackpot'.
Rich kids with connections that get normally non-remunerative degrees may still be able to get good paying jobs....but so can non-rich kids that get a certain degrees.
There's also the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program where if you work as a federal/state/qualified non-profit employee for ten years while making payments the rest of your debt is forgiven.
I think it takes too long to get forgiveness through either IBR or the PSLF but both programs are pretty great...
Hmm. I have a question about IBR vs. paying flat out.
Suppose your expenses is $200k for a 4 year college and you can _afford_ to pay that but you really want to go work for job afterwards that happens to be lower paying.
Right now you can take a loan for $200k or pay the $200k outright, and you mostly just pay it outright I think rather than the interest. But either way the university is probably ok with it.
If it's IBR then you take the IBR loan and pay it back that way, paying a lot less total.
Although this is almost certainly a small enough chunk of people in this situation that you just don't worry about it if you otherwise think IBR is a good idea.
How does that account for the amount being borrowed? If you're just paying 10% of you discretionary income for 20 years what incentive would you have to take out $20,000 in loans instead of $200,000? Why pay a cent our of pocket?
There's a limit to how much you can borrow from the feds per year, and for standard loans there's a max of like 60k you can borrow from the feds at all.
And with repaye there is even a cap on the total dollar figure! This is sometimes called the doctor’s loophole because they don’t even end up paying 10% of their monthly income.
What's the rationale for banning debt-based repayment? If I think I'm smart and going to make good money, why should I be forced to do the more expensive equity-based repayment?
If you end up making a lot more than the average graduate, then paying the same fraction of your income means you’re subsidizing them, while just taking a loan means that whatever you pay is your own costs.
This piece really misses the mark. MY premise that higher Ed in America is great is based on a few pieces of evidence. First the sort of anecdotes that star professors want to come here. But that’s not very different from noting that people with means and horrible diseases would like to come to US from all over the world to have their complex operation. That by no means proves us has a good healthcare system!
Second, the rankings. MY mentions the recent uk visa program. Readers are probably curious why the uk chose the seemingly random number 38 top universities? In fact the number is 50 but out of them a full 12 are uk universities! Why is it that the vastly smaller and poorer uk, which also charged relatively lower tuition at its prestige universities compared to US, manages to be so successful *with vastly smaller resources*?
The truth is that both US and UK have one major advantage over most of Europe and Asia: English. A factor in rankings is number of foreign students and the English speaking environment (not just at schools but in the country at large) is a pull factor that peer countries (e.g Germany, Japan) cannot compete with.
At the end of the day one must account for how HUGE the US actually is in population, in the size of its high Ed sector, and in the disproportionate resources pulled in to it. Compared to these, the sector is actually severely *underperforming* and the number of top ranking institutions is actually smaller than you would expect. The system is extremely wasteful and inefficient and -importantly becoming increasingly so while producing increasingly worse results and higher price tags.
This is but one point. I haven’t even discussed:
1. Disappearance of middle class from top institutions due to funding models
2.Adjunctification and loss of academic freedom due to administrative takeover
3. falling standards, including at the very top institutions (I teach at one and talk to colleagues)
4. Rising intolerance and “McCarthistic” atmosphere in past couple of years
EDIT: I made a mistake on the way UK visa system works (as I now understand it, 38 is the number of universities appearing on at least two out of I believe three approved rankings of the top-50 non UK and non Ireland ranked universities). The actual number of UK universities in top 50 is on range of 7 or 8, depending on ranking and year, with greater proportion towards the top (e.g. 2/10 and 3/15 in THE). However this doesn't really change my general point on the relative success of the UK HE sector compared to US despite vastly smaller resources (and the advantage both probably gain in ranking relative to much of Europe and Asia due to English).
What is the real story of adjunctification? I hear a lot about it, but don’t actually directly see much evidence of it. Is it mainly language classes? Are some disciplines doing it extremely extensively and others not at all? In philosophy departments I’ve known, there are sometimes a couple people on a professional teaching track that isn’t tenure track but isn’t adjunct, and we’ve only had an adjunct or two at times when we need to fill in for last minute deaths or research leaves.
