Prick that higher education bubble. Soon.

Higher education, particularly here in Oregon, has been in an economic crisis for years now, and has resulted in it becoming an expensive investment, especially for those from lower-income backgrounds.  To a large extent, it is only the private sector that can help out—by shedding the requirement of college education and degrees for many jobs where such expensive credentialing is not required.

Often, we operate with a misconception that community colleges are significantly less expensive than a teaching university like Western Oregon University (WOU) where I am employed, and that research universities will be the most expensive among public institutions.

It ain’t so!

Consider, for instance, the tuition rates at WOU and its two immediate neighbors, Chemeketa Community College and Oregon State University.  For an Oregonian who is a full-time student taking fifteen credits per term, the annual tuition at Chemeketa will amount to $3,645, while it is $6,135 at WOU and $5,760 at Oregon State. 

Of course, decrease in state support is a big reason for tuition increases in the public system.  Rapid increase in non-academic expenditures is a significant factor as well. 

In addition, over the years, government subsidizing higher education has also contributed to tuition increases.  “Political Calculations” noted that between 1976 and 2008, there is “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.” 

Government's role in subsidized loans to students has an effect which is not that different from how low interest rates led to higher home prices during the real estate bubble years. 

When monthly payment amount is a critical variable in the home purchase process, low interest rates make it possible for buyers to go after larger-value homes.  However, soon the homeowners also sense this, and home prices are correspondingly adjusted upwards. 

The later entrants to this crazy market do not realize that such a system will only help those who are already homeowners and, before they know it, those who joined this game towards the end find themselves "underwater."

In higher education, colleges and universities, like homeowners looking to sell in a bubble market, have been similarly adjusting their tuition upwards.  The net result is that increasingly students now are like the late entrants to the real estate bubble, and end up graduating with debts, loans, and underemployment that do not justify the costs.

In such a higher education bubble, we are wasting considerable individual and taxpayer investment through requiring college degrees for many jobs where such qualifications are way more than needed for productive performance. 

One better model could be for employers to appropriately scale down the higher education requirements.  And, by offering to pay for college courses as rewards for productivity on the job, they could actively encourage employees to value education as a life-long learning experience.  After all, there is infinitely more to education than pecuniary calculations, which is why I teach, and that too in Geography!

Damn, if only they listened to me! On rising college costs

The cosmos regularly reminds me the same idea that Martin Krieger, one of my grad school professors, told us: it is not what you say, for the most part, but who says it that matters!

So, what is it this time?  More than a fortnight ago, I sent one of the newspapers here an opinion piece where my point was that the cost of attending college is not affordable, even at community colleges and teaching universities like mine.  And, to quite an extent, this is encouraged by government subsidies.
Apparently the editor thought otherwise, and it has not appeared in print.

And then today, I read this in the Chronicle:

College leaders often argue that the way to attract more low-income students to college is to increase the amount of need-based financial aid that states offer to those students.
But doing so may also increase the cost of attending college, according to a study that was presented this month at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. The researchers who conducted the study found that an increase in need-based aid resulted in higher tuition and fees at both public and private institutions in the state.

Hmmm .... so, what was the opinion piece I wrote, you ask?  Here it is:

Higher education, particularly here in Oregon, has been in an economic crisis for years now, and has resulted in it becoming an expensive investment, especially for those from lower-income backgrounds.  To a large extent, it is only the private sector that can help out—by shedding the requirement of college education and degrees for many jobs where such expensive credentialing is not required.

Often, we operate with a misconception that community colleges are significantly less expensive than a teaching university like Western Oregon University (WOU) where I am employed, and that research universities will be the most expensive among public institutions.

It ain’t so!

Consider, for instance, the tuition rates at WOU and its two immediate neighbors, Chemeketa Community College and Oregon State University.  For an Oregonian who is a full-time student taking fifteen credits per term, the annual tuition at Chemeketa will amount to $3,645, while it is $6,135 at WOU and $5,760 at Oregon State. 

Of course, decrease in state support is a big reason for tuition increases in the public system.  Rapid increase in non-academic expenditures is a significant factor as well. 

In addition, over the years, government subsidizing higher education has also contributed to tuition increases.  “Political Calculations” noted that between 1976 and 2008, there is “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.” 

Government's role in subsidized loans to students has an effect which is not that different from how low interest rates led to higher home prices during the real estate bubble years. 

When monthly payment amount is a critical variable in the home purchase process, low interest rates make it possible for buyers to go after larger-value homes.  However, soon the homeowners also sense this, and home prices are correspondingly adjusted upwards. 

The later entrants to this crazy market do not realize that such a system will only help those who are already homeowners and, before they know it, those who joined this game towards the end find themselves "underwater."

In higher education, colleges and universities, like homeowners looking to sell in a bubble market, have been similarly adjusting their tuition upwards.  The net result is that increasingly students now are like the late entrants to the real estate bubble, and end up graduating with debts, loans, and underemployment that do not justify the costs.

