How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I love education-related stories. I feel that hacking in this area can help the most people and advance the species the furthest. But we also need desperately need to keep new information we receive in context.
You claim : "the current system is broken"
You submit as evidence to that claim : "there are tons of kids right now graduating without a sliver of hope for a job."
If I ran this claim backwards (which is to say reverse its assertions) then a "working" education system would produce "most of the kids employable" ?
I wonder why that defines "fixed" (or broken for that matter). I feel a bit differently about it of course (or I wouldn't be whining here :-) that the 'publicly funded' part of our education system (that is K-12) should strive to make you generally employable, and that higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment.
Of course looking at it that way its a harder problem, since it really says that every kid who graduates from high school should have the equivalent of a two year STEM degree these days, but those are the base skills that employers want to start from, and we're still not even graduating 100% literate kids from our high schools.
I'd venture that no matter what else an education provides, if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan, it is non-sustainable. (Whether you want to use "good" or "bad" here is up to you)
Even the phrase "public education" is broad and fuzzy. With a tremendous amount of student loans publicly-financed, with public financing also intricately involved in the public university system via research grants, there's a distinction between secondary education and higher education, but I'm not sure how much the distinction matters for purposes of broadly-based public policy discussions.
Of course, they'd do it in the name of lending to high paying, high demand job skills and high likelihood of repayment. Under such a system, I'd have still gotten loans, but I'd rather see a system where some percent of people who make bad choices suffer from their choices, but where educational loans are widely available than a system where few are "allowed" to make bad choices, but loans are more narrowly available.
I don't want a world that's even more "rich get educated, poor don't" than today. If I look back at my family, my generation is much, much better off, primarily via education, than my grandparents who very literally mined coal and worked in a steel mill. They scrimped and saved so my parents could go to college to become teachers, who in turn ensured we did as well. That's no college to no-name college to top-name college in the span of two generations.
Of course that's only one data point, and if I read it in a paper, blog or on news.YC, I'd roll my eyes at the cherry-picking, too, because it'd be 1 story hand-selected from 100s of millions. In my case, it's 1 of 1, so I want to ensure we preserve the conditions that let my parents work hard to forge a better life for themselves and my siblings. Maybe in a world where college loans are hard to get (such as the world they lived in), this would all work out similarly, and easy college loans are in fact part of the problem, but I think there's been heaps of hidden benefits to having education being more widely available and more common that people overlook when they see Mr or Ms Bad Choices as an adult with untenable student loan debt.
>I can also see that lenders might exert their influence in ways you'd find objectionable,
If the gov't decides to use economic forces to manage the supply of college grads, I would hope that a large portion of funding would go into very productive areas. It should/would likely change over time to correct oversupply, changing demographics of society, etc.
>making lending predicated on family assets/income, requiring co-signing from a parent with a 650+ credit score,
An unfortunate but predictable outcome. Ideally, a parent with a 650+ credit score would be able to afford to support a child in college w/o much support. I have such a credit score, but probably won't be able to educate my kids based on my college instructor salary alone. Ironic, eh?
>not lending to liberal arts majors at all,
Funding the arts via loans is right out, obviously. Funding the arts is a problem that has spanned pretty much all of recorded history. No simple scheme such as mine can pretend to solve it today. Attempting to use economic/market forces in the normal manner to produce good art will only ever have comical results at best, and the nominal result will be crap. (I have an amusing idea. I'll tell it further down.)
> refusing to lend at "black colleges",
Grants? Be prepared to write off a lot of the "loans" to minority and impoverished areas. Since they are minorities, it will be cheap anyway. We could probably do away with race-based affirmative action, and simply make grants to students and institutions in impoverished places, and from impoverished families.
> or preferentially lending at Ivys, etc.
I'm also not sure how to effectively stop the well-connected wealthy from sponging off of everyone else. I could say "means testing" but we both know that these types of parasites are clever and quickly adapt to their environment. Hopefully if the rich use loans, the majority will repay them, and thus be a source of income rather than a drain. More likely, their parents will hire expensive accountants to help rid their heirs of this debt, justifying this thievery because it is "so unfair" to "tax success."
