By Professor
Doom
Most people think education is the great
equalizer, that in a society where everyone is equally educated to the highest
levels, everything will be perfectly equal in all other ways. It’s a silly
utopian dream, and a recent article highlights the
reality of higher education today, although it misses quite a few things.
The number of Americans between ages
twenty-five and twenty-nine holding a four-year college degree rose from one in
twenty in 1940 to one in four by 1977. And if the federal government did much
to make this happen, the states did more. Led by California, which virtually
guaranteed college access to every high school graduate, many states committed
themselves to providing high-quality public education at low cost.
Although this is a well-researched
article, I’d have to put a [citation needed] after that “high-quality” part,
and I’m sure “low cost” means to the state, not to the taxpayer. In over 25
years of teaching at the college/university level, I’ve never had a single
administrator tell me to improve quality. Improve retention, improve the number
of butts-in-seats? More times than I can count. But cover more material, ask
more of the students, anything like that? No way, and having seen so many
faculty let go or at least punished for trying to provide a quality education,
I’d really like to see some evidence of a commitment to high-quality education,
to contradict what I’ve seen with my own eyes.
“…highly selective colleges like
those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our
society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments. This meager figure is
often explained as the consequence of a regrettable reality: qualified students
from disadvantaged backgrounds simply do not exist in significant numbers…”
Yeah, no kidding, rich people go to the
nicer schools. I reckon the author would be surprised to learn that rich people
tend to stay in nicer hotels, drive nicer cars, and eat nicer food. Yes, this
is reality, but it’s a reality that’s been around for thousands of years now.
“…Their numbers, which Hoxby and
Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors,
“are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part
because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about
the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do…”
I can’t help but suspect the article has
some sort of agenda here. There are 20,000,000 college students right now. The
existence of 30,000 low income students that aren’t applying to top tier
schools is pretty minor, only accounting for around 0.15% of college students.
That’s what “do not exist in significant numbers” means, after all. Maybe the
poor shouldn’t go deep into debt for these top tier schools, maybe the guidance
counselors realize that poor families just don’t have the resources to send
their kids across the country, much less pay for all the other expenses
associated with college, and so it makes more sense to get the promising
student to apply to the local college, where he’ll have a much better chance of
getting a scholarship. The whole point of each state setting up a local
university system was to serve the local citizens; I don’t see the author’s
cause for alarm about this aspect of the system only working for 99.85% of the
population.
We’re only talking about 0.15% of college
students here. This may be the reality of higher education, but there are many
larger issues to consider than the possibility of some tiny minority not being
sent to the top schools.
As a result, the cost of public
higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their
families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition.
The article justifies this, but I have to
disagree. The cost hasn’t really shifted, so much as gone up so extravagantly
that families have to pay more. For example, about $14 billion was spent on Pell Grants in 2007,
but by 2011 it was over $41.5 billion. That’s a huge increase over 4 years, the amount of time to
get a degree. The reality is the money flowing into higher education isn’t
going anywhere near higher education. Instead, it’s mostly supporting a huge
administrative bureaucracy, gigantic money-losing sportsball programs, and
bloated remedial programs in giant lecture halls that don’t actually help
students….as longtime readers of my blog already know.
These are indefensible realities in a
nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at
this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided
from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European
model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for
university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the
rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
While I’m not necessarily advocating for
the European model, the author is revealing a bias. Yes, it is a “select few,”
that go into the obscure academic training, but the selection process is
self-selecting: those that want to go, and can demonstrate an interest and
aptitude, can go. For free. Do we really need to send everyone to school to
learn the mating habits of the Southeastern Swamp Centipede? What’s so bad
about only “letting” the people that want to learn such things do so?
In the United States, the model is “those
that want a check, and can click off a box saying they want a degree, can go.”
It’s a different process, and has led to schools basically emptying out after
check day, when the checks are delivered, and to nomadic bands of students that
go from school to school, collecting
those checks.
That’s the reality of higher education in
the US: bands of fake students taking fake courses in (often) fake
institutions, while the administrative caste skims off the top, in layers so
thick that it’s more fair to consider that only a thin layer on the bottom is
going to the actual students being educated.
Too few are challenged or given
guidance and encouragement. Cheating is common, including at elite private
colleges and the so-called public flagships
Yeah, no kidding. The “Butts in Seats”
payment model means that anything that would conflict with having butts in
seats (like tossing cheaters, or challenging students to learn anything) is
removed from campus. The reality is that higher education is no longer
controlled by educators, but instead by an administrative caste who is, quite
literally, paid based on the number of butts in seats.
In 2012, thirty-six private
university presidents earned more than a million dollars—some a lot more—and
many supplement their salaries with “service” on corporate boards. Especially
in straitened times, these excesses are, to say the least, tasteless. They make
presidential homilies urging students to put aside selfishness ring hollow. But
they contribute only marginally to the college “cost disease.”
Finally, the article starts to get close
to the reality. Yes, the millions of dollars thrown away on ridiculously
overpaid Poo Bahs is only a drop in the bucket, but it’s indicative of a system
that is out of control…there’s just no need to pay this kind of money in a
wildly noncompetitive system where the customers are willing and, through the
student loan scam, able to pay anything for a high falutin’ degree of minimal
worth.
A few dozen million-a-year Poo Bahs aren’t
much…but then you must figure in the vast administrative bureaucracy…there are
more administrators on campus than there are faculty, and it isn’t just the Poo
Bah who gets ridiculous pay. The gentle reader is invited to look at the median pay for college
administrators in 2012, and see with his own eyes that a salary of $200,000 or more was common
enough then—even assistants typically broke $100,000!--and is assuredly more
common now. Toss in that all too often nobody can even tell you what rare,
special, skill these people have to justify the pay, and I think the reality of
higher education becomes all the more obvious. Toss in tens of thousands of
these grossly overpaid deanlings, and it becomes ludicrous to say this
contributes “only marginally” to the cost of higher education.
The general theme of the article is that
the rising cost of college is hurting “the poor” the most, and I suppose it is.
The author’s unwillingness to consider that the student loan scam, which was
instituted primarily to help poor people pay for college, has, in fact, caused
the cost to rise ever more. Thus, it would be far more reasonable to get rid of
the thing hurting students. Does the gentle reader suspect the author will come
to this conclusion, or will the author instead think the solution will be to
pour more government money on higher education?
Next time we’ll find out.
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