In such a higher education bubble, we are wasting considerable individual and taxpayer investment through requiring college degrees for many jobs where such qualifications are way more than needed for productive performance. 

One better model could be for employers to appropriately scale down the higher education requirements.  And, by offering to pay for college courses as rewards for productivity on the job, they could actively encourage employees to value education as a life-long learning experience.  After all, there is infinitely more to education than pecuniary calculations, which is why I teach, and that too in Geography!

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. 

U.S. not the only place higher ed faces crisis

CHENNAI, India — “Higher education: The mess,” screamed the cover of India Today, one of the country’s leading news magazines.

“Welcome to the club!” I thought to myself, reflecting on how the cover echoed discussions in the United States.

In America, the mess in higher education has been a major preoccupation.

In particular, the financial aspects from a student’s perspective are increasingly bleak. The recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that more students are taking out loans thanks to the widening gap between the cost of attending colleges and universities, and the financial ability of students and their families to pay: “Nearly 53 percent of full-time undergraduate students borrowed money to attend college in 2007-8, compared with 49.5 percent in 2003-4.”

To make things worse, fresh college graduates find that there are few jobs waiting for them, a situation that has grown even worse.

After all the time and money invested, students and their families begin to wonder if college degrees were worth it.

Having seen quite a few students in those circumstances, some, including me, wonder whether higher education is an economic bubble that is waiting to burst, similar to other bubbles that already have burst in this Great Recession.

However, the problems pale in comparison to those in India.

There simply aren’t enough colleges and universities in India to serve the large population that is college-ready. Capacity is an important issue because, demographically speaking, India is a young country — almost half the country’s population is younger than 25 years old.

Such a choked structure makes higher education significantly less accessible to the less privileged — and there are a lot of them.

My parents’ neighbors tapped into their networks to get a seat at one of the evening colleges here in Chennai for an 18-year-old whose mother works as a maid. There would not have been a college seat for this teenager without this effort.

My parents and their neighbors have chipped in with financial assistance, which has made it possible for this young man to attend college after working for a couple of hours every morning.

A few aspects of the Indian “mess,” however, are simply beyond any comparison with the United States.

For instance, the India Today article reports that “on average most Indian universities revise their curricula only once in five to 10 years.”

Such a “stable” curriculum might have been acceptable in the early years of the 20th century, but not now when we are barely able keep up with changes that come every day.

In contrast, most of the universities in the United States, including the one where I teach, regularly update the curricula to reflect new insights gained through scholarship, and to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

In fact, a college curriculum that is not considered current might be grounds for revoking an institution’s accreditation.

On top of this, within the academic walls, and in public forums, including this newspaper, we have intense debates and arguments about higher education — something sorely lacking in many other countries, including India. These help ensure that the typical American college is of significantly higher quality than a typical institution in most parts of the world.

Ultimately, however, it comes down to the quality of students. I think this is really where the Indian higher education system is in a mess.

Citing a study by the McKinsey consulting group, India Today reports that “only one out of 10 Indian students with degrees in humanities and one of four engineering graduates are employable.” This certainly warrants an OMG!

The dismal conditions in India do not mean that we do not need to work on higher education issues, particularly here in Oregon. We need to be constantly vigilant — not to fend off economic threats outside our borders, but because we ought to offer the best opportunities to our youth.

I am reminded of my childhood: Whenever we complained that a sibling or a cousin got more snacks, my grandmother admonished us to “just focus on your plate!”

In America, in more ways than one, we do, indeed, have a lot on our plate.

For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Monday, Aug 3, 2009

College is not a trade school. Higher education as an investment "risk"

Whether it is in India or in the US, higher education sells, seemingly at rates faster than how tulips sold in the manic Dutch and European markets nearly 500 years ago.

Students (and their parents) operate with a skewed understanding of what higher education is about.  In economic terms alone,

colleges are not employment agencies.  Plus, the labor market rapidly changes; few schools are prepared to perfectly match students with open positions.  If they did, colleges would admit students (to the school or to majors) based on the supply and demand of available jobs.  Instead, students undertake a great deal of risk that their investment will pay off with increased income, but there is no guarantee.  Unfortunately, even as the student loan bubble continues to inflate, too few students (and their parents) appear to grasp the magnitude of risk that they are undertaking when they enroll in college.

So, what ought to be done?

While we can keep arguing whether college is worth it, the people who really need to answer that question are the ones who are ponying up the dough at the cash register.  We owe it to them to provide the best information so that they can make an informed decision.  They need a clearer definition of the assumed risk of enrolling in college.  They have to wrestle with the notion that a future graduate may have to pay $300 a month for 30 years after graduation, regardless of where that student goes after graduation.

Of course, a good college education does provide intrinsic rewards beyond a future paycheck such as an enlightened mind and a love of learning, but at the moment those benefits do not characterize the intentions of most students.  Hence, we need mechanisms to reduce (what Austrian economists call) the malinvestments in higher education.  The sooner this happens, the less pain will be involved and the quicker we can shift our intellectual energy from running in place to moving forward.  

