Roughly...Girl spends four years, gets $100K of debt for a 4-year "women's and religious studies degree" at NYU, and is now surprised that she can't make enough to pay it back decently. Stunner, I know. Brings us back to the Aretae line on the future of education:
Undergraduate education as we know it in 15 years will be in no better shape than newspapers are now. Other forms of education will not be far behind.
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Undergraduate Education is a pretty broad brush.
That Bachelors of Philosophy is worth butkis, a Bachelors of Aerospace Engineering on the other hand is worth money on the counter.
80% of Undergrad Education is "feel good" politically correct BS, but the engineering and materials science departments are still turning out decent engineers.
Undergraduate education as we know it in 15 years will be in no better shape than newspapers are now.
As much as I'd love this to be true, colleges have an ace up their sleeve - credentialing laws.
If you want to be a lawyer, doctor, civil servant, nurse, military officer, teacher, parole officer, etc, by law you need a college degree. Because of barriers to entry, these jobs pay more. The Griggs case continues to ban the use of IQ tests for employment, so Bain and McKinsey use college as a proxy. Plus, public colleges are still four years of subsidized fun. The combination of these factors leave me pessimistic that the universities will be broken any time soon.
@Devin
Credentialing laws are already being effectively circumvented. It's not yet obvious, but the system is already dead. University of Phoenix, Kaplan, and the other online schools have become sufficiently powerful in the industry that the credentialing BS is only nominally true any longer. This is wave 2:
I expect a federal law in the next 5 years that specifies that you cannot specify in a degree whether it was an online degree or an onsite degree.
And with online degrees, the ability for credentialism to matter much dies abruptly. Turns into computer-credentialing which pays the credentialing schools some but is effectively commoditized. Med School survives, maybe. But nothing else credentialist survives the culling.
Lawyers need 3 years of school + passing the state bar. It's not long before you have online law schools that are effectively 3-year bar-cram courses.
CPAs...already dead as a credential. All online MBAs killed it. Civil Servant? similar. I think more Military officers get their (advanced) degrees online now than at traditional schools. etc.
Online has already won. However, it's going to take 15 years for the death of in-person, professor-owned (vs. education as a service for students) to become obvious.
There are obviously issues with the way higher education is structured. And I am all in favor of what used to be called "distance learning." However, not everyone goes to school to learn a trade. Despite what you say, mark, about a bachelor's in philosophy being worth nothing, that's not the case. There is value to a liberal-arts education. Even for those who want to go into business, the sciences, engineering, etc. One article is extremely unlikely to change your mind, but try this one and see what you think.
And, as for learning a trade, I see nothing wrong with trade schools and community colleges. Many jobs didn't use to require a BA or BS, and many jobs shouldn't require a BA or BS. Part of the reason colleges have expanded so far so fast is because people have been told a college education is a necessity. It's not. I've seen many people on campus who would rather be anywhere else, but feel they have to get the degree to get ahead.
I'll tell you — the new model of education will work for some disciplines, but not for others.
@Mark
1st...I don't dispute that engineering is useful, bankable, worthwhile.
But the question...does the degree make the engineer, or does the degree credential the engineer is more tricky.
I'm convinced the model is basically BS even in engineering. Engineers take about 8x as many courses as they need. Math, Physics, Chem(?), Science Lab, Engineering, Engineering Lab, Tech Writing, Communication, done.
And there's a real question of whether 4 years of school + 1 year of experience is better or worse than 1 year of focused school + 4 years of experience. Actually...I don't really think there's a real question. Option 2 is CLEARLY better for 99/100 cases.
Certainly it's true in software....where I teach.
Thanks for the "wave 2" link. This is the heart of the matter:
"Ivy League and other elite institutions will be relatively unaffected, because they’re selling a product that’s always scarce and never cheap: prestige. Small liberal arts colleges will also endure, because the traditional model—teachers and students learning together in a four-year idyll—is still the best, and some people will always be willing and able to pay for it.
But that terrifically expensive model is not what most of today’s college students are getting. Instead, they tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn’t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine."
Will a liberal-arts education become the province of the rich, even more than it already is?
Creative destruction is all well and good, but when we're talking about something as fundamental as education, it'd be really great to have a viable replacement in place before the old institutions start falling. We've been really bad about this in the past, and I'd hate to see education go down the same rocky path. It's just too important.
And, here's the end of the article.
"Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed."
That all sounds great. But...
"But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone."
How likely is that to happen? Honestly now.
