This has been discussed before in many other sources. The cause of the bubble is probably the way tuition and financial aid are used by many colleges. Perhaps the most in-depth analysis was by The Atlantic.
If this hypothesis is correct, then it has interesting implications for how a pop in the education bubble might play out. Since a fair portion of college budgets are propped up by moms and pops taking Mortgage Equity Withdrawals to finance their kid's education (who may or may not actually be deserving to go the college of their choice, but probably not) then we can expect (1) the tuition portion of institutions' income to drop precipitously and (2) that there will be fewer sort-of-rich-kids going to elite schools.
This doesn't seem all bad in my opinion. Maybe academia should return to humbler roots. Do the top schools really need Olympic sized swimming pools, or gyms that would require a $100 a month membership in any big city?
I think it will pop much differently. There will be enough PhD waiters and Home Depot employees that people will start to question if college was worth it. The recession also seems to be triggering a wave of self employment. That will reduce the need for the all important degree on the resume.
Attendance will just evaporate as people ask "do I need college?" Not in the smug 90's startup way, but in the cold, calculated "great recession" way.
I'm still hoping for some sort of disruption that will change the game.
The line of thinking is along these lines: The core of what elite colleges (or any colleges) is not really valuable. A university course is mostly a syllabus, a textbook, lectures, tutorials, papers & exams. All are based on knowledge that is freely available. You do not need a Professor who spends most of his time on research that doesn't benefit you teaching you.
It wouldn't even be hard to offer the core of what Universities offer at a much lower cost. What is hard to offer is the vast periphery. The clubs & socialisation. The Gyms. The contact with researchers & other talented and/or rich young people. The social norms & leeway associated with Undergraduate life (this might be more important then we think). The prestige. The prospects created by the contacts, the prestige, the social conditioning & whatever else goes in to making a University education other then education.
A potential catalyst could be the growing Internationalisation of Uni education.
I just finished my undergrad degree a month ago, and I think I have some insight into this.
By far the most valuable thing I take away from university is not the classes, but rather the experience. As a student you get a lot of leeway to screw up and learn - even interning at large, private corporations. This has helped me in my life (and my career) more immensely than anything else I've ever learned at school (most of which I doubt I will apply in a job, ever).
Secondly, the networking opportunities that you have at a university is ridiculously useful. Short of going to war together I doubt there are many forces that bind people together as tightly as the college experience. I have made many friends, many of whom are incredibly talented and will no doubt go far in life - it's a network that you can't replicate, say, studying online.
Thirdly is the name - prestigious schools, whether justifiably or not, do for some reason make you more employable in a lot of places. I know many a hacker from "lesser" colleges who can't find a job in this economy, while I had multiple offers before my final semester even started.
I suspect that the strongest thing holding all those aspects together is convention. I think the institution is very entrenched in the US. maybe the place for innovation is outside.
In Israel (where I am from), a lot of people do go to war together. So they're sorted for friends. Actually, most don't physically fight, but they still make friends. There is an additional (recent) institution of backpacking/travelling that tackles some of this friends/experiences/growth/leeway territory. University entrance tends to be 20-25 yr olds.
So, the whole dynamic is very different. A lot of no frills courses are offered. Cost effectiveness is a big factor ,though naturally the level of Government intervention messes with this and doesn't allow private colleges to compete with research Unis on equal footing.
Another place change might come from are the places in the world now entering the growing middle income per capita range (not sure what that is exactly. But I think around 2-$10k pa) where people care about education, can afford some of it, but can't afford $100k or even 10k. They also are first generation entrants & don't have too formulated an idea of what schools should be.
Basically, what I am saying is that if you took Universities away and then let something else grow in their place, it probably wouldn't be universities.
I don't think we need to take universities away, just the unnecessary competition-induced crap that makes them so expensive. The "college experience" we all hear about can be done on a way smaller budget. And like you mention, universities probably aren't the best at it anyways.
Depends on what you're studying. Subjects like medicine, dentistry and chemistry need extensive lab facilities and highly skilled, often personal tuition. That's going to cost a lot no matter where it's done.
On a broader level you also need to consider the value of networking opportunities. Is the course content of a Harvard MBA really that much better than elsewhere? Of course not. It's the contacts you make while you're there.
Possibly, but this needn't affect those studying history.
I listen to this economist podcast here & there. Recently, they were talking about how strange it is that they need any kind of qualifications to do the thing that they get paid for. They tell undergrads that the demand curve slopes down & the supply curve slopes the other way. That knowledge is freely available and easily accessible. Yet their students bid up the price of the best academics to tell them this.
A better professor's demand curve slopes the same as a crappier one's. You may be right that this does not apply to dentistry.
