College Inc. PBS documentary
video.pbs.org
video.pbs.org
On one hand, you have "for profit" schools like those documented here. At best, these are a slippery slope. The fact that they are "for profit" doesn't scare me so much, but the predatory marketing and questionable value do. Bottom line, I would never attend one in current form and would take anyone unable to see through the facade with a heavy grain of salt while hiring.
On the other, you have traditional state and established private schools. The problems are myriad here as well. Costs continue to rise and most are hurting for money and have practically become "for profit". The danger of tenure means that quality can and often is lackluster. From personal experience, many professors are more interested in themselves and forget that the primary mission is the development of students. I've found that many college professors are down right awful at conveying their subject matter to students. All in all, it's a hundreds of years old bureaucracy with little oversight and questionable relevance to the 21st century.
I think the real crime is the expectation that everyone in America needs a college education. There is certainly value in pursuing the standard liberal arts curriculum; it pushes you to explore a wide area and develop at least some analytical and argumentative skills. Whether everyone is cut out for this study is another matter. It is a mistake to assume that the worlds needs such a large quantity of generalists. My intuition points to quite the opposite. Technology will continue to push complexity farther and farther into all walks of life. What is really needed is the ability to quickly assimilate knowledge and separate wheat from chaff (i.e. throw out the constant stream of bullshit that society and marketing throw at us). Most coursework focuses on quite the opposite by requiring rote memorization and prepackaged knowledge from the professor. There also seems to be a growing trend of disdain for good, honest work -- the thankless jobs that allow us knowledge workers to exist. It is deceitful to perpetuate that everyone is capable of everything and just because they don't have a degree are inferior. Society requires all sorts of people to thrive.
At least for building software, I can't help but think that apprenticeships and mentoring would do a lot more for software quality than four years of expensive daycare that most degree programs are.
Disclaimer: I've just finished my Junior year as a CS major at a small public military college. All in all, the best thing I gotten are a bunch of really good friends and networking opportunities. Those that weren't programming on their own prior to entering the CS program are going to be seriously disadvantaged in the market place. I'm curious what other startup junkies have to say.
I've seen this mistake a lot. While you may believe that the primary purpose of professors is teaching, this is not true at many institutions. In fact, at heavy research institutions the benchmark for tenure is not teaching performance, it's grant success and publishing.
I feel like the largest impact we can have on the future is looking for ways to increase mean intelligence. Otherwise we are perpetually stuck in the model of waiting for brilliant outliers to fix things.
simple example: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04kristof.html
The current for-profit system exists ONLY because of the broken federal student loan system. The goal of 95% of these schools is to extract the federal student loan money from the student as efficiently as possible with a nominal focus on quality of education.
To prove it, spend a half hour reading online education feeder sites that provide reviews (do a few google searches). They fall into three buckets - 80% complain about the aggressive recruiting tactics, poor education and poor customer service. 15% are sock-puppets paid by the universities to write reviews. 5% are satisfied students.
But here's the rub - and I wake up daily baffled by this phenomenon, but the students read the reviews and still attend the schools.
There are by my estimation four reasons for this:
First, you're dealing with, ironically, uneducated, low-income people who don't understand what they're getting into - they have been lead to believe that a college degree is worth something, and they'll take 30-40K of UNFORGIVABLE debt (because it's a federal loan) to make minimum wage.
Second, you're in an environment (higher education) where the very idea of certifying and grading the quality of education would have been unthinkable in decades past and the regulatory environment hasn't caught up with the business realities.
Third, the ease of access to government money won't dry up until major changes are made at the federal level and there's little likelihood that politicians would set themselves up as being against education for lower-income students. Lobbying has ramped up to protect the stream of 20-30 billion dollars of money flowing into the industry.
Fourth, aggressive recruiting tactics driven by the money at stake are keeping the doors full and forcing students into school without knowing what they're getting into.
I'm sure the banks, insurance industry and the investment houses despise all those layers and layers of red tape that tie them up and prevent them from helping Americans reach their God-given right of financial independence. No worries, you are all too big to fail and we'll just pass the payments on to the generous citizens of the United States. No, really, it is our pleasure. In fact, why don't you give yourselves a bonus?
Wal-Mart, America's greatest economic success story, loves America and loves regular folks. You know, the sort of folks that work at their store for minimum wage. The sort of folks who, upon becoming employees, are given paperwork to help apply for government assistance when it comes to medical care and such. Why would they share a tiny fragment of their distended profits reaped from cheap foreign-made American flags and "God Bless America" bumper stickers when they can just help their employees go on public assistance? If we gave them more money, how would that teach them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Sheesh, you just don't know business, do you?
