This day ... three years ago (3)

(Re-posting from 2012)

No noise in the classroom, please. Students are asleep!
As enrollment has increased in the college where I teach, there has been an increase in the number of students who go through some of the classes that I teach.  The opportunity to help more numbers of students understand and interpret the world certainly pleases me.

However, along with the larger numbers, I notice that there is also a much higher increase in the percentage of students who don't show up even though they are registered for the class.  Sometimes they are no shows during the entire term.

Yesterday, at class time, only 15 out of the 36 were in attendance.  A couple more came in late, but we didn't even reach the 50%-plus-one that would be required for a quorum!

It worsened after the break--we were down to twelve.  Only a third of the class.

Yes, there was absenteeism even in the old days.  Ten years ago, when I started teaching here, of course, students did skip class.  I have never recorded attendance because, as I tell them, they are adults and I do not have to babysit anybody.  But, I don't even need any hard data to understand that the trend has been of decreasing attendance.

It sunk to a new low yesterday.

One reason could very well be that I am a crappy teacher, and such teachers might not be making their classes exciting enough for students, who need to be "edutained."  But, as I joke with students, if they thought I am crappy now, well, I was incredibly crappier years ago.  (One term, a student, who mistook my humor, told me in all seriousness "if you think you are bad, Dr. Khé, you really don't know what bad teaching means."  That was one awesome compliment I received that term!)

Thus, absenteeism has been on a steady increase even as my teaching has gotten better; how about that!

My hypothesis to explain the rapid increase is simple: we now have a lot more students than before who are simply not interested in higher education.  Yet, they are here because of the societal contexts that force them to be in classrooms.

Is it worth all this trouble?

When 24 students decide to skip class, it is a huge waste of precious dollars too.  At the approximately sixty dollars it costs each student for each class meeting, that was $1,440 flushed down the toilet in a little more than an hour.  Mine is not the only class where we witness absenteeism.  Now think about all the other classes that are offered at this university alone.  And then all the classes across all the colleges and universities.

I do not mean to suggest that coming to class is always better than not coming to class.  We have to count the number of students who do come to class and promptly fall asleep.  Yes, asleep.  A few years ago, a colleague, who since left for greener pastures, described to me what he did when he saw a student fast asleep with his face down on the desk.  The colleague walked up to the classroom door, and banged it shut.  The sudden loud noise jolted the student from his sleep and the rest of the class apparently had quiet smiles on their faces.

I don't do anything like what that former colleague did.  I might ask students whether they think it will be ok with their boss if they didn't show up for work, or if they slept on the job.  That is the extent to which I go about reminding them that their habits are not healthy.  I don't have to, nor do I want to, babysit adults.

Do students ever ask themselves whether all this fun and sleep is worth the $25,000 debt that they graduate with, on an average?

Should voters ask ourselves whether we should worry at all about the student debt accumulated via such a process?

Given that there is also public money involved in universities like the one where I teach, I am sure taxpayers are not going to be thrilled to know that they are subsidizing students who choose to skip classes, or treat class time as nap time.

I would love it if taxpayers routinely observed our classrooms and judged for themselves whether their hard-earned monies are being put to good use.  I am confident that if they did, well, that will be the end of even the little bit of funding that we currently get for higher education.  I, for one, would not blame taxpayers if they chose to do that.

After that, the taxpayers should also sit in on faculty meetings.  I suppose I would be blamed if it results in them jumping off the nearest cliff.  I bet quite a few administrators will gladly push them over too!

Welcome to the university, and have a nice day!

Sugar-babies, too, are a part of capitalism :(

In graduate school, I was vaguely acquainted with a student from India, who was also of Tamil Brahmin stock and had come to America for higher education.  That common heritage aside, we had nothing in common other than a few friends.  Once, after a movie, my friend dropped her off first at her apartment before I got dropped off.  She lived in a much better neighborhood, way pricier than mine.  She could afford that because somebody else paid for it.  In exchange, she had to be available for that patron.

I never would have imagined such possibilities.  But, there it was.  She was brilliant, charming, beautiful, yet something offbeat like this.

A year ago, the Atlantic featured such arrangements that were apparently becoming more and more possible thanks the internet and smartphones.

In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for). Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies.

That graduate school acquaintance was a sugar-baby; a phrase that perhaps existed even back then.

But, I didn't think much about that Atlantic piece, until now.  Because, the Economist also has something to say about sugar-babies.  As I always comment, if the Economist and the Wall Street Journal report on such social aspects, then it means that it is not any fringe happening.

As the cost of university has risen, so has the number of “sugar babies” who pay for it by selling companionship and sex to wealthy older men. Monthly pay for this is typically about $3,000, though some “sugar daddies” offer much more. According to SeekingArrangement, a firm based in Las Vegas, two-thirds of sugar-baby graduates have no student debt.
Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago. Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder.

I suppose if we live long enough, we will get to witness quite a few strange things in life.