As others have said, the knowledge in most universities is not what you are paying for. I am currently getting my Master's in Mathematics. I am truly learning a great deal, but that is not what I am paying for. All of the information in the classes I am taking is readily available for free or extremely cheap.
From my perspective I am paying for 3 things:
1. A ready made (albiet small) community of other math grad students that can answer my questions when I don't understand some of the freely available information.
2. A highly educated professor that can provide further explanation and advice if my peer group of math grad students can't explain it well enough to me.
3. (arguably most important) A respected institution prepared to certify to prospective employers that I really have gained gained those skills.
The knowledge is free, you can get #1 on your own with a little work and a little luck, but #2 is hard to get without being an actual student and #3 is is very hard to get without the institution.
And before people say you don't need #3, it helps you get interviews if not necessarily jobs. I have been that hiring manager that has to weed through dozens of resumes to determine who I am going to spend my time interviewing. A degree was certainly a good discriminator for who was worth my time. I certainly didn't require it and I interviewed people who had experience but no degree, but they had to have something else on their resume to show me it was worth my time.
I worked for a small company, when dealing with middle management (or worse, HR) at a big company, they really want to be able to cover themselves and show why they hired someone on paper. To many of them being able to justify the decision is more important then actually getting the best person. The degree makes it alot easier for them to do that.
If you plan to start your own company, a degree is meaningless of course, but even Paul Graham says that path should be approached with great caution if you are married with children.
I'm not saying that these are not important or easily achievable outside of Universities. I am saying maybe they could be. IE, maybe someone can come up with a way of creating the networks & whatever else is important without being a university.
You are quite correct, BUT at least for the forseeable future a university is the most efficient way to get those things, and especially to get all 3 at once.
I could for instance create a facebook page and start gathering a group of other people interested in math to ask questions. But it would take time to find that was worth the time to actually talk and listen to and then of those the ones that were actually interested in my specific topic. With a class, those are ready made. You rarely find foolish people in upper division math classes at all so I know everyone there is (most likely) worth my time to deal with and we have the class in common so we are all looking at the same broad field at least.
Similarly, we could create certifications for math skills similar to certain technologies, but it would take a long time (if ever) before employers and HR departments in particular gave those the same weight as a normal degree.
Universities are certainly not the only choice, but for the meantime they are the best choice for someone who wants that combination of a ready made, (partially) vetted community of peers along with later certification of the skills gained.
I still think you're reading me backwards. I'm not recommending not going to University.
Say I thought that blogging could be easier 5 years ago. It would not be easier to build an easier blogging engine. It would be easier to just use whatever existed. But it would have been correct to identify that easier blogging is possible, a market exists & someone would cater to it at some point.
I think that University education (and possibly also the other features of Universities) could be available for easier/cheaper/different. I also think there is a market for this. I think that eventually Universities may not have the same prominence they do now.
Ah, I did partially misunderstand. I agree that the potential exists for universities to eventually be partially replaced by some other system, and I also think that right now we as a society undervalue vocational training.
With that said, I do not know what that partial replacement will be and I do not think (though I certainly could be wrong) that it will come anytime in the near future.
I think that there may be floodgates open if the right keys go in the right locks.
One problematic issue is accreditation/validation. Part of the reason vocational training is so different is because of this. This could work for a wide range of areas from programming or accounting to medicine & carpentry.
Other changes such as a move towards more self employment might also trigger something.
> I'm still hoping for some sort of disruption that will change the game.
The chance of success is basically zero, but you could lobby for the overturn of the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision, the famous lawsuit which resulted in U.S. employers being officially prohibited from using IQ tests in hiring:
I think part of the point of the article in the Chronicle is that the top schools will be fine and do not need cut back. While this only applies to the very top schools, they will still have people willing to pay the tuition and endowments large enough to cover any student they want to admit that cannot cover the tuition themselves.
It is the small and mid grade schools that may need to carefully look at their models.
Personally, I think a bigger question is what will it do to families trying to help their children climb into a higher income bracket if there is a major shake up in the higher education market?
I think the real solution is to stop overvaluing university degrees. Most of the folks coming out of universities don't have any particularly valuable job skills. (I'm thinking of majors in business, or liberal-arts fields, or for that matter most people with a BA/BS in the sciences.)
Will that happen? Not unless getting university grads gets hard.
There needs to be a real separation between vocational schools and comprehensive universities. I get the feeling that as a society we have a thing against vocational training - even though some of the most celebrated jobs really belong there instead of at a traditional college (e.g. engineering, accounting, etc).
The problem here is that people are going to university expecting this to lead nicely into a job - it does not, particularly for the liberal arts where the path is even more vague. People expect the fact that they have a degree to mean something to employers, when it in fact does not.