The simple majority of my undergrad professors at an elite university were adjuncts. These were Ivy League-educated PhDs with well-regarded published works offering better education to us, frankly, than the much better paid tenured professors or "celebrity guests" making six-figures to teach a single course.
That those adjuncts had to hustle between campuses semester-to-semester to get work and ended up making basically minimum wage was unconscionable, especially considering what we paid for that education. It all went to the bloated administration that MY doesn't think is so bad, actually.
Hasn’t the share of classroom hours taught by TT professors gone down significantly over a few decades?
I think I've heard that claim, but I haven't seen detailed breakdown of the distribution of these hours.
Well, here's a DoE table—check out the decline in full-time numbers. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_315.10.asp?current=yes
As far as I can tell, full-time numbers actually *increase* in every single year in that chart, other than small drops in 1976, 1979, and 1985 (and those years are all in the set that are listed as estimates based on enrollment, rather than actual surveys). The part-time numbers are increasing dramatically during this period, but the part-time numbers are much harder to interpret. Six people each teaching one class a semester at the same institution and one person teaching six classes at the same institution will show up very differently in the charts, but it's not immediately obvious which is more exploitative. One person teaching six classes at six different institutions is clearly the most exploitative situation, but I don't know whether that shows up as one person or six people in this chart.
Sorry, I said numbers but should have said percentages.
I wish ! Don’t have time to elaborate right now. Off top of my head recall data from a few years ago, something like only 30% of faculty nowadays are tenured or tenure track combined. Getting worse from year to year, used to be overwhelming majority. The rest are not all adjuncts but increasingly so. This is not always so transparen to students, but they are harmed by it in myriad of ways. It also is slowly killing the research university, though it will take decades to be extremely noticeable as older tenured faculty tend to retire later and later (and are also hired later and later). May find time later to elaborate. You can also google it and easily find much data and discussion.
I’ve seen that 30% number a lot but that’s what I’ve never found an explanation for. Does that mean there are lots of people adjuncting an occasional class while doing something else with their life, keeping that number up? (For instance, Joe Biden was adjuncting a class at Penn occasionally pre-2021.) Or are there really as many classes taught by adjuncts as by lecturers as by tenure track faculty? And I haven’t found discussion of whether this is disproportionately driven by one or two disciplines, like foreign languages or calculus or something, or by lower tier bachelors only state institutions or some other particular set. Everyone I see who cites the numbers is using the numbers to drive some other argument they have, so they don’t give me a dive on what these numbers actually *mean* and why it is that it isn’t obvious in my parts of the university world.
Good point. I would say mostly the latter. Adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s horrible. Why do they do it? For the meager chance of eventually landing one of the decreasing number of tenure track jobs. Sunk Costs syndrom if you will. I imagine you’ll find statistical variation by discipline (and institutions of course) on how bad it is but it seems to be a general trend across the board, not a handful of disciplines creating a misimpression. The Biden example is what adjuncting used to be back in the day and why it was invented. That’s not what’s happening now. It’s replacing normal faculty at alarming rates.
Thanks. I believe the figure for THE is 8 (N.B. to see the top 50 you need to scroll to next page!). In any case made an edit to correct my mistake!
Very frustrated with this take! Fine to defend higher education but you owe us a bit more steel-manning. Not going to use the "neoliberal" word, but it's important to engage with how labor and debt markets are actually working here. Two points in particular:
1] The primary critique of US higher ed as I understand it is that the loan/subsidy system has removed all the price control mechanisms that would be present in a normal market (similar to healthcare, if you like), which drives skyrocketing tuition from the demand side. Massive student debt is the externality of this system, saddled onto federal lenders and graduated students but largely not a problem for the institutions who set tuition. I don't think you can really address the debt/subsidy question without addressing this.
2] The profitable nature of US higher ed institutions is a direct result of that loan/subsidy system, so you can't wave away the problem by pointing to all the nice stuff we have. If I ran a theater where stage-hands mugged every tenth ticket-holder, I could use those profits to put on a heck of a show! But if we believe education is a social service, we have to engage with how students are actually being served by these institutions.
"If I ran a theater where stage-hands mugged every tenth ticket-holder, I could use those profits to put on a heck of a show!"
