“New Houses were built in every direction; an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that was too rapidly approaching.”
—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
It wasn’t that long ago that I was having lunch with the father of a friend at Mory’s, the venerable dining club at Yale, and he said to me: “Do you realize, Roger, that tuition at Yale next year will be $10,000? Ten-thousand dollars.” We paused for a moment over the Golden Buck to savor this enormous sum.
Ten-thousand dollars per annum was indeed a tidy sum. It is still is. But if you hope to join the Whiffenpoofs next year, it’s going to cost someone at least $52,900.
Exactly who is going to be presented with that tab depends on a number of factors, some of which I’ll mention in a moment. But first let’s step back and ask this embarrassing question: Is it worth it?
Is four years at Yale (or Harvard, Princeton, or any other “competitive” college) worth $53,000 x 4 plus annual tuition increases for a grand total (assuming you are entering right now) of roughly a quarter of a million dollars?
This is a question that, to the consternation of academic administrators, more and more parents — not to mention responsible teenagers — are asking themselves.
I took my epigraph from Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a remorseless anatomy of financial “bubbles” from the Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Bubble to Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland and beyond. “At last, . . . the more prudent began to see that this folly could not last forever. . . . It was seen that somebody must lose fearfully in the end.”
Glenn Reynolds, a lawyer and genius loci of the Instapundit blog, has for many months been been cataloguing signs of the higher education bubble. Writing recently in the Washington Examiner, Reynolds explained the process:
“The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they’re buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn’t.”
Have we reached that point in higher education? Over at Instapundit, Reynolds recently linked to an illuminating article at “TaxProf Blog” which includes this illuminating chart comparing the rise in housing prices with college tuition since 1978.
Paul Caron, the TaxProf himself, observes that “the housing bubble resulted from about a 4-time increase in home prices between 1978 and 2006, and college tuition has now increased by more than twice that amount since 1978 — it’s gone up by more than a factor of ten times.” Bottom line? “The college tuition bubble makes the housing price bubble seem pretty lame by comparison.”
Imagine the library you could buy for $52,900. Could one read that many books? (That is, of course, a quite different question.) Throwing money at something has become the modus operandi of a sector of our society (that shall remain nameless). But education is not something you buy; it is something you live.
Your post is precious. Everybody should carefully reflect about the two points you make (“how many books” , “education..is something you live”).
Truly excellent.
“’Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?’”
That is the question, isn’t it? For too many years now our children have been taught by holdovers from the Hippie generation — peace, love at any cost; America bad; military baby-killers… And they can say this with a straight face while aborting their own babies as an inconvenience.
My aunt and uncle were duly shocked when their two girls left home with morals and ideals intact, only to return home after one year spouting page 1 of the Communist manual. They had been “educated” so they no longer needed church, the Bible, or “old codger” truisms.
Also, if education at the higher colleges (Yale, Harvard, Princeton) is $250,000 for four years……..who paid for Obama’s college????
Well you probably shouldn’t have let the kids go to college in the first place then!
But seriously, the ability to question things, think critically and form ones own opinions, is a crucial aspect of education?
Oh please, don’t make me laugh!
)
If you think the major universities teach anyone how to think you need to lay off the kool aid.
I’m pretty sure Obama was still paying off student loans up until he sold “Dreams of my Father”.
I don’t quite know what point you are trying to make.
The funding came from this source, although no doubt it was laundered through a series of operatives and front groups.
Roger, as they say, from your lips to you-know-who…
I see no end of opportunity for the institution that can use the free material put out on the internet by everyone from MIT to the state universities, test, and matriculate. The free course material by itself is on no value if employers want to see a degree. Somebody who can offer credible degrees based on free quality course material could offer a degree for under $10,000. That would result in a tuition singularity all across the higher education industry.
Yes, that’s a fabulous idea, and one that someone has just got to be considering.
I wonder
a. if the free stuff could be subsequently copyrighted if the schools find out it’s being used in competition with them.
b. if they could ever get this type of school you’re referring to accredited. I would think that the people who accredit are the competition.
1. States control accreditation.
2. Any material produced from government funded research is ipso facto public domain.
And since states control accreditation, therein lies the challenge, as most of those states have one or more ‘state universities’ that these newly accredited ‘inexpensive’ colleges/universities would be in direct competition with.
We’d be asking the states to basically cut the throats of their own state universities. I suspect there’d be significant resistance in the accreditation process.
The question is whether employers will accept such an education as the equivalent of a name-brand university “education.” For one thing, it is well known that many employers value elite-college graduates not necessarily for what they have “learned” in college, but because they rely on the screening process that got the graduate/job candidate into the college to begin with. Will they place the same value on graduates of computer universities?
And many colleges are locked into guild arrangements with credentialing bodies of various professions: teaching, medicine, law, architecture, to name a few. Bar associations and medical boards (and certainly union-dominated education boards!) are not going to be recognizing computer degrees any time soon, I’ll wager. It took a long time to build up these symbiotic conspiracies of monopoly, and they will not go away without a very long fight.
Great article, Roger. Just two minors points.
1.) Students pay “fees” over and above tuition; then there’s room and board to consider.
2.) Many students, perhaps even most, do not graduate in four years.
Lastly, on another front, large universities are developing a kind of two tiered system: one is the traditional teaching tier, the other is the research tier. These two tiers are slowly drifting apart. I don’t know what to make of the situation in relation to what you have said. But my guess is that research dollars will begin to shrink.
Isn’t that the truth:
1. If you want to be licensed to teach in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the program takes a minimum of 5 years. If you want an elementary K-12 certification it takes 6 years and a Masters Degree. 4 year college has gone bye bye…
2. My eldest is enrolled in one of the highest rated Architecture programs in the US (and its a public college which really gripes the Ivies… good).. the program has been 5 years since I can remember.
3. Some of the time is ablated by AP and other certification tests that help ablate the requirement for some of the core curriculum survey courses (those boring 300 student drone fests with Zinn’s propaganda blit on US History…etc.) But many schools have stopped taking the the courses above Freshman year level and even set up parallel standards… my son had 2 semesters of 5 hour calculus accepted as AP credit, and still had to take a numb nut Geometry course because the college had no particular valid reason… it just insisted that the course be taken for two semesters. It wasn’t even taught, it was a computerized CBT course that required computer visitation to a lab to take the tests and quizzes.
4. The campus has lost 6 dormitories to academic offices. 30 years ago the student population was roughly 5,000 less than it is now. The number of academic and office buildings has exploded so much that dorm space was taken up by office space for administrators.
Administrative jobs (non-instructional – to run the school’s plant and equipment) are almost impossible to get due to the massive academic requirements laid out, and go unfilled for years. Those administrative jobs that are filled are given to people who have years of academic work, but nothing much to note for actual real world experience with running facilities.
Teaching jobs are doled out like prizes. The over specialization, compartmentalization, departmentalization, school (vs the entire university) structure has exploded. Instead of simple Arts and Sciences, the ego ridden administrations have created new sub groups of schools, Arts and Sciences is now three or four new schools in the university systems, with all new administrators, Directors, Deans, assistant Deans, Deans of Gender, Directors of Political this and Social that…
So, 5,000 more students meant 170% increase in support staff…
And the state school costs roughly $25k a year with room and board… which is off campus because there aren’t enough undergraduate dormitory facilities for the students.
The upshot is that this all comes from borrowed money, funded by the Government. Which is a perfect example as to why universities and colleges run the way they do.
r/The Mighty Fahvaag
Great post describing the two tier system. I worked in the research branch after spending 30 years as a state employed engineer. There is a whole ecosystem of research that is solely dependent on research dollars from each states Senators and Representatives. It’s a self licking ice cream cone. I think the global warming academic branch is a prime example of find a parade and then get out in front of it. There are new research areas being developed every year. My university had lofty research goals but they were tied to money levels not products.
I believe this is a prime area for the bubble burst. Many of the graduate students in my program were foreign and their tuition was subsidized by the research money coming from congress. If we would have had to depend on money from the private sector, we would have closed shop.
Your point about space on campus is dead on. Most of our research facility was office space and we took space from academic studies but since we were bringing in money (the school administration got a cut off of every dollar we brought it), they gave us the space. This created a huge slush fund that the administration could spend without much oversight.
I think you are on to something here…
Jake
Big things are afoot in this country. Let’s not let the crisis the Marxists induced to destroy America go to waste!
On another thread, I argued that the Tea Parties are post-racial and the decades-long scam of race-baiting is on life support.
Mr. Kimball here argues that the scam of “higher education” is about to burst. Thank God. Who believes that what the country needs is more Harvard graduates? It’s insane.