This whole thing would be a lot simpler if we didn't have such a grudge against vocational schools - who by and large do not seem to have trouble placing their graduates into jobs.
I think you have a very good point. Personally, I got a traditional degree and am working on my Master's, but there are people in my family that learned things like welding instead and they are doing quite well for themselves. Similarly, a fully certified mechanic is in an excellent position. Some people need traditional degrees, but we as a society do need to value significant trades more highly.
Actually, I think that just the opposite should happen. The goal of higher should not be crude "job skills". The value of higher education includes a wide view of the world and broad participation in intellectual life.
This goal should be furthered by private foundations and government. More things should be "priceless".
> Do the top schools really need Olympic sized swimming pools, or gyms that would require a $100 a month membership in any big city?
I'd guess that students are less likely to use their college gym than members are to use their gym. If I'm correct, the per-student cost of a college gym may be in the noise.
I'm always surprised when people suggest "community college", as opposed to an elite university, for the masses to flock to. I don't mind if people take on vocational tasks like welding, and as Mike Rowe of dirty jobs explained at his TED talk society definitely has a problem with imbuing meaning towards regular tasks. But all too often I hear that snide remark, which translates to: "Not everyone can excel towards, or afford, an elite education with all the debt and opportunity it offers. But get yourself to a community college and do something basic, to get your portion of the pie. Otherwise you are nothing."
It is disappointing that these service based industries come to a point when making money is becoming so important especially when they are commodities. I hope that some institutions will reduce their price for a greater purpose especially for poor people.
I agree that they are over priced, but they aren't commodities. Commodity products are indistinguishable, but there are definitely different qualities of healthcare and higher education.
Pragmatically, I would describe health care and education as commodities with some providers who sell a "premium" service. How much education happens at top tier, how much health care happens at the Mayo Clinic?
Just how universal is higher education in Sweden? Can all people who desire to attend the best university in Sweden enroll if they wish, or are there entrance requirements for that university?
Anyone can attend any university (with the exception of a couple of private ones, mainly within marketing and design). This includes medicine, law and business. The only requirements are high school grades and/or a public "university entrance"-exam.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "base acceptance rate". But the universities usually accept around 50% based on high school grades, 25% based on the entrance exam and a further 25% on mixed backgrounds (professional experience, prior university credits etc). The numbers themselves differ between universities.
If you meant something else, I'm happy to explain that too :)
Does the entire relevant age group in Sweden apply to university, or do only some students who complete secondary schooling apply for further schooling? The base acceptance rate for any one university is the number of students who are admitted divided by the number who applied. (In the United States, that number is just above 7 percent at some of the most highly desired universities, which receive almost 30,000 applications but admit only just more than 2,000 students.) Some universities in the United States have a base acceptance rate above 90 percent, so on that basis I suppose one could claim that university schooling is "universal" (that is, universally available) here too. More than 500 schools of higher education in the United States have explicit policies of open admission, meaning that they will admit ALL applicants without any requirements beforehand (except possibly completion of high school or residence in the state where the college is located).
What exactly does it mean for higher schooling to be both universal and free?
Ah, thank you for the explanation. I digged around a little, and the base acceptance rate of all university applications was 54% för 2008. This is an aggregated number. For Sweden's most prestigeous med school (Karolinska Institutet) the number is 3,6%, so it does vary a lot depending on the education.
There are very few programmes that don't have any requirements. However, if one doesn't have any good high school grade, the "university entrance"-exam is a way in, or else professional experience. Hence, there are (again, depending on the education) a wider range of ages represented. However, 28% of all applicants are 19 years old. No one in my class is older than 25.
About universal and free, I'd say the system here is close to very good. According to me "universal" apply more to the possibility of actually studying, than the numbers of students accepted. And "free" is simply no tuition fees, which Sweden does not have. This is also the main difference, with the US having (large) fees.
The cost for higher education that steadily climbs faster than the inflation rate will need to stop when it equals to its time-discounted marginal benefits. (Given its many alternatives--both for learning and socializing--the marginal benefits of higher education do not seem to increase nearly as fast.)
If the cost goes higher than that, the bubble will indeed burst--sooner or later.
In order to keep "the education bubble" growing, the article speaks highly of reducing teaching costs by 40% (by relying less on actual PhD professors who know what they are talking about) and instead giving "students ... a choice of learning styles and ways to get help online from ... fellow students". Oh, and paying university presidents huge incentives for using such "cost cutting" measures.
Yeah, right. Take their $50K+ in annual tuition, then plug students into an e-learning social network where they "TEACH THEMSELVES" through "INNOVATIVE LEARNING STYLES".
If these moves are genuinely embraced, it will indeed create a bubble that will grow until these poor disillusioned students realize they are just sheep following other sheep wandering around, going nowhere, ... when they should instead have been following a shepherd who knew where he/she was going.
