When the Education Bubble Finally Pops
blog.jamtoday.org
blog.jamtoday.org
Words cannot express how infuriating that widget is. It's like Snap.com only more evil. Banish it back to the nether regions from whence it came and submit this post again so I can actually read it.
UPDATE: Seriously, I can't get rid of it. Clicking inside it, clicking outside it, the Escape key, nasty words about its mother -- nothing works. I even tried following one of its links, and the resulting page had the same obscuring widget on it. Who designs the UI for these things?
I'll try restarting Safari.
FURTHER UPDATE: Nope, it's out of excuses. That is officially the suckiest non-musical widget I've ever seen.
[edit: It doesn't appear at all in Firefox 3.x/Win!]
Also, Safari Adblock, it's not terrible.
Also, Safari Adblock's crap. If you really want to block ads, use http://glimmerblocker.org/
The site has pretty bad usability with About page as well. You can't even see close/next/previous links on pages.
"Robb claims that as 'there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree' this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble."
Have college costs risen so steeply that there is now no economic rationale (from increased lifetime income) to seek a college degree?
javascript:document.getElementById("sideposts").style.setProperty("display", "none");
Somewhat ironically, all of this complaining got the post to the front page of Hacker News. Next time I'll have to do it on the merit of the post, alone.
One of the harbingers of this is the fact that a lot of employers started giving exams to the folks they hire. The 4.0 gpa start not being enough to prove to them that someone was educated enough to do the job (whoa!).
I can envision the day when passing some sort of qualifier will be accepted in lieu of a degree for most professions. How you come by the knowledge to pass that qualifier will be up to you.
I suspect that the system is self-destructing right now. The more degrees that universities award, the less it will matter that it came from a university. This will bring about the end of most university education, and hence most universities (because they can't all be doing worthwhile research).
I suppose you could just pay for access to facilities and equipment on demand, but in the case of something like a chemistry lab or x-ray machine the institution granting access has to know your level of competance before they give you access and the easiest way of doing that without checking each time is a structured program.
After all, they think, if I satisfy the peers in my field, why do I care if I have an acceptable org chart?
I could easily see an employer caring more about getting through a program blessed by a professional organization than about getting an accredited "degree." I actually think this would be a "purification" process for universities.
The metaphor of a degree being a pointer to a body of knowledge fits well here -- I think it was pg who I originally got that metaphor from. I can imagine extending the metaphor to where the degree points to a graph of knowledge, and the GPA is a walk length. No knowledge of which nodes are touched, just how many. Hopefully this metaphor isn't too much of a stretch. :-)
The problem is that the GPA to walk relationship isn't well defined at all, and it still doesn't say what they know, or more importantly how well they think and learn.
The only thing I can really glean from a degree-holder and their GPA is that they were able to learn some body of material at the pace of a college-level course, and were able to retain and work with that information well enough to get the GPA they have. Maybe, depending on how grading is done, and what their grade was based on. It is a very weak indicator even then, but better than using it for determining stored knowledge.
I think it might be better to include as part of the qualifier (in fact, maybe even most of it) a problem they need to learn and apply new things to solve.
This is a harsh generalization, but unfortunately as much as I don't want to believe it, I've found truer more often than not. Human communication is hard, it's even harder when your terms of agreement is in the form of a syllabus.
I don't mean to undermine some of the finest minds I've ever encountered in real-life, I'm just saying that more often than not, the people who do take it upon themselves to know is hardly worth the modern student's money or time. This is simply proven given what the web has become; I've made more meaningful connections by actively participating in what other people are working than I'll ever make in any formal arrangement for the rest of my life. The problem is in how we reassure ourselves, since we often rely on these tried-and-true techniques that aren't really measuring anything of value other than who originally did it and why. Self-directed learners don't fit into the modern University's model.
In short, I don't believe in universities because I think we don't have a real way to hold these institutions accountable given all the money we give them. I put most of my faith in the people who don't believe in these monolithic institutions and instead believe that there must be a better way.