But there are many other bubbles and cons that are reaching the point where the great American people have had enough. If we prevail, the entitlements scam will be slain; social security and Medicare will be placed on a paygo basis, myriad forms of fraudulent welfare scemes will be shut down, Mediare fraud will be ended, and even “lawsuits as redistribution” will be ended. It may sound like a fantasy, but I’m for it. What about you? Let the grown-ups prevail after 50 years of marxists converting the children.
And think about the others now teetering on the brink of extinction: the msm, Capo politicians, government pensions, unions as shake-down conglomerates, Wall Street as socialist cash cows.
All of these and more could fall within 5 years, simply because the criminals, in there overwhelming, overwheening greed and arrogance have done the one thing they never could have imagined they might do.
They woke us up.
“On another thread, I argued that the Tea Parties are post-racial and the decades-long scam of race-baiting is on life support.”
Yes. In fact, I think identity politics in general is a dead issue. After 40 years, the American public has had enough. Identity will still inform and give meaning to individual lives, but it won’t gain anyone anything in the public sphere. We are moving toward a level playing field, where identity, whether racial, gender, religious, or ethnic, will neither hinder nor harm. It can’t happen soon enough.
Hehehe – you sound right to me, but Cynthia Tucker, nutty she! has a very different view of this situation:
“Backlash to the browning of America” – Cynthia Tucker, via RCP:
http://blogs.ajc.com/cynthia-tucker/2010/09/03/summer-of-discontent-backlash-to-the-browning-of-america/?cxntfid=blogs_cynthia_tucker
We have moved well past, what they have been mired in since the late 50′s.
…and it will kill them. Good!
“Yes. In fact, I think identity politics in general is a dead issue. After 40 years, the American public has had enough. Identity will still inform and give meaning to individual lives, but it won’t gain anyone anything in the public sphere. We are moving toward a level playing field, where identity, whether racial, gender, religious, or ethnic, will neither hinder nor harm. It can’t happen soon enough.”
Beautifully said. This needs to be printed on a poster and plastered on every street corner.
I argued that the Tea Parties are post-racial and the decades-long scam of race-baiting is on life support.
Agreed. I’ve stood by that point, on many a forum. From the start, the Tea Parties took a benign attitude toward race. It was automatically assumed that, as it grew, it would become multiracial. That is exactly what is happening. To the left, this is anathema. It is the only weapon they have left and it has fallen completely flat. The barrel is worn-out, the firing pin is broken and they are out of ammo. Death by their own hand.
A recent poll shows Rand Paul getting 37% of the black vote in Kentucky. It shows him 15 points ahead of the Democrat. Everybody says they don’t believe it but there you are.
Love your sentiments, Roger. And your reasoning.
BUT, having spent a long, long lifetime of daily disappointments while witnessing the bottomless gullibility, even stupidity, of the American public: it’s beyond reason that anything can ‘wake them up’.
I disagree. It’s “not beyond reason” that the American Public will wake up. They’re already awake – have been for decades. Walk into any cafe; stand on any street corner any place but the socialist north east and the “left coast” and listen to average citizens talk. The Tea Party – along with the internet – is doing what the msm succeded in suppressing for so long. Letting them know they’re not alone in what they think about the farce going on inside the beltway. These last few months – when our so called “representatives” completely ignored our wishes – was a clarion call: all we’re doing now is letting the marxist know we’re onto them – and their days are numbered!
I would add, start your base year in 1968 rather than ’78, otherwise you miss out on the ’70s “stagflation.” Then there is the “grade inflation,” which can be explained to some extent by the educational draft deferment. Because of the draft, male enrollments exceeded females by up to 30 percent in 1970–females were exempt from the draft and Selective Service registration . Forty years later those gender ratios are reversed and now some people talk about the need for poor white male college affirmative action programs! Hell, bring back the Vietnam era draft and those gender ratios should straighten right out! Those Michael Moore celebrity types are not really interested in being conscripted “freedom fighters” to prevent the on going genocide in Darfur. Gee, strange, now that Obama’s the president there is no mention of Darfur!
Those kids would be better set for life if the parents just gave them the money outright. The could buy a brand new house and keep $150,000 in the bank.
Under those conditions you could get by very well just waiting tables or driving a cab.
Very interesting observation.
Or buy junior a small business. For that kind of money you could get a shop with a comfortable cash flow.
Setting Junior up in a business was one of Caroline Bird’s alternatives to the expense of college in her 1975 book The Case Against College. That’s not a typo; Ms. Bird saw the higher-ed bubble in full view as early as the year nineteen hundred and seventy five.
Starting out, with a paid off residence, makes a whole lot of things easier. You can make some mistakes and regroup pretty easily. Downside is the life lessons you learn along the way. Then again, keeping them out of the re-education centers, learning by doing or learning a trade would offset that, probably many times over.
Good point about the house. Remember though that the only way to gain access to the full 250,000 is to spend it over 4 years in the prescribed way. Some of the amount will likely come from aid, grants, scholarships, gov money.
It isn’t only the identity-politics drivel that’s the problem. Obama’s war on the middle class has made it so that borrowing even for tech education is too big a risk to take:
Just Say No to Student Loans for High-Tech Education
I just sent my college senior off on a cruise around the world, on a cruise liner. With classes. It’s cheaper for me than sending him to his state school as an out-of-stater. How ridiculous. Of course, the classes he’s taking worry me…..
I look forward to the crashing of prices that accompanies the bubble pop. I’ve always wanted a doctorate in nuclear physics. After the coming crash, I might be able to afford it.
I have a doctorate in physics (U. of Chicago, mid-1980s) and a large library of undergraduate and graduate level physics texts. I will teach you everything I know, including presenting you with questions to solve and grading your answers, for $15,000. Take as long as you like to complete the work. Deal? (I’ll throw in all the math you’ll have to learn for free)
Interesting points, Roger.
Is an Ivy League “education” worth the price of admission? One could argue that being “admitted” is worth the price, since Ivy League pedigree carries some weight on first job applications…and certainly seems to hold sway in three four arenas. Government service specter, academia, Goldman Sachs/trial lawyers types…and mass media outlets. My stars and little garters! That seems to overlap overwhelmingly with….Democratic strongholds!
Outside of those bastions of “feed the machine/rage against the machine” types, it tends to have a diminishing returns quality.
Moreover, outside of the “hard” sciences (engineering, accounting, computer science, not to mention agriculture) there is no four year degree that is of very much greater use than many others. Medicine, law, and many other degrees require more than four years. The cost is closer to $400,000 than it is to a quarter of a million dollars.
In the those hard sciences for undergraduates, you are probably MUCH better off in considering the price/value/status analysis, to go to Illinois, Michigan, Purdue, Indiana, than you are to go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia.
Obtaining a four year B.A. in a humanities major at an Ivy League institution, is a four year exercise in avoidance of economics…personal and intellectual.
The value is in having gained admission, not in the matriculating. In the humanities, it’s really the building of a McEducation or perhaps a McResume’. It is overvalued and overpriced. It needs a modification and principal reduction to more closely relate to actual value. A “medification”, perhaps.
I suggest a national program called the CAMP, program. 17 year olds who gain admission would be offered a College Assistance Medification Program, if they bought too much “Ivy” and now their student loans don’t reflect the “teaser” that they were sold in the job market.
They get to pay back what it would have cost at a Big Ten or Big Twelve school of comparable ranking in accounting, engineering, computer science or agriculture, depending upon their high school residence. The Ivy League school has to eat the difference. Since there has been a massive job foreclosure on these kids, implementation should start today to forestall the impact. Unless the graduate goes into Journ-o-lism. Then the price should double.
Government service specter, academia, Goldman Sachs/trial lawyers types…and mass media outlets. My stars and little garters! That seems to overlap overwhelmingly with….Democratic strongholds!
Now, whose the party of the entitled elite? I kinda forgot.
Ex – actly!
Along with the CAMP program, there ought to be ought to be some kind of credentialing that recognizes students who were admitted to the Ivies, but didn’t go. Like a National Merit Scholarship- even if one doesn’t use it it still speaks to how truly intelligent one really is.
This illustrates why I took so many AP Exams in High School. I managed to cut an entire year off my bachelor’s degree program with AP credits. Now, I’m a Graduate Student Instructor, so they’re paying me, instead of me being a Senior paying them.
Most undergraduate programs either teach from the same textbooks or there’s not much difference regardless of university/college. For instance, an accumulation point in mathematics is an accumulation point regardless. Hyperbolic geometry uses the same theorems whether at MIT, CALTEC or Texas A&M. Most bridges you drive over are not built by Ivy League grads and for that you should be eternally thankful.
Is the education bubble about to burst? Hasten that day, Lord, hasten that day…
Personally, we’re hoping that universities will be looking to fill the little red-haired girl from Montana demographic and grant us some financial aid accordingly!