That *would* be a heck of a show, already. Though I prefer a more naturalistic style of acting -- if you encourage too much mugging then they all start upstaging each other.
Some part of the bad comparisons to Europe may be that folks underplay how much even large research universities in the US are influenced by "the liberal arts tradition". In my understanding from relatives, university in Europe is generally more like just being an adult and getting some professional training and less like four years in which you get to spend your time Thinking about Big Ideas and Exploring Yourself.
It takes a lot of work and effort on the part of working adults at the campus to maintain a safe enough, fun enough environment for a bunch of 18-22 year olds to self-express in! I actually went to a liberal arts college and endorse this heavily, it was a great experience, but it can be a little bit of a cold shower when you realize that the rest of life is not just thinking about interesting things.
The experience I remember from being affiliated with the Berkeley math department is that incoming PhD students from Europe or Asia always knew a lot more math already than the incoming PhD students from the US, because the foreign students did math for nearly every undergrad class after a few science classes early on while the US students usually had 1.5 math classes a semester. But by the third year of the PhD program, the American students were as successful at their research. Probably the foreign students had deep knowledge of a broader range of topics in math, while the American students had moderate knowledge of a broader range of topics outside of math, and both of these are a fine foundation for a research career. The American one probably provides a better foundation for things other than academic research.
It is if you go for the PhD :)
I did! Nothing saps all the interesting out of an idea like doing a PhD on it.
I'm sorry to hear that, my experience was the opposite, I just fell more in love with the field and I was lucky enough to get a tenure track position
Yeah this is the limit of my knowledge on this -- European or just British??
Right, although it's never been clear to me how much infrastructure was needed to support that concept (like were there businesses who mainly catered to people on a Grand Tour? Conventional itineraries?).
That said, my main point here is that at the moment the American and European systems are really trying to accomplish different things, even if those things are related and we call them both "university".
I’ve long been a fan of reinstating the gainful employment test and this time including non-profit universities in addition to for-profit ones. It’s obscene that we continue to enable these predatory programs by sadling their students with unserviceable levels of debt through federally-subsidized student loans.
I understand our coalition concerns about aggrieving higher education professionals, but I don’t think we can continue to ignore this problem. We need to work with them to reform their programs so that they are economically sound. We’d need to do this even if we replaced student loans with direct subsidies so as to not squander taxpayer funds.
I’ve seen several analyses over the years about the extent to which the gainful employment test would exclude financially-exploitative non-profit programs. A quick search for up-to-date stats turned up this 2020 article, “Many Nonprofit College Programs Would Fail Gainful Test”. [1]
> Only about 60 percent of programs at private nonprofit institutions, and 70 percent of those at public colleges and universities, would pass the Obama administration’s gainful-employment test, if it were in place and applied to them, according to an online tool developed by a conservative Texas policy group.
> Only 5,646 of 10,147, or 55.6 percent, of private, for-profit programs for which income and debt data were available would have passed the standard. Another 2,071, or a fifth, would have failed. And 2,430, or 24 percent, of the programs would have been on probation.
> But private nonprofits didn’t do much better. Only 6,262 of 10,585 programs, or 59 percent, would have passed. Another 1,916, or 18 percent, would have failed. And 2,407, or 22.7 percent, would have been on probation.
> This indicates that a lot of the people asserting that for-profits are uniquely bad actors are wrong -- as a group, their performance is quite similar to that of nonprofits. Publics do noticeably better than either nonprofit private or for-profit colleges, no doubt because they generally cost less to attend and therefore their graduates have less debt.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/16/profit-programs-not-only-ones-would-fail-gainful-employment-test
As a physician (who works at a university hospital too), I just feel like the coalition concerns are a huge red flag that we're about to give up on healthcare reform entirely once we realize how liberal the current generation of doctors and nurses is becoming thanks to educational polarization/covid. Doctors, nurses, and professors are great! But that doesn't mean we aren't selfish human beings sometimes just like everyone else in the world.
