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The coming melt-down of [Higher Education]
Protein Shakes
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Other people have talked extensively about this topic in the past several years, but I like the way Seth writes about these things because he can get to the heart of the matter and deliver it effectively.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/the-coming-meltdown-in-higher-education-as-seen-by-a-marketer.html
Please visit the link if you can, as it has many links that are interesting and serve to reinforce the point. If your workplace has it blocked or something, here is the pure text:
I think he's absolutely right. It is very interesting that college is viewed as an extension of high school and therefore as a necessity, which "cheapens" the college degree (relatively speaking), yet the costs have been ballooning exponentially. It's only a matter of time before the system collapses on itself.
Another article by The Week also makes very good points regarding this "higher education bubble":
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What do you guys think?
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/the-coming-meltdown-in-higher-education-as-seen-by-a-marketer.html
Please visit the link if you can, as it has many links that are interesting and serve to reinforce the point. If your workplace has it blocked or something, here is the pure text:
The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)
For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.
I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.
1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.
Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.
This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again...
This leads to a crop of potential college students that can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the 'best' school they get in to.
3. The definition of 'best' is under siege.
Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?
Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?
4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
College wasn't originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.
5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.
A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.
Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass market degrees.
Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I'd ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?
The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference (start here). Most of these ways, though, aren't heavily marketed nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped two-hundred-year old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.
The only people who haven't gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass marketing colleges and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.
I think he's absolutely right. It is very interesting that college is viewed as an extension of high school and therefore as a necessity, which "cheapens" the college degree (relatively speaking), yet the costs have been ballooning exponentially. It's only a matter of time before the system collapses on itself.
Another article by The Week also makes very good points regarding this "higher education bubble":
- Over the past quarter-century, the average cost of higher education has risen at a rate four times faster than inflation—twice as fast as the cost of health care.
- Tuition, room, and board at private colleges can cost $50,000 per year or more.
- The market crash of 2008 inflicted terrible damage on college endowments. The Commonfund Institute reports that endowments dropped by an average of 23 percent in the five months ending Nov. 30, 2008.
"Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college.”
From an economic point of view, in other words, a college degree costs more and more and returns less and less. Kind of like a hot stock with a price-to-earnings ratio of 32, it’s a prelude to a crash.
As the number of job applicants with degrees rises, employers become more sophisticated in assessing the value of any particular degree. The degree itself matters less than the institution that granted it, the subject areas of concentration, and the grade point average earned. A 4.0 math degree from Cal Tech is a very different thing from a 2.8 communications degree from San Francisco State University.
Yet economic benefits are not the sole measurement of value. Intellectually, spiritually, and morally, American higher education is in crisis, with the worst damage manifested at the most expensive institutions. At Duke, racial politics whooped up a faculty lynch mob against student lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape. It’s often at the costliest universities that students are able to graduate with a degree in English without ever having read Shakespeare, a degree in history despite ignorance of the Civil War, or one in art history without ever having encountered the Renaissance.
In their own ways, universities indulge in some of the worst faults of the corporate sector, overcharging their customers in order to allow managers and staff to engage in wasteful or destructive activities that could never be justified on their own.
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What do you guys think?
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I really want to contribute original research to the fields of Psychology/Neuroscience/Cognitive Science. I love me some brains.
But every source I read/ask says it takes too long, and doesn't give you appreciably greater chances of success in the field. That it leaves you competing with too many people for too few jobs, and that it traps you forever in academia.
Still planning on getting one, though. I need to be able to argue professionally with some of the people in the field. Friggin no one over the age of 40 should be allowed to compare brains to computers.
Edit: Oh, and my sister just got an MBA in Australia. She said that about 40-50% of her class were foreign students who barely knew English, probably because those students had to pay significantly more to go to school. Not a mark of a bastion of education.
What are your chances of getting a decent job without a degree from either?
/cry
I have five degrees and have spent tens of thousands of dollars in their obtainment, yet the only thing to ever garner me continued gainful employment was an associates degree that cost less than $2000 to obtain.
There's mounds of statistics showing a single bachelor's degree to be the highest ROI
They exist for one reason, to make money. That's what they do, just like any other business. So they apply practices that encourage growth. They dumb-down courses to entice a wider base, they spend a lot of time and effort deciphering just how much they can charge, they market their products. There is very little incentive for these organisations to adopt practices that would improve the quality of their service. Very few institutions actually trade on their name as much as the media would have you believe.
And just like anything else, when more of their product is available, it ceases to be as special.
Hell, the one thing university taught me above all else, was that anyone can get a degree.
What I will say though. A lot of you are talking about the ease of which a graduate can get a job. That hasn't been the point for some time now. The rate at which earning increases over time is. And most management positions will have a degree as a pre-requisite these days. So, I view my higher education as a requisite for the upper-tier jobs - not as a way into the entry level stuff. Hell the reason I got my first job out of uni was because when the boss asked why he should hire me, I said "Because I'm one of the few graduates that knows that I know nothing. I'm here to learn".
EDIT: I love how I'm in a higher education post and I manage to spit out the most typos-per-word post seen in years.
