By Professor Doom
Hey, it’s no
secret we’ve got a serious problem in higher education right now. Our kids,
trained from birth that they should go to college after high school, are doing
their supposed duty by going to college…and getting destroyed. Many of them
leave higher education with lives crushed by debt, and gaining nothing from
their 4 to 6 years of higher “education” that will help with that debt.
Teaching kids they must go to college once they hit 18 is about as abusive as
teaching them they should jump into a volcano at that age.
The Mises
Institute usually focuses on theoretical Libertarian ideology or Austrian
economics, but recently they posted an article on higher education:
It’s a
good enough piece, but it repeatedly neglects an important concept: why. So, let’s hit the reasons and fill
in the missing details.
1. Graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills.
This
is well documented:
According to the WSJ, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of
seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence
in a document or interpret data in a table”. The outcomes were the worst in
large, flagship schools: “At some of the most prestigious flagship
universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no
improvement in critical thinking over four years.”
Absolutely, a college degree can’t
maintain its value if you can’t distinguish a holder of a degree from a
non-holder. It used to mean something, and now it doesn’t. But…why?
The answer is pretty simple:
a college degree used to be awarded by academics, demonstrating the holder was
capable of jumping through a wide array of academic hoops, primarily by writing
papers demonstrating understanding of a broad range of topics. That’s changed.
Assignment 1: “Fill in
the names and capitals of the 20 southeast Asian countries on this blank map.”
Assignment 2: “Use
techniques of advanced calculus to show how perturbations in the measurements
of Mercury’s mass as it orbits the sun confirm the relativistic effects
predicted by Einstein.”
---both of these
assignments are from 4000 level, senior level, courses in state run
universities with a reputation for partying, as capstone material for a degree.
Assignment 1 comes from around 2014, assignment 2 comes from around thirty
years ago. I totally concede neither has much to do with real life…but which of
these assignments could a 10-year old complete with a bit of effort, and which
takes years of knowledge and skill development before it can be attempted?
It’s also well documented that many
college courses have no requirements, no reading, no writing, no demonstration
of any knowledge. We have classes with hundreds of students in them, watching
Powerpoint presentations that, over the course of the semester, add up to
around 30 pages of text (i.e., less than an hour of reading)…and students are
tested on how well they can learn this material over the course of 4 months.
The reason many campuses have courses like
this is accreditation is broken, and no longer has anything to do with education.
Even major campuses like UNC can operate academic frauds for decades with no
significant penalty from their accreditor.
This is why most students get nothing from college: colleges don’t have to
provide anything.
2. Shouting Matches Have Invaded Campuses Across The Country
Absolutely, a degree from a school famous
for race riots isn’t going to be worth much, and every year at least one more
school goes into the “you don’t want this school’s name on your resume”
category because of the ridiculous rioting—problematic when the degree from
that school cost $100,000 or more.
The article highlights one school, but
it’s hardly alone:
It
seems that developing critical thinking skills has taken a backseat to shouting
matches in many US colleges. At Evergreen State College in Washington, student protests have hijacked classrooms
and administration. Protesters took over the administration offices last month,
and have disrupted classes as well. It has come to the point where enrollment
has fallen so dramatically that government funding is now on the line.
The chaos at
Evergreen resulted in “anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the
campus being closed for three days.” One wonders if some of these students are
just trying to get out of class work and studying by staging a campus takeover
in the name of identity politics and thinly-veiled racism.
Again: why? Please understand,
administrators have incredible power on campus today, they’ve tossed faculty
for the most idiotic reasons imaginable.
If admin wanted to stop the riots, they
could do so, trivially: remove students from campus, and keep removing students
until there are no more rioters.
Admin won’t do it, of course, since it
cuts into those sweet, sweet, student loan checks. They’ll cheerfully degrade
the value of a degree into nothing before that.
Obviously.
3. Trade Schools and self-study offer better outcomes for many
Truth be told, this is a redundant
criticism: the first criticism (college graduates gain nothing) sets a pretty
low bar for a “better outcome” from doing something else, right?
So, yeah, the “why?” is easy enough to
answer regarding the better outcome at trade school. If you get nothing from
college, then anywhere else is better.
For a more satisfying answer, however, we
need to consider how it happened that college became so devoid of skill
development. There are many issues here, but primary is education hiring is no
longer controlled by educators. Instead, administrators with administrative
degrees handle that.
Thing is, every dollar not spent on hiring
educators is a dollar that goes into administrative pockets. You’re going to
hire people as cheaply as possible, and obviously that’s best done by hiring
people without marketable skills. This is why our campuses are bogged down with
coursework on gender studies, ethnic studies, and deviant-sex studies—there’s
no other place people who can bloviate about such things can get hired.
On the other hand, you don’t see college
courses on plumbing, air conditioner repair, or car repair. People with those
skills can get high paying jobs, and thus won’t accept the crappy conditions and
welfare-qualifying pay of your typical college professor.
One might argue that such things are not
academic, but what of computer science? That was an academic subject, but many
campuses are thinning out, if not outright closing down their computer science
departments…it’s just too hard to find people with computer skills that would
subject themselves to working for admin.
So, yeah, there’s a reason why you’ll learn
better skills on your own or at a trade school.
And now we come to the last reason:
4. Tuition is increasing, but future earnings are decreasing.
The article backs it up with charts and
things, and it’s true enough, but there are two “why” questions worth answering
here, “why is tuition increasing” and “why are earnings decreasing.”
Tuition is increasing primarily because of
the student loan scam: all the money flowing on to campus just raises prices
due to increased demand, it’s very basic economics. I could, of course, blame
the insatiable greed of admin as well but even if they had integrity or an iota
of self-restraint, prices would still go up with all that money sloshing around
in higher ed.
The second “why” is the big question for
this country: earnings are decreasing for a great many jobs. When inflation is
factored in, the average pay in this country is below where it was at the turn
of the century.
For many kids, going to college is all
about landing that “high paying job.” Hey, a high paying job is a good thing,
but if you have a choice between a job paying $25,000 a year (a janitor, say),
and a job paying $40,000 a year but also comes with loan payments of $16,000 a
year…then janitor turns out to be a better deal, right?
Now factor in the years spent in college
spending that loan money, and the janitor deal is even better.
“Why are earnings dropping?” is a complicated
economic question and I can respect the article not even attempting to answer
it (although, seeing as the site is named after an economist, they really
should have tried…). That said, your average Trump voter believes it’s because
our government has basically sold out the country, shipping those high paying
jobs overseas and burying the whole country in debts to bankers rather than
making decisions that would help the people of the United States.
The evidence justifying this belief is
pretty strong, but the ultimate question is what, if anything, can Trump do to
bring those jobs back?