January 27, 2012 – 7:14 pm
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.
January 27, 2012 – 1:01 pm
I spent a few minutes trying to understand Tamar Lewin’s article about the inscrutable new Obama proposal and after my brain started hurting I gave up. As far as I can tell, it’s simple. First, the givens:
- Given that everyone except the college industrial complex hates the skyrocketing tuition.
- Given that the politicians always pander to the voters.
- Given that Obama administration hates hurting anyone’s feelings. (Witness leaving a Republican in charge of the DOD.)
- Given that money is the only carrot now that sticks are off the table.
Put these four givens together and there’s only one answer: the Obama administration will pay schools to keep tuition low.
Where will this money come from? The taxpayers. Aren’t the tuition payers and the taxpayers one and the same? Almost, but not exactly. Many of the taxpayer never get to go to college but they get to subsidize some other kid’s raccoon coat.
The sad thing about this is that many people won’t even see the circular lunacy of this. A bunch will be so excited about saving so much on tuition that they won’t mind paying even more in taxes.
January 27, 2012 – 11:54 am
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.
January 26, 2012 – 8:04 pm
Dave Sheinin at the Washington Post spends some time with the graduating Penn State students, the ones who find that job interviews always turn to the “Jerry Sandusky Crisis”, the phrase the Penn State President applied in the hopes of diverting attention from the massive failures in leadership around the place.
If the theory is that a diploma can bring respect and cash, then the counter theory is that the actions by a few at Penn State will corrode the diplomas of the many. I’m not sure I believe it, but it certainly makes sense if you believe the first part of the equation. Those who live by the hype die by the hype.
January 26, 2012 – 4:03 pm
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.
January 25, 2012 – 5:49 pm
The only thing worse than people ignoring your research– to paraphrase Oscar Wilde– is for someone to shower it with attention, especially if that special someone is a personal-injury lawyer. Josh Fischman at the Chronicle of Higher Edumacation points out that the personal-injury lawyers are reading those ghostwritten papers churned out by academics and looking for any weakspot that will allow them to sue. Kkkkaaaa-ching! Deep pocket time.
You know those papers. There are a dozen authors who get together at some ski resort to look over the draft on the chairlifts. The soft money pays for the so-called “conference” and everyone gets to add a few more lines to the CV. It’s all good.
And the reason it’s so much fun is that someone else is typing up the text and putting those words in the right order. Some of the drug companies pay ghostwriters to do the work and then everyone at the ski resort waves their magic wand over the paper. It must be good if the typesetting looks good.
I’ll close with some harsh words from the piece:
“By lending his name, the author is contributing to fraud,” says Bijan Esfandiari, one of the authors of the PLoS Medicine article. “And the ghostwriter is involved in the conspiracy as well.”
January 25, 2012 – 1:08 pm
An unsigned piece from the British Daily Mail brings us the news of 23-year old John Campbell who is “studying for dual bachelor’s degrees in business administration and economics.” He’s also the part-time treasurer of Harrisburg, PA, the bankrupt capital of Pennsylvania. He’s been trying to help the city declare bankruptcy but that fussy judicial branch won’t go along with the executive branch and it’s plan to just flip the bird to the bond holders.
While I can’t predict much wonderful for Harrisburg, I think there’s something quite good about elevating someone from Generation Debt. If anyone understands the reality of deficit spending, it’s someone from a Generation that’s been decimated by the blithe spending habits of the elders who piled all of these debts on their shoulders. Good luck Mr. Campbell. You need it.
January 24, 2012 – 10:10 pm
One of the classic gambits in the salary shakedown at the universities is to say that Prof. X would be making twice as much in private industry. This is repeated so often that I’m sure that the real standouts probably think that they, being much better than average, would make three or four times as much. If only this were true…
The brilliant LawProf continues to supply us with deep insights and nice data points on the way to writing wonderful explications of the problems confronting the legal corner of the college industrial complex. My favorite line from a recent post:
In other words, since the 1980s per capita law school faculty direct compensation has roughly doubled, while the sheer number of faculty, relative to the size of law school student bodies, has also doubled. I have entered this data into a program that can only be run on a Cray supercomputer, and the resulting calculation suggests that total law school faculty costs are four times higher now than they were 30 years ago.
He finds that while new law professors took a salary cut to work in academia back in the 1980s, the new professors are getting pretty much the same amount. They’re not taking that cut any longer.
I continue to submit that the college industrial complex pays as much as if not better than the private sector for all but a few strange outliers. The Bank of America, that evil bastion of the 1%, pays Senior Vice Presidents between $150k and $250k. That’s less than many stars make at universities. Elizabeth Warren was pulling in almost $400k at Harvard Law and she had plenty of time to work for outside clients.
Oh, I’m sure there will be a few partners at the very top firms who work very long hours and make more than Ms. Warren, but their numbers are shrinking and there’s a great deal of pricing pressure on lawyers. Why I know several smart people who were pushed out of the best firms because they couldn’t bill enough.