Benjamin,
First, thanks much for dropping by.
I probably came off less nuanced than is fair in my post. I happen to be a pretty hardcore pro-education guy...I teach for a living, and have for 20 years. My favorite topics are Education, Philosophy, my degree is in pure (useless) Math, and I (most recently) teach Object Oriented Software Design.
My claim is that the current BUSINESS model of the university is all the way dead. We're on a short path back to the 1945-equivalent where 5% of the population pursue a college degree and the current 30% that are chasing one just don't. Or more likely, they pursue the $999.99 online version that purchases a credential, rather than getting an education.
I can't understand living without a good handle on the Hume-Reid epistemology dispute in 18th-century Scottish philosophy, or without understanding limits-based calculus, Adam Smith's brilliant insights, or those of the Reverend Thomas Bayes. Those are a part of my DAILY life. I've learned tremendous amounts visiting art studios in Talinn, Warsaw, and Moscow, appreciating the history and technique of art. Speaking another language, and living in another country have truly expanded the way I think. I ached to attend St. John's Great Books education.
I love the liberal arts. I wish everyone WANTED a liberal arts education. I'd love to teach one.
But they don't. And they don't get one at our current colleges anyhow, despite what some professors might wish.
Our current system is predicated on undergrads who (think they) need a degree to get a (high-paying) job in this increasingly credentialistic world...and those undergrads overpaying, in a concealed fashion so as to support graduate students and professors in their chosen work...all because they have no other option.
No longer. The other option is here...and upwards of 75% of the current crop of undergrads will opt for the credential cheaply, over the education expensively...which will destroy the economic model of all but Prestige Schools.
...
You end with the following:
"But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone."
How likely is that to happen? Honestly now.
A lot of it (>50%) will go away, towards productive areas of the economy, and the rest will go back to the amateur where it belongs. Who knows where Darwin would have been without a University position...
Thanks for stopping by and adding your thoughts. I always appreciate good thinkers here.
aretae-
I hope you're right, but I don't think victory can be declared yet. Back in the early 1900's cheap correspondence courses threatened to make law school obsolete. But the bar associations simply lobbied to change the law school accreditation requirements to mandate a minimum amount of face-time. As a result, Tno online law school is accredited.
The universities may still strike back, figuring out ways to prevent online schools from becoming legal credentialing providers in other subjects. I see this PBS documentary as the Cathedral firing back. Or perhaps the online universities are already too strong. The battle could go either way.
You're welcome! I've been a reader for a while.
You are absolutely right that universities' business models are broken. No question about that. And those 30% shifting from college to an online credential, or simply entering the workforce without a degree they never wanted in the first place — not such a bad thing.
I guess I still want those things you mention as part of your daily life to be an option for others who want them. I can tell you do too. And yes, it's true — many who sign up for a liberal arts education don't emerge with one (though a good number still do).
I haven't seen a much better encapsulation of the situation than this:
"Our current system is predicated on undergrads who (think they) need a degree to get a (high-paying) job in this increasingly credentialistic world...and those undergrads overpaying, in a concealed fashion so as to support graduate students and professors in their chosen work...all because they have no other option."
You then write "A lot of it (>50%) will go away, towards productive areas of the economy, and the rest will go back to the amateur where it belongs. Who knows where Darwin would have been without a University position..."
I hope this works out. Amateurism is great. But things take time, and time is money and vice versa. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you're not getting paid to study those Mughal carpets, you're either not going to be able to devote the time to study them properly, or you're going to have to be independently wealthy, or you're going to have to be dysfunctional in some way.
One of the benefits of expanding the education system, I think, was to make it so this kind of work could be done in a structured environment. It's the gift of time and space. Perhaps we can't afford it as much as we used to, but I hope as a society we can afford some of it. Once again, it looks like we took a good thing and ran far too far with it. I suppose it's a part of human nature.
That having been said, I still have faith in the good parts of human nature. The lack of our post-war system of education certainly didn't stop… well, just name anyone before, say, Feynman. We'll muddle through somehow.
Devin,
It only looks like it can still go either way. For undergraduate degrees, the cat's out of the bag. And the undergrad is the economic foundation of the whole thing.
You can have the law degrees, medical degrees, and graduate study...but the university dies without undergrads.
The Cathedral may try to pull, but the economics are effectively deterministic. The number of folks who have online/distance degrees is so large at this point that the immediate costs to them massively outweigh the long-term benefits to the Cathedral...therefore the Cathedral loses.
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