The boom is fuelled by increased acceptance of “sugaring” (dating for money), says Steven Pasternack, the owner of a Miami firm known as Sugardaddie. The company’s site gets more than 5,000 new profile uploads worldwide every day. A quarter are students. Astute marketing helps. Sugardaddie’s pitch notes that it does not “discriminate against people’s desires”. Sugar babies are increasingly advised to negotiate not an “allowance”, but rather a certain “lifestyle” in exchange for dates. These arrangements can remain discreet. New Yorker Keith and the younger woman he met online, seeking a sugar daddy to pay for college, both tell friends that they met in a bar. His weekly $500 deposits into her bank account will cease, he says, if she becomes unavailable.

You are probably thinking, "hey, this is prostitution."  And you run into legal trouble for prostitution.  Right?

Might any of this qualify as prostitution? The websites say no. A sugar daddy doesn’t want his sugar baby to leave, whereas no client of a prostitute “wants the hooker to stick around”, as SeekingArrangement puts it. This argument has prevailed in America’s courts. If a relationship exists, payment can be labelled as compensation for companionship, not sex.

As that Atlantic essay noted:

When we consider what it means to be a high-end prostitute, we generally think about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman—a desperate young person willing to trade some of her dignity for the chance to avoid working on curbs at two in the morning. A college education seems fundamentally at odds with that image. By actively seeking out college students, and publicizing the high numbers already in its ranks, Seeking Arrangement makes it easier for smart, young women with bright futures to rationalize the decision to join Seeking Arrangement: If so many college women are signing up for the site, it must be something different. It must be more socially acceptable somehow. It can’t really be prostitution.

Sugar-babies are yet another reason why we need to spend time thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humankind, and what our existence means in this universe that is a mystery; I have quoted the following before and is worth repeating:

we're living at a time when public moral deliberation is rapidly moving away from considerations of ultimate ends, ideals of human flourishing, in favor of a morality of rights that is largely indifferent to what individuals do with their freedom. As long as you refrain from harming others, you are free to pursue happiness however you like, no questions asked.
Politically speaking, this might be the best available strategy for people who disagree about the highest good to live together pluralistically in relative peace. But this doesn't mean that it's possible for individual human beings to forego the question of how to live, to bypass the question of human flourishing — what it consists in, and how to achieve it. In fact, with the retreat of institutions that once proposed compelling comprehensive visions of the good life, the burden of choosing among various ways of life falls more than ever on the shoulders of individuals.

Life!

Are the feds helping students with easy loans? Hint: NO!

I always worry about my paycheck.

No, not the way the "comrades" do.  But, I worry that my paycheck is dependent more and more on the tuition and fees that students pay.  "Blood money" as I have referred to it in the past.  Over the years, I have started worrying that I am less an educator and more a mercenary.

As I have often blogged here, and written in op-eds, we are unnecessarily pushing students to college.  Right from the middle school years, we make sure to convey to students that not going to college is a sign of a loser, and that picking up a trade is evidence of being a loser.  Simply awful.  Just awfully distorted and condescending this is.  And so destructive to the human that a young person is.

The federal government does not help when on top of all the screw-ups it has managed to create in K-12 and higher education.

The federal government will lend money to anybody who goes to school, no matter how poor their chances of completing their degree and finding a job that will position them to repay their debt.

That is no exaggeration.  It is true.

The more the government says it will loan, well, is it any mystery that the costs continue to go up?  And, therefore, should it surprise us that the student debt is shattering records month after month?

Even worse--yes, there is even more of a horror story here--is the default rates in student loans.  Consider this chart:

You see how bad a story this is?  A horror story!

Of borrowers who began repaying their debts in 2009, 26 percent have already defaulted—meaning they fell at least 270 days late on their debt—according to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of those who went into repayment in 2005, when the economy was somewhat decent, 25 percent have defaulted.

You see why I am worried and guilty about my paycheck?

The (relatively) worthless college degree

This catchy tweet appeared in my newsfeed:

Why you need a bachelor's degree to be a secretary today http://t.co/ttIKHPIelp
— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 9, 2014

My first thought was this: I wrote an op-ed on this seven f*ing years ago!

college education serves as a filter for employers who are faced with the daunting task of selecting from among the many, many applicants for jobs. This further reinforces the notion that college degree is important.

I calmed myself down and tweeted using polite language:

When I wrote an op-ed on credential inflation, in August 2007, neither students nor faculty agreed with me :( http://t.co/XgLIpJ49WI
— sriram khe (@congoboy) September 9, 2014

It is the story of my life--it is not what you say but who says it!

Oh well, enough about woe-is-me and let us get going with the issue of, to borrow Catherine Rampbell's column title, "the college degree has become the new high school degree"

Regardless of what you actually learn in college, graduating from a four-year institution may broadcast that you have discipline, drive and stick-to-it-iveness. In plenty of jobs — such as I.T. help-desk positions — there is little to no difference in skill requirements between job ads requiring a degree and those that do not, Burning Glass found. But employers still prefer college graduates.
With college attendance more routine today it was than in the past, degrees are becoming a common, if blunt, tool for screening job applicants. In 2013, 33.6 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds had a BA, vs. 24.7 percent in 1995. Bachelor’s degrees are probably seen less as a gold star for those who have them than as a red flag for those who don’t. If you couldn’t be bothered to get a degree in this day and age, you must be lazy, unreliable or dumb.

That is no different from the arguments that I made seven f*ing years ago!  Crap, I am getting way too pissed off that we have been taking the youth and society for an expensive ride all these years.