Roger:
Precise and on-point, not to stretch the matter , but , how can one resist highlighting the “brilliant and messianic ” extant Chief Executive. Just how brilliant ? Who knows ? We know of G.W.Bush and John F. Kerry’s performance parameters @ Yale…Obama? Nope , thems be a state secret….but, most clear thinking citizens know that affirmative action is a disaster for the “minorities”( ‘cepting the “Asians” ) and most citizens know this are now aware that LBJ’s Great Society engineering has buried the “afro-American” communities country-wide.The larger irony , as I see matters , is that the surging Latino communities are going to , in their time , re-inter these same black Americans to the lowest rung on the ladder. And, to think that Crispus Attucks fell on Lexington Green. Obama is a shame and a silver lining all in one stroke- now EVERYTHING is on the table for discussion; it’s past bloody time.Let us discuss in November. In the meantime, thank you for your energy and engagement. Let us search for our Cincinnatus…..
Affirmative action is a disaster for Asians, too, because it keeps well-qualified applicants out of highly competitive schools. Of course, at these prices, it is probably a blessing in disguise as most will do just as well or better by going to less expensive state schools.
Crispus Attacks was killed in the Boston Massacre.
It’s the end of the nihilist-subversive control of the minds and of thoughts, but the fools don’t yet see it.
I have all the party items ready for the final event. It can’t possibly come soon enough.
“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe.”
Being of a rather cynical disposition, I would be more alarmed at the prospect of spending over $50K/year … so that my kid learns to despise capitalism.
One thing to note is that this is by and large a North American problem. In Europe and, I suppose, most of the rest of the World, students who enroll in the hard sciences, engineering, medicine, even law, will not get any course in the humanities: the humanities profs do not have a captive audience; if they want students, they have to teach something that students want to learn. Even if they teach PC indoctrination (and some do), the damage is limited to those foolish enough to enroll in their courses.
Why is that? They’re not as obsessed with a degree as a condition of employment? Certainly in the US, that’s the root of the problem. If a reasonably intelligent person could get past the HR bouncer without a degree, the degrees would be as worthless as monopoly money, and the colleges would be empty.
Why is that?
Mostly for historical reasons, presumably: in Europe you are supposed to have a general education by the time you finish high school (whether you do, is a different question); so there is no need for any more humanities past high school — unless you want to make a career out of them.
Also, most universities in Europe are not concentrated on a single campus, also for historical reasons: students and faculty do not live in a bubble.
They’re not as obsessed with a degree as a condition of employment? Certainly in the US, that’s the root of the problem.
That’s a good point: the reason you need degrees in the US is that tests might be considered discriminatory. In Europe there is little worry about discrimination, so far. Still, this does not explain why higher ed courses are so specialized in Europe.
I disagree on the capitalism, there is some pretty good porn coming out of the dorm rooms. Are we to assume these kids are whoring themselves out for the collective good of whomever set up the camera? Could be, I guess. But it would be worse to discover that parents are paying $50k a year for their daughter to be a porn star and school bike. Throw her out of the house and she can work down at the the local strip club without the capital outlay.
Great column, thanks for writing this. As a middle-aged doctoral student I’ve witnessed exactly the things that you mention—the young undergraduates sent to a wonderful University on the parent’s dime, only to study some riff-raffy pursuit as gender studies or other seemingly worthless exercise–merely as a means to further be indoctrinated with a liberal agenda. The revenue streams flowing into universities are large and numerous–federal research funds, grant funds from private organizations, alumni donations, mom n’ pop tuition, loans, state funds and lots others. However, the inherent value in the product (a graduate) is rapidly diminishing.
Take for instance Christine Romer (a professor from some CA school) who uttered this week that “we gave it our best shot” when it came to the economy. Aren’t these intellectuals supposed to be at the fountainhead of all knowledge in these institutions? Haven’t these wonderful ideas been studied and pored over for years and now “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” the chance has presented itself to implement them and revalidate them on a national scale? Hell yes it has, and they made a valiant attempt and subsequently fell from grace like a skinny latte’ off the professors desk when he finds out he doesn’t get tenure.
I submit that I will not subjugate the education of my three children to the financially hungry and morally dishonest institutions that have led the way in the destruction of social, financial and scientific standards for which they used to stand. These guilds need to be assaulted, the bubble needs to be burst and the lectern needs to be seized by people who are the purveyors of truth and honesty, not ideology and leftism.
Are you tellin’ me that students shouldn’t have to sit and listen to some overpaid prof’ blather for an hour about how being a good person means not violating your conscience, a course necessary in my state to be certified for any public teaching position?
Don’t laugh, it’s true. She didn’t have any answer when I casually mentioned that the suicide pilots on 9/11 didn’t have consciences bothering them, either.
I have a “science” degree, I earned the old fashioned way, work, get money to take classes to get work to make more money to take more classes. In the mean time my primary area disappears as work is sent overseas to “cheaper” engineers.
So, seeing that many people I worked with over the years had poor math skills, decided I want to try teaching… The second career Masters programs, “sound” reasonable, and supposedly “build” on your own experiences.
I would go into the Minotaur’s maze, but I decided that under the current conditions, teaching was not for me. However I do tutor some neighborhood kids in math, and would like to continue this, without the loss of more $$$ or my sanity.
Personally I wouldn’t pay a red cent for the education of my sons at any of the Ivies, or for that matter, at any liberal arts school.
Not that education isn’t important. It certainly is, but it’s the type of education that matters.
I paid upwards of $ 320,000 in tuition-NOT including books and personal monthly allowances deposited into their accounts-to educate my sons at Caltech and MIT up until 2007. Best money I ever spent, as the education was SUPERB, they learned to think outside the box, to solve impossible problem sets, and to feel confident in their skill sets to go after any engineering job they want.
Now, can ANYONE say that about the worthless Ivy degrees of indoctrination, not education?
How do you solve impossible problem sets? In fact, you don’t. The word “impossible” in this context implies there is no solution. You meant that they learned to solve nearly impossible problem sets.
As for MIT, don’t forget that that’s where Noam Chomsky is.
JFP,
Chomsky is but a pesky fly in the ointment for the ‘average’ student at MIT.
For the most part, the kiddies have little time to sleep, let alone listen to Chomsky’s rants. Most of his audience hails from outside the campus, some interested faculty, and other hangers on.
In the 4 yrs my son labored over ‘impossible’ problem sets-meaning, impossible for most, but possible for Techers after learning to think outside the box-Chomsky never entered his mind.
It will be extremely amusing to watch the gnashing of teeth when the overpriced indoctrination diploma mill bubble bursts. It will be a treat, indeed, to watch many over “educated” profs try to find a job in the non-BS productive sector. Make no mistake, college is definitely necessary for many disciplines such as medicine, engineering,the sciences, etc. But these courses of study do not attract the intellectually lazy students/profs due to the fact that they teach critical thinking,and that there are right answers and wrong answers. I am grateful to obama and his ilk for demonstrating the failure of what affirmative action has become, and for showing, beyond any doubt, that an Ivy League education in the non-sciences is vastly overrated, and basically worthless.
When I was contemplating colleges many moons ago, I told my British mother (whose family came from working-class, miner/factory-worker stock and was raised hard-core Labour/Socialist, but jettisoned it when she took a job at a newspaper in the 1950′s and saw the phoniness/intellectual bankruptcy of the left), “Wouldn’t it be great for me to go to Oxford?” She said it was “a hotbed of Marxism” and that the way colleges were, it didn’t really matter where you went, as long as you got a degree and got decent grades. I pooh-poohed that as out-of-touch hyperbole at the time (as you know, all 17-18 year olds know everything).
I wound up getting my degree in Computer Science at a satellite campus of one of the state colleges, working almost full-time during the day and taking classes at night. It wasn’t that great a school, and I feel I did miss out on some of the social aspects of college life, and some of the more broader classes I could have taken. On the other hand, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen she’s dead right. I think the Ivy League colleges, much like other American institutions who have sold out excellence for leftist dogma and political correctness (Hollywood? New York Times?), are coasting on their reputations. I think, as with the MSM, people are seeing that high-ticket educations aren’t what they used to be, and are putting less credence in them.
Kids are graduating with massive debt burdens that will take them at least a decade to pay off, and that’s if you get a decent job from studying something useful. There’s no way that I’d underwrite a “Studies” major (Gender, Women’s, Racial, African-American, etc.) as a parent. This has to be a bubble that’s going to burst.
No surprise then, that the “progressives” want to make higher education an entitlement; in a sense, having an academia bailout.
Kids are graduating with massive debt burdens that will take them at least a decade to pay off, and that’s if you get a decent job from studying something useful.
And they are half as literate, as the high school grads of thirty years ago.
“Somebody who can offer credible degrees based on free quality course material could offer a degree for under $10,000. That would result in a tuition singularity all across the higher education industry.”
Very interesting observation. What would it cost to use the examinations set by, say, Singapore?