And the huge salaries made by a few private sector folks are more than balanced out by the large group of professors who do things that no one in the private sector would ever want to pay someone to do at any price and certainly not at the six figure salaries collected by many specialists in advanced metatheory.
January 24, 2012 – 10:06 pm
Well, duh. They target any pile of cash that appears on the radar screen and the DOD has a big one. Now if he would only realize that the not-for-profits can gobble up the cash just as quickly. See reporting by the AP.
January 24, 2012 – 5:53 pm
Professor Sebastian Thrun had 120,000 students in his online course last year at Stanford. Now he’s headed out the door to start Udacity.com where he’ll teach another course and, presumably, make a fortune. The spin is that Thrun is “giving up his Stanford position.”
Perhaps. But he was a research professor and maybe, just maybe, Stanford gave him the boot for not bringing in any grant money while he was busy holding the hands of the 120,000 students jammed into his virtual auditorium.
This is the big challenge for these grand plans. I’m sure we can drive costs down if we spread the costs out among thousands of people, but Stanford still couldn’t figure out how to do that. If they charged only a few dollars, that would undercut their regular tuition. If they charged the same price as the face-to-face course, well, I bet 99% of those 120,000 students would find something better to do with their time.
And as several people sagely point out: the 120,000 wanted to say they were going to Stanford. They wanted to root for Stanford to beat Cal. They don’t know Udacity and I’m sure they’re not going to be wearing Udacity t-shirts to any cool parties.
It’s not that I’m pessimistic, it’s just that we don’t know how this will shake out. The course could be free because Stanford cross-subsidized it the research professor’s other contracts. Normally the tuition cross-subsidizes the research.
I’m sure we can get the price lower, it’s just it’s not going to be what everyone expects. Thrun won’t be able to get the rush of teaching 120k students for free at Stanford. And the students won’t be able to get the rush of thinking they’re learning at Stanford for free.
January 24, 2012 – 2:46 pm
Lynn O’Shaughnessy at CBS News writes about Mark Kantowitz’s proposals to help deal with student debt. While I admire much about what Mr. Kantrowitz is doing, I think these will do little to deal with student debt and will just allow us to pretend the debt isn’t there. Most of them seem to require the US to play Sugar Daddy and bail out the students– something that just puts the debts on everyone’s shoulders. In other words, it doesn’t get rid of the debt, it just forces everyone to repay it including the 40-60% of the people who didn’t get to spend four years in raccoon coats and singing Boolah Boolah.
Let me take these seven in series:
- Allow Bankrupcy– Okay, this is bound to help in the long run. But in the short run the unpaid debts end up on the backs of the guarantors which is often the taxpayer.
- Boost the Pell Grant Size — We’re already a debtor nation. Spending more just means more debt for everyone. I’s like everyone gets to take out a student loan with these bigger grants.
- IBR for everyone — I’m not sure how I feel about this idea unless we actually use it to set how much money goes to the school. Right now it guarantees that the taxpayer picks up the unpaid portion and that can be HUGE.
- IBR for parents too! — While I guess it makes sense to give the parents a break too, it’s just going to pile even more debt onto the backs of the taxpayer. And the parents are taxpayers too.
- Financial Literacy Course — Not a bad idea, but the universities will probably lard it up with deconstruction and other metatheoretical financial theory producing something that’s worthless.
- Some contract — The blithe kids already sign legally binding documents that say the same thing without understanding anything. Why should this document make much difference?
- Colleges Do Something — What? Take steps? What does that mean? Does it mean actually firing professors and cutting the outrageous salaries? Bah. They’ll never do it until kids stop showing up.
I understand the impulses behind these wishes, but they’re like believing in Santa bringing the winning Lotto ticket. The government will come along and shower you with money and it will all be for free. Bah.
January 23, 2012 – 7:58 pm
Today’s update come from Chris Bourg, a librarian at Stanford, who notes that things don’t look so hot for the librarians at Harvard. A big reorganization is coming and no one knows who will be in a chair when the music stops playing.
This is only to be expected because the support staff are always the first to go. I feel obliged to put in some boilerplate about the need for humans but they can’t compete with a search engine that scours the globe to find what you want. . I’m sure most of the professors will kick the librarians out of the lifeboat before the other professors because the librarians are just another cost that’s not necessary in the age of Google.
January 23, 2012 – 11:51 am
How do we think about the price of getting a degree if we happen to be the one paying the bills? That is, if you’re a parent or a student?
It’s not easy. The anonymous LawProf goes into a long, detailed discussion about disclosure, as only a lawyer would. He notes that some of his colleagues claim that all of the information– like the truth in “The X-Files”– is already out there. So the faculty is absolved and can go on selling the majesty of the law because the students can make up their own minds.
LawProf points out that availability isn’t the same thing as understanding. No one understands the numbers very well and he’s pretty scared of what he himself can comprehend. He feels that no one knows what to think.
This is the real trouble. No one knows what the economy will look like in 4-10 years, the amount of time it takes to reach employability. No one can predict demand or anticipate unforseen inventions that will both create and destroy jobs. It’s an impossible bet.
Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years.