The gutting of the traditional liberal arts is a tragedy:

As the former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, John Agresto, argues in his essay, "The Liberal Arts Bubble," were it not for the continued infusion of government subsidies and the influx of foreign students, the bubble might already have burst. Agresto points out that the liberal arts, once the backbone of the higher education system, has fallen into a precipitous decline.
"What was once normative -- that Jake or Suzie would go off to college and study some history, some literature, learn a second language, and perhaps major in philosophy or classics -- has not been the case for years," Agresto writes. By 2008, the number of bachelor's degrees had risen to 1.5 million Americans, but few of these degrees were in the traditional liberal arts. Barely 2 percent of BAs were awarded in history and only 3.5 percent in English literature. Agresto points out that more than a third of undergraduate degress are now earned in business, health professions and education. Colleges have become trade schools by another name -- but far more expensive ones than their for-profit counterparts.

Yep, we have become expensive trade schools :(

Now the credit agencies are on to the other debt: student loans

Unless students limit their debt burdens, choose fields of study that are in demand, and successfully complete their degrees on time, they will find themselves in worse financial positions and unable to earn the projected income that justified taking out their loans in the first place.

 That is the analysis from the credit rating agency, Moody's, and Reason adds:

In August 2010 financial aid guru Mark Kantrowitz announced that student loan debt had, for the first time, surpassed credit card debt. A month later, the Department of Education announced that default rates for student loans had jumped from 4.6 percent in 2005 to 7 percent in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. While the two announcements went largely unnoticed, some took the data points as evidence that America's next big bubble—higher education—was becoming dangerously inflated.

My reaction? a big yawn! 
I have been writing about the higher education bubble for more than a couple of years now!  (Search for "higher education ponzi")

More from Reason:

the college industry had more in common with Detroit than the housing crisis.
“These subsidies are kind of like propping up the auto industry with cash for clunkers, or the housing industry with cash for first-time buyers,” he told me last year. “We have this financial aid system that is keeping the system alive.”

Seriously, tell me something new!  

When will the policymakers and the public wake up to the fact that we are overselling higher education, which benefits neither the students nor the idea of "education," and the only beneficiaries are those in the higher education business? 

I am doing my part--like this recent opinion piece in the Oregonian, and this one that I hope that the Statesman Journal will publish.  How about you, dear reader? (editor: what makes you think there are readers?)

When colleges boast of enrollment growth, be scared. Be really, really, scared!

Suppose hospitals boasted about the massive increases in the number of patients who had to be taken care over weeks within their facilities.  The public and the government would be alarmed that either there is something seriously wrong with the hospitals.  More so when heath care costs are soaring.

The increases in in-patient numbers would also make us worry about possible public health epidemics--the possibility that there was something significant that was making people really, really sick.

Fortunately, hospitals don't work that way.  Their goal is not to go into an overdrive and increase the hospitalization rates.  If at all, the complaint often is that hospitals are always too keen on sending patients packing quite early in the rehab stage.

Now, compare that behavior with the trend in another service industry where too costs have risen dramatically: higher education.

As the following chart from Carpe Diem shows, costs of college have outpaced even the much talked about health care costs.

Is all that college tuition worth the investments though?  Not at all. I have blogged enough about this (including this op-ed in the Oregonian.)

Isn't it an unfortunate irony then that the only goal of public colleges and universities seems to be to maximize enrollment!  To use that hospital analogy, more patients, with patients taking longer and longer to get better even while paying high costs, and when they leave the hospital many of them are worse off than when they entered it :(

Yet, again, I find that public universities, like here in Oregon, are only too thrilled about the unheard of and historic growth in the numbers of students.  Only one university seems less concerned about enrollment itself:

It also might be tougher to get in to Portland State University in the future but for different reasons. School officials there have shifted the emphasis from enrollment to retention and graduation, said PSU spokesman David Santen.

Which is how it ought to be--focus on quality patient care, so to say.

Back in 2009, David Leonhardt, who later won a Pulitzer for his succinct analytical writings in the NY Times, observed that a big problem with higher education was:

the focus on enrollment rather than completion, the fact that colleges are not held to account for their failures.

As far as colleges are concerned, it seems to be a variation of the old sarcastic comment, "the operation was successful, but the patient died."

The leaders of educational institutions don't seem to care; in fact, their worry is that there is not enough money coming from the federal government in order to subsidize students:

Current proposals in Congress to cut funding for Pell grants — the federal government’s primary program to help economically disadvantaged students go to college — are shortsighted and could have a devastating effect on students’ access to higher education and work force training, especially in today’s weak economy.

As noble as it might sound, cheap money handed out by the feds ends up benefiting the colleges and not the intended beneficiares--students.  Here is an explanation of how that happens:

[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.