Tbh the converse might be true - if we're getting Bashar Al-Assad numbers with the doctors (this used to be a Lean R profession) then maybe we can convince them to take a 40% haircut for the greater good (I'd even forgive all their loans for being good sports)
If this tells you anything, the head of the main single payer physicians advocacy group (a big Bernie guy) thinks that all the extra money in healthcare is going to CEOs, and we don’t need to cut any doctor’s paycheck ever. Refusing to push back against upper middle class privilege has consequences (even Bernie doesn’t ask anything of the 98th percentile of wealth)
I have no clue. Just know that Yglesias explained that this was the reason that the Obama administration only applied this rule to for-profits. [1]
> But it was also a limited idea. Obama didn’t want to take on the incredible lobbying clout of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, so the rule only applied to for-profit colleges.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/there-are-too-many-scams-in-higher?s=r
Mostly agree, only thing I would add is that I’d love to see some federally enforced accountability for individual college programs (both college majors and specific graduate programs). My liberal arts college basically lied to kids entering unmarketable majors and told them that they could get jobs. As an affluent kid of college educated parents I knew better because my parents told me to major in something useful, but not everyone had that advantage. And while a bachelors degree from a decent school is still mostly a useful credential even if the major is useless (I think just forcing more transparency from colleges is reasonable for college majors), predatory grad programs are not useful credentials. The government should be able to shut down a bad Harvard master’s program without shutting down Harvard as a whole.
Is it entirely the fault of the major? Could it be that impractical majors attract impractical people? Take some 18 year old who really wants to major in finance and offer him a full ride if he majors in history. I’m willing to bet he doesn’t struggle to find a job nearly as much as the kids who really want to major in history.
It looks to me as though you are using misrepresentation as a stand-in for quality. I'm not sure that any liberal arts major is "unmarketable," but advisors who steer students into, say, English or History, by telling them they could get good jobs by choosing those majors is misrepresenting what those majors are about. (Although that's not true for a lot of liberal arts majors in the sciences and some social sciences.)
A liberal arts major, especially in the humanities, is about providing high flexibility in career paths with lower specialized career training (unless the path is towards being an historian); a professional school major, say, Finance, is about more competitive career training with low flexibility in career choice (at least growing out of the major). A History major can buffer that contrast by doing some professional school coursework, and Finance majors generally are required to broaden their options by taking a pretty large number of liberal arts courses as a core curriculum requirement. Unless a History major goes on to grad school, graduation will generally involve a period of career uncertainty/shifting that matches college training to a long term job role, while Finance majors are more likely to be directly recruited for finance-related positions by corporations. Humanities students are taking on greater responsibility for finding their way professionally after graduation, but there is supposed to be a trade-off, in that they have greater freedom to build a range of more universally applicable skills. How well that trade-off works depends more on the type of job market they graduate into than on the major they choose (and the principal factor is in any event the quality of their academic record).
So I think there is a host of problems with expecting a uniform federal metric to measure success rates for majors. The main problem, in my view, is likely the low budgets and poor performance of undergraduate advising, especially at large public universities, especially outside of professional schools. For bachelor degree programs, students are investing four years and a ton of (their parents' or their own) money/debt: that should buy individualized guidance that clarifies what the trade-offs are before majors are chosen, and monitors the way best advice can change as students mature over those years.
Masters programs may be better suited to placement-based accountability metrics, based on employment in the field, but the people enrolling in them are college graduate adults. I'm not sure there is as much to gain by imposing a federal standard. And I'm really wary of the idea that "the government should be able to shut down" any program. If its staff is committing fraud in recruitment statements, that can be dealt with by the justice system now.
I agree that measurement would be difficult, but throwing up our hands and saying that we just need to stop trying to regulate things because it's hard would read as an ultra-libertarian stance if it was about anything other than college. I work in healthcare and no progressive would ever say that we should stop trying to reform healthcare because healthcare outcomes are hard to measure. I just want Elizabeth Warren's former employer subject to the same consumer standards that she expects of everyone else who sells large financial products to sometimes naive customers.
To put this another way - if our healthcare system is putting people in a high amount of debt, shouldn't we be trying to reform healthcare to prevent this? And not just hand-waving away the problem by saying that the president should just cancel everyone's medical debts and give the money to the hospitals (which is basically progressives want to happen to student debts, since the colleges already got paid)? Again, I think the amount of deference progressives have to universities would come across as beyond naive if it was applied to literally any other industry.