>Of course, they'd do it in the name of lending to high paying, high demand job skills and high likelihood of repayment.
Yeah, so, at least we agree that there may be a possibility for a pseudo-private-ish loan outfit to be somewhat profitable for some higher-ed funding.
> Under such a system, I'd have still gotten loans,
I could have gotten loans too, but I refused (for better or worse, I'm not sure). I had negative/neutral financial support from family, and eventually dropped out of Uni before completing my BS. meh.
but I'd rather see a system where some percent of people who make bad choices suffer from their choices, but where educational loans are widely available than a system where few are "allowed" to make bad choices, but loans are more narrowly available.
I don't want to see people suffer, but I don't think that's what you really meant. I think it would improve our economy, and the lives of many people if some of us were economically herded into productive industry. I know, it almost sounds like communist central planning, and it probably is. But letting high school seniors choose the economic direction of our country at their whim seems like a poor alternative.
I don't want a world that's even more "rich get educated, poor don't" than today.
Me neither.
If I look back at my family, my generation is much, much better off, primarily via education, than my grandparents who very literally mined coal and worked in a steel mill. They scrimped and saved so my parents could go to college to become teachers, who in turn ensured we did as well. That's no college to no-name college to top-name college in the span of two generations.
Yes, it's so obvious that it shouldn't need to be said. Education will improve everyone's life to a greater degree than pretty much anything else.
Of course that's only one data point, and if I read it in a paper, blog or on news.YC, I'd roll my eyes at the cherry-picking, too, because it'd be 1 story hand-selected from 100s of millions. In my case, it's 1 of 1, so I want to ensure we preserve the conditions that let my parents work hard to forge a better life for themselves and my siblings.
Let's call this a friendly chat over coffee, and overlook these misdemeanors.
* Maybe in a world where college loans are hard to get (such as the world they lived in), this would all work out similarly, *
I think it needs a systematic approach. The colleges themselves have to adopt ethics. It will be tough, you can't really outlaw meanness, wanton greed, stupidity.
and easy college loans are in fact part of the problem,
Greedy businessmen are sucking this money out of kids' pockets as fast as the kids can borrow it. I see it every semester. Students pay 2X, 3X, 10X, prices for books, computers, supplies, etc. because the campus store is integrated with the school and makes spending that money much easier than buying used texts from individuals, the internet, etc. The bookstore stocks lab items for my courses, but at a huge markup over retail. Next to every nasty decrepit warm-water fountain is a vending machine full of cold Dasani(TM), or better yet Coke!### Prices at the "food court" are another outrageous example. Privately financed campus housing? The same.
* but I think there's been heaps of hidden benefits to having education being more widely available and more common that people overlook when they see Mr or Ms Bad Choices as an adult with untenable student loan debt.*
Absolutely, but, I think that was probably true to a greater degree in the past, and that the [education funding] system for people in our cohort (middle-class-ish?) is tending more toward a sort of Hobson's choice of debt-slavery / indentured servitude vs. forgoing formal education.
## Arts funding should be fragmented from education funding. It should be as independent as possible from political influence. There could be divisions administered by appointees (appointed for life) who would primarily give block grants to institutions of their choosing. Funding divisions could be run in a variety of ways, but at least one should be required to only make funding decisions while under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Now that I think of it, the same arrangement might do well for science funding (especially Physics).
### Unless Pepsi has the vending "contract"
"I'd venture that no matter what else an education provides, if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan, it is non-sustainable. (Whether you want to use "good" or "bad" here is up to you)"
Your reasoning here doesn't make any sense to me, are you claiming that if a student takes out loans in order to pay for an education in basket weaving. Then fails to earn enough money by applying their acquired expertise in basket weaving to repay that loan. That they educational institution was at fault here?
There are many colleges which will train you in skills that will pay off the entire cost it takes to attend them in under 5 years. In California alone there are 23 campuses of the California State University system, with a median four year tuition of $25,000 for state residents which will train you in a STEM degree which is less than you would pay for a new car. There are community colleges which will do an Associates degree for even less.