Parents will go on anteing up forever. Why? Because they know that being an Ivy League graduate confers a distinct advantage upon their children. The quality of the education is as nothing compared to the leg up.
“Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold.”
And there you have it. Colleges and universities are living paradoxes. The very capitalism and representative republic which produces the freedoms we enjoy and allows these institutions to exist and flourish are being repudiated and denounced by the very same professors and administrators who work in these ivory towers.
How does a white professor denounce America as racist and white Americans as privileged not laugh at the hypocrisy? How do the professors who extoll the virtues of communism and marxism not find themselves at all self-contradicted when they collect their paychecks from the taxpaying public and parents? How do all the white professors and administrators not find it funny that they support the very program that would inhibit their future growth potential had they been born later and then be subjected to the racialism of affirmative action?
Is Harvard and Yale not embarrassed by the level of incompetent graduates they have produced in the last 15 years who have become part of the Democrate party and establishment and helped with on-going destruction of our nation? Unless of course they are complicit in this destruction?
We need more commentary like this one for all to read.
On capitalism repudiated and denounced… check this: http://www.planethan.com/drupal/sites/default/files/reflectionofcapitalism.pdf
Three Cheers for Mr. Kimball! Truly one of the enduring frauds perpetuated on us today is the myth of the the “elite” university. It’s very amusing (to me at least) that the same people who wail about “elitism” in other professions defend the status of the Ivy League, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and other such schools to the last ditch. Not only do these schools produce more than their share of mediocre graduates but their liberal arts and humanties departments are bastions of (dare I say it?) an entrenched anti-American bias that is only made possible by the constitution of the nation they despise.
Why shouldn’t a degree from Northern Iowa or U. of Dayton or Montclair State be as “prestigious” as one from Brown or Yale? Who gave Princeton and Harvard the monopoly on scholarship and ideas? The only difference is the eclat given to the prestige schools by their cost and their financial power.
Here’s my (wildly impractical) idea for bringing down the costs of college tuition. Take the combined endowments of the nations’s “top 50″ schools and spread that money around the remaining colleges and universities in the U.S. I realize it is against conservative principles to confiscate private property but the howl from the elite academic community would be just priceless to hear. Besides we seem to be living in a “what’s yours is mine” climate (under the current administration) so why shouldn’t Harvard and Princeton and Cal have to poney up?
Suggestion to parents: Don’t pay for a crummy product. Fire the people who are selling these silly programs. That is your kid’s mind they are fooling with.
As a professor of a subject where reason matters, I do not fear the coming burst. I am preparing for it. There are many like me. We will give your kid a real education. After the burst, we will pick up the pieces and go on to form a stronger institution.
At some point the laws of supply and demand come into play. The sooner, the better.
Well, my child is not a math whiz although he is a great student. So, Cal-Tech and MIT were out of the question. He did not want to be an engineer. He is studying history in his first year at a highly regarded (NOT Ivy) liberal arts college. I take it that is a horrible waste based on the arguments posted here.
“I take it that is a horrible waste based on the arguments posted here.”
Unless he is willing to spew back Marxist propaganda for 4 years, yes it is a waste.
He should change majors ASAP and get out of humanities and the social sciences (Economics excepted) unless he is a committed Marxist.
At most schools you need twice the credits to graduate than are required for a degree (120/60), so one answer is to always do a double major. I went to a state school and doubled in Computer Science and Art, one for the career & the $$ and one for the fun. The CS credential has given me a good life and the Art department gave me equipment and taught me to make the films I wanted to make. I ignored their statist propaganda and focused on Linear Algebra and good lighting. Any major other than Math, Science, Engineering or a language is worthless on its own, anyway. Plus, you get two for the same money and you’re too busy to get in trouble.
I think people go to college for different reasons. For some it is just what they were/are expected to do and they have no particular direction. For others, it is to study a subject they are deeply interested in, but which may or may not lead to good career choices. For still others it is to prepare for chosen career paths with flexibility to change directions as the workplace evolves. If your child wants a career in teaching history or perhaps writing historical fiction, then if you and he are happy with the school and it is affordable, more power to you. However, if those or other possible career pursuits based on knowledge of History are not appealing or adequately rewarding, you may want to reconsider options as quickly as you can. Many states have excellent state universities that offer a variety of professional degrees that can be combined with a minor in intersting topics, like History. However, in keeping with the theme of a “financial bubble”, I would be extremely cautious about the prospects of repaying significant college loans based on pursuit of a “liberal arts” career.
You do not need a history degree to write historical fiction. I majored in Accounting in the late 70′s and am currently writing historical romances. You can do your research on the web or via books, if travel to the site(s) is not possible. In fact, it’s better to read source documents and biographies in order to understand the social thinking and world view of the time rather than have the information presented to you through someone else’s filter. A couple of overview histories of whatever era you are interested in can get you started on the research necessary for one’s particular plot line.
Sue, do all you can to influence your son NOT to major in history.The discipline is so skewed towards Marxism it is impossible to develop critical thinking skills under such circumstances.
As a subject, history is exceedingly important, but it cannot be properly learned under the tutelage of like-minded props who indoctrinate instead of teach.He can self study if history is his real interest, by finding out which authors present historical facts, NOT revisionist history.
Econ is also a viable option, perhaps a good program in international relations is another.However, it is most important, that as the consumer, that you perform your due diligence. Make sure that any dept he studies under has at least a modicum of balance in it.
Trust me, I would never had paid for Caltech or MIT if I had not made sure that I would receive value for my investment, that my sons would learn under profs who saw their mandates as education & NOT indoctrination, otherwise the degrees would not have been worth the paper they are written on.
Sue, I would suggest you – personally – take a >cold hard look< at the curriculm vitae of the professors teaching your son, what they've written and their professional reputations, and the texts they are using. I assume you're paying his tuition – so it's your money at stake.
I am a history major with a BA from a good midwestern Jesuit university (and I'm not Catholic). Yes, some years ago. Thanks to the Navy, I got a solid grounding in math through differential calculus, less so in engineering. I was able to pass a technical Master's a few years later (albeit, studying every possible minute of the day).
I firmly believe the humanities are important. but – not the marxist and anti-American garbage being taught now. Hence my suggestion that you conduct a personal review.
The world needs competant historians just as it needs competant engineers. A liberal arts education is scorned in the comments to this column becasue it is often the refuge of marxists and socialists, a self-licking ice cream cone. If the field is abandoned to the marxists, then they'll own it and we'll produce more Howard Zinns who will lie to us about our own history.
Our son is a freshman as well and in a small liberal arts college. One thing we did was used this website a ss a guide to selecting a school, http://www.isi.org. They publish a guide for colleges based on 1) the american experience and 2) western civilation/great books. While he has not decided on a major he is required as a first year to a sequence of classes on the great books in western civilization (regardless of major). Hopefully this heps.
There is a reason why history majors are the butt of so many jokes.
He needs to switch to a major that will teach him something he can USE. He needs to leave school with skills and knowledge that will allow him to do things that others cannot, things that are of economic value.
If this is NOT what he is learning, then he should cut his losses and go learn to be a plumber or an A/C technician. He’ll make very good money and won’t have a mountain of student loan debt that he won’t be able to pay off because he can’t get a job that pays anything with the degree he earned.
History is a recreational degree. The people who pursue such programs leave school with nothing to show for it but debt. Worse yet, with the decayed and radioactive state that the humanities are in today, those same students are likely to leave school actually knowing LESS than when they arrived. It isn’t that they aren’t educated, but that so much of what they know simply isn’t true.
College tuition is just privately organized wealth redistribution program. Need based financial aid rather than merit based is just an excuse to reward politically correct mediocrity at the expense of the hard earned income of those who work hard and who have kids who work hard in school.
Having gone to an elite school that even 30 years ago was known for leftist indoctrination, all I can say is that the best way to avoid it as much as possible is do what I did – be an engineering major.
If you want 4 courses/semester instead of five, go for the physical sciences, math, business/accounting or (in a good department) economics.
Otherwise, you can get a better (and less ideological) education in the Humanities and Social Sciences on your own if you are motivated.
I believe the era of the online university is upon us. The technologies have matured — high speed bandwidth, down-loadable and streaming video, web cams, digital textbooks, etc. What is needed is for the universities to be serious and accredited.
There is at least one: “Western Governors University” — that charges an average of $3,000 per 6 month term. Currently, the degree programs are limited: business, information technology, nursing, and teaching. They do offer advanced degrees. It has valid accreditation and is backed by the governors of 19 states.
So here you have an example of the future. It is quite feasible to complete an entire undergraduate degree for $20K – $25K — TOTAL. A student can stay home, work part time, and graduate with zero debt.
The Ivy’s are not doomed. But I suggest that they will suffer a serious crash and return to being the playgrounds of the wealthy.