Why would we want to create a bubble anyway? By definition, it is only a bubble if it will eventually burst.
I can't help but think the real bubble is in our own inflated sense of ourselves. Everyone thinks their child is capable of becoming the next great whatever, but the reality is that there are only so many people with original and useful ideas out there.
Higher education is dangled as the carrot that is the means to achieving greatness. Everyone speculates that the future will yield awesomeness, but when it takes too long to reach our unrealistic expectations we overreact in the opposite fashion. We have this never-ending cycle of overinflated possibility followed by reality and an overreaction of conservation.
Is it perhaps a flaw in our culture? Selling an idea is more important than the idea itself. Getting "traction" or "backing" is more important than delivering something real and of actual value.
Perhaps the problem is that they're spending too much on the education.
BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education!
Does anyone here live in the Phoenix, AZ area? If so, take a tour of ASU's recent campus renovations. The new dorms look like luxury-condos. The buildings around campus match. ASU has gotten into the habit of buying up the most expensive property available, and developing high-end real-estate on top of it.
Do we really need that?
What we need are desks, blackboards, and good professors. I could not care any less what the building I'm studying inside of looks like. Are campus aesthetics really that important, or even relevant at all, to higher education?
No. The answer is that no, they are not.
It seems cliche' for a geek to get bent out of shape about it, but lets also look at the sports teams. How much money is spent on this educationally fruitless endeavour? What is the return on it? How does it effect education?
Suggesting that post-secondary education should cost what it currently does is insane.
Private institutions can do whatever they please, in my opinion, but the state schools need to get back to their roots. That is: intellectual pursuits, not physical ones.
"BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education!"
This logic is running rampant right now and is a major player not in the economic collapse, but our inability to convince our governments to deal with economic collapse. When the answer to "Are we spending enough on education?" is simply hard-coded to "No", you get very stupid budget behaviors.
In point of fact, there must be a point where we are spending enough on education, enough on police, enough on health care, enough on welfare, enough on anything. There must even come a point where we are spending enough on educating the disadvantaged, enough on health care for the elderly, enough on programs for poor children. Because the alternative is, frankly, absurd... yet that is where we've gotten to, politically.
Actually I live in Chandler, went to ASU as a graduate. I like what ASU is doing to urbanize Tempe and even Phoenix downtown. It is growing too big probably but it does drive lots of technology. The engineering 'brickyard' at ASU right there in a highly trafficked part of town is a good message to send to people. The ASU Research Park for instance has many high-tech companies there and it is also a park for people to come to and play. This is similar to what Intel does around their locations in Chandler, AZ.
Anyways, as long as it doesn't harm the educational experience then it may actually help the area as a whole. I feel I got what I needed out of my education but that is really up to the student in the end.
Also, on the sports teams, most of the time this funds a large part of the school so in the end it is a necessary evil. Much like how defense brings the most innovative technologies, even this here internet.
I agree that schools need to focus on quality education experiences and get better professors. I think that the internet and universities that open up to that can share the best professors with the world.
We will see an enormous change in this regard in our lifetime, the University as we know it will be much different. It has taken some time, but the internet and cost reducing measures to information and education are shaking harder at the pillars of these college institutions.
BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education!
Yeah, and it's unfortunate that "education" often has a capital E and is viewed as being something that only formalized schools, Big Education, can provide.
Spending money on things like internet access, libraries, encouraging greater literacy and reading, and not banning "educational toys" just because they may be perceived of as dangerous (I'm thinking of things like chemistry sets here, which were a lot more fun and educational back in the day) could end up going a long way to increasing the minimum education level without actually requiring people to throw money at schools to have to attend them.
Products that cost more than they are valued tend not to be produced (or rather, there are no buyers), but that doesn't imply that everything is worth more than it costs.
Unless you value cost. The value of a degree comes from the story we tell ourselves, and paying $160,000 is part of that story. Most people wouldn't want to go to college if it was free; just look what people were saying when Seth announced his alternative MBA, or look at library participation among 20-somethings for that matter.
I don't know that library participation is so much relevant in the days of instant-access to the ammount of information that is available to us on the internet.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...
If this hypothesis is correct, then it has interesting implications for how a pop in the education bubble might play out. Since a fair portion of college budgets are propped up by moms and pops taking Mortgage Equity Withdrawals to finance their kid's education (who may or may not actually be deserving to go the college of their choice, but probably not) then we can expect (1) the tuition portion of institutions' income to drop precipitously and (2) that there will be fewer sort-of-rich-kids going to elite schools.
This doesn't seem all bad in my opinion. Maybe academia should return to humbler roots. Do the top schools really need Olympic sized swimming pools, or gyms that would require a $100 a month membership in any big city?