The Future of College
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
>"The data we see shows that, unless you’re given the preparation and access to higher education, and unless you have a successful completion of that higher education, your economic opportunity is greatly, greatly reduced. There’s a lot of data recently talking about the premium in salaries for people with four-year college degrees."
The problem is that the observation that people with degrees earn more than those without doesn't imply that increasing the number of people with degrees would increase overall prosperity. Degrees are credentials that are used to sort people. Similarly, while an individual student earning a lot of As is likely a meaningful signal of their studiousness and understanding of their subjects, inflating the grades of all students and awarding more As in general doesn't mean the students have become more studious.
If nearly everyone had a college degree, its effect on their occupational opportunities would be very similar to that of a high school diploma now. Unless the focus is on the education itself, instead of schooling, the result is just credential inflation—something very expensive and wasteful economically and in terms of peoples lives.
Degrees are used to sort people, but not arbitrarily. A degree certifies what you have learned. Giving out more degrees could mean degree inflation or it could just mean that more people are learning.
Our economy is shifting away from unskilled labor towards skilled labor. You can get those skills without getting a degree, it's just harder (and cheaper) to do. I love institutions like the Khan Academy that make it easier to improve your skills outside of a degree program, but I also love initiatives that make degree programs more accessible.
I disagree -- I think the case can be made that the sorting process is largely automatic and disregards individual traits, This is supported by the number of very high achievers who are also dropouts, people who didn't understand or accept that they had already been "sorted".
This certainly isn't meant to suggest that, on average, a degree holder doesn't do better, has a higher income as a result of attending college. But as college costs continue to rise (now increasing faster than any other household expense) the day will come when it no longer makes economic sense.
> Our economy is shifting away from unskilled labor towards skilled labor. You can get those skills without getting a degree, it's just harder (and cheaper) to do.
It may be harder, but it avoids the trap of being taught things in college that are already out of date in a fast-moving world.
1) People who are already more likely to do well tend to go to college. 2) Going to college prepares people to do well.
I think both have a significant effect. Certainly in my own experience what I learned in college has benefited me in the workplace and almost none of what I learned (graduated in 2008) is out of date. When I look at my most respected peers, several of them don't have degrees, but those who don't either went to college and joined the work force before graduating or took more than 4 years to develop the skills and experience they needed to compete with college graduates.
I'm not sure what kinds of individual traits you are talking about that are ignored by the sorting process or how this claim is supported by the few very high achievers that dropped out of college. I would expect some of the very high achievers to take the harder path of blazing their own trail.
This.
I think the focus must go more to the substantial knowledge gained, than the "credential system"..
Universities were created so that the son of the nobleman, could have a blue blood certificate, in the world of the (new top dog) bourgeoise back then.. than good manners and education could distinguish them from the poor ones..
So they can rule the world with their pedigree certificate.
This sort of elitism baggage we still have in the educational system must go for good.. and we really need to focus on knowledge itself.. because in this new digital era we are living now.. knowledge is more valuable than ever before
I agree that better data reporting, with focuses on goals and outcomes, much as has been done in the Aid sector, could help. I also think that having a better education environment, in the form of good advising for support, and broader class type / learning options, may help students complete school once they're there.
However, in a tie-back to the earlier article [1] on the disconnect between boss / worker expectations, I think we also need a much earlier focus on individual achievement and learning. On setting goals, and then largely giving students freedom in how they approach and attack those goals. That is what college students need to be successful, and that is what the job sector identifies as the signal of good, high performing workers.
Many of the students that we send to college are not mentally ready to be successful at college. In fact, many go without any clear idea of why they're going, besides the advertised 4+ year party, or family saying "go". In many ways, I don't think that's their fault. Part of it is, for not taking charge of their lives, but for many, college is one of the first times where you seriously have to set your own goals. High school teachers took care of it, parents took care of it. We need to remedy that by providing more, low-risk opportunities for them to develop those skills while they still can work with a net.