"Oh no, you need to finish High School if you want to make it in the 'real world"
"Oh...you have that high school diploma....yeah, we meant college diploma. Yeah."
"Right. Bachelors. You actually have to have a Masters."
"You thought you'd get anywhere with that? Come back when you have a PhD."
I completely expect the response when I finish my doctorate to be
"Wait, you actually got your PhD? Well, it turns out that you actually need to go back and do..."*STAB*
what does he mean by it being an outlier
As a tutor at a community college I can tell this is absolutely not true. Some people just aren't cut out to do what they think they want to do.
I've seen, in just a year, at least 30 people fail out of their major (usually in A&P, biology, and since I deal more with them PC networking classes)
There was probably more sarcasm there that I intended. I was a tutor at University also. What I was suggesting was that if you apply yourself, most people could achieve a batchelors degree. The idea that they somehow indicate that you're "a cut above the norm" is, in my opinion, false.
That's not to say that everyone is cut out to get one. And you're ABSOLUTELY right that a huge number find out that they don't want to do what they think they want to do. But I feel it would be rare to see someone for whom it is genuinely unattainable.
This would also vary on the type of degree... I'm not sure I could do some of the science subjects.
After witnessing 2/3 of my class struggled with the 'Can O+ donate blood to a B-' question....
I'm fucking glad that a lot of people can't get a nursing degree.
The St. Johns he talks about is what's known as a "Great Books" school, where the curriculum is built around the investigation of the "literary greats".
oh
i went to st. john's university in queens
m'bad
thank you
Yeah, that confused me too, as the only St. Johns I know of is your alma mater. I think that Godin misses the mark in his piece, which isn't surprising, as he's really not looking to discuss making the system work better for everyone (his final section makes that abundantly clear.)
Edit: I read an story about how another Great Books shool in Chicago managed to thwart a Randian takeover a few weeks back. It was rather...interesting how things unfolded (turns out that the Randian's natural enemy is democracy.)
How does it make it abundantly clear?
Is there something wrong with suggesting that higher education should strive to create leaders and problem-solvers?
Here's a hint - gap years, research internships, and the such? They're not exactly available to everyone...
You can't even play ball anymore in the field I'm currently in without a graduate degree, and the field I'm transitioning to is the same.
Why not?
You have to have a lot of money, or rich parents, or the ability to take on a lot of student debt to take that much time without getting paid.
Money, dear boy. Actually, money and connections. It's really not that hard to figure out.
My biggest problem with the college system is all of the artificial roadblocks, redundant bureaucracy, and other bullshit that is thrown in the way of college students. College is just difficult enough to where it should be able to weed out the people who do not belong there on its own, without needing stupid shit getting in the way of the people who should be there.
I don't know how people manage to get themselves into $100,000 debt in 4 years. It boggles my mind.
The problem is that the worsening finances of many states has caused tuition, even for instate students, to skyrocket as well. The UC and CSU systems have been getting their pennies pinched by Sacramento for decades now, for example.
And this is a bigger cause of tuition rises in higher education in the US than endowment hits, as most of the major colleges in the US are public schools.
That said, I think the "college experience" and the people (students, parents, schools) that perpetuate it are a enormous problem.
Seriously, live at home, work, and go to a state school. That is within anyones reach except in very extreme socioeconomic circumstances. University is still not that expensive if you're willing to make sacrifices.
I can't even get rid this debt by declaring bankruptcy. Something needs to be done to ease the debt of Gen X/Y'ers.
I'm in telecomm. All you need to make ~$90/hr in a management position is a PMP certification and a few years' experience in the industry. Network administration is much the same; you can have a CS/IS degree, sure, but they're still going to ask you to get Microsoft or Cisco certifications, and in fact the more certs you get the more money you make. More recently on job descriptions I'm not even seeing the degree listed as important as the experience and certifications.
That's the fucking point - things like that become a matter of money because college is way too expensive right now. So when someone accumulates 100k debt in 4 years, of course they won't have the time or money for gap years and unpaid internships and things like that.
It's funny how you can be a condescending prick ("dear boy"? really?) yet don't have the ability to add 2 and 2 together.
You really think that the middle class kid is going to be able to take a traditional gap year? Or take an unpaid internship (something that is horribly abused by companies, by the way) in a distant city? And then you say I'm the clueless one?
My best friend did, who came from a single-parent home. His mom earned about $28K a year, and supported him and his two sisters.
He took out college loans, got his foot in the door with summer internships, and got a junior executive position with Macy's directly out of college. He now is at Academy, and will be a Vice President before he's thirty.
It happens.
Do you think him the standard, or the outlier, though?
Definitely an outlier, but only because his success was determined by his skill and ambition.
Opportunity isn't a synonym for Entitlement, or vice versa. The people who win out on these things are going to be a lot like him: driven, extremely good networking skills, highly social, highly intelligent, self-aware.
To me, college is a lot like someone handing you some wood, bricks, and tools. But you've got to figure out how to build the house on your own.
Too many law enforcement jobs, for example, want a bachelors for a 35K/yr job writing traffic tickets and filling in names, locations, and times in preformatted reports. Hell, there's plenty of other public service jobs (teachers, social workers) where the pay is nowhere equivalent to what it takes to get you in the door.