But you are absolutely right there is a problem here, it just isn't with the colleges (although there may be grounds for accusing them of collusion).
Come at this from a different angle, how would you like to be able to conscript hundreds, thousands, maybe even a million people into a program where some fraction of everything they earn goes right into your pocket? Sell them a government guaranteed loan that they can't afford to pay back. It was a great scam in the Mortgage business for a while, the banks made billions on it, the tax payers took it in the shorts when the bottom fell out. And why did the bottom fall out? Because those damn suckers could declare bankruptcy and get out of paying the loan! Can you imagine. Well the banks have fixed that loop hole, you can't declare bankruptcy and get out of a student loan, no way no how, you're mine for life.
And guess what, the same people who were fleecing stupid people with bad mortgages are now fleecing people with student loans. In some cases literally, like when I heard from the same Wells Fargo loan officer who used to do mortgages and now wanted to talk to me about getting loans for my college age kids.
Its a problem *for schools" if they are over priced since they need students to survive. Guess what, if they can't justify their costs they go out of business or they get more efficient. As long as there are people willing to provide the same degree for less money, the system will continue to work and anyone who wants to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer, or a geologist or whatever can get their degree.
I implore you not to let the red herring story of 'students drowning in debt' convince you that college is broken, its not, student lending is broken and students are not be properly informed with respect to what "a degree" means versus what an "employable degree" means. Once we educate them and they start spreading out to the more affordable schools the private schools will have to fight harder for the top talent and will do so with scholarships so that their 'total cost' is the same as if they went to a state school but got their 'marquee' name.
Make students more discerning shoppers and the "problems" you decry go away.
Your reasoning here doesn't make any sense to me, are you claiming that if a student takes out loans in order to pay for an education in basket weaving. Then fails to earn enough money by applying their acquired expertise in basket weaving to repay that loan. That they educational institution was at fault here?
Not at fault, just not sustainable. As in, if the students can't make enough money to pay the school, the school will go out of business. Less drastically, if a student knows they will have to take a job doing something else to pay off the basket-weaving-school loan, they will not pay thousands of dollars to learn something that can't make them that money back.
What a weirdly backwards way of phrasing it. Why should anyone take out a loan to get an education? Why would a public university charge tuition? My parents did not take out loans to get college degrees (in California, in the 1960s). But their generation got rich and now doesn't want to pay for the next generation to do the same. Should boomers who attended fully subsidized public education now really be let off the hook with their ridiculous claims that they're some kind of Randian superhero who worked their way up "on their own", and it would be "theft" to ask them to pay taxes so the same system they benefited from can continue?
It's certainly not impossible to do so, if people aren't so stingy. I moved out of the U.S. and now live in a country that has free public education. Not just free, but you get paid to attend university, up through a master's degree. (Not paid a lot, but a modest living stipend.) We have a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. does, too. And better transit and less bureaucratic healthcare.
At least I think so. And that's because, at least for me, exploring my interests while worrying about my employability later, worrying about grades and every failure is pure hell, enough so to make me lose any interest I had at the beginning.
Education, in the form it takes now, is for the most part killing any joy of learning. I don't really think that this is possible to fix as long as we rely on money this much. So my conclusion is this: make the education as painless as it needs to be to make it relevant for earning money (more relevant and in a good sense), but don't prolong it far into the twenties. Let it end as quick as it's possible and let the people earn enough to pursuit their interests by themselves later.
I disagree. Historically, postsecondary education might have been limited to the disciplines of academia and focused solely on liberal arts. However, at this point, a four-year degree is an effective prerequisite to 90% of white-collar job. (Irrespective of the actual value of a degree in performing jobs, of course. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of professions don't require four years of institutional training or education to perform. Indeed, I'd wager that most careers don't require academic knowledge beyond that of a seventh grader.)