Roger, It is all a flim flam game. Almost no one besides “the rich” pay list price; it is simply the starting point from which financial aid is dispensed in a competitive game to nab the best students.
My best estimate is that if you analytically net financial aid against tuition and then chart the increase in “net tuition paid”, you will get a graph that much more resembles historical inflation.
But who is really paying the financial aid and why should it be required?
FINANCIAL AID? What? If you are white, male, and non-athletic, and not a freaked out genius, your massively wonderful financial aid package will be:
LOANS, and those loans are not large enough to cover the tuition, fees, room and board costs for the university, and the phony number added to your phony “finaid” award of in-state tuition… woo woo… throw confetti…
Ok… You can go out of state with some sort of partial scholarship, but then you need to be pushing the scary geeky smart level, AND the scholarships generally end up to be just enough to make the TFRB to be roughly equal to the in state rate for the school.
Of course there are ROTC scholarships, but the price for those is military service, and the requirements usually include several years of varsity athletic competition, and scary high GPAs.
So Financial aid mostly turns out to be the opportunity to get yourself and/or your parents into $100,000+ (in state school). A similar out of state cost would be closer to $200,000. Both amount to debt owed to Uncle Sugar at 6.7%. Nice aid there.
No folks, one either pays for college out of pocket, or owes the government a car payment for three to five new cars. (Maybe one reason the automobile industry is strangling… not enough new college grads running out to buy their first car. They already have the used Honda Accord, and they are already paying 4 c-notes a month for the “Five Year Party” (H/T to Craig Brandon – he is becoming a most valuable resource since I have one in college year 3 of 5, one a Senior in High School, and a Freshman.)
Yes.. the bubble will eventually burst. My Senior gets at least 20 emails a day from various small colleges… He gets at least two or three fliers or packages in the Snail Mail. There are too many schools chasing too few students (at least ones who can pay).
Eventually the false economy built on borrowed money will deflate or pop. The operative is eventually, and right now the artificial support of the government is keeping the current system afloat. I don’t think a serious correction is in the offing.
Regards, TMF
“Of course there are ROTC scholarships, but the price for those is military service, and the requirements usually include several years of varsity athletic competition, and scary high GPAs.”
There are many who welcome such service. Participation in varsity athletics (I assume you mean at the high school level) is nice, but hardly mandatory. As for the GPA’s, it is a competitive market.
There is an excellent site that ranks colleges based on what they need to learn to succeed, i.e. are colleges’ required core subjects preparing the student for life, it is whatwilltheylearn.com. They analyze college based on 7 core subject and how many of them are required by the college. The 7 are: science, math, economics, foreign language,US history, composition and literature. As your topic hints, the so-called elite Ivy and liberal arts colleges get a D or F, as do schools like Cal-Berkley, Univ Michigan-Ann Arbor, Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, Virginia-Charlottesville.
A sample of colleges that get an A: University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Baylor, Texas A&M, Lamar University, Air Force Academy, West Pointe.
So a “student” can go to college, extend high school 4 more years without any intellectual challenge, graduate, believe they are an “asset” just because they have a college degree, have 6 figure loan debt and then wonder why no one wants to hire someone with a degree in liberal arts (take you pick of majors). Then they continue the hallucination of unrealistic expectations by going on to law school.
Judging by the condition of this once great country, all the Ivy League universities need to be carpet bombed.
College tuition will continue to rise as long as idiotic parents are willing to shell out the money to put their precious preps through the degree machine. Read Dr. Seuss’ “The Sneeches” to see why it is clearly better to live life with a star on your belly! My teenager will be going to the local community college for her first 2 years and then transferring to a state school at a locked in, reduced rate. If all goes as planned, she’ll have a 4 year degree from a reputable school (VT) for under 20 K.
What parents and kids need to realize is that the location isn’t nearly as important as to what the degree actually is. I am in the forth year of a mech engineering program (it will take me about 5 to get it done). Its at an ABET certified institution (UMBC go RETRIEVERS!!!) so that when I graduate, I will be fully certified in the engineering field. I already have a post college career locked up with the Army, though to be clear, I did six years in the Navy so I kind of got more access than say the standard student would have in a similar position.
I am utterly dumbfounded by my friends at the school that are taking 5 or plus years to get a BA in poli-sci, psychology, English Lit, ect with no hope of getting a post college career in their field. What is truly mind-numbing is their answer to the lack of jobs in their fields is to take on even more debt to get further along in their dead fields. There is a reason why a certified engineer with a four year degree will always get paid than a lot of masters and PhDs.
All that is true, Roger. I’d add, nothing has diminished the value of an Ivy League education more than this Administration. The thought of paying this kind of money to turn out people liked Eric Holder and Michelle and Barack Obama has to be unpalatable.
I would be only too happy to see certain things change, at the elite universities–I’d love to see the PC claptrap disappear, and the humanities taught again as the real disciplines they used to be, with arguments about meaning and truth and things that matter, not the identity politics and race-class-gender (after all, that’s trickled down all the way to high school by now, for god’s sake!).
It’s all very well to shop around for a cheaper place to send your kids; there’s some truth to the idea that ‘the books are the same’ that they read. These days, with the trouble the PhD’s have getting jobs, even quite lousy places may have some decent instructors.
The problem is, you want your child to be among other intelligent and well-prepared students, so there’s a chance of class discussion (or discussion outside of class, even!) that will be stimulating to him/her. To achieve that, you really do want the kid to be at the kind of place that attracts the kind of student who has read something and thought seriously about something–to the extent that they do this (instead of tuning into some fancy media, these days).
They’re called ‘competitive colleges’ for a reason.
Don’t worry, I hate the gaming of the admissions process as much as anyone. Those awful kids (or parents, probably) who’ve figured out some clever-looking scam for appearing to have done community service …!
Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians?
Also why parents should fund institutions who allow that thir children leaning time is wasted on indoctrination classes instead of on some indoctrination crap? If you send your child to get an ingenner degree in electronics he shoud study maths, physics, electronics perhaps managament full time. Not_ chomskian mocu-history. And parents whose money h
When parents send their children to get say an engineer degree and find that parta of the curriculum has been spent on “indoctrination” disciplines totallly irrelevant to an an enginer job (or teachers from relevant disciplines have spent time on indoctrination instead of their discipline) it means
1) Part of their money has been stolen since indoctrinatos don’t wor for free.
2) Thair child will leave university as a less capable engineer than if he had spent that time studying engineering disciplines full time so he will get poorer jobs.
The answer should be to sue the university to death.
Out of 134 hours to get my engineering degree, twelve of them had to be humanities/social science electives. I took 101 level psychology, anthropology, philosophy and a course on western literature. I still remember them, they were a fun break from relentless formula memorizing. With the required 2 semesters of English, one of technical writing and one of economics, that left 110 hours of straight science and engineering. I don’t think you have to worry about “indoctrination” in engineering achool.
Great blog lord Roger.
I’ve been teaching business English in Europe since 1997. I get paid only for the number of contact hours that I have with student(s). Maybe if the dons at the academy got paid only for student contact hours; okay throw in pay for lesson prep time and grading homework, the students would get better value for the money that they pay. Also the textbook scam of the Prof. assigning his book as required reading should be done away with.
Expat
The irony of all this discussion is that alongside all the talk and all the comments on this web page is an advertisement featuring a lovely young lady (OMG! I made a sexist, non PC comment, shoot me now…), that advertises going back to school with grants available “for those who qualify”.
You might of noticed blue collar industries the last forty years have taken in the neck. And of course non union blue collar workers too. Why should we subsidize Heather and her degree in Lesbian Theater, or Biff in Sports Management, or Dwan in Afro-American studies, or Irving get a law degree to sue me, or Jack in Criminal Justice so he can write me tickets morning, noon and night?
If college is so valuable, how come it can’t pay the freight?
Adults that go to college are adults. Let them, and only them, pay. Then lets see how ‘valuable’ it is.
Further, how come MIT, and Harvard and other feather merchant factories are free of local taxes? Why should the muffler shop, and the dinner just off campus be paying for the fire department, and the real police, and the welfare for the illegals moping little Johny’s hallway?
“Eight years of college down the drain!!!”
One of the things I think this and other articles on the subject miss is the decline in the quality of K-12 education. How much of the premium of the college degree increased because a highschool diploma became nearly worthless?
I lucked out, and went to a great highschool and was on the AP track. With few exceptions I had great teachers. I didn’t have a critical thinking “class” but even our art teacher would engage students in lively debates.
When I got to college I realized many people couldn’t write an intelligible sentence, much less a 5 paragraph essay, that is left for remedial college courses to fix.
My children will know how to write a five paragraph essay before they leave highschool and will have completed first year calc — this is my vow!
