By Professor Doom
I saw a great cartoon on Zerohedge.
It’s a joke, of course, but why not take it as a serious suggestion:
Imagine if higher
education really did work this way. Institutions of higher education,
especially universities, justify their incredibly high tuition because of the
incredibly high value of their degrees, or so they claim.
“College degree
holders make a million dollars more over a lifetime”, or so university
officials claim, but this myth is easily
debunked, to the point that janitors are better off than college degree
holders, at least at current tuition prices.
But…why not make
the above joke a truth? Just add another line to accreditation: “All accredited
institutions allow graduates to return their degrees, in exchange for the
institution paying off all student loans incurred for such degrees.”
Wow, this would
melt the face off higher education. No longer would institutions sign up hordes
of students for 6th
grade level work, knowing full well that such work has no market value. For-profit
schools could no longer rip off students with utterly worthless degrees,
year after year, with no drawback to doing so. It
wouldn’t take 18 years of fraudulent classes before students could feel like
they could sue for being ripped off.
Instead, within,
say, 2 years of graduating, a student could just go back to the university, and
say “Sorry, turns out this degree doesn’t work as advertised. Here, you can
take it back, and pay off my student loan for me. Mkay?” This may seem draconian, but keep in mind the
university clearly ripped off the student of years of his or her life, far more
precious than a $100,000 in my opinion (if you don’t believe me, come back when
you’re 75, and see if you wouldn’t pay $100,000 to live as a 20 year old for 4
years!).
Institutions of
higher education, with the sudden realization that they, and not students,
would pay for institutional fraud, would probably be much more interested in
not being so fraudulent anymore. Knowing that they, and not students, would be
paying for 340,000
square foot student recreational centers that would shame amusement parks
would stop their ridiculous building sprees. Institutions realizing that they,
and not students, would pay for bogus degrees with no content, would no longer
sell degree programs in homosexual
music preferences, or coursework
on Lady Gaga, or any of the other myriad versions of academic snake oil so
prevalent on campus. Institutions realizing that they, and not students, would
be paying
all the seven figure administrative salaries would probably cut back on such
insane pay. (Hey, anyone else remember when a “six figure salary” was a big
deal? That’s chump change in higher education administration today!).
If degrees are
so frickin’ valuable that universities can be shameless about charging 100k or
so for them, why not have a money-back guarantee? If accredited schools are so
frickin’ legitimate then why don’t accredited schools actually stand behind
their product?
The simple fact
that no institution anywhere stands behind its educational product well enough
to offer a refund like this, despite the supposed legitimization offered by
accreditation, strongly supports my assertions that much of higher education
today is fraud, bordering on an extraordinarily expensive joke.