Employers have figured out a cost-minimizing approach to the recruitment and training of young hires: use college degree as a filter to weed out those who could be "lazy, unreliable or dumb," and, on top of that, leave it to the youth to pick up job-skills at the college, instead of training them--even if the grads are hired only to be glorified secretaries.

We then mix up the data of students graduating from elite universities with students graduating from Podunk U., and brainwash the youth and society about higher education. For instance, in the following chart, do you see any small time public regional university?

It is f*ing insane that we don't ever engage in honest discussions on this important public policy issue, and instead try our best to distract everybody by touting college sports, climbing walls, and fancy dorms.

And then we wonder why we are graduating the most indebted generationever. Ever!

“As the transition to adulthood has protracted, and the costs of education have risen, young adults have shifted their credit use away from home mortgage debt and towards student loan and consumer debt”

On my part, I will continue with the full-disclosure with the students. Though, this means that it will only continue to worsen the enrollment issues and I will be writing my own professional pink slip--I can't thank tenure enough!

Fatal attraction

No, not those brightly painted toes that distract me when the summer heat reveals those female feet ... but blogging about student debt and higher education

[What] do you tell perspective parents and students about the options they should be looking for, whether they should consider, you know, not going?

What would any responsible person tell them?

[We] really emphasize that metrics such as completion rates at schools, average amounts of student debt and employability at a particular institution once someone graduates should be the priority in choosing a school, and not, again, which university has the more popular football team or the more lush student center.

We should use such metrics because ...?

[If] we can reorient to those metrics, many people might be able to avoid going into an amount of debt that is crushing.

That is from the PBS News Hour interview with Andrew Rossi, the director of the documentary, "Ivory Tower," which is about "the growing worries and criticism over college costs and student debt."

(BTW, looks like the transcriber got mixed up with the prospective versus perspective.  Or, wait, did the News Hour's interviewer get it mixed up?  If the latter, well ...)

To me, and to readers of this blog this is nothing but the proverbial preaching to the choir.  It really does not take a rocket scientist, or even a first grade student, to figure out that reason why college has become expensive is rather simple--higher education has strayed far, far away from the mission of education.  It is now an enormous mostly "non-profit" arm of the entertainment industry, while occasionally holding classes for students.

David Leonhardt explains, very well as he always does, that it is not the debt that students at the prestigious schools have that is of real worry.  Those students will always succeed.  But, the scary story, which is also what I have often argued--like here--is with the college dropouts, a group that is also highly correlated with low and low-middle income households.

Many colleges graduate fewer than half of the students they enroll — and resist policy makers’ attempts to hold them accountable for their results.

Meanwhile, yesterday, this blipped in my Feedly:

Students may be graduating $30,000 in debt, but at least they live in relative opulence for four, five, or six years.

Why that sarcasm, you ask?  Here is an example for you:

At Wichita State, a new $65 million residence hall and dining facility at the center of campus has a waiting list while openings are plentiful at the university's older, lower-priced halls. It'll cost between $10,000 and $12,000 a year (including meals) to live in the new facility, compared to $6,800 a year for older residence halls.

Yes, students and parents care more about country-club living, fancy gyms with climbing walls, and, of course, football and basketball teams, and conveniently forget that the metric ought to be about "completion rates at schools, average amounts of student debt and employability at a particular institution once someone graduates."  And then the same students and their parents complain about the debt?

Why not talk about something pleasant when I am trying my best to maintain my sanity in this hot oven!

source

Back to that nagging question ... is college worth it?

The answer is not as easy as one would like it to be.

For once, there is one commentary that I agree with without any qualifier at all:

The question “Is college worth it?” clearly can’t be answered unequivocally. So much depends on another question: “Worth it for whom?” Is college worth it for everyone? Worth it for an individual student? Worth it on average? Worth it for society? Each of those questions is likely to lead to a different answer.

Which is why when students or parents ask me about college or majors or graduate school, I don't tell them what I truly feel but, instead, I turn their question around and ask them what they want to get from that investment of time and money.  Because, it all depends.

For the most part, I criticize the current state of discussions because we do not take the effort to explain how the answer to "is college worth it?" will depend on so many issues that can easily vary across individuals.  Forget the elite schools--to those students, college is clearly worth it.  But the elite institutions are few, and the majority are places like the one where I teach.  It is at these places that answering the question is tricky and is not by any means a case of one answer fits all.

For one, economic class makes a huge difference in terms of college and earnings.

Suppose I got someone to make a chart showing the incomes of prime-age BMW drivers versus average Americans. It would reveal a large BMW earnings premium. I could even produce a chart showing that the children of BMW drivers grow up to earn more than the average American. But that wouldn't be evidence that BMWs cause high wages, and that the BMW Earnings Premiums extends across multiple generations. It would be evidence that high-income people buy expensive cars and that there's intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.

The question of whether college is worth it needs to tease out that  intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.  To disaggregate that data won't be easy, I would think.  Especially when the trend in terms of who attends college is clear:

Today, only about 7 percent of recent college graduates come from the bottom-income quartile, compared with 12 percent in 1970, when federal aid was scarce. From a liberal egalitarian point of view, we’re going in the wrong direction.