So, yes, the college tuition and fees keep increasing, and quite rapidly--an example, also about Oregon, in this news report:

Oregon's seven universities have proposed an average 7.5 percent tuition increase for full-time, resident undergraduate students next year, pushing the average annual cost of tuition and fees to $7,634. ...
The proposed increases, which the State Board of Higher Education is expected to approve Friday, range from 5.1 percent at Western Oregon University to 9 percent at PSU, the University of Oregon and the Oregon Institute of Technology. Proposed increases are 8.1 percent at Oregon State University and 6.8 percent at Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon universities.

Where does all the additional money go?  I suppose we need all that extra money for rock-climbing walls, re-branding, ... who cares if students are screwed in the process, right?

I come to bury the liberal arts, not to praise it

Getting ready for a new academic year includes thinking about many issues not related to the course content themselves.  With every passing year, the level of difficulty seems to increase for at least one reason, among others: deep down, I am a traditionalist, and most of what higher education, including at the university where I teach, is far from traditional.

Because I use a whole lot of technological tools--way above the average faculty colleague, and way more than the typical student--students and faculty alike might not think of me as a die-hard traditionalist.  But, that is who I am.

In my traditionalist approach to higher education, it is actually not the content per se that I am interested in.  Instead, higher education, especially at the undergraduate level, is, to quote Andrew Delbanco, channeled via this essay by Joseph Epstein:

“show me how to think and how to choose”

Yes, I want students to demonstrate how they think and how they choose, and my hope is that through the readings, my observations, and class discussions, they will learn how to think.  I jokingly mention in most classes that all the courses I teach are the same--that I say the same things in all my classes.  I am not sure how many of them understand when I tell them the course itself is a front, a facade, because students might find it boring to register for courses called "Thinking 101," "Thinking 102," and so on.  We, therefore, package them in different flavors, from "Philosophy 101" to "Physics 101" to "Art History 101."

But, I suspect that I am in a tiny minority who believe that it is all about thinking.  I try as much as possible to stay away from describing it as "critical thinking" because I don't believe that there is any place for any un-critical thinking in a classroom.  When Descartes famously declared "Cogito, ergo sum" note that there is no "critical" used as a qualifier for the "thinking" that defined Descartes' existence.

Thus, I mean it when I tell students that a major itself does not matter, unless they are interested in a vocational education, where content is king.  Not that there is no thinking involved in vocational education; there is.  But, a major in electrical engineering is, after all, about the content of electrical engineering.

With every passing year, I am, therefore, increasingly appalled at how much faculty colleagues and other advisers routinely advise students to pick a major on which they plan to have a career, and to get all the other university requirements out of the way as soon as possible.  Getting everything else out of the way is often about whatever feeble form of the liberal arts that continues to exist in our curriculum.

It has been years since I gave students any kind of in-class, timed, closed-book exams.  Because, they are less about thinking and more about one's ability to recall from memory.  As Epstein writes:

[Quickness] of response —on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers in courtrooms, and salesmen. Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there. One of the hallmarks of the modern educational system, which is essentially an examination system, is that so much of it is based on quick response solely. Give 6 reasons for the decline of Athens, 8 for the emergence of the Renaissance, 12 for the importance of the French Revolution. You have 20 minutes in which to do so.

I routinely tell students that the worst of all these practices is the exam in which students have to bubble in their responses on scantron sheets.  "I feel like puking when I see a scantron sheet" is typically what I tell them. 

As I get older, the more I find bubbling in to be contrary to the goal of "thinking."  Even if students arrive at the correct answer, I would like them to show me how they thought that through.  When students arrive at an incorrect answer, it is all the more important to me that students show how they messed up so that we might begin to point out the errors in their ways.  It is all about the thinking, yes.

The result is that when students come in to my classes, and during discussions when I follow up on their observations with something like "you say that because ....?" I find that most are simply stumped.  It is not their fault, however, that they have never been questioned about the thinking.  They have only been through classes where they are expected to echo the words from the textbooks or the teachers' notes and lectures.

It is a crime that faculty (and universities) talk the liberal arts talk, but essentially do everything they can to kill the liberal arts because they themselves do not believe in it:

The profession of teaching, like that of clergyman and psychiatrist, calls for a higher sense of vocation and talent than poor humanity often seems capable of attaining. Yet there was a time when a liberal arts education held a much higher position in the world’s regard than it does today. One of the chief reasons for its slippage ... is that so many of its teachers themselves no longer believe in it

Thus, I begin yet another year in which I will witness Caesar being stabbed yet again by his own friends.

The higher education bubble bursts, with law schools first

A typical complaining note in this country, perhaps more than anywhere else, has been that we need yet another lawyer as much as we need a frontal lobotomy.  (editor: we do think you need one. Awshutupalready!)

Yet, law schools seemed to be sprouting everywhere. Why so?

Over the past decade, the number of law-school students has also steadily increased, as universities have opened or expanded their schools. Law schools tend to be moneymakers: They're cheap to set up, and tuition runs high, even at poorly rated programs. Thus, universities have added them on with relish, and the list of approved law schools has increased 9 percent in the past decade, to 200. That means that the number of new lawyers minted every year has not stopped growing, either: Law schools awarded 44,004 degrees last year, up 13 percent in a decade.