I don’t think anyone is talking about directly shutting down programs. They are saying if more than X% of grads of a given program default on their loans then the program looses access to the federal student loan program.
For both Mark and BronxZooCobra: The problem I see with the approach you're taking is that it assumes that the mission of a college program is to impart employable skills, so outcome success can be measured by postgraduate income. That's a reasonable standard for a school of business, but it's not central to the mission of an English department--you could build a spectrum of programs from those with missions fully career-oriented to those that are oriented towards general intellect. Business schools typically advertise themselves as career pathways. English departments typically don't--if one does, it's a problem, although a high-performing student in English develops skills that could be more valuable to a business career than a specialized business degree that is not strong in developing generalized analytical skills (as corporate employers frequently note).
Moreover, assessing a program's performance on the basis of output measures has to include assessing inputs. Harvard Math students may be wildly more successful than students graduating from Podunk State, but Podunk may be superior in focusing on student learning and actually adding educational value; its output problem may simply be that it serves students who couldn't get in to more prestigious schools, or whose family and precollege backgrounds placed them at a disadvantage--or simply that employers of all sorts will be better networked or more impressed with Harvard than Podunk. Podunk will surely charge less, but its students may out-borrow Harvard students because of far lower family resources.
I think that in general every dollar we might invest in federal program-based assessment would be better spent invested in adding advisors and improving individual advising protocols, particularly for general admissions undergrads who have yet to be admitted into a major. (That would go double for high school counselors, but that's another conversation.) In my experience, college advising now is largely focused on the fulfillment of graduation requirements. Guidance on choice of major based on individualized interactions that assess student interest and potential, and that educates students about career paths for liberal arts majors outside the sciences is very expensive.
This suggests that all education is vocational, which it isn't and shouldn't be. It also totally disregards the social importance of low-paid professions like teaching, social work, etc.
I don't disagree that education is valuable, but subsidizing super expensive programs via debt is a terrible way to fund education for low-paid professions. And education has negative externalities in addition to positive - the top universities accept overwhelmingly rich kids and tuition is expensive, so education entrenches inequality right as people are starting life.
I think it's actually an argument that most school should happen via the up-front subsidization European model that Matt is arguing against here. Does anyone seriously think the US is more cultured than Finland or France just because a few more people go to college?
Totally in agreement there. As an American who lives in Europe (across the Baltic from Helsinki whose titular university that Matt was so unimpressed by because it has... multiple campuses...?) think he is 100% wrong on this take.
The European model of middle-skills training, especially is far superior to the American one. And the median student is far better off studying at Western European universities than at middling American ones.
Even many elite students would be better served at the elite European universities than American ones, given the relative cost and academic/intellectual/cultural/vocational benefits thereof. Frankly, had I to do it over again myself, I probably would have studied in Europe instead of at my very expensive private elite American university, for which I had to take out a lot of student loan debt for and which caused me significant financial strain in my 20s (also because of the personal debts I had to take up to supplement my HCOL city non-tuition costs in the absence of parental subsidy).
But, given an American student is generally faced with only two basic options--college vs. no college--I argue that they're still marginally better off with college, despite the eye-watering cost, debt burden, and unsuitability of the tool for its purpose in many cases.
Maybe make posting post-graduation employment statistics mandatory? But I think most people that end up in a useless ivy master's know what they're getting into. At least that was my experience.
I'm guessing that's true - I think just shutting programs down if students can't pay their debts is reasonable, the same way that we no longer allow predatory mortgage products without shutting down the entire mortgage industry.
I would require bachelor's degrees overall to meet the same consumer standard as Obama's old for-profit standard (which should also apply to specific grad programs, so that otherwise reputable schools can't run a scam business on the side). I think the college major transparency requirement would just be an extra level of protection since it's mostly naive 18-year-olds making these decisions. And because I think media coverage could amplify these effects - if local TV news stations keep running segments on degrees from State U where everyone earns $15,000 a year 10 years after graduation, it might provide a good incentive to universities to invest less money in useless programs.
Yeah, but if people know the employment outcomes and they still want to enroll for the fun/prestige/networking then I don't see the issue, they're essentially subsidizing research/scholarships. I do think a high tax on University advertisement spending would help everyone, since it's mostly a zero sum game anyways. We can then redirect that tax income to the education system in a more egalitarian way.