As a corollary, I also don't think we should make it easier for students who aren't ready to attend. It does a disservice to them, and due to the way our current college loan system is set up, it often ends up burying them for the rest of their lives under non-transferable debt. (often times at the scale of a low-end house) For those who it didn't, many times we get C to D folks out the other end, who muddled by, and drift on to something. Maybe the act of attending enriches them, and ultimately makes them better people, but for a lot, I feel like higher education has become an expensive trap that we're not properly preparing them for.
[1] http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=4...
[1] http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/admissions/guide/otherfactors.html
Gap years are, unfortunately, a privilege for students who are so wealthy that doesn't matter or so poor that they're on full rides anyway. For a middle class student, it's just throwing away money.
They cost money, but that's not the same as throwing money away. It depends on what you're getting in exchange. If the gap year serves its purpose of helping you figure out what you want to do, the delta in cost is substantially less than paying a few years of tuition while you figure out the same thing.
> On setting goals, and then largely giving students freedom in how they approach and attack those goals.
I don't think this even happens in many colleges. Paradoxically, at the better resourced universities, the student has enough advisors and guidance that they're often simply walked through their degree program without too much decision making on the student's part.
I'm reminded of a friend of mine who went to a very nice private school and got her B.A., started her career and decided to go to school for her M.S. Except she went to the local state commuter university while she was working and simply couldn't figure out how to navigate a system where the student was expected to figure out everything from their prerequesites to planning their class load and specialization - advisors were rare and hard to get a hold of.
She was simply overwhelmed by all this and really had lots of second thoughts about staying at the school. We talked about it and I asked her what he experience had been like at her undergrad. She said from day 1 she had basically always had an advisor of some sort to call upon to help her set her schedule and priorities, make sure degree requirements were being met, etc. And the advisor:student ratio was some ridiculously low number. I told her that at regular 'ol state school, you have to buck up a bit and fend for yourself. It means you have to do extra work to figure things out, but you also can get more flexibility for your degree goals.
She ended up sticking it out, but I was kind of surprised at the struggle since I had just taken the lack of guidance for granted.
In 2001 when I entered as a freshman minimum wage was $6.75 and tuition+fees was $5,707.
In 2013 minimum wage was $8.00 and tuition was $13,258.
minimum wage is up +200%, education costs up +850%.
That is probably a major reason why a) Not as many young people are getting degrees b) why not many actually finish their degrees.
My advice: stick to the trades, work in a union for a major utility provider. At least until the singularity happens.
The reason I ask is due to an NPR segment that aired last week about a Texas power company. They described the different types of energy they were using as well as how long it takes to "turn them on". There were order of magnitude differences between the various power sources. The more efficient the power, the longer it took to start/act to changes in demand.
If more people are using local solar, then peak hours during a summer day would help level out usage: more sun = more local energy that will be used for AC. I would imagine that change would allow these companies to save a lot of money by not having to use the less efficient power sources to properly adjust available power. That extra money can then be spend on the infrastructure or more R&D.
I'm just curious because I keep hearing crap like "solar is going to completely kill the grid and costs will skyrocket as people leave."
I am wondering if there's an even more revolutionary approach - for example, continuous education, where evaluation/tests are performed continuously.
I learned more, and more quickly, in that class than probably any other I've ever taken. It was mixed between grad/undergrad (I was undergrad at the time), but because everyone "had" to do the reading for each class everyone was on a more or less equal footing, and the discussion was fantastic.
The model works very well for upper-level courses, but not so well at the first 2 or 3 years, which is where most drop out of college.
edit: the short pre- and post-tests are pretty effective, if you can afford the time, at every level of the curriculum. I'm not sure why they aren't more prevalent, except that it's very time consuming for the course staff.
The end result was that you were constantly getting immediate feedback about how well you understand the material; if you thought you knew what you were doing and you were actually totally lost, you found out the very next day and were presented with an opportunity to ask for clarifications. And since there were so many quizzes, there was no need for larger tests (because the professor constantly felt like he had a good handle on how people were understanding the material) and you never got stressed out about bombing a quiz or two (because there were thirty other quizzes that would go into calculating your grade, plus the workshop scores and homework scores).
It really removed the stress of the class and gave me an opportunity to focus on the material itself, instead of worrying about how I would do on the tests. Weirdly, when every day was a quiz, it seemed like there were never any quizzes.