Even as we push college for all, we need to keep this bottom-line in mind:

unless the overall job market is booming, simply churning out more college graduates risks making everybody a bit poorer.

And the result will be a worsening of the very inequality that we hope college education will help narrow:

It’s also important to remember who would stand to lose the most if a surge of graduates did manage to bring down the college premium. Chances are, alums of elite schools wouldn’t be particularly affected, since any substantial growth would likely come from mid- and lower-tier schools. Graduate degree holders, the real winners of the educational race of the past 30 years, also wouldn’t be much affected. In the end, you’re essentially talking about an approach to inequality that involves bringing solidly, if unspectacularly, middle-class households a little closer to the bottom, while pushing down the bottom even deeper.

Depending on how we think through the question, our public policy suggestions will also differ.  If we take one route, we will then come to this public policy option:

Not so many decades ago, high school was considered the frontier of education. Some people even argued that it was a waste to encourage Americans from humble backgrounds to spend four years of life attending high school. Today, obviously, the notion that everyone should attend 13 years of school is indisputable.
But there is nothing magical about 13 years of education. As the economy becomes more technologically complex, the amount of education that people need will rise. At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal.
That point, in fact, has already arrived.

Now, 15 or 17 years of education as a universal goal is entirely different from claiming that college is worth it but then requiring the student to bear that cost, right?   

As always, it is America's Finest News Source that provides clarity via asking this:

According to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, though recent graduates often struggle to find work and student debt has passed the $1 trillion mark, a college education is more valuable than ever because the wage gap between grads and non-grads continues to grow. What do you think?

And the clear response is:

“Really? Well then, by all means, raise tuition.”

Yes, let them eat cakes!

The degree you get in graduate school: MD (More Debt)

In my classes, I often tell students, who are awake, that they should not assume there is a direct relationship between their undergraduate majors and their careers after graduation.  In fact, I go one step more and caution them from assuming that there is even any kind of a relationship anymore between college degrees and employment.

If after all that they come to talk to me about going to graduate school, especially for a master's degree, I make sure they understand the huge risk they take, and I am usually ready to even use that "P" word--ponzi! A Google search for this wonderful description of graduate school will bring up a post from my blog in the top results.  I have no idea how the Google algorithm works, but sometimes visitors to my blog land up here because they seem to be worried about graduate school.

They ought to be worried about graduate school.

All of us ought to be panicking about graduate school.

Because, we have simultaneously inflated the credentialing requirements and watered down the quality of undergraduate programs that now graduate schooling is the new two-year BA degree!  In the process of suffering through more years of education, students do not end up amassing knowledge but more debt.

As I noted in a post a long time ago, it now is a requirement to have a graduate degree to teach fifth-graders!  At this rate, we will have post-docs teaching in high school!

No noise in the classroom, please. Students are asleep!

As enrollment has increased in the college where I teach, there has been an increase in the number of students who go through some of the classes that I teach.  The opportunity to help more numbers of students understand and interpret the world certainly pleases me.

However, along with the larger numbers, I notice that there is also a much higher increase in the percentage of students who don't show up even though they are registered for the class.  Sometimes they are no shows during the entire term.

Yesterday, at class time, only 15 out of the 36 were in attendance.  A couple more came in late, but we didn't even reach the 50%-plus-one that would be required for a quorum!

It worsened after the break--we were down to twelve.  Only a third of the class.

Yes, there was absenteeism even in the old days.  Ten years ago, when I started teaching here, of course, students did skip class.  I have never recorded attendance because, as I tell them, they are adults and I do not have to babysit anybody.  But, I don't even need any hard data to understand that the trend has been of decreasing attendance.

It sunk to a new low yesterday.

One reason could very well be that I am a crappy teacher, and such teachers might not be making their classes exciting enough for students, who need to be "edutained."  But, as I joke with students, if they thought I am crappy now, well, I was incredibly crappier years ago.  (One term, a student, who mistook my humor, told me in all seriousness "if you think you are bad, Dr. Khé, you really don't know what bad teaching means."  That was one awesome compliment I received that term!)

Thus, absenteeism has been on a steady increase even as my teaching has gotten better; how about that!

My hypothesis to explain the rapid increase is simple: we now have a lot more students than before who are simply not interested in higher education.  Yet, they are here because of the societal contexts that force them to be in classrooms.

Is it worth all this trouble?

When 24 students decide to skip class, it is a huge waste of precious dollars too.  At the approximately sixty dollars it costs each student for each class meeting, that was $1,440 flushed down the toilet in a little more than an hour.  Mine is not the only class where we witness absenteeism.  Now think about all the other classes that are offered at this university alone.  And then all the classes across all the colleges and universities.

I do not mean to suggest that coming to class is always better than not coming to class.  We have to count the number of students who do come to class and promptly fall asleep.  Yes, asleep.  A few years ago, a colleague, who since left for greener pastures, described to me what he did when he saw a student fast asleep with his face down on the desk.  The colleague walked up to the classroom door, and banged it shut.  The sudden loud noise jolted the student from his sleep and the rest of the class apparently had quiet smiles on their faces.

I don't do anything like what that former colleague did.  I might ask students whether they think it will be ok with their boss if they didn't show up for work, or if they slept on the job.  That is the extent to which I go about reminding them that their habits are not healthy.  I don't have to, nor do I want to, babysit adults.

