The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
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Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#2You borrow as much money as you can for the best school you can get into and afford and then you “flip” that education for the great job you are going to get when you graduate.
Maybe there is a bubble in higher ed but this analogy is pretty shaky. The most obvious difference between a house and a degree is that you can't "flip" a degree.
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#3While this article talks about how bad things are I think an interesting solution was written up here [pdf] http://www.fixuc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FixUC-Propos...
The idea being you go to school for free and the University only makes money from a percentage of your future pay, thereby ensuring that it's students are actually prepared for the work force.
More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/04/23/f...
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#4You borrow as much money as you can for the best school you can get into and afford and then you “flip” that education for the great job you are going to get when you graduate. Maybe there is a bubble in higher ed but this analogy is pretty shaky. The most obvious difference between a house and a degree is that you can't "flip" a degree.
An analogy isn't supposed to be a 1:1 comparison of two things. I read Cuban here using "flip" not as selling your degree, but exchanging your degree for a job. You could call it a conversion or something else. I don't consider it shaky at all.
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#5While this article talks about how bad things are I think an interesting solution was written up here [pdf] http://www.fixuc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FixUC-Propos... The idea being you go to school for free and the University only makes money from a percentage of your future pay, thereby ensuring that it's students are actually prepared for the work force. More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcro…
The problem I have with this is that university should NOT prepare you for the work force.
Universities are awesome! We ruined them when we started thinking of higher education as preparation (or even requirement) for the workforce.
University should prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person. As soon as it becomes vocational the whole point is lost.
We don't need to "fix higher ed", we need to remember why we created it in the first place - to teach a small percentage of the population how to use critical thinking.
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#6Many people, me included, frequently complain about all of the politics required to get the least bit of funding for anything from my university. Then I read something like this and that kind of trouble suddenly seems much better than the alternative.
According to NCES[1], the average total cost per year of attendance at a 4-year private institution in 2009-2010 was $32,475. The cost for BYU was $4,290[2]. There's tons of construction going on all the time, but BYU doesn't add floor space without a donor who can guarantee long-term financial support for the facility. And we still manage to have nationally and internationally recognized programs in among other things, computer animation and ancient languages, so clearly you don't need a whole lot more money to do good instruction and good research.
It makes me wonder what exactly there is to cut that manages to use up all of the 9-times higher costs of other institutions.
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#7This was the first comment on Cuban's blog. Can anyone comment on it? I listened to the NPR Podcast, it is specific to private colleges; I am not sure how public colleges fit in.
"The most recent Planet Money on NPR was about the cost of college. [1] They point out that the price that has been rising is the “sticker price.” However, the average price a student pays for college hasn’t risen (except to adjust for inflation) over the past 20 years or so. The schools are raising the sticker price as a marketing tool, so they can give big need and merit based scholarships to woo desirable students.
The reason student loan debt has ballooned isn’t because students are paying more, it’s because more students are paying. Federally subsidized loans aren’t increasing the cost of education, they are serving their purpose to give more people the opportunity to go to college.
I suppose your point that it is a ton of debt and we don’t have a job to give to each college grad is valid. But, I am not sure the classification of it as a bubble is valid because we aren’t really seeing a rise in the cost of education."
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/11/152511771/the-real...
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#8While this article talks about how bad things are I think an interesting solution was written up here [pdf] http://www.fixuc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FixUC-Propos... The idea being you go to school for free and the University only makes money from a percentage of your future pay, thereby ensuring that it's students are actually prepared for the work force. More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcro…
The problem I have with this is that university should NOT prepare you for the work force . Universities are awesome! We ruined them when we started thinking of higher education as preparation (or even requirement) for the workforce. University should prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person. As soon as it becomes vocational the whole point is lost. We don't need to "fix higher e…
I'm partial to this argument, but it only works if you allow for technical education that does provide people with the STEM (or other) skills needed for the workforce. I think higher education in the US is actually very broken.
The best example I can think of that embodies that division of purpose is the UK, where you have Oxbridge and other elite institutions which function in the sense you are referring to, but you also have the Polytechnics that train people for practical careers.
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#9Many people, me included, frequently complain about all of the politics required to get the least bit of funding for anything from my university. Then I read something like this and that kind of trouble suddenly seems much better than the alternative. According to NCES[1], the average total cost per year of attendance at a 4-year private institution in 2009-2010 was $32,475. The cost for BYU was $4,290[2]. There's to…
This disclaimer was on the BYU website. Do you know how much that is?
"* A significant portion of the cost of operating the university is paid from the tithes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Therefore, students and families of students who are tithe-paying members of the Church have already made a contribution to the operation of the university. Because others will not have made this contribution, they are charged a higher tuition, a practice similar in principle to that of state universities charging higher tuition to nonresidents."
Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon
#10While this article talks about how bad things are I think an interesting solution was written up here [pdf] http://www.fixuc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FixUC-Propos... The idea being you go to school for free and the University only makes money from a percentage of your future pay, thereby ensuring that it's students are actually prepared for the work force. More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcro…
Then you would just have universities competing to crank out CEOs/MBAs in the hopes that they 'hit it big' a lot.