College, the Great Unleveler
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...
The non-profit colleges have far more lobbyists crawling DC than the for-profits, so it can't be that.
Undoubtedly, but would they be positive? Universities are not vocational schools, nor do I think they should be. Their goal should be to give you deep theoretical and philosophical understanding of your field of interest. The practical stuff you can pick up on the job or on your own.
If you don't want that, but rather want to learn the current industry best practice in how to build web apps in Rails, then you should go to a vocational school.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect or even very good, and there is much universities can do to improve. But forcing them to focus 100% on getting their students jobs is not the answer. The answer in my opinion is to stop demanding university degrees for every job, focus a lot more on creating industry specific 1-2 year trade schools for those who just want to learn a useful skill, and let universities be for people who enjoy a heavier focus on theory, research and pushing the state of the art.
These days, when I look at suggestions for national policy for the United States (which show up here on Hacker News with alarming frequency, even despite the differing topic emphasis of this online community), I really like to hear from other countries about what is already working in public policy on the same topic. Is there some country in the world that does a better job in setting higher education policy than the United States? If so, which one? What improvements can United States policy gain by studying the example of other countries? As an American who has lived abroad for years during my adult life, I find it tedious to consider policy suggestions here in the country of my birth without reality-checking them by the experience of other countries. In this light, what we should consider as we ponder the suggestions in the article kindly submitted here?
(Disclosure: I have a college degree, gained at a state university in the United States at the time the article author identifies as a time of policy transition. I have close relatives who have never completed college degrees, and I wonder what factors matter most for college degrees being accessible, and also what factors matter most for college degrees being useful to their possessors and to the broader society.)
> > I really like to hear from other countries about what is already working in public policy on the same topic.
I think that explains it.
In our system the government sets prices and directly pays the education provider for "commonwealth supported places". The student has to repay the government only a part of that cost, and it is indexed to inflation and you don't have to make repayments until your income is around ~$50,000 AUD.
As an outside I think Americas two big problems with higher education is the lack of national standards, which is feed by your student loan system.
There are a few weird in-between things. For example the National Film School is very well respected and mostly publicly funded, but doesn't issue degrees, because historically it grew out of the film production scene and doesn't see itself as "academic" (nowadays they could probably gain degree-granting rights, but it's become a point of principle that they're a "film school", not a "university").
In my opinion, Americans are overeducated. We shuffle people through colleges, but the jobs waiting for them at the other end hardly merit all that preparation. We're drowning in college debt because we're spending vastly more to educate people than is warranted by the sorts of jobs available in the economy.
What is the main problem is the cost of higher education. I really hope the experiment at Georgia Institute of Technology (CS degree at less than $7k) works out wonderfully. I really think that with some more improvement here and there, it is the way to go.
Of course if one could still be learning in a suboptimal way: acquiring useless information, or acquiring information without understanding of the subject matter, but that's an orthogonal issue altogether: it's suboptimal regardless of your effort/time/how much knowledge you had.
At the very least, I found it hard to believe that in this time and age, one can acquire enough knowledge of any subject (breath or depth) that any more effort would be suboptimal. The other choice of thinking "I know enough and don't need to care anymore" is potentially far far more dangerous.
If you're going to secretly use nonstandard meanings for English words, just stop posting.
I strongly agree that more regulation of the higher education industry is needed.
> but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s.
As someone who came from a working class background, college has enabled me to move up multiple socio-economic classes.
I'll admit I was lucky when I attended, graduating in 2006 right before huge price increases went into effect. Even so, I believe college offers a huge opportunity for social and economic mobility.
> In the bottom half of the economic distribution, it’s less than one out of five for those in the third bracket and fewer than one out of 10 in the poorest.
So what I am seeing here is that college does offer opportunities at mobility. Compared to the almost 0 opportunity so many would have had otherwise.
Let us remember here that we are talking about fifths and tenths of hundreds of millions of people. Ok discount that to only college aged, and we still have tens of millions of people we are talking about.
> Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend public universities and colleges, historically the nation’s primary channels to educational opportunity. These institutions still offer the best bargain around, yet even there, tuition increases have bred inequality.
Ah now, here is a real problem! The cost of in-state tuition has sky rocketed. Let's do something about that, rather than say "college is useless".
As for private educational institutions, the problem seems to be that they have better advertising. They sell a slick message. (Though I have had positive encounters with a few of them that have convinced me that private education does have a role in the overall educational system, sometimes direct skill training is exactly what is needed!)
I'm really happy someone brought this up. Where I went to school, the average student just ended up working in their parents/relatives' car wash, nail salon, or sandwich store, those that didn't fall into the grips of drugs and gangs. Even into high school, a few of us didn't even have an internet connection. Though I used to code a lot as a kid, I never thought of coding as something of inherent value because I never saw anyone around me go into a job that involves coding or even math/science as a skill. Forget working at a startup as a teenager! To me, the folks at Google and Apple (Facebook didn't really exist yet) wore white labcoats and tweaked giant machines and took notes on their notebooks. I was just a kid who could visualize math and physics better than his peers.
It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that I might end up working for a company like that or making a difference in the world of technology. And it's college I thank for giving me the self-confidence and technical ability to work in the world of tech.
College isn't useful for social mobility? Bullshit.
There's no such comparison to be made. Those people who expended that much effort going to college only to flunk out could have expended that same effort doing something else. Most of them might have failed at that too, but a few might have succeeded. At least none of them would have been saddled with tons of student-loan debt. "College or immediate and irrevocable failure" is the myth that for-profit-college hucksters love to promote, and I'm sure they'd be glad to see that it's working.
The problem is not that college exists as a possible route to prosperity for poor people. The problem is that it's presented - including by comments like yours - as the only route. Instead of comparing college to nothing at all, we should be comparing the real odds of achieving success via college vs. the odds of achieving it by other means. If we're morally compelled to consider the 1/5 or 1/10 who benefited from going to college, we are also morally compelled to consider the 4/5 or 9/10 for whom it failed and left them worse off financially.
At better schools, there's a whole different set of dynamics to explain why rich kids stay in and poor kids don't. This is hardly the forum for that discussion, except to note that the net result is approximately the same. Lots of kids leave college with a big pile of debt and no degree. When such a high percentage of lower-income students end up worse off than they started, it's quite rational to consider that a more entrepreneurial focus might actually serve them better.
Honest question, for anybody who has a real answer.
"Prices do not include room and board. Numbers are adjusted for inflation in constant 2011 dollars."
"these are just averages, and there's huge variation."
The go look at the report it is based on http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
Except, the author was not saying "college is useless". The author was saying that college has become no more useful at educating a wider population than it was in the 1970s, while costing the federal government and students more.
Part of the reason was the increase of in-state tuition; basically, state colleges shifting the burden to the federal government and student debt. And part of the reason is the rise of for-profit colleges, which are essentially business optimized to extra as much free federal money as possible with no concern for the well-being of their students.
Because these for-profit colleges have no admission standards, they tend to be attended by people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds who haven't had as much opportunity to get good high school educations and test prep. So while college is still plenty useful for people from better socioeconomic backgrounds, or those from poorer backgrounds who are able to beat the odds and get into a good school that will cover a large portion of their tuition, people who are stuck paying more at state schools or getting tons of debt and crap education at for-profit schools are getting the short end of the stick.
I don't know how you read "college is useless" out of that article. As far as I could tell, it was all about how useful some colleges are, but how expensive or inaccessible they can be.
Private schools let the wealthiest, most influential people take their children out of the system, and so have no motivation to fix the system. Meanwhile the people who are least able to fix the system are left stuck with it. Take NYC as a great example of this - extremely high incomes, $45k/year private schools, and some of the worst public schools in America.
It's not that people are bad for using private schools - it's hard to take a moral stance when your children are the cost (I will certainly send my future kids to private school). But by having an easy out, it lets people avoid fixing the system.