But, the Great Recession's aftermath has helped clarify that there might not be much monetary rewards waiting for these students upon graduation.  So, what is the latest news then?

According to data from the Law School Admission Council, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the number of applicants to law school has dropped a whopping 11.5 percent year-to-year—to the lowest level since 2001 at this point in the application cycle.

One heck of a reason to celebrate, wouldn't you think?  But, what is driving down law school enrolments?

In the past year or two, scads of blogs have committed themselves to exposing law school as a "scam," and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have devoted thousands of words to telling readers why law school is a bad, bad idea if you do not actually want to be a lawyer. Look to any of a dozen blogs or news sites to explain how wages for legal workers might continue to fall, as automation takes over rote tasks and businesses increasingly refuse to pay obscenely high per-hour fees. Wandering further into the realm of anecdata, virtually every young lawyer or law student I know would love to talk my ear off about the worrisome employment prospects for new legal professionals.
Once the conventional wisdom has spotted a bubble—whether in housing or gold or anything else—it tends to burst.

When will the public notice that law schools are only the most glaring example of most of higher education swelling up into a giant bubble?

Good questions on the future of higher education; But, answers?

I read the following sentences in an email from the university's provost about an upcoming "campus conversation"

The Conversation will provide a chance to respond to multiple questions:

We’re in the midst of a radical change in how knowledge is acquired and shared.  What do we see as opportunities or challenges in responding to that change?

What are the instructional challenges that have come about in the recent past that are beyond some faculty or staff members’ skill set and require support or assistance?

How can we guide the institution’s use of limited resources to help faculty and staff meet students’ needs to succeed?

Of course, other questions will come up.  At the end of the meeting, the ideas will be gathered and serve as the basis for another Campus Conversation in the fall when we can share what we learned and begin to identify possible answers.

Now, these are the kinds of questions that I would love to discuss with fellow professionals, and the laity too.

However, past experience has been that my fellow professionals do not want to hear about how I think about these kinds of questions.  I don't blame them; after all, it would not be comfortable to think about:

how higher education is another speculative bubble that needs to be popped, or
how the way the "business" is conducted it resembles a ponzi scheme; or
how the system is only about serving itself, instead of being focused on the welfare and success of students; or
how the wasteful spending on athletics is too sacred a topic to be discussed; or
how teaching is failing big time; or
how ... 

 Well, I could list them forever ... no point attending such meetings, which almost always are exercises in self-congratulations, and scheming about how to raise more money from taxpayers, students, and donors.

I love (higher) education way too much :(

Outlook bleak for college graduates

A couple of days after I write about the higher education bubble, the NY Times reports that outlook is bleak even for recent college grads:

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.
...

This may be a waste of a college degree, but it also displaces the less-educated workers who would normally take these jobs.
“The less schooling you had, the more likely you were to get thrown out of the labor market altogether,” said Mr. Sum, noting that unemployment rates for high school graduates and dropouts are always much higher than those for college graduates. “There is complete displacement all the way down.”
Meanwhile, college graduates are having trouble paying off student loan debt, which is at a median of $20,000 for graduates of classes 2006 to 2010.

The Chronicle adds more to this discussion from another perspective:

A report by Rutgers University, "Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy," says that 53 percent of college graduates from 2006 to 2010 have full-time jobs, while 21 percent are in graduate school, 12 percent are working part time, and 9 percent are unemployed.

Awful, the situation is.  I hope we will put an end to this soon.

Money, sex, and entertainment ... today's American university!

In an email to my colleagues, in which I shared with them an informative video, I wrote:

People pushing STEM while systematically marginalizing the humanities and the social sciences need to understand such a big picture, which is what the idea of liberal education is all about.  If any of you want to share this video with the institution's STEM-pushers, feel free; I have long given up on them.

I then wonder why I don't make friends ;)

Apparently there is one set of higher educational institutions where the humanities and the social sciences are alive and well. No, not the Ivy Leagues and other private elites.  There, the best and the brightest are feverishly in the pursuit of fame and fortune via Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

So, where are the humanities and the social sciences prospering?

I’ve only found one large class of schools where humanities enrollments have held steady: historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently most of the rest of us do not care about "crafting a philosophy of life."

 In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped. Of all the statistics on the humanities I’ve seen, I find this one the most depressing: For the past 40 years, the percentage of first-year college students who think highly enough of crafting a life philosophy in the course of their studies to muster the energy to fill out a bubble indicating as much has flatlined below half. It’s little wonder that so few major in the liberal arts in the end.

Across the board, there has been an ever increasing interest, a passion, a commitment, to one part of higher education: Athletics--football, in particular!  No scandal shall ever stop this deep-commitment.

Most of the big-time football schools are public--yes, taxpayer funded--like the U of Alabama, Ohio State U, ... an endless list. Many of them still referred to as land-grant institutions:

Each of these universities is a land-grant institution, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which was sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Their guiding vision was to offer the highest quality of teaching, research, and service to communities across the country. These institutions have given our nation the greatest public-university system in the world.

