It’s unfortunate that Thomas Sowell’s famous book about “Thinking Beyond Stage One” wasn’t mandatory reading for every single politician in America involved with funding post-secondary education. For if it had been then they would have realized that dumping more & more money into the Education “Industry” was going to create extreme inflation. Such is revealed in a stinging new article by the WSJ’s Alyssia Finley. Here’s a sampling:
Mr. Vedder is skeptical about the president’s proposal to tie federal aid to graduation rates, among other performance metrics. “I can tell you right now, having taught at universities forever, that universities will do everything they can to get students to graduate,” he chuckles. “If you think we have grade inflation now, you ought to think what will happen. If you breathe into a mirror and it fogs up, you’ll get an A.”
A better idea, Mr. Vedder suggests, would be to implement a national exam like the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) to measure how much students learn in college. This is not on Mr. Obama’s list.
Nor is the president addressing what Mr. Vedder believes is a fundamental problem: too many kids going to college. “Thirty-percent of the adult population has college degrees,” he notes. “The Department of Labor tells us that only 20% or so of jobs require college degrees. We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor’s degrees or more. Why are we encouraging more kids to go to college?”
Mr. Vedder sees similarities between the government’s higher education and housing policies, which created a bubble and precipitated the last financial crisis. “In housing, we had artificially low interest rates. The government encouraged people with low qualifications to buy a house. Today, we have low interest rates on student loans. The government is encouraging kids to go to school who are unqualified just as it encouraged people to buy a home who are unqualified.”
Also worth bookmarking is the first of a ten part series on higher education in the WaPo.
Not to worry, the impending economic melt down and dollar implosion will collapse the usurious welfare state and extinct the parasite culture – in a hurry.
It is unfortunate that many productive people will suffer and lose wealth but anyone productive and intelligent enough to be liquid in this stagflationary depression has transferred enough fiat currency wealth into tangible assets they will weather the economic maelstrom – grasshopper- ant scenario.
An example of how much tuition has risen:
When I started at Stanford in September 1972, tuition, in general (I think that the medical school and business school were exceptions to this) was $2,850 per year. Students starting next month will be paying $42,690. Average household income has certainly increased over that period, but it certainly hasn’t increased by a factor of fifteen.
” The government is encouraging kids to go to school who are unqualified”
Well of course the Chimp-in-Chief is. Can’t have students educated in the sciences and medical professions. After all, they might start questioning the commissars, and the proletariat in charge can’t have that, now can they.
It isn’t much better up here. At UNB, the engineering tuition has spiked from $2300 in 1993 when I began, to over $7900 today (which includes health insurance and all kinds of other crap). More than triple. Of course lefties blame it on government cutbacks.
Turn off the student loan spigots and tuition will settle down. Keep them wide open and all they will do is keep increasing.
Sticking students in a big room with one lecturer is an out-of-date model anyway. So much can be done on-line: lectures watched, essays emailed in, just show up a few days a year for the exams or a day or two a week for the science labs, etc. The enormous cost of infrastructure and bureaucracy that evolved around a centuries-old model of education is no longer necessary. Sooner or later the top-heavy structures should topple. A university education simply does not have to cost this much when a kid in his apartment or parents’ basement with his laptop no longer needs the “Student Union” and the “Campus Patrol” and the “administrator for the receptionists of the assistant profs . . .”
It may be touching but in high school graduation we sit and watch retarded kids get their high school diplomas. Now that they’ve degraded a high school diploma down to an 80 IQ to attain they are getting after universities. When I took courses at university 40 years ago, an “A” was unachievable for me. In the last 40 years my abilities have went down just a bit and recently on online graduate courses from a top 100 American school received nothing but “A”s.
It is truly amazing that achievement exams haven’t replaced instructor awarded marks and degrees. And the final grade should simply be a percentile, what percentage of the class you beat.
Father Sarducci had the cost of education thing solved many years ago.
You can check out this wonderful theory Five Minute University
This article is right on the money. Education, both K-12 and university, is in such a royal mess at this point that I am surprised it has not already fallen apart completely.
Education has been taken over by the left at every level, including now even in engineering programs. And when the left takes over, you can always be guaranteed that the eventual outcome will be a disaster.
My daughter is in high school in British Columbia, and when I see what goes on I can only shake my head. The teacher unions are hard left, and they seem absolutely determined to destroy any and all value in education. The so-called “education experts” don’t have the first clue what they are doing, trying one fad after another on students. And so on it goes.
These days parents who want their kids to get ahead have to find clever ways to get around what is essentially a completely broken system at this point.
“Turn off the student loan spigots and tuition will settle down. Keep them wide open and all they will do is keep increasing.”
Absolutely correct I.M. And that is one of he reasons why I hate the RESP plans the government introduced. Lots of people are piling their hard earned money into them thinking “Yay, I am doing my kid a favor”, when all the RESPs are going to do is cause tuition to inflate.
The sad part about all this (higher education?)is it is financed by taxpayers. Look for student loan
defaults to explode very soon.
“Innovation, he says, is being driven by entrepreneurs like Stanford computer science Prof. Sebastian Thrun, who founded the for-profit company Udacity that offers “massive open online courses” (MOOCs). Mr. Thrun began teaching artificial intelligence, first at Stanford and then at Udacity. Mr. Vedder notes that he quickly got “200,000 people to sign up for it. And it’s a great course and people are learning like crazy.”
That paragraph must strike fear in the hearts of educators. The current system of educating kids is part public service,part massive boondoggle,for the teachers and their Unions.
So many kids go the school today with the attitude that getting an education is very much secondary to partaking of the culture at the school or university.
We have to start looking at less costly alternatives to the current mode,and with almost every household in Canada on the internet,this shouldn’t be that much of a problem. We might end up with less propagandizing and more educating.
Sound government is about seeing more than one move down the chess board. And often it’s not tough to do. You just have to ask yourself “If I was an intelligent and sane person looking after my own interests, how would I respond to this piece of legislation? Would I do what the government hopes I would do, or would I do something quite different?”
But I guess thinking like an intelligent and sane person is a tall order for some legislators.
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In his speech in Buffalo last week, Obama said university tuition has gone up 250% at the same time incomes have gone up 17% (not quite sure of the time frame).
His solution? Well, it was definitely not to control costs.
Three guesses and anything before ‘raise taxes’ does not count.
As I’ve said before, my 36 year old daughter graduated, and went to college, and she did not know the difference between to, too, and two. But she graduated, and now works as an assistant to two ministers in AB. I just tell, go for it girl. Your pension can help your parents when we retire. (not that we need it, but it is a good joke).