Since college degrees are a large but often relatively good debt comparable to mortgage debt, maybe it would be best to treat college somewhat like mortgage debt (dischargeable in bankruptcy, with at least some level of consumer protection, and requirements that people qualify in some way...this could ensure that rich trust fund babies with wealth to burn could still get an NYU film degree, the same way as rich people can buy a uselessly large but cool house).
Unfortunately we seem to have an aversion to treating education like the consumer product that it is, which is why I would like stricter regulation, but I'm open to finding a way to preserve access to useless programs for rich people who want to waste money.
The trick about higher ed debt is that we (I think correctly) treat an education credential as completely non-revocable except for academic misdeeds.
If policy ever existed such that "go to Hahhvahd, get a killer education on loans, discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and end off better for it" was obviously a good plan before a student embarked on it, that would be bad policy and we would need to fix it.
If you substitute “hospital” for “university”, isn’t this functionally a defense of the US healthcare system just because the best few hospitals in the world are here? Mayo Clinic doesn’t justify the waste of the entire healthcare system and Harvard doesn’t justify the waste of the entire higher education system.
Or if this argument is correct, then isn’t a lower-spending single payer system a bad idea and we should figure out how to reform our healthcare system in a way that allows Mayo to thrive? Hospitals put money into cancer and vaccine research, so they have good externalities too.
Yes, in both healthcare and education, the more free market, consumer-driven, fistfuls-of-money-sloshing-around American model allows for higher peaks of top performance. And that's enormously valuable, to Americans and the world. In both cases, we could do a better job with distributional equity and creating better structural incentives for efficient allocation of resources (such as forcing key institutions to internalize costs of inefficiency). But would be a serious mistake to try to cut costs with crude spending caps and controls that truncate and eliminate the peaks of high performance. We're a wealthy society and there's no inherent reason why we shouldn't spend lots of money on our health, wellbeing and education.
Basically agree with this. I do find it funny that people who support this model for education spending think it's evil for healthcare (and vice versa) when it's almost literally the same exact funding model
Precisely!
I would be interested in taking a harder look at the criteria that are used to evaluate the world's "best" universities. My hunch is that it has nothing to do with the quality of instruction and is instead some combination of 1) factors that tightly correlate with the elitism of the student body and 2) the research that the university produces. By those standards, of course Anglo and American institutions are gonna outperform; Yale's student body will always be better off than the student body of some other country's system of publicly financed schools. And even the research a university isn't a good basis of comparison because it falsely assumes that other countries adopt the (not obviously good) American practice of centering their research on college campuses. (Teaching undergrads the second law of thermodynamics is a fundamentally different task than performing experiments with a particle accelerators.)
In a lot of countries (like Germany where I live), basic research is conducted without a university affiliation, which means that no university basks in the reputational benefits from that research. If you were to snap your fingers and call the Max Planck Institut part of Humboldt University, Humboldt would instantaneously become one of the greatest research universities in the world through nothing but an administrative trick. My friend's husband is a mathematician who does pure research. He teaches no classes, has no university affiliation. Also, he works at an institute that is literally a couple of blocks away from a university. In the US, that institute would clearly be part of the university.
There's no doubt the US does a lot of research and has some great schools, but the positive impacts are greatly skewed by the false assumption that higher education in Europe and elsewhere operates on the same basic UK-US model.
you forget to mention better 420 access for American universities when talking about HIGHER education.
I don't see any European schools making Playboy's list of top party colleges!
I think it is difficult to really compare to the European system for a few reasons:
(1) European degrees are typically three years.
(2) European degrees are typically centered entirely around the field of study, rather than the liberal arts education people receive in the US.
(3) European countries don't feel a need to send everyone to college. People whose career goals don't require a college degree don't go to college.
Look, it's great to get an education, but not worth accumulating six figures in debt just for some personal growth. In addition, in the US, a college degree is a de facto requirement for the vast majority of white-collar employment; most of these people really don't need a college degree. The loan system has created an environment where employers can insist on an extraneous credential (for the job), which is however prohibitively expensive.