Interestingly, this is exactly what I like so much about the best MOOCs I've completed. Assigned exercises typically allow multiple attempts and provide immediate feedback during and after completion.
This is in stark contrast to my local University experience where everything is single attempt with the exception of papers where a single draft submission might be allowed.
Needless to say, I find the former far superior for learning.
In true doublespeak fashion you can name something an "education system" all you want, but that doesn't mean it necessarily educates or even does vocational training.
Edited to add:
The weirdest lifestyle of my entire life has to have been school related, both K-12 and college. It is like visiting a very foreign land. Its just bizarre, compared to real life. For a weird alternative history mind bender experience imagine trying to re set your current home and work life into the lifestyle and culture of high school or freshmen year of college. And I'm not talking about trivial things like music fads or drug experimentation but basic things like interpersonal relationships and the social structure both among the students and "authority". And slavish devotion to the factory clock although the factory closed and moved overseas in my dad's generation. I would imagine literature like this already exists, but it would be so weird as to be unreadable.
This is what makes intense credentialism so weird. The way we prepare our youth for life is to have them compete against each other in an RPG where the rules and stats are in constant unknowable flux and the goal is uncertain but may be academic or sports or drug experimentation or sex experiences, with a little binge drinking, then the winner (which seems to depend mostly on inherited genetics and luck and stamina) gets handed the controls of a nuclear reactor. It makes the hazing that .mil basic trainees go thru seem calm, wise, and rational. Everyone agrees its time to fire the GM and replace the whole RPG with a sane new set of rules. No one can agree on which rules, and the guys in charge, who happened to be pretty good at the old game, want nothing to change other than at most a reskin of the game art, if that much.
Coming up with a workable solution is a lot more difficult than throwing out the old, both objectively and politically.
edit re: parent's edit:
see Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society.
Students should progress at their own pace in each subject. They should not be forced to speed up or slow down in order to synchronize with arbitrary time periods. The only reason that structure exists is because of constraints that exist in low-tech teaching environments. In a high tech environment individual pacing and discussion/collaboration groups organized according to current level are possible.
Also there is no reason that students should purchase all of their courses in one lump from an individual university. Instead they should be able to mix and match virtual courses from different direct providers.
Also, with our current technology we could move to a finer grained system for describing educational achievement where information about specific courses is conveyed and even match that with an ontology covering skills and knowledge areas used in business.
This presupposes that these aren't present in the non-for-profit sector, which in my experience isn't the case.
And if we're going to use outcomes as a measure, it's clear for-profits are absurdly dysfunctional. Except:
> The way they take a much tougher cohort of students, on average, than most institutions.
The "we take on more difficult students" line makes no sense. With failure rates so high, it's not at all clear that they're doing anything other than taking on more students, failing those students, and thereby generating unnecessary debt and pocketing the federal grant money.
More-over, favorable analyses of for-profits almost always compares for-profits to flagship state schools or private non-profits, ignoring the class of institutions most similar in terms of prestige and quality -- local and regional state-run colleges and universities. Which are -- in my experience -- similarly prices and vastly superior in terms of learning community and outcomes.
> And, so, while there are certain practices that are not good to adopt there, seeing the challenges they face and seeing the things the way they have done well, bringing that into all of education, will be important.
Yeah, but it's kind of a tautology. "Good practices are good".
Anyways, I'm interested in specific examples. Because I really don't see any innovation per se in private higher ed. It's all stuff everyone else has been doing for decades, but with more marketing and unfounded claims to novelty.
> I don’t believe that a measurement system should simply apply to them and not apply to the broader universe. And, getting those things right is very, very difficult.
Yeah, I'll agree that performance-based funding structures don't make sense in education generally, and make even less sense in higher ed.
That said, it's kind of a misnomer -- if laws end up looking like what's been proposed so far, private institutions will always have the option of not taking federal grant money or subsidized loans.
IF performance measurement takes hold -- which it shouldn't -- I don't understand why the public should be expected to subsidize a for-profit industry and not have carte blanc to regulate. If you don't like the regulations, don't take the subsidy.
