Your comments hit on so many of the key points as I see them that I separated them and will just do a +1 by way of asking questions I think we all ought to be thinking about, if the goal is to get to effective and pragmatic solutions:
Absolutely. I was just with a client who is a retired professor and administrator who proudly helped guide his college into a health care curriculum that was clearly needed and clearly helped lots of people get jobs. He is also proudly a historian. As we discussed this issue he was passionate about the fact that even if you are choosing a field of study that is likely to guide you to financial success, you should also be required to get a well-rounded education. So the question is, what are the best ways to make this both/and, rather than either/or?
Absolutely. Any effective proposals to throw more money at education are going to have to include standards and accountability. And in some ways it's not about spending more money on education. What we basically did is shifted costs from taxpayers to students, who had to accept skyrocketing tuition and debt. In my mind as a taxpayer it is perfectly reasonable to say I'll pay more taxes to help pay for your education, so you can have less debt, but I expect accountability in return. So the question is, what are the best standards and ways to hold colleges and students accountable?
Absolutely. As I said above, I am a poster child for getting a liberal arts education, and I went out of my way to avoid the things that looked like the sure path to financial success. Fortunately, my Mom and Dad made enough to pay for most of my education, and I got Summer jobs, so I had no debt. And ha ha, I'm a smart enough guy with a good enough education that I succeeded financially anyway. But I think it really is a myth to say there used to be some golden day when everybody got this great liberal arts education we don't get today. To overstate the point, that world mainly benefited middle-class and upper-class white men, like me, it was an elitist model, and it all was based on the idea that only 10 % or so of the population goes to college, and they are the best and the brightest, and their degree will end up being a ticket to affluence, regardless of what they study. That world still exists at places like Harvard and Yale. College has always been about jobs as well as well-rounded education. So the question is, what are the best models today, in a more diverse country where more kids of more races and more skill levels are going to college than ever before?
Absolutely. One of my clients thinks that any student who gets federal help should be required to complete college at a 4 year institution in 4 years. I think that's a nice ideal, especially if the deal includes taxpayers paying for all or most of the ride, but it has to deal with the financial reality that people have to pay their bills, and not everyone comes from a middle-class family. And the other reason that some students take longer is they take "unnecessary" classes. But in a world where it's more likely than ever that you will bounce between different careers, either within one field or across fields, is it bad to, in effect, be "overeducated?" I would argue you can't be "overeducated" in today's job market. So the question is, if taxpayers are footing some or all of the bill, what is a reasonable set of expectations of students in terms of how much education they get?
Absolutely. If there is one simple, one-size-fits-all solution, I think it would be to ban for-profit education, period. Unfortunately, that would throw a lot of good babies out with the bad bathwater. The Obama administration has made some reasonable attempts to crack down on the worst offenders with the highest drop-out rates where students with inadequate skills were more or less doomed to fail. The other point to remember is Elizabeth Warren is right: the federal loan program is a profit center. The question is, how much sense does it make to weaken our economy long-term by forcing students who do graduate and got jobs to carry heavy debt loads, just so we can have a federal student loan program that in the short-term makes money?
I have a personal way of thinking about this. The government, who greatly fear the older voters who AARP organizes so well, is willing to dump limitless amounts of money through Medicare and Medicaid on my 93 year old Mom who has dementia and who bluntly has not future but to slowly waste away and die. I am very grateful for those programs. But why in God's name would the same government say that my Mom, if she were 18, can't go get the kind of education that would make her and her family prosper, unless she is willing to go into massive debt? As long as we stay out of more stupid wars, I don't think these are either/or choices. We can "take care" of both my Mom and her granddaughters. I hope we have a serious debate in this election about our investment priorities.
Definitely an alarming statistic, Steven. When I was in college my degree choice was very focused, so when I graduated I knew exactly what I was going to be doing in healthcare. I did go to a University that insisted that even Science focused majors receive "core requirements" in both the arts, humanities and business. At the time I was pretty annoyed but looking back I do feel they helped me indirectly, but not directly.
In addition to the spiraling cost of education I think what's missing is transparency on the part of Universities. It's almost reached the point where I feel that the Federal government and any institution that accepts financial aid should be required to publish the average salaries, job employment prospects and job titles of every degrees student for a period of five years after graduation.
So often we see case examples of students graduating with Political Science, history or basic business degrees who find jobs that leave them incapable of making student loan payments. When someone declares a major there should be transparency and doses of reality surrounding what they're going to be able to do with it.
I'm also disturbed by the profitability associated with funding education. I'm immediately distrustful because the global banking system is painfully morally bankrupt. I truly wish the government would fully fund education at zero interest rates so that when people came out of college they didn't have so many chips stacked against their success. It's one of the few things all Americans could benefit from and actually use other than the postal service.
Today, I'm still involved with my original career choice but it's taken me in an interesting and enjoyable direction. I wish that every college student today could have some level of security knowing that their decisions to pursue a specific degree was not going to be the specter that haunts them 10 years down the road.
Huh. One of the reasons I avoided majoring in sociology, which us perhaps closer to my real area of interest than political science and history, is that at the time the department was the domain of doctrinaire Marxists. There were probably a couple of Marxists in the poly sci department, and as it was I wrote an honors thesis on Marx, among others, but they were not doctrinaire. This was forty years ago.
Can you please point me to concrete data, as opposed to nonspecific grumbling and speculation, that freedom of expression (which I take to mean the professor's freedom to say what he wants) has been impinged other than when professors sexually harass or otherwise treat students on a basis other than merit? The cases of academic freedom of which I am aware concern tenured professors disagreeing with the administration finding themselves shoved out the door. Where is this indoctrination taking place?
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