GM, fed up with all those unions, OSHA standards, foreign companies who collude with their governments and incessant regulation decided it was time to close up shop. Sure, they've been moving jobs out of the nation for years and years even while they were making record profits, but that is just business, right? I mean, we need MORE profits, don't we? So, it is a good thing that TARP money was around to help them back on their feet so they can put more Americans out of work. But it is an American company, right? Yep, a good old American company with a few Americans still building cards and getting paid and paying taxes and buying things in their home town. And, they've even started paying back that money (with more TARP money... you know... taxpayer money). You see, capitalism DOES work!
After watching this PBS program, I see the next bubble rising in the distance. These visionary capitalists are throwing off the dusty shackles of dated institutions and bringing a new model to the world. If only the government would step aside and let them realize their dream of educating those who might not otherwise receive education! Why must the Nanny State always talk about standards and expectations and accreditation and other big words? Begone, you scoundrel! Yes, I am talking to you accreditation and regulations and truth-in-advertising! Just get out of the way Uncle Sam and just keep those student loan checks coming. Stop obstructing the market, comrade!
Same old shell game. Bang the drums of free market capitalism with one hand and hold out the other hand for government money. Exploit whomsoever you can and call it freedom. So glad these forward-thinking capitalists are running this and not the evil commie-socialist-fascist (or whatever term they are using this week on Fox News) government. Why won't the government just get off our backs (and just start sending us checks). No, it isn't all bad, I'm sure, but I guess I'm just jaded after all these types (and I didn't even start on the military industrial complex or the medical industry) screaming about freedom and free markets until they need money or help. Good thing the teat of liberty is full (just like the Gulf of Mexico is full of oil).
/rant
How to make people more "productive" by essentially finance them to a small bump in their qualifications.
Very very predatory (at least for me, coming from a top school)!
EDIT: Woah, look at this link http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/University-Of-Pho... - so many complaints. I really wonder what is going on here. Is there any online university that is not a ripoff?
Now, the question is, what do for-profit institutions do better than non-profit institutions? The first is enrollment numbers. For-profit schools enroll many times the number of students that non-profit schools do. The problem with this is assuming that all students are created equal. That is, is educating 500 good students worse than educating 10,000 bad students? Even more concerning, is educating 500 students well worse than educating 10,000 students poorly? If you watch the special you will learn that it is projected that as many as 50% of for-profit students who take student loans will default on those loans. This suggests to me that, regardless of the cause, the for-profit institutions are not educating the students adequately. In this case it seems that this is not a strength of capitalism--the for-profit institutions are not making money by providing a useful service, they are essentially making money by playing snake-oil salesmen.
To my eyes, the only other thing that for-profit institutions are better at than non-profit institutions is enrolling low income students. I think this leads back to your claim that capitalism identifies vacuums in the market. I think the vacuum here is one created by marketing--free money. The for-profit institutions work by promising education, which they say lead to higher income jobs. However, we can see from the statistics that there's no direct proof of that. In fact, the crippling student loans may place students in an even worse financial situation. While educating low income students is certainly an area that we could improve upon, I don't see for-profit institutions as having any revolutionary way of solving this problem.
In essence, I think we see the situation two different ways. I understand you as seeing it as elucidating the weaknesses in traditional higher education (which I can't completely disagree with), but I also see it as direct exploitation of the undereducated due to weak governmental regulation. For-profit institutions signal a demand for what was promised but I don't see a solution anywhere in sight, including inside the for-profit universities. Right now, it's simply exploitation.
I think an important issue here is that the for-profits have good numbers in these areas, but not necessarily good results. It's important to note that we can't objectively say that these things are better from an education standpoint, only from a monetary standpoint. Perhaps traditional institutions are more inflexible (don't offer online courses, etc.), but maybe that isn't an effective teaching method.
Governments don't tend to do that sort of thing because there are incentives for government officials to distort their priorities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
A focused interest group (for example, operators of government-funded schools) can corrupt even a democratically elected legislature to protect its interests through legislation. And this is exactly what has happened with provision of schooling services in most parts of the world, even in countries that mostly have comparatively free and fair politics and largely free-enterprise economic systems. Education (schooling) is deemed so important that it must have substantial public subsidy (that is a reasonable proposition) and "therefore" it must be in the hands of a protected oligopoly. The flaw in policy is assuming that that which has general value to the public must be provided by a limited set of providers who enjoy exclusive subsidies.
"The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
Such as subprime mortgages?
The continued belief in the myth of freemarkets and continued worship of obviously broken capitalism is as outstanding to me as the continued belief that Sadam Hussein had WMDs.