To a certain extent that's already true of degrees; you can choose not to show up to lectures at all so long as you show up for exams (if there's no coursework obv).
I feel the press is a bit bubble-happy these days, but the scale of the economic depression doesn't make that unmerited. In fact, I welcome it; education costs have gotten more and more out of hand and no one seems to be making a fuss about it except those having to pay. The bubble craze has pointed out areas where things have been going wrong for a very long time, it's sort of like draining a swamp to reveal all the bodies.
I think part of the bubble is an untested assumption, that having a degree will always net you more income in the long run, much like it was assumed that house prices would never, ever, ever fall. It's a core indicator of a bubble, because it's easy for reality to break things if the assumption stops being true. I can definitely vouch for those who have gotten degrees and lead careers that have nothing to do with them; from a career perspective (not a personal or educational one, mind you), a lot of people have just wasted four years of their life.
I was raised by engineers who got degrees to go work in the very specific fields they got degrees in, so of course this flies directly in the face of what I thought was supposed to be the way things work.
A better comparison would be: how many people with college degrees are doing worse than people without them? If you do the math, you will see that very few people without college education are working in the same job as people with degrees.
The main reason for that is that a college degree is a pre-requisite for most well-paying jobs. Which means that people cannot afford not to have a university education, because their prospects will be pretty limited without it.
Even when it is, it is also related to prestige, ideas about what it's like to be a lawyer/engineer/doctor & other things. It's not unreasonable that the price will outweigh benefits & that people will pay to be a lawyer.
>>from a career perspective (not a personal or educational one, mind you),
I don't think you can isolate those two in the long run.
But all that said, the education world can be turned on it's head. There are more ways to learn things now & there are potentially much, much cheaper ways to provide education. Students subsidising research doesn't make much sense.
I once worked out that for a year of full time study, I was only getting about 5-10 hours of dedicated lecturer/tutor time. That includes some classes with low enrolment & some with massive enrolment & doesn't include preparation or marking.
I don't think that is very common: the vast majority of the funding for research comes from the government (e.g. NSF, DARPA, NIH), various non-profits, and corporate sponsorship.
In any case, my point was that the fees charged by elite US schools are disproportionate to the cost of providing the education. Even the costs are probably disproportionate to the what costs would be if universities were competing on efficiency/price.
But there are a bunch of cross subsidies going on. International/Domestic, Across disciplines, undergraduate/postgraduate. Science students get 3X or more the hours, equipment & materials that sociology or accounting students get. An accounting course (8 courses = 1 year down here) might consist of 2X14 lectures (50-150 students per lecture), 1X12 tutorials(8-15 students) & whatever preparation time is paid (I imagine anywhere from .5 to 2.5 to the hour). Tutors are often only paid in the $20-$30 range. It would not be unusual to average a figure that works out at a small fraction of the cost (or potential cost) to deliver that education.
In general, that hints at a possibility of something flying under the current system & undermining it. All these money machines (eg prestigious MBA programs) could go outside the big institutions. You might say these programs are worthless without the prestige of the institution. Well that's another problem.
It would be a shame to see all education move online for purely cost reasons.
"If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable--I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books."
However, all memory based knowledge can all go online. Also, video and audio of lectures, homework assignments, etc. Much like MIT opencourse, UC Berkeley webcast.
It would be like what happened if you subsidized the speculative investment in assets that people irrationally thought would never decline in price, like, I don't know, homes.
If we really need college degrees for everyone, then there is no choice but to go the high school route and fund it publicly.
(all trends are in real dollars, costs may simply grow slower than inflation)
Other solutions may be a globalization of the educational system. Currently, US institutions are the top. Perhaps that will change, and costs will decrease as suppliers increase.
Also, tuition is not going to research. Most research is payed by the Government and a few non-profit institutions.
The "corporate university" thing makes me sick. No thank you, Mr. CEO President.
But then I am from the old world where education is a basic right and never understood why people would frame it as a purely economic question...