One reason it takes so long to graduate is that schools are designing their degree programs so as to maximize the length of time they can hang on to a student and squeeze tuition, fees, room and board etc. from them. This doesn’t have to be. One partner in our CPA firm graduated in the 1970s from the U of Georgia with a degree in accounting and a degree in forrestry. It took him exactly 4 years.
One reason it takes so long to graduate is that schools are designing their degree programs so as to maximize the length of time they can hang on to a student and squeeze tuition, fees, room and board etc. from them. This doesn’t have to be.
The other reason that people are taking longer to graduate is because the awful economy is requiring more and more students to work while attending classes, and that’s almost certain to lengthen the stay. (I teach at a two-year school where at least 80% of our students work.)
But yes, the other reason is as you stated–too many multi-kulti, Indoctrination 101 classes have been added to everyone’s degree plan.
As a parent who paid “full freight” for both his children at private schools, though not Ivy’s, I can tell you that one result of overpaying for school was to refuse to donate a single penny to the school. Since I was one of the few who paid the entire outrageous fee, my decision was that I was already doing all the capital campaign donations through my excess payments.
Telling the schools that during their never-ending funding campaigns was always a modest entertainment for me.
In my state of Washington, we are seeing more and more high schoolers attend community college for their junior and senior years. When they do this, they get 2 years of free college credit as well as 2 years of high school credit. Even with public schools, this is a considerable savings.
Of course, it does beg the question of which is redundant; the high school or the community college?
If ideological conflict is the ONLY reason you are concerned about the education bubble, you are no better than Michael Moore. You want to see higher ed changed *not* because of the need for skills (which, as usual, the Ivory Tower gets wrong) but because they are not teaching what you want to hear.
And no, Mr. Kimball, most parents are not shocked about their children with a different political philosophy…they are shocked at the cost for the NEXT school year
Rae, you are absolutely right – all this Kimballian claptrap about “-Studies” and so on is a heap of hysterical and/or cynical nonsense: the outrageous price of education is the real issue, and has enormous consequences for all of society. (Though the underfunded, neglected state of public schools is still more dire.)
However, the line about footing the bill for “Ahmed, Juan and Harriet down the hall”?? – what an appalling racist you are, Kimball!
And such a coward as well: cynically inserting the less immediately categorizable “Harriet” simply in order to deflect criticisms like the one I’m now making. . .
The core of Kimball’s “argument” (that is: ideology) is contained in that apparent aside – legible, of course, only by those able to read.
Koko, I’m not sure you are correct regarding the racist slant. These days most elitist colleges and universities give much of their grant monies to ethnic minorities. Middle class whites are expected to pay full freight, or they can go elsewhere, and many do. My brother, an English teacher and an Ivy grad, has been interviewing for his alma mater for decades. According to him the best and the brightest students come mainly from the middle class, eventually most opt to attend state schools and matriculate in their honors programs. These programs are very selective and very good, and the price is right compared to the Ivies. Not every family/student can feel comfortable with the level of debt required to graduate from a private college. My brother laments the loss of so many wonderful students each year because of the way his alma mater now disburses its available funds.
From what I’ve seen and heard, elite colleges and universities are becoming the “playground of the wealthy” on the one hand, while on the other, they admit a whole bunch of minority students who are on financial aid. There may not be a plethora of “brilliant” students in this mix, but that is apparently no longer the criteria.
I don’t think it’s racist to recognize that parents who are paying 50K/year are more than likely subsidizing less affluent students who may very well be from ethnic minorities. This is not “racist”, it is simply the reality.
If ideological conflict is the ONLY reason you are concerned about the education bubble, you are no better than Michael Moore. You want to see higher ed changed *not* because of the need for skills (which, as usual, the Ivory Tower gets wrong) but because they are not teaching what you want to hear
Let’s say that just like most people don’t want to be flogged and still less pay for it, most people don’t see any reason to pay for the privilege of being spit upon and give some losers a pulpit enabling them to brain wash their pupils so in a few years so they vote for someone who will tax us to death. Not to mentin the fact that you are entirely free to hand lmeaflets at the entry of university but if you use your pulpit for indoctrination instead of say, maths, then you are a thief and should be punished as such. Also I see no reason why students in marketable disciplines should fund crap departments a la Women Studies.
We’ve dummied down the k – 12 system to such a degree that 90% of the H.S. grads from Newark. Nj have to take remedial math in college. If that many need remedial help maybe they should not have graduated in th first place. But with so little manufacturing in the US do we need trade schools.
The HS that my dad graduated from in NJ was ranked #3 in the state. Students learned Latin and Greek, everyone not just AP or honor students. Now the school is in the bottom 25%. I’m sure that this is true in many of our public schools. So now students who can’t master HS work are now in college. With the O administration taking over student loans the college bubble will become worse. If you don’t payoff loan in 20 years it’s forgiven. If you take a government job or a “service job its forgiven. To clean up the college bubble we need to get rid of majors and degree studies that wont get you a job. Anything that ends in studies. Women’s studies Asian studies etc. College should be if you need it for a job. Lawyer, doctor, teacher, accounting. Get rid of the BS and all the teachers,staff, pensions and overhead and costs will come down
I’m surprised no one has mentioned community colleges. My older son completed the first 2 years of college while he was still in high school by getting permission to take courses at the local community college, and his younger brother will do the same. They have had good, basic courses in English, History, Math and Science with little to no time spent on the professor’s pet causes.
In Texas, high school students taking college courses to fulfill high school requirements have tuition waved, so he got almost the entire first two years of college for free, but community colleges are a great deal even if you have to pay full tuition. Students can get a good start on a four year degree at community college, or students who are interested in training in a specific field can get a two year degree that leads to a job in a skilled field (IT, nursing, etc). Community colleges also offer students a great opportunity to explore different fields of study- they can take intro courses in music theory, accounting, or geology for a lot less than it costs at 4 year university. That course in accounting may start them on the road to a career as a CPA, or make them realize that they should pursue a different field- in either case, it’s a valuable lesson at minimal cost. Of course, the Ivies won’t accept credits from community colleges, but state schools do, and most employers just want you to have the bachelor’s degree- they don’t care too much where it comes from.
I hope more students and parents will start to look at community colleges as a way to get a good education at a reasonable cost.
I don’t disagree that college is expensive. However, the returns to a college education are worth the cost, even at this enormous level.
Assume a 60k salary for 47 years. discount it back by 5%. NPV of the cash flow is $930,000. You’ll pay 250k for a 930k cash flow.
This ignores taxes, inflation and cost of living-but it also ignores raises and bonuses.
Jeff – Could you cite your source(s) for $60K as the average salary for a college grad? That may be accurate for high-demand fields (e.g., engineering), but I strongly doubt that it’s true for most majors.
Good article, Roger, but I think what you really have are THREE higher education systems that you’re confounding. The hard sciences have one kind of problem. The humanities have another, very different, problem. Finally, the social sciences are in the middle– with some disciplines humanities in all but name and subject to their problems, and others doing quite well.
For an undergraduate in the physical sciences, especially engineering, there is a bright future ahead once they graduate. Even the inflated tuitions (and even considering that their prospects aren’t quite so bright as their teachers lead them to believe), they can expect to be well-prepared members of their profession with good job prospects and useful skills. Or they can stay for a masters and, depending on the discipline, do even better. It’s at the doctoral level that scientists and engineers have poor career prospects: 5 years to a doctorate, then 7 years or more in post-doc purgatory, followed by (sometimes) a tenure track position. A rational person would not get a PhD in a hard science in America.
In the humanities, the picture is reversed. Four years to get an undergraduate in pop culture (ie majoring in being entertained) or (insert grievance group) studies, and then… what, exactly? It’s a microcosm of the liberal program: the masses babied and coddled by government programs, suited only for indoctrination and as warm bodies at rallies; and a chosen elite to call all the shots and reap all the rewards. Even the elite come out from a PhD program parroting their elders and trained in sophistry– but where’s all those critical thinking skills they blather on about? Even most humanities professors are virtually innumerate (incapable of even basic mathematics), and are more suited to jargon than logic. Instead they compete on rhetoric and their own academic pedigree. Except for the very few who make a PhD, the only career prospects in these fields are the ones who jump ship and get their graduate degrees in something else, or take jobs that didn’t require a college degree in the first place.
In between are the social sciences professors. Some fields, like political science, anthropology and (for universities that consider them a social science) grievance group studies, are humanities in all but name, at least at the undergraduate level. As with the humanities, the best someone can do short of a professorship is to either become an activist or to leave the field entirely.
The rest of the social sciences, though, are doing just fine. The business school students are gaining good practical, mathematical and analytical skills that they’re likely to use in paying jobs. The same goes for economics students. (Psychology not so much at the undergraduate level.) For grad school students, an MBA or masters in economics or social work prepare you for genuine career opportunities. If you get your doctorate, there are plenty of positions in academia and in the business world eager to recruit you.