Do students ever ask themselves whether all this fun and sleep is worth the $25,000 debt that they graduate with, on an average?

Should voters ask ourselves whether we should worry at all about the student debt accumulated via such a process?

Given that there is also public money involved in universities like the one where I teach, I am sure taxpayers are not going to be thrilled to know that they are subsidizing students who choose to skip classes, or treat class time as nap time.

I would love it if taxpayers routinely observed our classrooms and judged for themselves whether their hard-earned monies are being put to good use.  I am confident that if they did, well, that will be the end of even the little bit of funding that we currently get for higher education.  I, for one, would not blame taxpayers if they chose to do that.

After that, the taxpayers should also sit in on faculty meetings.  I suppose I would be blamed if it results in them jumping off the nearest cliff.  I bet quite a few administrators will gladly push them over too!

Welcome to the university, and have a nice day!

A New Yorker cartoon that is not funny? Yep, it happens!

It ain't funny because the cartoon simply presents the reality, about which there is nothing to chuckle:

But then, the magazine has another cartoon for people like me who didn't think that the internship cartoon was funny:

Ok, am laughing now ... call off the mafioso :)

A river runs through student debt and academic integrity

In an email that invites us to invest "in our future generations by making a gift today at the highest level," the president of the university, where I am privileged to be employed as an instructor, writes:

Our graduating seniors are paying the lowest tuition rates in the state while our entering freshmen are charged among the highest. Because of the disinvestment by the state in state higher education, we must revamp our tuition structure yet again to assure affordability for all students, and we are counting on you to help this special university.

Right now our graduates face significant challenges, from average loan debt exceeding $25,000 to the difficulty of starting a career that utilizes our students’ skills and education in this economy. We have done well these past couple of years by increasing student aid and scholarship from your donations and from university sources. But, to ease the financial burden on our students, we must do much better.

For once, I would like the president to first issue an apology for the misguided expenditures, like this Taj Mahal, that have then translated to unnecessary fees for students, who then go on to amass debts.  It is not that the Taj Mahal alone resulted in all of the $25,000 debt he refers to, but a dollar here and a dollar there and soon it is real money, right?

But, of course, it has never been kosher to ask such troubling questions, even within the settings of universities, which are the places that we idealize as environments for "critical thinking."  And more so for somebody like me whose sincere attempts to engage in difficult and urgent topics led to my excommunication from the flock.  I suppose if you don't drink that metaphorical kool-aid that everybody else is drinking, ...

In those years when I was engaged with the "professionals" on campus who were behaving without any sense of integrity and accountability, one colleague suggested that perhaps I should recognize that some topics are off-limits--he was sympathetic to the faculty union, whose bizarre ideas I was questioning.  I asked him if he was suggesting that I could criticize the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where billions were being wasted and lives were being lost, but that I could not criticize what was happening locally?  And, by silencing me on the local issues, weren't they enacting their own versions of Bush's insane argument of either you are with us or against us?

It shocked me when he argued that it was one thing to criticize the policies on wars but not ok to criticize the union's policies.  Yes, that was his argument!

The lack of professional and academic integrity continues to shock me, even though one would think that after all these years I will be used to such behaviors.  Maybe I should worry when the day arrives that I am no longer shocked--that will be the day that I think I should quit--it will not be worth it if I ever become so apathetic not to be shocked.

Student loan up 24%. Earnings down 15%. Do the math!

Won't it be in the interests of full disclosure if colleges and universities provided incoming freshman students with information like the following graph?

Source

I am increasingly convinced that right from the early years of schooling, students hear all the time that they will suffer a loss of prestige if they do not go to college.  That they will be labeled "losers."  That they would be thought of as stupid if they didn't transition to college straight away from high school.  As one student told me, he was made to think that there were only two options he had: either go to college or sign up with the military.

Such an approach to higher education not only leads to a terrible misallocation of taxpayer and household capital, and to high levels of student debt, but it also defeats the whole idea of education that is to enable the youth realize their full potentials, whatever they might be.  Instead, we shove them through a higher education factory system in which the real beneficiaries are those suckling at the teats of the education-industry-complex!

Furthermore, as I noted earlier:

We push teenagers to higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply equate higher education to nothing but a passport to a job, instead of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path towards understanding their own respective potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.

Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different--life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers to college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life.  The tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as "the road not taken."

By focusing on an economic argument, which is weak at best, in order to get students out the high school doors into college, we are rapidly reducing them to mere worker bees who have to compete against those in India and elsewhere.  Is that really what we want from the billions we invest in education?

Who ever listens to what I have to say, eh!  But then, hey, every once in a while students--yes, even students--tell me they read my blog.  I am sure they will do all right with all the warnings I provide them here.

College affordability and student loan in election year politics

First, from the LA Times:

President Obama used his weekly video address to launch what will be a weeklong push on the issue of college affordability, pressing lawmakers to act to prevent a sharp increase in interest rates for student loans.

The president noted that at a time of economic distress, a college degree has never been more important. But "it's also never been more expensive."

