EduBubble

The nominally anonymous LawProf wrote a nice essay about erasing the stigma of failure. This is a big problem in the legal business because he suggests that half of the former law school graduates and more than half of the future legal eagles will not practice law in the coming years. The oversupply has been building for some time and we’ve all been letting shows like “Ally McBeal” blind us to the cold,  hard reality.

LawProf mixes in some good academic jargon to make it seem serious, but the point is pretty simple: we overproduce and toss aside the people we don’t need. Then society tells them it’s their fault when it really is a systemic issue of overproduction.

It’s worth noting that this overproduction has been rampant in many fields for many years now. PhDs are in a huge oversupply. Liberal arts majors are a dime a dozen. It’s just a bit shocking to hear that it’s true for lawyers, but it shouldn’t be any surprise because it’s happened with every other field. The world has more talent than it can use.

Bob Samuels delivers a number of points into this posting and I’m only going to deal with one: the idea that there should be a  ”major emphasis on making sure that federal research grants receive enough overhead funding (indirect costs) to make them at least break even.”

I think Mr. Samuels and I agree that undergraduate tuition is subsidizing research, but I’m guessing we differ on the mechanism. He is probably using the old cheap Sugar Daddy model, the one that seems to be quite popular around schools these days. This is the one that says the schools are forced to boost tuition because the Sugar Daddy isn’t giving them enough cash. If the state or federal government would just recognize the value of the research, then they would turn the spigots back on.

It looks very different to me. I see a university system in great demand by parents who desperately want to make sure their kids are in the middle class. That makes them easy targets for fee increases because they just don’t blink when the prices go up. The easy loan money just fuels the desire.

The research game is different. The fanciest proposals stand the best chances and the easiest way to get a fancy proposal is to do much of the work in advance with another stash of cash. Then you use the grant money to fund the next project. Provosts often talk about “investing” in an area of research because they think the government will shower it with cash in the future. And so they take any excess cash from the undergraduates and use it to jumpstart their research. I’ve heard one professor from a tech college lament the fact that his chums can’t milk the liberal arts students like the balanced universities.

If you add in the fact that the professors are chosen for their love of research and promoted based largely upon their success getting grants, it only follows that the professors will take any excess cash around the place and use it for research.

So I don’t think that it will make a darn bit of difference for the grant giving agencies to magically dump another N% on the schools. The professors will keep using the tuition money because that’s how they stay competitive in the granting process.

It’s not just the kids who are fudging their SAT numbers. DANIEL E. SLOTNIK and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA at the NY Times report that Claremont McKenna college just added a small amount to their median scores when reporting them to US News. The numbers seem so small — just 10 points to the verbal– that I can’t imagine it made much difference. But it’s the thought that counts.

The technically anonymous LawProf has an elegant description of a legitimated scam, a system where the scammers hide this reality from themselves with ideology. Fascinating.

Or at least that’s the message I got from from Aaron Glantz’s story in the NY Times about how Silicon Valley is just like “Logan’s Run.” And if you get that analogy, you’re going to feel a special sympathy for the article about how no one wants to hire anyone over 35.

So while Silicon Valley is sending their lobbyists to Washington asking for more emigration visas because they can’t find anyone to hire, a group of folks over 40 are congregating in downtown Sunnyvale to help each other. You wouldn’t know it from the blather about high demand for Silicon Valley employees, but the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley is 8.9%– higher than the national average!

And who is unemployed? Plenty of people with fancy degrees and plenty of experience. Do you remember long ago, the buzzword was that the companies didn’t want to hire new graduates because they didn’t have “experience”? Surprise. That buzzword doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

So what’s going on? I think a scientist would look at the data and come to the conclusion that the degree is worthless. The only reason people want to hire new college graduates is because the graduates are young, unencumbered, willing to work long hours, and pliant. The degree is superfluous. Wooo hooo.