So we really have several inter-related higher education systems, each with their own problems. There’s the administrative bloat at colleges, dumbing down of education in the humanities, campus as a primarily activist institution, and lack of job prospects for hard-science PhD’s. These each have their own solutions.
I’ve been teaching philosophy at a prominent state university for thirty years, and agree with much of this, but want to add 3 thoughts. First, not all of the humanities are Marxist training camps. A few philosophy departments have become postmodern in orientation, but the overwhelming majority remain solid, and do a great job teaching students to read, write and think– skills that are as important to society as knowledge of mathematics and natural science. Second, most of the price increases are due to government subsidies and the growth of administration to handle the vast array of government regulations. It’s like the housing bubble. Get government out of involvement with education, and the price tag would drop significantly. Third, I’ve been talking to legislators in my state about the possibility of charter colleges, roughly on analogy with charter schools at the K-12 level. If they could be set up and accredited without becoming caught up in the regulations that force high administrative costs, it would be possible to provide students with excellent college educations for about $5,000 a year.
Great article Roger…and addressed one of my biggest pet peeves.
Personal story: two daughters – one at Texas A&M on the way to medical school; one at University of Tulsa (private). Both never saw a public school K-12 which ma and pa forked over about $250K. I have no idea if academically it was work it, but I do know that the quality of parent made it worthwhile.
I didn’t know a thing about Texas A&M four years ago. In fact, it was my suggestion for my daughter to visit the UT and instead she somehow she ended up at A&M. I have been thoroughly impressed with her preparation for medical school and it showed when she took the MCAT. More so, there’s been no indoctrination of American hating, liberal propaganda, or rewrite of history best I can tell. My oldest appears to have kept her conservative bearings, and I would highly recommend A&M to any parent.
My youngest at TU is thinking maybe Physician’s Assistant – doesn’t want to go the medical school route, but likes the material. I estimate the yearly tuition for TU is somewhere between $35-40K and I’m too lazy to look it up.
This semester mom and dad got to pay about $3K for a “women’s studies” class which was required (that price included the scholarship offset). The rest of the classes were questionable too, sprinkled with one biology course. I think the women’s studies class is a requirement for the B.A. in Misandry.
If this is an indicator for the private school education across the nation, I can see where parents would be a little disgruntled about the bang for the buck. I know I was a little miffed before mom dropped the hammer and I shut up.
Did I mention TU is very proud of the fact they just built a mosque on campus under the guise of “diversity”? I guess we get to pay for that too.
Although it was about high school and not college, I was reading an article yesterday about black kids in a PHiladelphia school bashing Asian kids, robbing them and beating on them, etc. The reason given was that the black kids saw the attention being given to the newly-arrived Asians and were jealous.
I wonder if that’s a reason thought up by a guilt-inducing white counselor or if a black thug-in-the-making would *really* come up with an alibi that he merely wants the same amount of classroom attention as little Duc Hung Lo in the corner.
The comment in this article, “Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall,” makes me think that perhaps Ahmed, Juan and Harriet are not satisfied any more with the free ride they’re already getting, and are starting to demand more tithe with their fists, guns and knives.
And high school administrators, at least, evidently are perfectly fine in allowing this piracy in the school halls. Probably all in the name of diversity.
This is not college related but the Midland Borough (PA) School District had to close its high school after it got to expensive. Finding that busing kids to an Ohio school was not a satisfactory answer it started a cyber-school.
It’s now a state-wide institution with 9,000 students and meets all state targets for academic performance.
The point is that it really doesn’t make sense to spend a quarter-million dollars to get a certification when equal if not better knowledge and skills implied by that certification can be found at a fraction of the cost.
Such an education is more of a status symbol than anything of measurable value. The cost associated with it, like so much that the socialist left touts, is relative to an ever changing ‘perspective’ with no real metric for evaluation. Just how they like it.
However, with the falling value of the dollar and fewer men and women that actually can DO something of substantive value it is easy to see how the perception of potential value could eclipse reality. Businesses value the piece of paper more than they value person holding it in many cases. And with good reason, all too frequently they can’t perform up to the shtick.
But then again, look at how obama’s “education” has benefited his fellow classmates, radical socialist associates et al via stimulus, bailouts and payoffs.
It would be really hard to payback your student loan with a Social Worker degree. Entry level salary has actually gone down in the last ten years. The field is over saturated.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Social_Worker/Salary
Send your kids to Hillsdale College and you won’t have to worry about the problems discussed by Mr. Kimball. Hillsdale takes no federal or state money,that is, it is entirely private. Given that it is entirely private,the cost is quite reasonable. The college reinforces the values we have taught him at home and that he learned at his private, religious high school. I am amazed with the education my son has received there so far. Great professors, great small college atmosphere, fine (famous) speakers on campus all the time. And, the college treats parents as partners, not interlopers. Best yet, my son has become a fine young man.
I wouldn’t send my dog to the college at which I teach.
The biggest nut in this upturn on Tuition is TENURE. Colleges and Universities are BLOATED with deadbeat professors who have guaranteed income, super benefits, great working conditions and no restrictions on how much left leaning propoganda they instill in students. The only pressure is how to work on that propoganda when most of them don’t even teach more than a few classes, as most have T.A.’s who handle that menial job.
Cut out the Tenure and get rid of the dead wood and costs will be more in line with private sector jobs. It’s not just higher education – it’s every level of education. Who has TENURE in the private sector??? Yes – correct answer – NO ONE.
This is the third or fourth such article I’ve seen in recent days, all of it quite welcome. I’ve thought, and said, for years that the higher education system in this country needs to be completely upended, revolutionized, even scrapped and begun again.
We live in this great communications age, so why not make better use of it? Identify the select few very best professors in each field, pay them handsomely, and then transmit their lectures into college classrooms all across the country. As for the 95% of professors who wouldn’t make the cut, let them go out into the real world and try to get real jobs. (Would you like sprinkles on your sundae?)
Better yet, eliminate the whole idea of college and instead focus on the mastery of a certain body of knowledge. If a person manages to acquire a prescribed body of knowledge, however it is done, even from just their own reading and study, why shouldn’t that person be entitled to a credential equivalent to a degree?
Everybody now recognizes that many campuses are chock full of teachers who are incompetent and students who are unqualified and uninspired. Meanwhile out in the real world there are thousands, maybe millions of self-educated people excluded from certain jobs, or hamstrung from advancement, simply because they lack the ol’ sheepskin.
It’s crazy.
The bubble has already burst. Europe has gone to the 3-year degree and US colleges are accepting these kids to graduate school. The students are prepared and do well. The US general ed for 2 years is little more than indoctrination and profit centering (who would take these classes if they didn’t have to?). More and more kids are staying home and going to a local college and not taking out loans. I work in admin and we all see the storm clouds growing and unofficially refuse to acknowledge them.
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Europe-Skeptics-of-New/44467/
The cause of both bubbles is government intervention. At the point the housing bubble burst, one could not afford to buy a house, but the loans one could take out to make the attempt were plentiful. Ditto for college expenses. The government makes loans and grants available, and the market (the colleges) adjust their rates to take advantage of the new money.
The medicine is bitter to swallow, and, if we couldn’t do it with the housing bubble (Freddie and Fannie are still in operation and still unregulated), what makes you think we’ll see the light with respect to the college bubble?
One of the factors that is driving the inflation of tuition and the growth of a number of sub-par institutions is the health insurance factor. My older children were forced into continuing their post-HS education in studies they neither wanted nor needed; however, entry level jobs do not provide health insurance,and the only way that they could maintain their health insurance coverage as a dependent on their father’s plan was to remain in school. All of them are in the workforce now, with decent jobs that pay good benefits; however, their university education did NOT help them secure these jobs, and, in their view, was a complete waste of time and money. However, this hidden agenda does help the universities, who manage to keep a boatload of 21-23 years old “on the plantation” filling seats in useless courses for health insurance coverage. Complete silliness.
Very well said, Mr. Kimball.
If the subsidizing of illegal aliens and allegedly “poor” students is the bear in the room, the outrageously bloated salaries of professors and administrators is the elephant. Those same vastly overpaid instructors often rely upon graduate students to do half their work for them.
Teaching at a college or university is a PART-TIME job, yet the salaries are commensurate with those professionals who WORK 40+ hours per week eleven+ months per year.
What’s wrong with this picture?
~(Ä)~
What we need are websites where students can rate their instructors and classes and programs. I see time and time again where schools start telling children “you must go to college” – it’s like mind control. Many successful people in this world are in vocations that DON’T require college. In this country parents are almost forcing their children who may want to go to trade school or other professions than colleges/universities offer to GO TO COLLEGE. They spend a tremendous amount of money, take on huge levels of debt and end up with what I’ve labeled – JUNK BOND DIPLOMAS. A piece of paper that has no value and has a huge debt behind it. The programs in college are more fluff than substance and some of the majors are idiotic. Then these students ARE NOT EMPLOYABLE – so what do they do??? THEY GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL TO INVEST IN ANOTHER JUNK BOND DIPLOMA.