Good ol' Abe will be shocked at how these institutions that he helped found have now become altars for entertainment, where coaches earn gazillion dollars, and scantily-clad women cheer the men on the field!

Do we have to then wonder how we ended up with this presidency, when even institutions that supposedly are about learning couldn't care a shit about life and truth?

If a BA is for bartending, a BS is for ...

Last week, I had a very difficult conversation with a student who wanted my thoughts on a certain academic major versus majoring in geography.  It was not difficult because the student wanted to ditch geography in favor of something else.  In fact, it was a move the student was thinking of making in the opposite direction, hoping for better employment prospects.

So, why was it difficult when all I had to do was to further encourage the student?  Because, I had to give my honest spiel that within the traditional liberal arts, any one major might not make students more or less employable compared to another--unless it is a professional, or a pre-professional, major.

I spent a few minutes describing the idea, that wonderful ideal, of liberal education.  We talked for almost an hour.  While I felt awful that nobody had ever told the student this reality of higher education, the student was thankful, and said, "nobody has ever taken the time to explain all these to me.  Not eve the counselors."

That was last week.

Earlier today, I read this news report on the tremendous underemployment of college graduates:

Students who graduated into the Great Recession have struggled to find work that fits their learning. But according to research released on Monday, millions of college graduates over all—not just recent ones—suffer a mismatch between education and employment, holding jobs that don't require a costly college degree.
The study, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says that nearly half of all American college graduates in 2010—some three years after the recession began—were underemployed, holding relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.

This is not news by any means.  After all, even I have been commenting about this forever, it seems like.  (like here, and here)  It has been one long trend, since the burst of the dotcom bubble, with a brief rise that came crashing even more.  Anyway, the latest report adds

Mr. Robe, a research fellow at the center, said that the "bartender with a bachelor's degree" is a classic example of the lack of jobs that require a college education. Many college graduates who take jobs as bartenders or taxicab drivers have better options, he said. But vacancies in those occupations tend to be filled by other college graduates, a trend that slowly crowds out high-school graduates and dropouts.

How terrible!

Meanwhile, there is a different kind of a report from the WSJ--about graduates with specialized skills:

Mirroring trends in the broader economy showing that engineering and computer skills are highly sought, eight of the ten highest-earning majors come from these departments. Companies need workers with specialized technical skills to keep up with rapid technological change and the explosion of data, but too few American college students are choosing the relevant majors to meet that demand.
“Over the years the number of graduates in those areas has decreased, so that creates greater demand,” said NACE’s Andrea Koncz, who oversees the survey.

The way I understand all these, it is quite simple a narrative: the economic structure has rapidly changed over the last decade.  In the new economy, high school graduation alone does not guarantee that "American dream" that was once possible.  That has led to an incorrect perception that getting a liberal arts degree would guarantee one a prosperous middle class life.  But, again, this is a completely different global economic structure where such a qualification doesn't make one readily employable.  Further, the liberal arts were never intended as an employment-ready credentialing system.

Ultimately, it is the college student who is paying a huge price.

Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter.  However, of the $42 billion, $23 billion is new debt while the remaining $19 billion is attributed to previously defaulted student loans that have been updated on credit reports this quarter.¹ As a result, the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter

How terrible!

Student loan delinquency. O.M.G.!

The student loan issue is not new to this blog by any means.  I have been wondering and worrying when the higher education bubble would burst, and how that will mess up the lives of the youth. 

Despite all the mental prep, it was mind-numbing when I came across the following chart (ht):

You see how the rate has shot up?  Should scare the bejesus out of anybody!

In order to address a concern that maybe this chart is incorrect, I went to the source--the report from the Fed, which has the following on student debt, and, the comparative data for other kinds of debt too.  (The bullet-format of the excerpted quotes and the added emphasis are mine)

• Aggregate consumer debt fell again in the third quarter, by $74 billion, continuing the nearly four-year downward trend in household debt.
• Mortgage delinquency rates continued to improve, with 5.9% of mortgage balances 90+ days delinquent, compared to 6.3% in 2012Q2.
• The percentage of auto loan debt that is 90 or more days delinquent held roughly steady, at 4.2%.
• Outstanding student loan balances increased to $956 billion as of September 30, 2012, an increase of $42 billion from the previous quarter. However, of the $42 billion, $23 billion is new debt while the remaining $19 billion is attributed to previously defaulted student loans that have been newly updated on credit reports this quarter2
• This increase has boosted the delinquency rate for student loans balances. The percent of student loan balances 90 or more days delinquent stands at 11.0%

This is awful.  .

The report also has the following chart, which highlights the growing share of student loan in the debt:

Good grief!  Let us have more football :(

What we've got here is failure to communicate

If you have ever watched America's Funniest Home Videos, you know that towards the end the studio audience votes for the top three by using the clickers they have been handed.  Those clickers made their way into higher education, too.  Of course!  I did not ever want to use them in my classes.  It is a wonderful tool, no doubt, but it depended on the sincerity of students to use that in order to advance their own learning.  I was afraid that without that sincere interest in learning, well, the disaster that education is will become a catastrophe.