This beautiful sophistry comes from the great state of Maryland. John Fritze and Steve Kilar of the Baltimore Sun report that some of the state schools in Maryland are being squeezed hard by too many students. Yet those cheapskates in the state house don’t want to give the schools more money. What do the schools do? They fight back with the one tool they have: denying middle class taxpayers the chance to have their children inducted into the middle class.

One state school cut their enrollment by 1000 to protest the lack of funding. Now, everyone knows that the extra kids in the auditorium don’t cost very much. The professors are already there waving their hands around. An extra few kids in the audience don’t matter.

My favorite line:

Danette Howard, the state’s interim secretary for higher education, called O’Malley’s proposed tuition increase this year “modest” and said some campuses want larger increases to keep up with rising enrollment.

Just to be clear about the sophistry here: the n-th student doesn’t cost as much as the first. In every other industry, buying in bulk cuts prices. Yet when the state buys education for its citizens in bulk, it’s being asked to pay more per person if enrollment increases.

That’s the college industrial complex for you.

All of my colleagues like to parrot the horse manure from the administration that financial aid budgets are like Doritos: bigger and bolder than ever. But is that really true? It could be that the schools that want boost revenues by, say, 4% will raise tuition by 9% and then brag about boosting financial aid by 5%. (I know that percentages don’t really add so perfectly.)

Daniel Slotnik at the NY Times reports on a new study that suggests that financial aid options are more like pollution or global warming or deforestation instead of Doritos. In other words, worse than ever.

The dwindling of financial aid was borne out by the survey, which was first conducted in 1966 and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive of its kind because of its scope.

Among the key findings from the most recent survey:

The percentage of students who received financing from grants or scholarships dropped four percentage points from 2010, to around 70 percent in 2011, with the dollar value of those scholarships falling as well. Nearly 12 percent of entering students reported major concerns about financing, and 56 percent had some concerns.

The old saying goes, “You can lead a horse’s ass to knowledge but you can’t make him or her think.” And by horse’s ass, I don’t mean the high school drop outs who leave school at 16. According to Tamar Lewin at the NY Times, the Obama administration wants to raise the high school drop out age from 16 to 18. And why? This is one of my favorite sophistries to come out of the education industrial complex in some time:

“The evidence is quite robust that raising the school-leaving age increases educational attainment,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, whose study found, however, that exceptions to the law, lenience in enforcement and weak consequences for truancy could all interfere with an increase.

What a genius. I bet instituting a draft raises military honors attainment, instituting a driver’s license requirement raises driver’s license attainment, etc. etc. You force the kids to go to school and — what do you know — they have more “educational attainment.”

But what is “educational attainment”? Well, let’s not get too specific about this. I’m sure we can use the diploma granting powers of the Wizard of Oz to make sure that everyone gets a brain.

Finally at the end of the article, Ms. Lewin notes that kids drop out because they’re bored and they realize that the curriculum has little relevance to the real world.

And they’re right. It’s been years since I used anything I learned in high school math class. I had to learn how to balance a check book from my parents. Literature is great fun, but it’s largely day dreaming about living in the fantasies of someone like Jane Austen(yay) or Fyodor Dosteyevsky (ugh).

I’m just waiting for the diploma-whipped Obama-ites to get together with the college industrial complex to mandate 2 or 4 years of paying college tuition. I’m sure studies will show that it increases college attainment whatever that is.

OMG, they’re saying. Stop what you’re doing. We better think about this free thing. Well, not literally, but that’s what I heard between the lines of this story by Sue Gee in I Programmer.

It seems the debate  about certification is still ongoing but speaking in the broadcast, James Plummer, dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering said:

“I think it will actually be a long time, maybe never, when actual Stanford degrees would be given for fully online work by anyone who wishes to register for the courses.”

And of course. All of the prestige depends upon it being hard to get into. The filtering makes it worth it. If 20,000+ of the great unwashed can make it through the AI course and earn a certificate of completion, there could be a big inflation in the number of Stanford Degrees.

OMG indeed.

Brett Nelson at Forbes says that kids today should look for “grownup training” after high school and by this he doesn’t mean the keg parties and ivory tower dreaming sold by the college industrial complex.