It has never been more expensive is true.  But, I am not sure whether it has never been more important.  Anyway, that debate aside, the immediacy is in the fact that

In 2006, the rate on all types of Stafford loans was 6.8 percent. But in 2007, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed a bill that cut the rate on subsidized Stafford loans for undergrads in half over four years.
The rate dropped to 6 percent in 2008-09, to 5.6 percent the next year, then to 4.5 percent and to 3.4 percent for the 2011-12 school year. Under that act, the rate jumps back to 6.8 percent starting July 1.
"It's not surprising the 3.4 percent rate expired in an election year," says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.com. "Normally Congress passes legislation with a five- or 10-year window. The four-year window was timed perfectly for an election."
In other words, Democrats knew Republicans would have a hard time letting a rate increase take effect on the eve of an election.

When one can get 30-year mortgages for 4%, 

letting the rate increase now, when jobs are harder to find and schools are cutting other types of financial aid, would be a "triple whammy" on students.An argument could be made that at a time when banks are paying almost nothing on deposits and mortgages can be had for 4 percent, a rate of 6.8 percent is too high for all student borrowers.

As Judith Scott-Clayton noted a few weeks ago, 

With a bachelor’s degree, even $40,000 may be a manageable level of debt over the long term. But for those who are unemployed – including 9.1 percent of the 20- to 24-year-old college graduate labor force and 20.4 percent of their peers with no college degree, according to a recent report – even much smaller amounts may be unmanageable in the short term.

The worst one could do is to go to graduate school to get non-professional and non-terminal degrees--these will merely add to the debt.  Yet, students continue to flock to graduate school, especially in the humanities and the social sciences!

Consumer spending fuels growth. Really? Think again!

So, ... buried in the news report about a rise in consumer spending is this:

Most consumers spent more of what they earned and saved less. The saving rate dropped to 3.7% of after-tax income in February. That was the lowest level since August 2009. It had averaged 4.7% for all of last year.

Americans are also taking on more debt. Consumer borrowing increased from November through January by the most in a decade for a three-month stretch. Yet the increases were driven almost entirely by auto and student loans. Credit card debt decreased in January and remains well below pre-recession levels.

Dales cautioned that at some point, consumers won't be able to draw further on their savings. Further job gains are needed to boost consumers' income.

Hmmm ... job growth has stagnated, and consumers are taking on more debt.  Isn't this a cause for worry, rather than for the stock market to go up?  What the heck am I missing in this picture?

There is at least the old reliable Robert Reich who makes sure that I am not coming across as an idiot:

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke – who doesn’t have to face voters on Election Day – says the U.S. economy needs to grow faster if it’s to produce enough jobs to bring down unemployment. But he leaves out the critical point.
We can’t possibly grow faster if the vast majority of Americans, who are still losing ground, don’t have the money to buy more of the things American workers produce. There’s no way spending by the richest 10 percent – the only ones gaining ground – will be enough to get the economy out of first gear.

Even more worrisome is this: the increase in student loan debt.  Students are borrowing more and more hoping that a college degree will transform into well-paying jobs.  But, that, too, is a mirage on many fronts for most students!  The trillion-dollar debt means:

as more people go to college and assume bigger loans for education, they may take longer than previous generations to hit key milestones such as buying a house or getting married, U.S. officials and economists say. It could take longer for heavily indebted graduates to save money for a down payment on a home, or it could be harder for them to qualify for mortgages.
Rohit Chopra, student-loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said student debt could ultimately slow the recovery of the housing market. "First-time home-buyers are a substantial part of the housing market," Mr. Chopra said in a speech at the banking conference in Austin. "Instead of saving for a down payment, these borrowers are sending big payments every month."
Student debt is a burden not just for recent college graduates in their 20s but also parents, who often co-sign their children's student loans, as well as midcareer professionals who opted to go back to school during the sluggish recovery.

 Meanwhile, we are well on our way to think of debt as from the cradle to the grave:

new research shows a trend that’s even more troubling than Americans going into hock to pay for a college degree: Apparently, some parents are taking out five-figure loans to finance private school tuition for K-12 kids. Yes, student loans even to pay for kindergarten.

Who shouldn't go to college and end up with huge debt?

Judith Scott-Clayton asks over at Economix who should not go to college:

While college may be a great investment, it’s not like investing in the stock market: a prospective student can’t just fork over some money and let someone else worry about how to make it grow. For college to have any payoff, students must participate in the process by going to class and engaging with course materials, peers and instructors.
The cost of college includes not just monetary costs but psychological costs, which are highest for those who either strongly dislike classroom instruction or have to work particularly hard to get anything out of it. Individuals with high psychological costs who enroll anyway because that is what they believe they “should” do may end up with the worst of both worlds: forgoing income (and possibly accumulating debt) without accumulating skills. 

The downside to all this?  Student debt that now has hit the trillion dollar mark, and worse:

we've reached a point where two-thirds of college seniors now graduate in debt, where a total of 37 million Americans now owe money on their education. Sixty-seven percent are between the ages of 18 and 39, but recent research suggests the fastest growing group of borrowers may be in middle age -- people who have been laid off from jobs or are afraid their professional skills aren't fresh enough to keep up with a changing economy. [...] For young graduates -- or dropouts, for that matter -- the debt will drag on their finances well into adulthood. For the adults, it's an investment they may not have a time to recoup. Many are already being overwhelmed by what they owe. The NY Federal Reserve believes that more than a quarter of all borrowers with due loans are now delinquent on some of their payments.

