These conversations tend to also ignore that the percentage of Americans attending college has more than doubled in the last 50 years and the return on investment of a college degree has never been higher. If the quality (measured by earnings instead of education) of a product and demand for that product both go up it only makes rational sense that it will get more expensive. We should be far more worried about opportunities for people who don't go to college.
The argument in this one is much better than the previous one. Free community college is a worthy & attainable goal. Leaving the very top tier to their own is probably cost-benefit tradeoff there. A big issue is culling the for-profit trade sector (eg, Bob Smith barber college).
I should say that I think calling European Universities low quality with a crappy college experience is unfair & inaccurate. I was interested in the UK's top global universities list, and while I certainly approve of UT Austin (my alma mater) being there & A&M not :-D, that list is hardly very scientific.
can’t tell if this take is cleverly designed to put Left Leaning Academic types who support $50k or more in debt relief in an odd spot or not by low key sustaining the alleged “greatness” of the American system while also low key highlighting its excesses... 🧐
Surprised the difference between career technical education (CTE) vs general education wasn't even mentioned in an analysis of US Higher Ed? The US has the best Universities at the top end and the worst CTE. Compared to the rest of the world we have the most regressive educational system. We should seek to maximize the best of both systems since that would tackle the twin problems of bogus for-profit colleges filling the CTE vacuum nd the hopeless fantasy that more than 30% of the US population wants or needs a Bachelor's. Oh, and by the way, DeSantis' bill attacking the crony accreditation system is genius.
I feel like the fact that the United States has absolutely huge enrollment and average graduation is really bad? It's not something to gloss over - "Some college" provides a wage premium of about $40/week and if the majority of students are obtaining this education than we've got really, really bad effects especially with debts written on the assumption of the college wage premium.
The focus on schools instead of degrees obscures the core problem.
A person from a non-rich family who gets a degree in sociology or ethnic studies or any number of other areas — whether at Harvard or Last Chance State College — is unlikely to be able to pay off their college debt through employment.
The scams in education are not principally in garbage schools like Trump University and its peers. The scams are run-of-the-mill tenured faculty and TAs at non-profit universities convincing 18 year olds to major in things that will never make them incomes, often by taking on debt to pay for it.
The big lack of incentive alignment is still around the way schools get paid regardless of their graduates' performance in the labor market: once they have the money, schools have no skin in the game.
I don't know what the best policy around fixing this might be: if a student with debt from school X declares bankruptcy or stops paying student loans, maybe we should claw back some percentage of the money spent at that school. Underwriting, particularly for the classic party majors, should probably exist: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton
Most schools are incentivized to get as many butts in seats as possible, because what happens after is immaterial to them. That's a big problem that should probably be better foregrounded in these discussions: the problem isn't in many of the top-most schools, but it's happening almost everywhere else.
I'm a data engineer/scientist. Out of curiosity/vague sense of mission, I took a position (and big pay cut) at a non-elite non-profit university system that has an interesting niche.
One of my big curiosities was trying to figure out where all the money went, especially given the fact that so many of the courses were taught by adjuncts making very little money. There was a small cadre of administrators - many with the EDD degrees - who were likely making far more money than they could have elsewhere.
But the vast majority of the admin bloat was pretty smart, dedicated people who were making way less than they could have in the private sector or even government and who were in roles that, to be honest, probably had little impact on anything. Trying to improve, say, first-year student retention is just really hard. But those people could - and later did - apply the same analytical skills elsewhere for twice the salary in ways that definitely impacted a company.
The non-profit university system eventually "acquired" a smaller, sketchy for-profit. After months of denying it, it then had the for-profit operations people take over many of the core administrative functions of the non-profit parent system. I quit rather than having to deal with all that.
An an aside: My ventures into working in the non-profit world have revealed far more toxic, weird workplace cultures than the traditional businesses. The more noble the company's mission, the more fucked the internal politics are. My n is only 3 on this though.
In the chart, what counts as "public spending" on tertiary education? I'm also curious what a "total spending" chart looks like for comparison... In other words, is total US spending markedly different on the basis of private contributions?
"The institutions that grant doctoral degrees get the most subsidy, but they charge the highest tuition."