But Colleges and Universities keep rubbing their hands together because the over head of dead beat tenured professors is a great big Elephant to feed – FOREVER.
In what other commercial transaction does the buyer of a commodity bear their financial soul to the seller with every aspect including their and their parents IRS forms.
With this information in hand, it’s no wonder that the educational industrial complex is able to absorb every dollar, euro and peso that comes their way.
“Why does his [Johnny's] four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall.”
Great point. A quote I recently read from Intellectual Takeout’s Cost of College page declares that “each one dollar in grant aid leads to tuition fees somewhere around 35 cents higher than would otherwise be the case.” Perhaps, as you implied, it would be good if the college bubble were to burst. A return to the alternative, less expensive ideas of the past could be very beneficial.
Has anybody ever asked/investigated what these schools do with the hundreds of million, often billions, of dollars in their contingency funds?
For those of you discussing History as a major, I have a suggestion. Maybe we could all request that our favorite politically incorrect historian, Victor Davis Hanson, open an online college for history. How about it Victor?
Even in engineering, there has been a tremendous increase in tuition and fees that has far outpaced inflation. I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) in 1974 with a BS in an engineering discipline. Tuition, room and board, books, fees etc. came to about $4500 for the year. Dad was a unionized steel worker working all the over time he could and pulled in about $20,000 a year. The whole kit and caboodle for CMU for the 2010/2011 school year is $55,286 per information on the web. If I were sending a child there this year, to maintain the same percentage of cost versus salary I’d need to be making about $245,715, (I’m definitely not @ that pay grade.) nor do I know of any unionized steel workers pulling in that kind of wage.
Starting salary out of college was $915/mo ($10980/yr) or about 2.44 times the annual college cost at CMU. To get the equivalent benefit from a BS in engineering, students would need to start their employment at about $134,898 annually. Instead, they’re starting in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, or about 1 times the annual cost from CMU. College today seems much less beneficial from a ROI view point than when I graduated.
I have to admit there’s still a tinge of bitterness about my graduate school experience (in English) 20 years ago. That’s when I saw there was a generational shift — the older professors still held an appreciation for culture and that there was something for them to teach. The younger ones — the Baby Boomers — were enthralled by postmodern critical theory.
I avoided the critical theorists, but only a couple of years later they had taken over the purse strings of the department, and proceeded to drive every decent professor into retirement and every decent student out of the department. It was a blessing in disguise, I suppose. And everything worked out well for me.
Problem was, it’s always stuck in my craw that these bastards had taken over a university English department and were now in engaged in anti-education, and ruthless in applying their power-mongering theories to others. But I thought they were harmless — I mean, no one but a tenured professor could actually believe this critical-theory bullshit, right?
It didn’t turn out that way.
The conversation over at Reddit on this general subject complements the discussion here, I thought. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dan6a/isnt_it_a_little_unfair_to_harp_on_people_for/
When I started college in the fall of 1980 at a small Junior College, my tuition for an entire semester was $500. Adjusting that for inflation, tuition in 2010 should be $1,200. Which I find to be a reasonable amount. Then I looked at my old Alma Mater’s web sit to see that tuition for a semester is now $4,326 or 3.5 times the rate of inflation. This is the lowest tuition of any public school in Indiana. Well at least I know the kiddies are getting a better education than I did.
Only question I have: Where is all that extra money going? Do college professors all driver Porches?
Let me suggest an answer to Tommy_G’s question. Look around the quad of even the most modest little campus and you will certainly see a “Women’s Center”, perhaps an “African-American” building. A “LGBTs”, “Asian-American”, “Latino” “Native American”‘ ad nauseum buildings speckle the campus of even midsized schools. And with each of these come “Directors of Diversity” and “Equal Opportunity Officers” with staffs and office space and the power and responsibility to police admissions, hiring,course offerings, grant money, down to the naming of the buildings. The just and well intentioned vision of the civil rights era has become the nose counting, group splitting, aggrievement cultivating present. Pile on to this the seeming need for princely dorm accomodations, immense sporting complexes and administrative staff upon staff to meet federal and state education regulations, and a college becomes like a giant, sticky, layer cake collapsing under its own weight. So you might understand why the community college I attended has raised it tuition from $760 a year (an amount I could cover with careful budgeting while working as a janitor) to its current $4190. This price is without room and board. My daughter recently headed off to a pricy selective private college in the Hudson river valley (no, not that one) with a yearly tuition of $57,000. I now realize the cost of my first two years of a through technical education would only cover one week of her misty liberal arts experience.
Daughters; nothing is too good for them, eh?
From today’s NYT article on Chinese trade policies:
“For example, engineers with freshly issued bachelor’s degrees can be found here in Hunan Province for a salary of only about $2,640 a year — not significantly more than blue-collar workers with vocational school degrees can make. But the fuel propelling clean energy companies in China lies in advantages provided by the government, executives say.”
Kind of puts in perspective how even major changes to our system would have difficulty competing with that.
Damned professors!
“Here in Changsha, Sunzone’s general manager and chief engineer, Zhao Feng, represents a new breed of Chinese clean energy entrepreneurs. Tall and fit, he is an avid painter, fisherman and golfer.
“If I go to Los Angeles for 10 days, I am on a golf course for eight days,” he said.
“A former professor of semiconductors at Hunan University, he has a daughter studying for a doctorate in bioengineering at the University of Chicago on a Pentagon grant, and he owns a house in Chicago a block from President Obama’s.
Mr. Zhao is quick to point out that state and federal governments in the United States have also encouraged the development of the clean energy industry. “Our provincial governor has come several times to our plant, just as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made several visits to solar power companies” in California, he said.
But the Hunan government’s backing of Sunzone is much more extensive than anything in the United States.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/business/global/09trade.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&th&emc=th
Evidence suggests that an “elite” education amounts for nothing but wasted money – certain fields of practice are already catching on to this fact, though others still seem to be unable to avoid being sucked in by pretentious “prestige.”
For example, graduates from architecture departments at “elite” universities are not considered highly, and this is reflected in their performance and success rates in the professional world, having a much lower ratio of permanently employed graduates, and graduates who have secured a career for longer than one years after graduating. Many employers also indicate that employees from these “elite” schools have disproportionately substandard performance levels. I cannot say why this is – perhaps the result of an exaggerated work ethic, or an arrogant assumption by graduates who believe that they are entitled to something extra upon graduation.
I am a twenty eight year veteran of teaching at a top fifty national liberal arts college in the Northeast. In spite of the fact that I benefit from the escalating price of higher education in the U.S., I agree with most of Kimball’s article and the angry posts. But a few more points are in order:
A. The Ivy league schools really do get their pick of faculty and students. Gold star professors and students are a dime a dozen there. That is not necessarily to say that the best education is to be had in the Ivy League. But the real payoff is the fact that these schools are a rite of passage where the future members of the top of the power elite network and assume the mantle of the masters of the universe. To a disproportionate degree they will run the country in the next decade or two.
B. Competition among top schools for top talent and big grants is ferocious and very expensive. Administration has ballooned to a ridiculous extent, and the technology explosion and posher than thou accommodations are extremely costly.
C. To a great extent, the humanities and social sciences are a disaster area. The toxic corrosion of the worst of modern culture is entrenched and here to stay, unless hardship supervenes. It would take several generations to flush out in good times. The hard sciences and the arts are less affected. You can’t politicize math or physics and drawing is drawing.
D. The flagship State Universities are a spendid bargain, especially for in-state students. You often get top quality for bargain prices.
F. Political correctness in hiring faculty has been ruinous. Even the brilliant ones are deranged–it’s a professional necessity. Fantasy clones itself.
G. A much better education could be provided for much less. But you would have to break the power of the radicals and the minority mandarins–I think the brutal realities of our financial folly will do the trick.
F. Present trends are unsustainable. Tuition is outstripping the ability of most people to pay, and the country is headed for financially strapped times. In hard times the useful sciences will survive and the malignant fantasies of many of our trends will be starved because they are poisonous frauds. This will be a good thing. Not so good is the fact that the authentic uses of the humanities and social sciences will also suffer. Eating comes before reading Shakespeare or doing sociometrics.
Or so I see it.
Best,
Richard
As a graduate of an “elite” college (Amherst), I think that for me, it was worth the money. I made life long friends, learned a lot, and was surrounded by bright and enggaged minds (the students and most professors). As regards, the loopy left students (a minority), professors and administration, its a tragedy but I am not sure you get a less ideological faculty at state universities, after all the profs there have ivy league degrees. The only solution is for the alums a la Dartmouth to apply pressure and to elect trustees that have more main stream views.