So, college has been perverted by the labor market into a corollary of the K-12, "career-preparatory" apparatus, and few students enter college in pursuit of actual intelectual stimulation. Most are simply going through the motions to get an entry level job. In effect, college has simply become a funnel from high school to the labor market. We can debate about whether or not this is good, but the fact remains that, given the current post-secondary education landscape, colleges exist to get people jobs and should be measured by that standard.
As for only K-12 being government-funded and thus career-oriented, many if not most students take federal aid of some sort, implicating public funding even for private colleges. It's impossible to disassociate colleges and government money, as federal aid pervades tuition expenditure.
Sorry, but... what?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but why should society pay for your exploration of your interests regardless of their applicability to employment?
We use employment as a means of converting skills into economic value. This is why when you work for a company or a government institution, you are given money in exchange for the value you produce. This value is determined by consumer and citizen demand for goods and services. What this means is that you need to produce something other people want, as opposed to what you want. Otherwise you won't have a job, because nobody will need your skills and knowledge.
Public education is a contract between the citizen and the (state) government. The citizen pays taxes to fund it, and in return his/her child gets a subsidized education. But that is where the contract ends. If the kid wants a job after that, they better make sure they are making the most use of the education by learning how to fulfill consumer and citizen demand in the economy. They can pursue their interest in botanics or cultural studies in their spare time, as hobbies.
This is why system is broken. If you want unbroken system, there should be a link between how much particular degree raises the income of its owner (after paying off the loans) and the public funding available to those seeking such degrees. If you want to study aspects of underwater basket weaving in medieval French poetry - be my guest, but do not expect a dime of public funds to be invested in it.
>>>> higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment.
That is true only if you ignore the premise that is described above. However, since the public support of the higher education availability is largely based on this exact premise, I do not see how you can ignore it.
Should we really insult people's character for wanting to work? Entitlement is a connotatively charged word that implies privilege, laziness, and an unreasonable desire to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor while sitting around. I can at least understand the use of the word "entitled" when leveled against welfare, progressive taxation, refusal to do entry-level work, etc.
But how is it wrong or anti-personal responsibility to want to work to support oneself?
(I don't know if that's what the OP intended, I'm just clarifying in a way that makes more sense to me.)
Just because one loves writing does not mean that they will be able to secure employment as a writer. Yet, students continue to enter writing programs and graduate with useless degrees, expecting to enter the workforce immediately. Certain positions simply aren't in demand, yet students act as though finding employment will be trivial.
Now that anyone with a decent amount of talent and/or the willpower to put in some effort into honing a skill can also showcase that skill, the supply of writers and singers and musicians has suddenly become much larger than before. So it follows that the price associated with purchasing access to the fruits of these talent/labours will have dropped.
TL;DR: Microeconomics 101.
Then we see articles saying "Well we need more science and engineering students in our colleges because that's where the jobs are too."
Perhaps the non engineering students aren't getting jobs because they just breezed through 4 years of fun while expecting a reward and a career at the end.
What I realized is that for the institution, my tuition money is all the money they were going to get. From the rich families they could expect donations throughout the year. I had a friend who paid very little to go to school there, but it was also clear to us that without his Dad financing the tennis team, we probably wouldn't have had any of the amenities that we were treated to. There's always that give and pull.
Another point to bring up is that financial aid can be up to the individual in charge of your application. When I worked at the schools technology center fixing faculty computers, one time I happened to fix the head of financial aid's computer and when she came to pick it up she asked to thank me personally and told me that, "If you need anything from the financial aid office, even just a little bit more, you come tell me and I will make sure to take care of you." I didn't know this lady until then, but I was sure glad to have fixed her comp...
If the school gives four students $5,000 scholarships on a $20,000 bill - the school makes $60,000 and the students feel good about themselves. If they give one student $20,000, they make zero. At the end of the day, someone has to foot the bill - and if it's not the taxpayer, it'll be the people who can afford to pay.
Of course, high quality education should be available to everyone, but as a society we have to be more lucid about where the money is coming from. If taxpayers want people from low income families to go to school (and I am firmly in this camp), taxpayers need to be willing to pay for these people to go to school.