It's worth noting that doctoral studies, at least in STEM, at the most prestigious institutions are heavily subsidized through fellowships. However, these very programs attract top talent that forego significantly higher income jobs ($120K+ in companies vs. <$60K in fellowships) to learn and conduct valuable research which, in the long run, benefits the public at large. It's an expense well incurred.
Something I’ve heard from my German friends is that there’s no real sorting of students between institutions, and the institutions are barely even delineated from each other. It can be competitive go get into a major, and not necessarily every campus offers that major, but there are no real prestige or student-quality differences between the schools offering a given program. Also, students and lecturers will tend to take classes and teach at nominally different institutions throughout the city in any given day.
It is not the case that Germany is trying to concentrate excellence in the same way we do and coming up short. They’re just not in that business.
I've attended school in the USA, Japan, France, and the UK, and, in my personal experience at least, the educational experience is way way better in the US. In the US, I got continuous assessment, regular office hours with welcoming professors, decent lecturers who covered all the course materials, feedback on the papers that I wrote, an undergraduate advisor who met with me once a week, and of course a huge, beautiful campus. The only place that even slightly resembled my US experience was in a well-funded University in the UK and there I got: half the amount of lectures as in the US for the same material; one three hour test at the end of the year; professors who got angry with you for coming to office hours; no feedback on papers; a PhD supervisor who saw me four times a year; and nothing like the preparation for the PhD job market like what is offered in US universities.
There is no comparison anywhere to the US college experience (except maybe China?). They pamper you so much. It's wonderful! As far as I can tell this is mostly for monetary reasons. The place I was at in the UK couldn’t offer quite as high salaries to its professors (although they were still substantial) so they compensated by halving the teaching load and virtually eliminating the grading load. This leaves more time for research, which lamentably is the only thing that matters for an academic career.
Or is it that the high attention, beautiful campus US system can charge more money? (Most of the really beautiful campus architecture was built before costs skyrocketed.)
I'm seeing an idea floating around about "too many kids going to college that should not be there", but I get the impression this is based on vibes more than anywhere else -- I'm not seeing a lot of empirical data pointing to it.
Now, as Matt said, there are too many students being scammed by fly-by-night operations and online degrees, but I think he's right that this is mostly a symptom of the labor market being bad, especially during the Great Recession. I'm not sure there really is an epidemic of people in 2022 going $200,000 in debt for a degree in Underwater Basketweaving.
"I'm seeing an idea floating around about 'too many kids going to college that should not be there'"
I'm going to counter people who keep pushing that idea: college is exactly the place where 18-23 year olds should be, because where else does society want them? It harkens back to the original setup of the university (I'm talking from its medieval origins) - accumulate all the smart people in one place where they can debate and bounce ideas off each other and generate new ideas and knowledge to power the kingdom. That was its reason for being.
Young people showed up because the rich gentry paid to have them sent there. These late-teens were too immature to be functioning, working adults on the estate (often getting into trouble), and instead were sent to a place with other similar-aged rich boys where they could self-entertain and socialize with each other for a couple years. Whatever education they got was incidental, as if gained through osmosis simply by hanging around the actual scholars. It was a marriage of convenience: the scholars got the money to fund their work while doing minimal baby-sitting for a bunch of people who mostly wanted to hang around each other and thus didn't need any real baby-sitting. Nobody cared much if the boys actually got an education in college, most of them worked in the family business once they got out anyway.
I wonder how our higher education debates could be solved if we went back to acknowledging this purpose for colleges: a place to generate knowledge about the world (research) and a place where society can send teens to be "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" but didn't worry much about it being a place of occupational training/"investment in the future".
"I'm not sure there really is an epidemic of people in 2022 going $200,000 in debt for a degree in Underwater Basketweaving."
I agree. Part of the issue may be that while there are very few such people, if you're the type of person who ends up working in the media you're much more likely to know one or be one yourself.
Another aspect is that those theoretical people are less sympathetic figures than "there were no jobs in 2010 so I applied for University of Phoenix, and now I'm stuck."
>>the University of Helsinki has an Equality and Diversity Committee led part-time by the Vice-Rector of the University and featuring one full-time staffer from the HR office.<<
Since Finland's population is 93.6% ethnic Finns (and 5.6% Swedish), that actually sounds like quite a bit of administrative bloat there at the University of Helsinki.