I think the last thing any part of the higher education industry -- for-profit or not -- needs is more subsidies. If we want them to cost less, we need to take money out of them, not dump more money in.
When I refer to cost, I mean total cost, not just the bill the university sends the student. The only thing worse than a bigger bill for a student enrolled at the university is a bigger bill for citizens who choose to not even attend university.
Generally the idea is a "compromise" whereby funding increases in exchange for regulation.
I suspect in reality, given the current political climate, it will be "regulation, or we'll blindly slash funding"
edit: some revision.
There are two forms of subsidy: direct funding for state systems, and loans.
With respect to subsidies in the form of low-interest loans, the underlying premise of this position is both faulty and arrogant.
Talk with any student. Odds are, they are acutely aware of how much debt they are taking on, and what that means for their life in the next 5, 10, 15 years.
The trope about cognitively dissonant art majors is an exception, not the norm.
More to the point, the position isn't even internally consistent. if the premise is accurate (again, wrt low-interest loans), then rate hikes on loans won't have any effect other than increased student debt and larger profit margins for major banks.
With respect to state funding, all we need to do is look at historical data.
However, I don't see the logic of both complaining that we spend too much on something while at the same time advocating more subsidies for those who want to borrow to buy more of it.
> I don't see the logic of both complaining that we spend too much on something while at the same time advocating more subsidies for those who want to borrow to buy more of it.
"we" the government, or "we" the individual consumer? It's possible for the individual to spend too much money on something precisely because the government isn't spending enough.
I mean the total of all spending. Although I contend that the two really aren't that different as government spending is just the aggregate of individual spending on government itself.
> This premise is also faulty
You are suggesting that subsidizing something can make the sum total of all spending on that thing go down? I completely disagree with that notion and I think this is the root of our disagreement. At least we found the crux of it.
Even if neither side in the debate leaves convinced of the other side's position, I'm convinced it was worthwhile if the debate ends knowing more precisely where you disagree.
America has a progressive tax system, so this sort of aggregation argument is over-simplistic.
> You are suggesting that subsidizing something can make the sum total of all spending on that thing go down?
Yes, absolutely. Even operating from your premises, spending more can decrease costs.
In the case of no/low-interest loans, as long as the cost of defaults doesn't exceed the amount saved in interest paid to banks, everyone is spending less money on education.
Combining no/low-interest loans with increased state funding for education significantly decreases the risk of default.
So the "right answer" to minimizing spending is just a matter of simply arithmetic:
C_f = Cost of state Funding
C_d = Cost of Defaults
B_i = Total money saved on interest payments (let's assume 5% rate with 20k load, probably higher if the entire market is unsubsidized)
Since we have some amount of state funding and some subsidized loans, it's entirely plausible that increasing C_f could decrease C_d, because the loans are smaller and therefore risk of default is lower. Furthermore, decreasing C_d increases B_i since higher-interest unsubsidized loans will meet the new demand.
Of course, there's a degenerate optimization: you can always just have zero subsidies. Most first world countries rightly give a shit about educating the non-independently-wealthy.
But also:
* I don't think "minimize cost" is a wise philosophy wrt education. Nations that do this tend to be sucky places to live/work.
* America has a progressive tax system, so the aggregate reasoning of your first response is at least disingenuous.This completely neglects that prices and demand will change as these values also change.
I thought this was clear from context, but: these are not constants. They are functions of many, many variables, many of which are probably shared; and probably also their dynamics are non-trivial.
For instance, changes to prices could be perfectly captured because all three variables are functions of price, and each of them probably has at least a first price derivative. I actually talk about this in terms of the model in my post, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that the model can't capture price change.
Also, demand for higher education is fairly inelastic compared to other variables within fairly coerce regions, so sacrificing fine-grained analysis of demand in exchange for more important variables isn't the worst exclusion.
Gates spends a lot of time talking about equality, but he's really talking about doing more with less. The scandal is that neither side of that equation works. Charter schools have the same or worse outcomes compared to public schools, despite the benefit of corporate funding.
that worked out pretty well for him.
Or heck, it's not even that uncommon for successful people as long as we're not talking about something like lawyers (TV doesn't enter the equation, Suits.).