The moral dilemma when my salary comes from ... student debt

I have worried enough in this blog that higher education has become an industry that only cares about maximizing its own welfare.  But, the issue continues and, so, I keep blogging about it!

A couple of years ago, when the faculty union at the university where I teach decided to go on a strike (it was averted at the proverbial eleventh hour) there were quite a few students expressing their "solidarity" with the faculty, some of whom ridiculously walking around with "will teach for food" hyperbole.  I asked one of those students, who keeps in touch with me even after graduating, whether he knew where the additional money for faculty salaries will come from.  I pointed out to him that if we faculty got raises, then it was a guarantee that student tuition and fees would increase.  He was stunned; he hadn't thought about it at all.

Since then, tuition and fees have gone up a lot.  After all, somebody has to pay not only for our salaries but also for expensive Taj Mahals!

But, I am increasingly uncomfortable in the classrooms, where I am painfully aware of the debt that students are getting into.  And, even worse is when those are from less-affluent backgrounds.  These kinds of dilemmas have haunted me throughout my life and, dammit, they don't seem to go away. 

In the case of higher education, as this writer points out:

Professors get paid in the form of borrowed money. In a speech to the demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street last month, Andrew Ross, a professor of American studies at New York University, deplored the fact that his salary is largely "debt-financed." He called the growing mountain of student debt "an unsustainable moral burden."

My father often remarked that many of the misfortunes in the extended family are a result of the bad karma of my great-grandfather having been a local banker.  Dad's logic is that every time the borrowers were forced to keep up with the payments when they could not, they were handing over the money while cursing the banker--my great-grandfather.  My scientific mind sees no cause and effect relationship here.  But, I do recognize the moral dilemma, which is no different from me collecting my paycheck that is largely from student debt.

Maybe I should call my paycheck a "blood-check" along the lines of "blood chocolate."

The depressing economic reality for college graduates

The small-sized university where I teach recently introduced a major in gerontology.  Introducing a new major (and a minor too) has also been accompanied by long-term investments in terms of tenure-track faculty.

Yes, society will have to increasingly deal with various issues related to the elderly.  The question that we could ask from a public policy perspective is this: could we have prepared students for gerontology-related careers without this degree program/minor?  For an entry-level job in this field, will it really matter if the undergraduate major is in psychology or sociology or biology or English literature?

We never had these kind of discussions on campus.  I suspect it is a similar story at other universities too.  It is unfortunate that these discussions do not happen because of what these decisions mean:

• long-term investments and commitments are being made, for which benefits seem to be way to low
• the costs are being borne by taxpayers and students, who are already being sucked dry
• students are misled into believing that pursuing one liberal arts major versus another is better for jobs in that major
• a further dilution of higher liberal education

The proliferation of undergraduate majors and minors is a vastly under-reported aspect of higher education.  There is a world of a difference between researchers specializing in a narrowly defined subtopic versus a narrow major like gerontology.  Narrow focus ought to come later in graduate schooling, not at the undergrad level.  Even medical school is post-undergrad, and yet we want to invest in "gerontology?"  Of course, gerontology is merely an example.  Numerous other similar programs have been initiated over the past few years.  Works well for marketing purposes, I would imagine!

In any case, students majoring in gerontology are going to face a future that will be no different from the future that awaits students majoring in geography or English literature or business: a bleak one.

Over to Mike Mandel on what the trends have been:
 

Imagine showing every college freshman these charts.  Wouldn't that be full disclosure?  In fact, shouldn't we demand such full disclosure?  At least from taxpayer supported colleges and universities?

The typical explanation is that college graduates fare better than those without degrees.  There are huge problems with such statements.  Instead of me pointing them out from my own posts, here is from a recent Cato report:

There are numerous problems, however, with simply concluding that because enrollment, degree attainment, and the college wage premium all rose along with spending, spending increases were good investments. The first is that in looking at averages one can miss a lot of data, and many people with college degrees might not get much economic value from them. The second is that we might be fueling credential inflation, in which the difference between earnings for people with a bachelor’s degree and those with only a high school education are large not because one attains valuable skills pursuing a degree, but because degrees are so commonplace—and perhaps signal some basic threshold level of intelligence and work habits—that employers reflexively screen out job seekers without degrees. Finally, there are very large percentages of people who enroll in college, perhaps lured by the promise of government aid to pay for it, who do not end up getting degrees. Their payoff is often small or negative.

Tyler Cowen offers another take:

Non-college grads also have seen declining wages, and so one can look at the “finish college vs. finish high school only” margin and conclude that the return to higher education is robust.  Another approach is to look at the “finish college and get on a real career track” vs. “finish college and hang out” margin and conclude the sector is in trouble, which indeed is the case.  Don’t get stuck looking at the old margins only, the new and powerful margin, I am sorry to say, is relative to unemployment or extreme underemployment.  The status and avoid-shame returns are high enough to keep a lot of people going to college, at current prices, but the falling real wages for graduates aren’t going to sustain an enormous amount of extra sectoral growth, including on the price side.  Nor do I expect the preceding orgy of student debt to repeated, at that level, anytime soon.