These conversations tend to also ignore that the percentage of Americans attending college has more than doubled in the last 50 years and the return on investment of a college degree has never been higher. If the quality (measured by earnings instead of education) of a product and demand for that product both go up it only makes rational sense that it will get more expensive. We should be far more worried about opportunities for people who don't go to college.
The argument in this one is much better than the previous one. Free community college is a worthy & attainable goal. Leaving the very top tier to their own is probably cost-benefit tradeoff there. A big issue is culling the for-profit trade sector (eg, Bob Smith barber college).
I should say that I think calling European Universities low quality with a crappy college experience is unfair & inaccurate. I was interested in the UK's top global universities list, and while I certainly approve of UT Austin (my alma mater) being there & A&M not :-D, that list is hardly very scientific.
Was the former mayor of Cincinnati you mentioned Jerry Springer?
can’t tell if this take is cleverly designed to put Left Leaning Academic types who support $50k or more in debt relief in an odd spot or not by low key sustaining the alleged “greatness” of the American system while also low key highlighting its excesses... 🧐
Surprised the difference between career technical education (CTE) vs general education wasn't even mentioned in an analysis of US Higher Ed? The US has the best Universities at the top end and the worst CTE. Compared to the rest of the world we have the most regressive educational system. We should seek to maximize the best of both systems since that would tackle the twin problems of bogus for-profit colleges filling the CTE vacuum nd the hopeless fantasy that more than 30% of the US population wants or needs a Bachelor's. Oh, and by the way, DeSantis' bill attacking the crony accreditation system is genius.
I feel like the fact that the United States has absolutely huge enrollment and average graduation is really bad? It's not something to gloss over - "Some college" provides a wage premium of about $40/week and if the majority of students are obtaining this education than we've got really, really bad effects especially with debts written on the assumption of the college wage premium.
The focus on schools instead of degrees obscures the core problem.
A person from a non-rich family who gets a degree in sociology or ethnic studies or any number of other areas — whether at Harvard or Last Chance State College — is unlikely to be able to pay off their college debt through employment.
The scams in education are not principally in garbage schools like Trump University and its peers. The scams are run-of-the-mill tenured faculty and TAs at non-profit universities convincing 18 year olds to major in things that will never make them incomes, often by taking on debt to pay for it.
Amount of debt should be tied to expected earnings of your degree.
Also, that debt should have the possibility of being discharged in bankruptcy if necessary.
There should be no wholesale debt forgiveness
The big lack of incentive alignment is still around the way schools get paid regardless of their graduates' performance in the labor market: once they have the money, schools have no skin in the game.
I don't know what the best policy around fixing this might be: if a student with debt from school X declares bankruptcy or stops paying student loans, maybe we should claw back some percentage of the money spent at that school. Underwriting, particularly for the classic party majors, should probably exist: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton
Most schools are incentivized to get as many butts in seats as possible, because what happens after is immaterial to them. That's a big problem that should probably be better foregrounded in these discussions: the problem isn't in many of the top-most schools, but it's happening almost everywhere else.
I'm a data engineer/scientist. Out of curiosity/vague sense of mission, I took a position (and big pay cut) at a non-elite non-profit university system that has an interesting niche.
One of my big curiosities was trying to figure out where all the money went, especially given the fact that so many of the courses were taught by adjuncts making very little money. There was a small cadre of administrators - many with the EDD degrees - who were likely making far more money than they could have elsewhere.
But the vast majority of the admin bloat was pretty smart, dedicated people who were making way less than they could have in the private sector or even government and who were in roles that, to be honest, probably had little impact on anything. Trying to improve, say, first-year student retention is just really hard. But those people could - and later did - apply the same analytical skills elsewhere for twice the salary in ways that definitely impacted a company.
The non-profit university system eventually "acquired" a smaller, sketchy for-profit. After months of denying it, it then had the for-profit operations people take over many of the core administrative functions of the non-profit parent system. I quit rather than having to deal with all that.
An an aside: My ventures into working in the non-profit world have revealed far more toxic, weird workplace cultures than the traditional businesses. The more noble the company's mission, the more fucked the internal politics are. My n is only 3 on this though.
In the chart, what counts as "public spending" on tertiary education? I'm also curious what a "total spending" chart looks like for comparison... In other words, is total US spending markedly different on the basis of private contributions?
"The institutions that grant doctoral degrees get the most subsidy, but they charge the highest tuition."