The argument is often that either ways should be found to deliver better services for lower cost, or that money should be diverted away from something else instead of a tax raise. Or people want a tax increase for somebody else but not themselves to cover it.
Everyone??
Typical right-winger: I want low taxes and don't care about public services (although naturally I'd prefer public services to no services).
Typical left-winger: I want public services and don't care about low taxes (although naturally I'd prefer low taxes to high taxes).
In truth, it's a false dichotomy for everyone except the super-rich. People could have both low taxes and good social services if they would be willing to tax the super-rich to the same extent that we did so back in, say, 1950.
Also, I think the gap in actual cost of tuition between private colleges and public colleges is somewhat overstated, the primary difference being that public colleges are maybe 30-50% subsidized, while private colleges are more like 20-30% subsidized.
I don't know why the tuition fees have risen so rapidly over a short period of time but it's certainly not helping out middle class families.
If UW cost had simply kept pace with inflation, it would be $30,000 this year. And if WA residents had maintained their support at 80%, the student bill would be $6000.
So, in a sense, the reason why states are spending less on higher education than a decade or two ago is simply because of this middle class entitlement. The middle class should be purchasing nursing home insurance but instead they leave it up to the state to support.
"Governments’ general support for higher education 25 years ago was nearly 50 percent greater than state spending on Medicaid. That relationship has now flipped: Medicaid spending is about 50 percent greater than support for higher education. If higher education’s share of state budgets had remained constant instead of being crowded out by rising Medicaid costs, it would be getting some $30 billion more than it receives today, or more than $2,000 per student."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19orszag.html?_r=1
> At most private institutions, a substantial majority of grant aid comes from endowment funds set up by trustees, alumni, and other generous donors. Many pay into the system hoping that their grants will make college more affordable for their endowed students. In the short term, it does. However, in the long term, the institution responds by raising tuition rates to keep the net price at the market value. While this may benefit especially needy students who qualify for additional grant aid, the average student feels no difference and the additional scholarship money gets diverted to other purposes. They are rarely fraudulent or scandalous. Most of the time they just involve making the institution prettier and more competitive in the cutthroat race for the best and the brightest of America's high school seniors. But looked at from a birds-eye view, one gets the uncanny feeling that colleges are not honoring their donors' wishes to make the place more affordable. And lest you think that you can avoid all of this by refusing to donate, remember that as a United States taxpayer, you pay into the system just like millions of your fellow-citizens. Are you satisfied with how your money is being spent?
http://www.stanford.edu/~rhamerly/cgi-bin/Interesting/Educat...
I don't mean to nitpick, but these are tiny differences between averages.
Yes, of course elite schools will always court rich kids. Need-blind admissions will never change this. If your business school is named McGruberstein School of Business and Mr. McGruberstein's child applies to your school you'll probably take him. While this chips away at the idea of a true meritocracy it does encourage many of the donations that fund the financial aid for low income students in the first place. Yes this is "evil" and is certainly Not Fair, but the colleges need to court these donations in order to build facilities and provide aid at current levels. I know that many of the elite schools spend much more on students each year than they bring in via tuition, and this is financed by the large and ever-growing endowment that they so value.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-09/college-fina...
are reporting on findings from a report by Stephen Burd for the New American Foundation, "Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind."
http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/undermining_pell
http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/...
This has been an ongoing problem for a long time. Colleges seek the advice of consulting firms that tell the colleges how to maximize revenues, and one way to do that is to skew "financial aid" policies in favor of students from high-income families.
http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...
As a matter of talent development across the whole country, the United States finding consistently is that it is more advantageous for a child to a be a low-ability child from a high-income family than a high-ability child from a low-income family.
http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge
http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=10000
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/education/scholarly-poor-o...
It's understandable why a parent who has money would want to use that money to give Junior leverage to gain upward social mobility. What's harder to understand is why publicly subsidized financial aid programs would fail to identify the most able students who lack family means to attend college, rather than being used by colleges to leverage the admission of even more average students from well-off families.