Also, your proposal would cause a collapse of U.S. cities, as all the middle class and wealthy families moved out. Schools are a key battleground for race and class warfare in the U.S. Even in wealthy Manhattan, 70% of students in public school are on free or reduced price lunch. Wealthy and middle class families would simply leave cities rather than send their kids to schools with students who skew poor and skew minority.[1] Even liberal San Francisco had to give up on its progressive policy of randomizing public school assignments (to prevent wealthy people taking advantage of neighborhood-based assignment to create enclaves within the public system).
[1] Peruse the school profiles in Chicago: http://schoolinfo.cps.edu/schoolprofile/SchoolDetails.aspx?S.... Note how prominently racial and economic demographics are featured. D.C. school profiles even have a handy pie chart for racial demographics: http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Anacostia+High+School. This information isn't prominently displayed because parents don't care about it...
The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?
What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.
The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.
I'm not proposing that private schools all close their doors tomorrow - of course there would be chaos - but that in long term planning of the education system, we should consider that that privatization of education perhaps leads to a greater socioeconomic gap.
Likewise, I'm not saying that the problem magically fixes itself. It's a long, hard road to undo all of the damage. But if the most influential people aren't on board, it becomes significantly harder. I don't think there's any hard and fast reason that we can't have a public education system that serves the needs of everyone.
As a means of affecting change, I think it's important that the wealthiest, most influential people are involved. Consider - I think it's not a stretch to say that a congressman with no kids in the public system would be more willing to vote to cut funding or vote for a counterproductive measure. And we do rely on the wealthy more to contribute to society. Someone making $500k/year is required to contribute at least $200k of that labor to the government - while someone making $30k might be barely required to contribute anything. And so one might say that it's not without precedent.
You probably just didn't think about them. So thank you for posting this, as it demonstrates a growing problem in America: ignorance of religion. I don't care if you're religious or not, this is a country with a lot of people who are.
People these days love words like "tolerance" and "diversity" but then they suggest the most intolerant policies you can imagine.
at the risk of sounding naive how does attending a public school limit one's ability to practice religion?
i am particularly confused because all of the private schools where i grew up were Catholic, which i assumed were even less religiously tolerant.
And this isn't just an ad-hoc excuse... this has been true for a long time. For example the puritans in this country highly valued public education. They thought all children should know how to read so that they could read and understand the Bible (a direct consequence of their sola scriptura reformation roots).
So suppose you come from that background (like many Reformed and Evangelical Christians today), and the top priority in the education of your children is that they know the Bible: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" and all that.
Well children won't be getting that in a public school in America. And more than that the social institutions in this country (at all levels) are dead-set opposed to those kinds of traditional religious doctrines. (parents might point to things like evolution, sexual education, etc..)
Now I understand that from a secular perspective this looks ridiculous. That line of reasoning isn't even something I would necessarily agree with. All I'm advocating here is a bit of tolerance as well as a little bit of knowledge about your fellow citizens. The very type of people who are predisposed to bypass the public school system for religious reasons, are also the type of people who won't bow to government pressure. You'll have to lock them up and take their children away from them before they'll stop. (There is abundant historical precedent for this)
As to your point about Catholic schools... do you think that a Catholic school ought to be a place where other religious teaching is tolerated? Do you think such a school ought to be required to teach Islam or Protestantism for example? Or, to take a popular topic at the moment, should a church be required to perform same-sex marriages?
That seems like a very strange definition of tolerance to me... Catholic schools ought to teach Catholicism, and because the government doesn't require you to send your children to that school you have the freedom to educate your children how you see fit.
Yes that means parents will sometimes choose badly and children will suffer because of it. But that's the price we pay for living in a free society.
herein lies my naivety i suppose. :)
>> As to your point about Catholic schools... do you think that a Catholic school ought to be a place where other religious teaching is tolerated? Do you think such a school ought to be required to teach Islam or Protestantism for example? Or, to take a popular topic at the moment, should a church be required to perform same-sex marriages?
no, my point was simply that public and Catholic schools were my only options. and fortunately one of them was suitable for my beliefs (whatever they may have been).
i didn't intend to suggest that forcing public schooling was the best, or even a good solution. but i'm wondering how we extract the logic from that argument without alienating anyone.