In other words, one of the best capitalized industrialists brags about the fact that he’s one of the few long-term thinker who’s willing to think five to seven years in the future. So how is a kid of 18 supposed to think in the same way.
The only solution is for the cost of tuition to drop dramatically. The college industrial complex loves to point at some software genius who makes a hefty salary and insist that it get a fair share of the value that it created in the classroom. The college industrial complex never wants to consider the huge risks that the students take and it doesn’t want to factor in a risk premium.
January 21, 2012 – 11:50 am
Will the Law Schools really report employment with such detail? Will the students answer accurately? Will the students even be able to predict their salary in this eat-what-you-kill world?
Tune in in a few years when the new ABA Rules are in force. Katherine Mangan at the Chronicle of Higher Edumacation reports.
January 20, 2012 – 11:39 am
As much as I rail against the college industrial complex for taking advantage of our next generation, the ones that will support us through their Social Security payments, I often have to wonder whether the kids deserve to be taken to the cleaners.
This question from Yahoo makes me wonder. This dude, he like has a girl friend, well like she’s really more than that because they’re engaged now. Oh wait. I should like get to the point. She’s getting bills now from a university that claims she owes them money for classes that she never attended.
Best quote:
I had tried to get her to clear this up with the university a while back but she assumed that they really didn’t have any power over her aside from withholding her transcripts (which are really not that important to her).
Ugh. Don’t people realize that this is real money on those pieces of paper from the bursar’s office? The schools can’t build those fancy climbing walls and wood-paneled office suites without collecting all of the errant debts, even from those kids who kinda got bored and like decided that college wasn’t really right for them.
January 20, 2012 – 10:13 am
A friend passed along this link to the cover story of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine with the snarky comment, “What does it say about Dartmouth when all of these graduates say that their most life changing time was spent somewhere else?”
January 19, 2012 – 7:32 pm
For every time I complain about the college industrial complex, I’ve got to realize that they’re just pikers compared to the medical industrial complex. While it can take four years to pile on six figures in debt at a normal university, the hospitals can do it in a few days.
Emily Atteberry at USAToday writes about one apparently uninsured student from Texas, Julio Manceras, who felt his heart racing and checked into a hospital. After a few days, he was hit with a bill for $100k. They apparently tried to use his student loans to pay off the debt, but that didn’t work. Today after a few more trips to the hospital, he owes $500k.
And how is this bright young man going to pay it off? He saw first hand how the medical industrial complex does it. “For two Tylenols they charged me $50.” he told Ms. Atteberry. So he’s going to med school himself. He just needs to push 20,000 Tylenols and he’ll have the debt covered. (Without interest.)
January 19, 2012 – 4:19 pm
And why do I say “reptiles”? Fast Company’s Gregory Ferenstein reports that the folks at MTV say they need to “shed our skin” every six years because they target the 18-24 year old demographic. Sure. Because the next batch of 18-24 year olds is not going to be interested in dating, technology, hanging out, partying, or any of the things that appealed to the last batch of 18-24 year olds.
But I shouldn’t be so nasty about the uplifting folks that bring us “Jersey Shore”. Jason Rzepka, the network’s vice-president for public affairs wants to use “MTV’s super-powers” to do super-good, in this case help people find scholarships. Their new project “My College Dollars” is like those old books filled with scholarships, but this time it works through Facebook and uses an on-line database.
I would hold my nose more, but I guess I need both hands to give one of those fist-bumping moves that morph into a hug.
(Update: More reporting and less hype from the NY Times’s Daniel Slotnik. )
January 19, 2012 – 3:58 pm
Jack Stripling and Andrea Fuller at the Chronicle of Higher Education deserve some praise for taking on the hard issue of conflicts of interest with college boards. When Presidents serve on corporate boards they often get into tough situations. I’ve written about Ruth Simmons, the President of Brown University who used to serve on the Board of Goldman Sachs while the bank was floating bonds for Sallie Mae. And where did that money go? Into the colleges to pay the salaries of people like Ruth Simmons.
Oh it’s a tangled web of back scratching. Stripling and Fuller point out that Donna Shalala seems to both supervise and answer to several board members. She’s also on their boards. It’s all so comfy. Let’s raise rates, okay?
January 19, 2012 – 12:16 pm
When we last tuned in, Shirley Ann Jackson, the President of the Banana Republic known as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, had suffered a debilitating loss of stature, tumbling from her position at the top of the list of highest paid El Presidentes. To be fair, it’s not that RPI cut her salary, it’s just that the other schools took out their extra big checkbooks, the kind reserved for charity fests and lottery winnings.
It must be tough not being the highest paid El Presidente. But it looks like she approached this the way that a plucky 99%er might: she got a second job. Actually, she did better than that. She got a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh job helping some corporations stay on the right path.
Scott Waldman at the Albany Times-Union rereports what the Chronicle of Higher Education first reported: Jackson now pulls in more that seven figures from her second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh jobs than she does from her first. $1,354,402 to be exact.
Let’s not quibble about the time commitment or wonder just what she does for the money. I’m sure it’s all for the good.
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