An idea whose time should come. But it will be fought tooth and nail by the academic-industrial complex, to protect their phony baloney jobs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
If you’re “investing” in college, think like an investor. Unfortunately, one of the many things that kids aren’t learning in public schools is how to do that.
[Update a few minutes later]
What comes after the bubble pops?
At UNC:
The 10-page report said the findings are a blow to the university’s academic integrity. The findings were so serious that the university consulted with the district attorney and the SBI about investigating forgery allegations, as some professors said their signatures were forged in documents certifying that they had taught some of the classes in question. Professors also said they had not authorized grade changes for students that the department submitted to the registrar’s office.
Law enforcement officials declined to investigate because they did not think the forgeries, if proven, rose to the level of criminal activity, according to the report.
“We are deeply disturbed by what we have learned in the course of our review,” said Jonathan Hartlyn and William L. Andrews, two senior faculty administrators who conducted the investigation. “Our review has exposed numerous violations of professional trust, affecting the relationship of faculty and students and the relationships among faculty colleagues in this department.”
They added, “These violations have undermined the educational experience of a number of students, have the potential to generate unfounded doubt and mistrust toward the department and its faculty, and could harm the academic reputation of the university.”
I think that at this point, just having a Department of Women’s Or Afro-American Studies is a de facto blow to any university’s academic integrity.
A depressing essay. Just one more sign of the abysmal state of our educational system at all levels. I don’t think that you should get a college degree if you can’t write coherently and grammatically. Or graduate high school, for that matter.
I always found that the best way to learn how to wrote was to read, and appreciate, others’ writing.
More thoughts from George Leef. As he points out, inability to write clearly is probably indicative of an inability to think clearly.
Why it’s a potential disaster for the Democrats.
I hope so. They deserve it.
Some thoughts on Peter Pan and the Occupy movement.
[Update a few minutes later]
Occupy’s totalitarian temptation. It’s what Leftists do.
There is nothing you can do that won’t prevent some idiot from mistaking almost anything for a firearm. It’s hoplophobe nation.
The false promise.
It seems to me that the big problem is that there is no relationship between student loan rates and prospects of paying them off, because the government got involved and completely eliminated the connection between them. In a sane world, an art history degree would carry a much higher interest rate than an engineering degree, and the market would send a signal to the students that maybe they weren’t making the best choices in major.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Jerry Pournelle:
What everyone seems to overlook is that the cost of college tuition will always rise to exceed the amount of money seeking tuition. The more money the government puts into the market, the higher the price of college, and it will trickle down from Harvard to the meanest community college. When more money chases goods, the price of the goods goes up; and if government then acts to increase the money supply, the price will rise without limit. Evan as I write this, the faculty of the California State Universities is voting to authorize a strike because they have not had raises in four years, poor things. The California State Universities were in the master plan to be the State Colleges, undergraduate institutions kept cheap and open essentially to everyone qualified to be in a a State College. They were to incorporate the State Teachers Colleges, and be the primary undergraduate education system; outstanding students would be accepted at or allow to transfer to the State University system, which would have a monopoly on graduate education.
The State College took over the State Teachers Colleges and next thing you know they needed to offer graduate degrees in education (although there is no evidence that those who have graduate degrees in education are any better at teaching, and in fact California State Colleges for twenty years taught such an ineffective system of reading that the illiteracy rate in California soared; but that’s for another story. If you know anyone about to enter the California state public schools, go to www.readingtlc.com and get my wife’s reading program so the kid will learn to read even if the teacher is a Cal State grad.) Anyway, all the Cal States offer graduate degrees in everything, and most of them are not very useful; but so long as the money supply lasts the costs will continue to rise, the faculties will be paid and paid and overpaid and pensioned off at very high levels, and the dance will continue.
So now it is becoming manifest that not only is the public school system nearly worthless, but half the graduates of the higher education system are unemployable.
There are solutions to this, most of them drastic, and we know how to have good higher education institutions. But so long as we are willing to pay for it, we’ll continue to have what we get. Charlie Sheffield and I played with this decades ago in a book called HIGHER EDUCATION. Alas it is not yet a Kindle book (I’m working on it). But the decay of our institutions of higher education under the relentless attacks of the government shoveling in money and the Iron Law assuring that the money will be accepted and overspent continues. And the beat goes on. We sowed that wind a long time ago, so why are we astonished at what we reap now?
Not all of us are.
[Update a few minutes later]
Glenn Reynolds expands on the thought:
What would a serious student-loan reform look like? Well, it would look more like normal loans. Students’ ability to borrow would be based on the likelihood that they’d be able to pay. Plus, loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy if things turned out badly.
Right now, student loans are sold on the basis that “college” promotes higher earnings. But “college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Some degrees — say in Electrical Engineering — increase earnings dramatically. Others — in, say, gender studies — not so much. A rational lender would be much more willing to finance the former than the latter.
Oh, and in ordinary credit transactions, creditors bear some risk. Loan someone money that they can’t pay back, and you take a loss if they go bankrupt. In the housing bubble, this discipline broke down because the people writing the loans weren’t going to hold on to the mortgages. Similarly, colleges today get their money upfront; if the student can’t pay it back, that’s someone else’s problem.
Let’s give colleges some “skin in the game” by making them absorb the loss, or at least part of it, if students can’t pay. Perhaps if students can’t pay their loans by 10 years after graduation, they should be allowed to discharge them in bankruptcy, with the institutions that got the loan money on the hook for, say, 20 percent of the loss.
If not a higher percentage. This would go a long way to fixing the broken incentive structure. But what Obama is proposing is just more of the same, pouring more gasoline on the flames.
[Afternoon update]
More thoughts from Nick Gillespie, and a response from Instapundit. Yes, humanities degrees aren’t intrinsically worthless, but the way that many of them are taught these days makes them so in many cases.
Get a degree in something societally useful.
…that changed the world. One of the signs of the disaster that is modern academia is that it is not only acceptable, but for many a point of pride, that they don’t understand math.
[Via Geek Press]
A better question is, should they be, at least in anything resembling their current form. It won’t change until parents realize what a massive fraud the whole thing is.