All these mean that President Obama dusting off the student loan problems through an executive order will not do a damn thing for students because they are looking at very low returns, assuming they will find jobs, on their huge undergraduate investment dollars.

Increasingly, I feel terribly guilty that I am being a part of the problem by taking money from the unsuspecting students.  But then, if ever they make the mistake of coming to me for advice, I take the time to present them the larger picture and, therefore, how they need to systematically plan for their academic and employment lives.  Some of them never come back to my office though!

But then some read my blog, which means I am reaching an audience and being a part of the solution too.

Students are trapped in the higher education ponzi. And are chained to their loans!

If students actually had to earn the money to pay for that world-class fitness center, the 2,000 different clubs, and the off-campus apartment with the pizza parties, there would be a lot less of those things.  And while I like both world class fitness centers, and apartments, they're not the sort of thing that should be funded with borrowed money.

That was Megan McArdle writing in the context of her arguments to "allow students to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy."

The university where I teach has built an ultra-modern fitness center, with rock-climbing walls.
Here is how a recent all-campus email described the facility:

The HWC is a 40,000 square foot facility, comprised of a two-court gymnasium with an elevated track, two racquetball courts, three multipurpose rooms, a 6,000 square foot cardiovascular and strength training area, a 40 foot high by 40 foot wide rock climbing wall, locker rooms,an equipment check-out area, lounge areas with wireless internet capabilities and the Aquatic Center (lap and therapy pool).

Seriously, we need such a facility so that our students' learning will be vastly improved?  Coming next: a cigar lounge with a well-equipped bar?

Of course, students have no choice but to pay a fee every term they are registered as students.  And, most of them do not use it either--their lives are way too busy, juggling work, family, and essays and tests.

Anyway, the same email also included this info on how much faculty and staff will have to pay if we wanted to use it:

Fall term membership cost is $78

$78 for three months works out to a monthly rate of $26.  Turns out that this is pretty much the market rate at privately run fitness centers that have swimming pools too.

Graduate debt, er, school!

This New Yorker cartoon is worth not a thousand but a gazillion words :)

Of course, I have blogged a lot about graduate scheme graduate school

More on the higher education bubble

In an earlier post, I quoted at length Megan McArdle's argument that colleges and universities appear to have gamed the system in order to extract for themselves as much as possible the economic benefits of higher education that used to go to students in the past.  Political Calculations' post seems to add to this:

We didn't set out to go looking for it, but we couldn't help but notice what would appear to be a really unique correlation between the average annual tuition at a four-year higher education institution in the United States and the total amount of money the U.S. federal government spends every year.

First this chart:

Notice the jumps compared to the median household incomes.

The argument here is that when household incomes did not grow much at the median level, and when state governments decrease their allocations for higher education, then one would expect adjustments in the service provision that would try to hold the costs constant, or at least hold the increases to a minimum.

But, that hasn't happened. Why?  We might not immediately think of the federal government's role in subsidized loans to students ... it is not that different from how low interest rates led to higher home prices during the real estate bubble times.  I recall even my realtor making this point eight years ago.  Realtors and mortgage brokers know this all too well because they operate with a clear sense of how much monthly payment the potential homeowner can take on. To them, that monthly payment is a critical variable in the process.  So, when interest rates are held low, it makes it possible for buyers to go after larger-value homes.  But then the homeowners and their advisers also sense this, and home prices are correspondingly adjusted upwards.  Pretty soon, the later entrants to this crazy market do not realize that such a system will only help those who are already homeowners, and are we to be surprised that those who joined this game towards the end are the ones "underwater" now?

In this case, colleges and universities then correspondingly adjust their tuition upwards.  Increasingly, students are like the late entrants to the real estate bubble.

Back to Political Calculations:

This correlation suggests that the U.S. federal government is directly behind the bubble we observe to exist in the cost of U.S. higher education, with federal spending during years of recession effectively insulating U.S. colleges and universities from the nation's economic circumstances by subsidizing their operations.
These subsidies, delivered at times of recession, free U.S. higher education institutions to set the price of their tuition independently of their students' ability to pay based upon their or their family's current household income.
The only limiting factor for U.S. higher education institutions then would be the actual growth of U.S. federal spending. This would be why the average cost of college tuition in the United States would appear to have come to track the total level of federal government spending so closely.
As a result, the cost of college tuition has skyrocketed with respect to the typical family's household income. Consequently, when a student attends college today, they must increasingly rely upon subsidies from the federal government that fill the gap between what their institutions charge and what they must pay for out of their own pockets.

How does all this translate to a typical student?  Here is a classic statement:

"I get financial aid but I get less because more goes to tuition," said Tiffany Webster, 22, who lives on campus. "It just seems like it is getting too high for a Cal State school. It should be affordable."

Which is how we end up with a scenario like the one in this graph from "Carpe Diem"'s Mark Perry, who adds that maybe, just maybe, students--like American consumers now--are not that excited to take on debt like they used to.  Perry notes that:

After remaining stable at about 11-12% of median household income between 1994 and 2001, student loans as a share of income climbed to more than 18% in 2006, before declining to 15.5% in 2007 and 13.6% in 2008. 

More mashed potatoes?

Yes, the inside joke continues. 
More here from mashed potatoes :)