AFTER EDIT: Other comments in this thread are asking where parents and taxpayers can find information about the costs of each college. The United States federal government IPEDS database gathers data about college revenues and spending from all colleges in the country, and the federal data are presented in the most user-friendly format by the College Results website
http://www.collegeresults.org/
operated by the Education Trust. You can look up how radically colleges differ in what they spend per student and in graduation rates of admitted students, among many other interesting statistics, on the College Results site.
Entirely possible that the mix of students at a University as far as "class" needs to be skewed a certain way as well to gain other hidden benefits..(Add: in addition to what else is being talked about in your and other comments.)
For example you don't want 90% of your students coming from NY State, you don't want 90% of your students to be asian and you may very well want a larger percentage of your students coming from upper middle class families just because it creates (in their opinion) a better environment as a whole at the University.
Meaning a mediocre student from a wealthy family is still a person from a wealthy family. A mediocre student from a lower class family is a person raised in a lower class family. Different dress, different actions etc. (I'm purposely using extremes to try and make the point about possible motives.)
All of this of course is not talked about but entirely possible that it exists (pure speculation). Just as it's possible that two women interviewing with exactly the same qualifications (and family background) one who is extremely attractive and one that isn't, the attractive one gets the admission.
Your thoughts?
From the Business Week article I linked to in my first comment:
"For example, the paper cites data that show 19 percent of freshman with SAT scores under 700 (out of a maximum 2,400) received merit aid, as did 27 percent of freshman with scores between 700 and 999. The term 'merit scholarships,' in other words, is a misnomer, the report says, because schools can distribute the aid however they please."
I do agree with you that if colleges decide the policies, they will presumably decide for the benefit of colleges, rather than for the benefit of society as a whole. What is objectionable about United States practice is federal tax-supported subsidies to colleges that the colleges distort into benefits for wealthier individuals.
Sucks if you absolutely need $10000 in aid of course. Is it killing the poor ? No. I worked my way through college and paid full tuition, and only got semi-sponsored housing because some friend told me that some monks actually did that if you made your case to them (essentialy you had to get and keep getting good grades. 80%+ good grades that is, a lot tougher than it sounds (average of class was < 50%), especially if you need a job to pay for tuition as well). So I did present my grades to these monks, and they got me in that system. Later I was able to trade other things (like helping run a fraternity in trade for a room at the fraternity house).
"Many countries consciously set different policies, and I think ..."
Yes, I've seen that in Western Europe. Specifically you can get full tuition scholarship + free housing if your parents pay less than $x in income tax. That sounds great, until you realize ... that rich people are often paid through a company, and can simply set their own pay, and "invest" the rest in a new mercedes or a new house (which I agree is a defensible investment in some cases, but not in most cases). The pay they set, you ask ? $the_limit - 1 for example. (the same limit is used for free childcare, >50% reduction on health insurance, the list goes on ...). About 50% of the people in the free housing had rich parents (you can't tell how much tuition they pay, but you can tell where they live, and whether it's sponsored). That's how at least one "other country" does it.
They try to keep these rich cheaters people away from housing aid, and even that is just mostly people behind the counter acting illegally on behalf of the poor.
I went to the college that was specifically called out as "The Best of the Best" in the linked NewAmerica report. There were a fair number of complete dumbasses who also attended, and continued attending despite infractions that would've gotten a normal student expelled. Their family names frequently were on the board of trustees. Their family names were also on the notebooks I bought all through elementary school and on the department stores where my mom bought all our clothes. I suspect they've given more to the college than I'll ever earn in my lifetime.
It's generally impossible to do social good without having power. Power often means making certain accommodations to rich & powerful people. There's a strong element of Robin Hood behind pretty much any sustainable philanthropic program. A lot of being able to do good in this world is knowing just how much you can afford to piss off rich & powerful people, and how much help you can extract from them, in trying to achieve your social goals.
This democratization was controversial at the time, though it also coincided with the biggest boom in global wealth the world has ever seen. I suspect this is more correlative than causal, and is tied to the increasing energy available to world economies through fossil fuels. That said, technological increases supported in part by broader education have increased productivity ($GPD/GWh) as well.