Four tough things the schools could do (but won’t):
“The American university is a grand political accommodation,” says Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist and founder of the Center for College Productivity and Affordability. College presidents, he argues, appease faculty members by giving them control over what and how they teach. They appease students and parents with high grades and good facilities. They appease alumni with expensive sports teams. They appease politicians with shiny new research centers. “The idea is to buy off any group that might upset the political equilibrium,” Vedder said.
I was particularly struck by the worthlessness of the majority of research, as judge by the number of citations.
By “won’t,” of course, I mean they won’t until they are forced to when they run out of other peoples’ money. That day may be approaching.
Well, there should be an opening for inexpensive quality colleges, if such is possible.
It is what we did. We used a community college to get past the core curriculum, and then only paid two years at a college with a good football team playing in a cheap stadium. While the kids didn’t get Fortune 500 jobs, they have no debt and make better than the median.
IMO, the problem isn’t core curriculum, aside from forced indoctrination through “diversity” classes, but that the two years that are supposed to be in depth study of a specific field are rather shallow and don’t give people skills they are expected to know to perform a specific job.
Community colleges churn out students with actual on the job skills, whether it is in aerospace, business, or culinary arts. There is no reason a four year college couldn’t do the same. Just because someone is an Art History, English, or some other similar major shouldn’t mean the school skips out on providing classes on how to work in those fields.
Maybe my college just sucked more than others but I bet many liberal arts colleges are very similar.
I figure schools will improve price/quality when students and parents more directly see the cost up front. Excessively easy credit tends to disguise real costs. It would also help if schools start taking it on the chin financially when a degree payed for with a loan is worthless.
For some parents, high costs aren’t a detriment but a signal. I read an article several years ago about how enrollment applications increased when a university raised their tuition. The article stated that parents believed that “if it cost more, it had to be better.” This is the living embodiment of the old saying about someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Perhaps that explains why some kids see going to college out of state (and paying about 3 times as much) is somehow better than going to a school where they live, even if the in-state school offers the same programs.
The whole purpose of academic journals hinged upon the high costs associated with making short production runs of scientific papers at a printer and distributing bound paper copies across the globe. Similarly, college textbooks are expensive because the production runs are small; setup costs must be recouped over a small number of units. For a university, it used to be necessary to have teachers and students in the same room, and thus it was desirable to have many teachers and many students co-located, necessitating huge up-front capital costs for land, buildings, libraries, sports facilities, dormitories, and so on.
The peer review process is clearly broken in most academic disciplines, perhaps worst of all in medicine. Replicating someone else’s experiment falls well down the priority list when you yourself must publish or perish. Journal referees only have limited time to look at any one paper, so they just look for egregious errors.
The result is that lots of garbage science and outright fraud gets published in the academic journals. I’ve seen estimates of 50% junk for medicine, but it goes across all disciplines with the possible exception of Mathematics.
Look at what blogs and podcasts have done to the newspaper industry and the rest of the mainstream media – democratized production, removed layers of filtering, allowed instant feedback, and demolished entry costs. Along the way this new media is slowly but surely strangling the old media.
And we have seen the rise of online educational resources like Khan Academy and online courses offered for college credit. The per-student costs associated with a server farm are negligible compared to the per-student cost of a campus, while the number of students using that server farm can be orders of magnitude more than can fit on a university campus. An e-book can cost a buck and make a profit.
I think you’ll see a transformation of the whole system. Instead of conferring degrees, a university might exist just as a place to house lab facilities. You might be taking a course from MIT, but it would be online, and you might be doing the lab in Montana State University; your lab partner might be taking the course from Stanford. Instead of taking four years and calling it an education, people would be taking a course here, a course there, for their whole lives.
And instead of submitting papers to journals, each paper would be a blog post, with citation by hyperlink and trackback. Perhaps there would be an internet science database similar to IMDb, as a place to collect abstracts and rank papers by citation.
Industry plays a role, too. Big corporations sometimes limit severely which universities they recruit from, and if you’re not from one of those big-name schools, you never meet the recruiter and thus your resume never sees the light of day no matter how many time you try to apply.
It’s funny — the HR departments at the big corporations set up their hiring practices under the guise of preventing nepotism, but all they’ve really done is taken it to the next level. I find my best employees actually came from smaller schools where they still learn how to think and get things done, instead of worrying about when the next frat party is scheduled. We need true meritocracy in recruiting — hire from the schools where your best employees come from, not the schools with the best “connections”.