Higher Education Bubble Update Over At Instapundit

With one college-age daughter and another about to be, Glenn Reynolds' Higher Education Bubble updates are something I've followed very closely. He has a very long, multi-updated one today that is worth reading.

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Rick Perry, Meet Salman Khan.

Back in February, Texas Governor Rick Perry challenged the state's colleges and universities to find a way to offer a four year degree for $10,000 or less. Not $10,000 per year, $10,000 total. Including books.  With the technology available today it should be possible. The cost of a four year degree the way it is done now has risen by over 400% from when I collected my degree almost 30 years ago. higher education must be one of a very few enterprises to have had negative productivity growth over time. Wander over to Instapundit and search on the term "higher education bubble" and you will get a 100 or more results. The current higher education system is becoming unsustainable and is an increasingly poor return on investment for the student.

Which brings me to Salman Khan. He may have the answer to how Texas can meet Perry's challenge. Khan was a hedge fund analyst working in Boston. He has some younger cousins that lived in New Orleans who needed tutoring in math. He put together a few YouTube tutorials for them so they could learn at their convenience. He didn't make the videos private, so other people started to watch them and thus was the Khan Academy born. I'll let him tell you the rest of the story in the TED video that follows. I see the question that needs to be answered is the determining how you test to make sure that degree requirements are met. I don't see this as a huge problem but the higher education establishment willl undoubtedly try to make it harder than it needs to be because this won't just upset their rice bowl, it will kick it across the room and shatter it.  The video is 20 minutes. It's worth every minute.

The Anchoress on Uncredentialed Wonder

That would be wonder as in that sense of joyful curiosity and delight in learning new things. 

 I've been following the rather worrisome phenomenon known as the "higher education bubble" lately. The cost of a college education keeps going up and up, 440% since I collected my degree almost 30 years ago, yet there seem to be fewer and fewer good job opportunities for college graduates, particularly ones that will pay them enough to retire the massive load of non-dischargeable student debt many will acquire, or even save enough money to retire themselves one day.  (As the joke goes; how do you get a psych major off  your porch? Pay him for the pizza.)

Over at The Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia has a wonderful post that explores the question of whether we have come to value a credential more than a true education. She also talks about the many examples of some very successful people who though they may not have possessed even so much as a GED are demonstrably better educated than some highly credentialed ones who are overtly disdainful of some of those successful people for the simple reason that they don't possess the right credentials. From the post:

I wonder if that’s really good for America, though. To become educated is a marvelous thing; to have the opportunity to study is a privilege too many take for granted. But have we become a society that places too much weight on the attainment of a diploma, which sometimes indicates nothing more than an ability to keep to a schedule and follow a syllabus, and underappreciates the ability to wonder, to strike out on an individual path, and to learn on one’s own? When did non-conformists become so unromantic and undervalued?

[snip]

It is a wonderful thing to sit in a classroom and grow in knowledge, if one is in fact doing that, but often it seems that degrees should be awarded in going through the motions; they come without a genuine expansion of thought, or an enlargement of wonder. And, to paraphrase Gregory of Nyssa, it’s the wondering that begets the knowing.

My sister also makes a great point:

Our Great-grandfather was a self-educated man, the eldest of 14 children, who rose to become the local equivalent of Superintendent of Schools without ever setting foot in a college or university. He used to walk the 5-10 miles to the local library whenever he had the chance.  Point is, credentials are fine, if they are meaningful, but it is intellectually slovenly to assume that there is only one way to acquire wisdom and knowledge. With our over-emphasis on credentials, we cheat ourselves out of the contributions of many bright ( or late-blooming) minds. 

Read the whole thing.

 

Barbara Oakley on Why Most Journalists Are Democrats

In an article ind Psychology Today entitled "Why Most Journalists Are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches", medical and biological engineering professor, Dr. Barbara Oakley talks about the psychology of conformism, self-selection and why most journalists identify as Democrats. It's worth reading the whole article but this is a point that jumped out at me:

"As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes. Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies. But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That’s why, when Robert Conquest was asked whether he wanted to retitle his updated The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges, his answer was: Yes, how about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?"

(via Instapundit)

More on Higher Education - Will It Be the Next Bubble to Pop?

This article at Minding the Campus is worth reading. It talks about the cost of higher education and its potential for being the next bubble, a la the housing market. The cost of a college degree has been rising at roughly three times the rate of inflation for some time. People have been willing to pay it, often going deep into debt (see post below), because they see it as the price of entry into the competition for the best paid jobs. Never mind that the degree earned may have little if any relevance to the career they actually end up with. I remember when I went to Large State U that the Chancellor addressed the incoming class and one thing he said has stuck in my mind ever since. He said that only about 5% of all liberal arts majors actually end up working in their field of study. I'm certainly not in that 5%, and that's probably a good thing because chances are it would be a poorly paid job teaching other people the same stuff.

After all, didn't ambitious citizens have to pay their dues to higher ed in order to have a meaningful chance at success? With seemingly no viable alternative or exit strategy, consumers have stretched their pocketbooks to the breaking point and taken out loans to purchase a chance at the American Dream. (Today over 35% of students rely on student loans, and the number is growing.) Not surprisingly, the last twenty years have seen tuition costs rise at over three times the rate of inflation. The overall costs for many private schools add up to $50,000 per year, while public universities cost up to $20,000
for state residents, and over $30,000 for those who hail from out of state. Meanwhile, wages for most Americans have been left in the dust.

Another point made in the article is of particular interest to me because part of my job involves arranging financing for both public and private higher education institutions.

Last September, Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore, wrote an influential essay at Inside Higher Ed in which he asserted that "the party's over" for higher ed's tuition and building binge. Burke focused on five main reasons for a contraction in higher education: 1) declines in tuition growth; 2) underperformance by endowments; 3) pullbacks by donors (indeed, on November 26 the Wall Street Journal published a lead story on how the economic crisis has caused a downturn in charity giving nation-wide); 4) lower funding from public and private sources; and 5) the fact that revenues from IPOs, investment property rights, and technology benefit only a few institutions. A respondent to Burke's piece added three other factors: 1) fewer students are attending college as the nation's demographics change; 2) "growing public awareness of the declining economic returns of a college degree" is causing a backlash; and 3) such on-line schools as the University of Phoenix provide education at a fraction of what residential institutions charge. (Will the Internet affect higher ed the same way it has affected newspapers?)

It's all very though provoking. Read the whole thing.

(via Instapundit and Newsalert)

Update: I remembered reading a column by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal along these same lines a while back and thought I blogged it already. Seems I didn't, so here it is. "College is an expensive way of taking an IQ test."