Tough. Between the fact that data shows that the religious schools produce sub-par academically trained students as well as promulgate a set of bigoted, intolerant social mores, yeah, I'm kind of against the idea of opting out for religious reasons.
Let's see how tolerant these "religious reasons" objectors are when the school has "Scientology" or "Madrassa" in its name.
Will you also ban those families from reading to their toddlers, teaching their kids music, helping their kids doi homework, and having rich friends?
I'd prefer to tax those folks and invest the funds in improving public schools.
I think that by having a two tier system, you end up promoting inequality. Consider American healthcare - from my perspective, it's fantastic, with world class doctors, no wait times and modern machines. Certainly better than my experience in Canada! However, this is a system that serves 20% of the population very very well, at the expense of the rest. I just happen to be in that 20%. And because it works well for that group of people - which includes congressmen, senators, celebrities and chief executives - there's not a huge push to fix it.
The same goes for education. I can more than afford to send my kids to private schools, and honestly, probably will. Small classrooms, modern materials, great teachers. It's a system that I'll be very well served by. Yet the American public education system is largely failing, but this failure does not affect the most powerful people, there's not a huge push to fix it either. Indeed, they benefit from it - their children have a competitive advantage by having fewer people well educated (although I don't claim there's a conspiracy here, just that the value of good education is so much more).
Part of it is that I don't think that money is the main issue - there's a ton of money in the education system, it just goes to the wrong people. And if someone is required to pay money into a system that doesn't affect them, why do they care what the results are and how well the money is spent?
So my only claim is that we should consider that for major public services (health, education, safety), that allowing two tiers can cause major divergences that cause long term negative consequences, and that we should seriously think about this.
In general, I wonder how strong the correlation is between availability of private schools and disfunction in the public schools: low, I suspect. The Washington, DC, area has three very strong school districts: Montgomery and Howard Counties in Maryland, Fairfax County in Virginia. And there are four pretty fair public magnet high schools in Washington, DC. Yet side by side with excellent public schools there are private schools. And though I don't know this, I suspect that in places where the public schools are uniformly bad (not this neighborhood or that, but whole counties), the private schools aren't much better.
My three children are in public schools, although they all did KG and preschool in private schools. Since the government does not own our children, I don't think it has the right to compel our children to attend a certain school. Are you going to ban homeschooling too?
There's absolutely two tiers of private schools and the secular and protestant schools are on one (top) tier and the catholic ones are on another.
Many parents end up sending their children through catholic school because they would otherwise be (or have been) removed from public school for behavior or are not performing at their grade level. Many of my classmates' parents donated their childrens' way through school. I met a lot of kids who couldn't hack it but their parents exploited every trick to get their kid passed through unimpeded. After I finished things in the diocese got even worse.
Neither my public or private school experiences were very good. In fact, now that my former public school principal is now the NYDoE Chancellor of Schools I have no hope or positive feelings for the education of anyone in NY... ...unless you can test into the super-exclusive private & public schools.
1. Programs were put in place throughout the last 60 years to help provide better opportunities for kids who did NOT come from affluent backgrounds.
2. Over the last 20 years (and perhaps even earlier, posits the author), these programs have been increasingly abused by for-profit universities. Additionally, these programs have become less effective as the cost of tuition grows.
3. So, if we want to restore the opportunities for aspiring students from less affluent families, we need to regulate the for-profits and we need to bring government aid programs back in line with the current state of higher education.
Of course the kids from affluent backgrounds have better opportunities -- that's not the point of the article. The point was that kids from less affluent backgrounds have fewer opportunities than they did within our parents' lifetimes, and that systemic corruption/abuse is responsible for this change.
An example is Siemens, if you get into a training program at Siemens you will if you complete it end up with a 2 year tech degree or a 4 year college degree complete with several years of on the job training paid both by the German gov and Siemens.
IS there any movement towards such a partnership between industry and the gov in the US towards education?