By Professor Doom
Despite the
intense relentless indoctrination of our public schools, our higher education
system has been losing students for years now (six
straight years, and we’re clearly heading for seven). Our
leaders in higher education have been crying about this as a bad thing. They
insist “education is priceless,” and of course want to charge accordingly…but I
disagree. Oh, education is valuable, of course, but this is the modern world.
Pretty much all human knowledge is available on the internet, and you can watch
free videos teaching how to learn ever more obscure skills with little effort.
It just doesn’t
make sense to pay $125,000 (the average) for a random degree under these
circumstances. It’s simple reality, and, as humanity has learned time and again
throughout history, reality eventually will trump any level of indoctrination.
A recent chart tracks how our schools have been losing students, but
fails to discuss the “why.” I wish to do so, lightly, but first
the chart:
A free market
really is an awesome tool for discovery, and higher education is, to some
extent, a free market. Yes, government indoctrination assures a steady supply
of suckers right out of high school desperately wanting “higher education,” and
yes, the government has considerable control over who can give out an actual
degree, but bottom line customers get to freely choose where they get their degrees, and this chart illustrates how even
in our heavily corrupted system, the free market shows its power.
The biggest loss
in students goes to the “for profit” schools. These places have a strong record
of being scams in general, and that word has gotten out. For the most part, they
never intended to be around long, simply renting a few slots in a strip mall or
setting up some online servers. They preyed on the most vulnerable in our
society, or at least the poorest, often signing up kids for huge loans without
their knowledge. Only years later do the kids, now adults, learn they’re under
crushing debt. Though the debt was incurred through fraud, the system is set up
in such a way that even falsely incurred student loan debt is still nigh
inescapable. The Federal government has forcibly shut down many of these
schools, only to be shocked, shocked to discover that accreditation
actually doesn’t have a problem with fraud. It’s good the government
shut down the frauds, but the people who created the frauds walked away with
billions of dollars, while the students are still on the hook.
The next biggest
loser in the above is the category of “2 year public” schools, the community
colleges. I concede the for-profits commit more fraud on a per-student basis,
but, bottom line, the community colleges are bigger frauds in the sense that
they rip off far more students, and steal the money of everyone in the
community who pays taxes…i.e., everyone. The Federal government doesn’t look
closely at these schools, which are often academically just as ridiculous as
the online for-profit schools. Our Fed government
trusts the state governments to do the policing here, but this is silly:
community colleges represent an easy way for a state government to suck in many
billions of Federal dollars via the student loan and Pell Grant
scams. It’s a huge, massive fraud, over 70% of
community college students end up being victimized by their schools, getting
absolutely nothing (not even a worthless degree) from their community college,
wasting years of their lives while the school rakes in tons of easy money. But
the free market is starting to figure it out, and so the true colors of these
schools are finally becoming known.
The third place
loser is the category of “4 year private non-profit,” but this is just a
statistical blip. These schools are pretty vulnerable to being turned into
indoctrination centers, and around 78%
of departments of these schools have no Republicans in them—the only
way this can happen is with political bias in the hiring. It’s pretty amazing
the free market still can reveal that this product is inferior when one
considers how these schools represent a fairly tiny proportion of our student
population.
Our 4 year state
schools come out on top as the least-foul option according to the consumer, and
allow me to explain why this is the case.
First is
legitimacy. Many states can boast of having universities founded over a century
ago, when our higher education system was controlled by scholars, who often
insisted on tenure. When the modern “debase it all to get as much student loan
money as possible” paradigm came on track, these schools and their stodgy old
faculty wouldn’t sell out their integrity for dollars. I grant to a
considerable extent those days are over, and it seems every month I see tenure
destroyed at another state school, to make way for bigger golden parachutes for
the plunderers who have taken over our campuses. Even where this hasn’t taken
full effect, many state schools settled on a “two tier” system of education—you
can still get a perfectly legitimate education, but in the name of growth
(i.e., dollars), there’s a fake education system built into the same school as
well, with lots of bogus courses. Not all state schools have it, but bottom
line the kid at least has a chance to get an education at the state university,
a chance he won’t get at other school types.
Second is price.
Private and for-profit schools can change their tuition prices every week if
they wanted to, but state schools often have to go through the state
legislature to change their tuition. The end result is that “average” price for
a 4-year degree is misleading, as it’s weighted heavily in favor of the far
more expensive schools which don’t need approval to raise their prices. No, I’m
not saying state governments are not corrupt, but the whole process is much
slower than at the non-government schools. Yes, community college is cheaper,
but word about the rampant fraud there is getting out—paying fewer dollars in
tuition does no good when the courses are completely worthless.
Just as when you go to a restaurant for lunch
at noon and seeing it deserted makes you worry that you’re not at a good place,
so too should you use the empirical data above to consider the possibility that
the reason students are fleeing certain schools is because those are the types
of schools to be avoided.
Word to the wise,
is all.
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