Clickers and bubble-in answer sheets are machine-friendly, unlike oral and written communication. Can you imagine the complexity if a machine has to read essays that students turn in, provide comments, and finally determine letter-grades?

Hey, what if we could do away with the complexity of communication itself?  Nicholas Carr writes that a few weeks ago "Mark Zuckerberg offered a peek into the future of interpersonal communication":

One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.

This is where you need to pause and think whether Zuckerberg's future is what we really want.

Did you think about it?

Carr then provides this interpretation:

But there is another, less frequently articulated reason why Silicon Valley wants to replace speech. One characteristic of verbal languages is that nobody can own them. Meanwhile, emoji characters are copyrighted, and software can be patented. The machinic capacity to measure emotions via the face or tone of voice is in the possession of businesses, and currently being rapidly capitalized by private-equity investment. Industrial capitalism privatized the means of production. Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.

Do you see where this argument is going?  You need to pause and think.

Did you think about it?

Let me bring in Carr:

The best solution, if you have a need to get computers to “understand” human communication, may to be avoid the problem altogether. Instead of figuring out how to get computers to understand natural language, you get people to speak artificial language, the language of computers. A good way to start is to encourage people to express themselves not through messy assemblages of fuzzily defined words but through neat, formal symbols — emoticons or emoji, for instance.

 Now do you see what the worry is?  No?  Come on, already!

When we speak with emoji, we’re speaking a language that machines can understand.
People like Mark Zuckerberg have always been uncomfortable with natural language. Now, they can do something about it.

Of course, using emojis today will not literally change the world tomorrow.  But, what we need to recognize here is this: we are slowly changing our daily behavior in order to make them increasingly computer-friendly.  We change our behaviors in ways that make it easier for algorithms to understand what we do, what we say, where we go, what we eat, ... Meanwhile, we willingly feed those machines continuous data on our walking, breathing, blood pressure, pulse, thumb-print, ... Remember this from a while ago:

 Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER.

Have a good weekend ;)

If only college faculty were public intellectuals in the classroom!

Thinking about what I do, in the classroom and outside, I was reminded of this by Tim Clydesdale:

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what's worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Likewise, the work of public intellectualism must go on outside the classroom as well. Others have made that case eloquently in these pages, so I shall simply underscore their appeals with a few suggestions.

First, I applaud the efforts of leaders of scholarly associations to promote and reward the work of public scholarship, despite membership pressure to preserve the status quo, and I encourage those associations to continue that work. Second, I respect the efforts of many agencies that support academe to promote general dissemination of research results and encourage other sources of financial support to do the same. To be sure, there is a place for highly specialized research programs; I simply ask program officers to ensure that each call for proposals includes a question about how results will reach a general audience and that responses to that question be considered in the proposal's evaluation.

Third, some of us need an attitude adjustment. It is not just residential-college students who live in a bubble — many faculty members do as well. We take for granted our privileged status, become consumed by petty controversies, talk only to ourselves, and ignore the wider public that makes our work possible. It is tempting, I know, to want to curse the culture and withdraw into like-minded enclaves. But neither catharsis nor retreat will satisfy those who demand accountability, raise financial support for public higher education, or generate more students who cherish college as an opportunity to learn and think.

Even though our interests often diverge from those of the general public, we remain beholden to it. With a few adjustments at our end, we can begin to rebuild trust among a critical mass of fellow citizens ...

I could not have said this any better.

The college tuition crisis

If you prefer a video, instead of reading text (no, it is not me in the video!) ... this is why we are now "re-branding" ourselves :(
Listen to them talk using all the words I have used in this blog for years now--words in the context of higher education: ponzi, bubble, taxpayers, athletics, .... I can only hope for the ponzi scheme to crash soon ...

We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure

Every once in a while, I give students in my classes an option to skip out of the required final paper for the class.  No, it is not that they get a freebie.  Instead of the final paper, the option they get to earn the grade is that good old viva voce--oral exam.  A ten to fifteen minutes with me quizzing them in my office.  That's all.

If you ever wanted a demonstration of "faster than a speeding bullet," well, that is how rapidly students negate that offer.  Not even one student is tempted by that offer, it seems.  Ten to fifteen minutes versus a few hours of work and they turn down that offer before I even fully describe it!

Over the years, I have become convinced that the college term paper is an abject failure. Perhaps it works at the Ivies, but I--and the overwhelming majority of us--ain't at one of 'em.  But, of course, the system would easily chuck me out, and there are plenty of colleagues waiting in line to witness that happening, if I were to abandon the requirement of papers when I make abundantly clear that the alternative is even worse, if that is even possible!