It's worth noting that doctoral studies, at least in STEM, at the most prestigious institutions are heavily subsidized through fellowships. However, these very programs attract top talent that forego significantly higher income jobs ($120K+ in companies vs. <$60K in fellowships) to learn and conduct valuable research which, in the long run, benefits the public at large. It's an expense well incurred.
Something I’ve heard from my German friends is that there’s no real sorting of students between institutions, and the institutions are barely even delineated from each other. It can be competitive go get into a major, and not necessarily every campus offers that major, but there are no real prestige or student-quality differences between the schools offering a given program. Also, students and lecturers will tend to take classes and teach at nominally different institutions throughout the city in any given day.
It is not the case that Germany is trying to concentrate excellence in the same way we do and coming up short. They’re just not in that business.
I've attended school in the USA, Japan, France, and the UK, and, in my personal experience at least, the educational experience is way way better in the US. In the US, I got continuous assessment, regular office hours with welcoming professors, decent lecturers who covered all the course materials, feedback on the papers that I wrote, an undergraduate advisor who met with me once a week, and of course a huge, beautiful campus. The only place that even slightly resembled my US experience was in a well-funded University in the UK and there I got: half the amount of lectures as in the US for the same material; one three hour test at the end of the year; professors who got angry with you for coming to office hours; no feedback on papers; a PhD supervisor who saw me four times a year; and nothing like the preparation for the PhD job market like what is offered in US universities.
There is no comparison anywhere to the US college experience (except maybe China?). They pamper you so much. It's wonderful! As far as I can tell this is mostly for monetary reasons. The place I was at in the UK couldn’t offer quite as high salaries to its professors (although they were still substantial) so they compensated by halving the teaching load and virtually eliminating the grading load. This leaves more time for research, which lamentably is the only thing that matters for an academic career.
Or is it that the high attention, beautiful campus US system can charge more money? (Most of the really beautiful campus architecture was built before costs skyrocketed.)
I'm seeing an idea floating around about "too many kids going to college that should not be there", but I get the impression this is based on vibes more than anywhere else -- I'm not seeing a lot of empirical data pointing to it.
Now, as Matt said, there are too many students being scammed by fly-by-night operations and online degrees, but I think he's right that this is mostly a symptom of the labor market being bad, especially during the Great Recession. I'm not sure there really is an epidemic of people in 2022 going $200,000 in debt for a degree in Underwater Basketweaving.
"I'm seeing an idea floating around about 'too many kids going to college that should not be there'"
I'm going to counter people who keep pushing that idea: college is exactly the place where 18-23 year olds should be, because where else does society want them? It harkens back to the original setup of the university (I'm talking from its medieval origins) - accumulate all the smart people in one place where they can debate and bounce ideas off each other and generate new ideas and knowledge to power the kingdom. That was its reason for being.
Young people showed up because the rich gentry paid to have them sent there. These late-teens were too immature to be functioning, working adults on the estate (often getting into trouble), and instead were sent to a place with other similar-aged rich boys where they could self-entertain and socialize with each other for a couple years. Whatever education they got was incidental, as if gained through osmosis simply by hanging around the actual scholars. It was a marriage of convenience: the scholars got the money to fund their work while doing minimal baby-sitting for a bunch of people who mostly wanted to hang around each other and thus didn't need any real baby-sitting. Nobody cared much if the boys actually got an education in college, most of them worked in the family business once they got out anyway.
I wonder how our higher education debates could be solved if we went back to acknowledging this purpose for colleges: a place to generate knowledge about the world (research) and a place where society can send teens to be "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" but didn't worry much about it being a place of occupational training/"investment in the future".
"I'm not sure there really is an epidemic of people in 2022 going $200,000 in debt for a degree in Underwater Basketweaving."
I agree. Part of the issue may be that while there are very few such people, if you're the type of person who ends up working in the media you're much more likely to know one or be one yourself.
Another aspect is that those theoretical people are less sympathetic figures than "there were no jobs in 2010 so I applied for University of Phoenix, and now I'm stuck."
>>the University of Helsinki has an Equality and Diversity Committee led part-time by the Vice-Rector of the University and featuring one full-time staffer from the HR office.<<
Since Finland's population is 93.6% ethnic Finns (and 5.6% Swedish), that actually sounds like quite a bit of administrative bloat there at the University of Helsinki.