I guess what I'm trying to say is, Bill Gates is an outlier in a heck of a lot more than education. Maybe it's time to consider that "being successful" has little to do with formal education and more to do with skills learned later in life. Which implies that being successful at a young age requires those skills to come earlier (which they are less likely to if you spend most of your time in college).
Reference?
Maybe it's time to consider that "being successful" currently has little to do with formal education or with skills, but instead has more to do with family money.
Consider a list of recent, spectacularly successful entrepeneurs -- Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and others. Most of them are not at all reliant on inherited wealth, often quite the contrary. I think the "family money" idea doesn't stand up to scrutiny, indeed in my experience those born to wealth don't accomplish much at all.
Richard Branson: born the son of a barrister and grandson of a knighted member of the High Court. Also attended an English public school. Exceptional for not attending university.
Steve Jobs: son of a mechanic/carpenter (finally someone blue-collar!) and... oh no wait, an accountant who worked as a payroll clerk at one of the first Silicon Valley high-tech companies. Attended an expensive private college.
Bill Gates: son of lawyers, got Microsoft's first OS contract for MS-DOS through his mother's connections to the board of IBM. Attended the University of Washington.
Being merely well-off to start with is also family money.
Sorry, no. Steve Jobs was an orphan.
> Attended an expensive private college.
Dropped out of Reed College.
> Richard Branson: born the son of a barrister and grandson of a knighted member of the High Court.
These are genetic references, not financial ones. Genetics isn't the issue under discussion.
You managed to overlook the fact that none of the examples had inherited money at the time of their greatest success. Attending an exclusive school is certainly no assurance of later success, often the contrary, and can't be equated with the classic case of inheriting family money.
> Being merely well-off to start with is also family money.
That twists the earlier premise so far as to render it meaningless. And how can the orphan Steve Jobs be described as "well-off to start with"?
Not so, and certainly not so in the case of Steve Jobs, an orphan. Each of the stories is of someone who certainly wouldn't have succeeded to the degree they did without personal qualities that transcended their origins, rather than family wealth, the original argument. Richard Branson didn't build his present empire by buying it with his family's money -- he created it out of his wits. Elon Musk is another story of the same kind -- it's hyperbolic to argue that he became successful because of inherited wealth as opposed to personal ingenuity and drive.
> Even the lowest of them started within the professional upper-middle class (roughly where you and I probably are), which is already most of the way up the class scale, in percentile terms.
But this isn't about class -- it might be about genetics, and it certainly isn't about family money, the original offered explanation. For these stories, class and family background are correlations, not causes.
What we're talking about here are stories of exceptional success with no obvious cause apart from personal drive and ingenuity. They can't be dismissed as resulting from high birth or privilege -- it would be more consistent with logic to examine them on their self-evident merits.
It's too facile (and clearly somewhat tempting) to argue that race, or old-boy networking, played a part. Most of these people (some of whom I have met) are so driven that the idea of joining a club of rich white guys would seem like torture. Some will argue that they're all Aspies anyway, thus very unlikely to be joiners of anything.
> They won the exploding-market lottery by being in the right place and executing well?
That makes more sense -- the role of blind chance. When I wrote Apple Writer for the Apple II in 1979, at the time I didn't fully appreciate the vacuum in which I was working, and how my program would seem more remarkable than it was, simply by being the only one.
This wasn't businees-side jobs, this was the tech industry, all around the country (I was willing to relocate). Being a college dropout, no matter what the reason and to a certain degree, no matter your skills, still hurts your employability in the US.
>percent more per hour, on average, than people without
>degrees
Wouldn't a more appropriate comparison be to compare the earnings of those that could have went to college but opted not to vs those that have completed college?
At some point, you have to make comparisons with the high-volume and reasonably high-fidelity data that you do have rather than wishing for more perfect data that you'll never have.
Certain personality types complete college (fairly disciplined). Are colleges taking a disproportionate amount of credit for the career success for the people that would have been more likely to succeed anyways(with or without) college?
[0]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/...
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/03/student-database-ga...
There's so much un-examined ideology in this piece, it's incredible.
RAISE TAXES.