I require a lot of writing in the classes that I teach.  No wonder, therefore, that a student has posted this comment at RateMyProfessors.com:

How this class is not a writing intensive class is beyond me. Expect to write 2 pages a week all term with a midterm and final totaling about 7 pages a piece. I received As in every writing class/ Writing intensive class but some how managed only a C+

Thus, there is nothing for me to disagree with the author, Rebecca Schuman, of this essay--from where I borrowed the line for the subject for this post.  Why the preference for the viva voce?

You cannot bullshit a line-ID. Nor can you get away with only having read one page of the book when your professor is staring you down with a serious question. And best of all, oral exams barely need grading: If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is immediately and readily manifest (not to mention, it’s profoundly schadenfroh when a student has to look me in the face and admit he’s done no work).

At the viva voce, we stare at the reality.  The reality that either one knows or does not.

While Schuman notes that in the context of the required college writing course, the argument is equally applicable to most courses in which we require papers at the end:

We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

The entire paper-writing is an effing waste of time and effort.  Especially when faculty do not seem to care about giving feedback.

Meanwhile, there is the lure of automatons reading and grading essays.  Fortunately, for people like me, there are a few experts like "Les Perelman, a former director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology," who rage against the machine:

Mr. Perelman’s fundamental problem with essay-grading automatons, he explains, is that they "are not measuring any of the real constructs that have to do with writing." They cannot read meaning, and they cannot check facts. More to the point, they cannot tell gibberish from lucid writing.

With every passing day, the higher education system seems to be more of a failure than it was the previous day.  Yet, all we do is continue to spin the same wheels.  Uninterested students, self-serving faculty and staff, apathetic public who only care about dollars and cents, together make for a horrible combination.  Perhaps it was always like this and I lived in my own bubble.

"Everybody does not get excited with whatever excites you, Dr. Khé" remarked a student in class.  That truthful vocal comment gets a full score in the viva voce!

9.7 % unemployment, but the employed have a great life :-(

Throughout this Great Recession, I have been worried about unemployment. Because it seemed like those whose productive economic lives get derailed might have a very hard time getting back.
But, of course, the stock indices have been climbing up quite impressively--here in the US and elsewhere too. (So much so that one commentator worries that this is another bubble in the making!)

Which is why my brother, who was impressed with all the talk about recovery, was probably surprised at my rather pessimistic statement that things are not good. I told him something like, "it is a great time if you have a job because prices are even falling, but it is a horrible time to be unemployed." A college-mate who now lives in the UK has been unemployed for almost a year now, and his is one of the many, many millions of such horror stories.

Of course, the scientific method means that we don't trust our own intelligent guesses but want evidence for the notion that some people and professions are doing well through this Great Recession. And, slowly that evidence is trickling in.

Richard Florida, who can be quite single-minded in his "creative class" arguments ad nauseum, writes:

Computer, sciences, and engineering professionals experience lower rates of unemployment than arts, design, and entertainment workers. But the lowest rates of unemployment and the most stable employment are found in meds and eds occupations - health and education - where unemployment stays consistently low, even during downturns.

The full analysis is here.

Notice again that meds and eds go together? (yet another evidence for another gut feeling of mine that if healthcare bugs us because costs are always going up, then eds should bug us even more. more here.)

So, ok, some professions have not experienced this recession big time. How about their real earnings? You might think that people have jobs, but have taken paycuts. Not actually, writes David Leonhardt:

Wage growth has picked up in the last several months, according to two different government surveys. You don’t hear or read nearly as many stories about pay cuts these days. Even though unemployment has reached its highest level in 26 years, most workers have received a raise over the last year.

That contrast highlights what I think is one of the more overlooked features of the Great Recession. In the job market, at least, the recession’s pain has been unusually concentrated.

And it hasn’t been concentrated in the typical way. Nearly every region and every demographic group has indeed been affected. But the pain has been concentrated within groups.

It must be awful to be unemployed. I can still recall, with horror and shame, my year of unemployment--well, through a massive, massive underemployment. I was so frustrated that I seriously considered taking up taxi driving. In Los Angeles! But, to be unemployed when one is 40+, or worse 50+, well, that I am sure is nightmarish.

So, how good life is for the employed lucky?

Executives of companies don’t cut pay, even when demand for labor has fallen. They worry that employees will become less motivated or start looking for another job, says Laury Sejen, who oversees the compensation consultants at Watson Wyatt. So companies instead lay off workers or stop hiring. They concentrate the pain.

The added wrinkle in this recession is that inflation has dropped below zero, thanks largely to a sharp fall in energy prices. In most recessions, inflation remains positive — indeed, higher than wage growth, which means that inflation-adjusted pay declines. In this recession, average prices have fallen 2 percent over the past year, while weekly pay has either been flat or risen 1 percent, depending on which data you believe.

So inflation-adjusted pay is up 2 to 3 percent. Amazingly enough, that’s almost as big as the peak increases during the late 1990s boom.

I am thankful for the job I have. And, of course, the email from the student is worth more than a few million dollars.
Here is to hoping that the unemployed, including my college-mate, will soon find gainful employment.