Higher Education Needs a Numerator
Lamar Alexander has a pretty interesting piece in Newsweek pushing the idea that you should be able to get a bachelor’s degree in three years. I think, however, that any innovation around this theme is ultimately going to be hampered by the same problem that befalls nearly all efforts to provide cost-effective higher education: Nobody knows what the numerator is.
Expensive but prestigious (cc phot by Dan4th)
Which is to say that the claim you’d want to make as a proprietor of a three-year college is something like “our students get 95 percent of the learning in 75 percent of the time and at 80 percent of the cost.” But we don’t have any systems in place to measure, even very roughly or extremely imprecisely, how effective different colleges are at actually teaching people. Instead we have this kind of prestige-based economy of higher education in which basically nothing can change. There’s an aristocracy of fancy private institutions that raise tons of money and get tons of applications and can thus be very selective in their admissions and raise tons more money. And in any given state university system, a couple of campus are designated as the “good” ones so they get the best applicants and thus wind up with the best students and thus stay as the good ones. The other branch campuses tend to languish in semi-obscurity.
When schools invest money in self-improvement, the tendency is not to use the funds to improve the quality of the education but to use it to improve the quality of the students. Offer a more generous aid package to a student who capable of being accepted at a more selective institution, and you can wind up generating a higher quality of graduate through pure selection effect. And that improves your reputation, and thus your fundraising and your applicant pool.
The whole set-up makes it extremely difficult for outside-the-box efforts to improve value to get a toe-hold. You can’t really prove that you are offering value, for one thing, and cutting your price can even serve as a counter-indicator of quality and make your school look like some kind of second-rate, bargain bin institution.
83 Responses to “Higher Education Needs a Numerator”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 20th, 2009 at 9:29 am
When schools invest money in self-improvement, the tendency is not to use the funds to improve the quality of the education but to use it to improve the quality of the students.
I’d like to see some evidence of this. In my experience, Universities use the money to upgrade infrastructure, raise salaries, provide research leave, attract recruits, etc. This is not to say administrators do enough to improve instruction, but it’s wrong to suggest they’re solely focused on admissions and aid.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Lamar seems to be echoing some of the same thinking we here in the state are hearing from the chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, the governing body for one of two (or three, depending on how you count them) state higher education systems. The chancellor, Charles Manning, has proposed online instruction courses with little or no involvement of faculty, prompting some to remark that Manning’s vision encompasses robots teaching students. More generally, the thinking is pretty much what you’d expect from conservative and Southern Republicans: if quality higher education costs money, it’s bad.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:39 am
I’d like to see some evidence of this. In my experience, Universities use the money to upgrade infrastructure, raise salaries, provide research leave, attract recruits, etc. This is not to say administrators do enough to improve instruction, but it’s wrong to suggest they’re solely focused on admissions and aid.
I work in higher ed, and this claim is exactly right. If anything, we don’t do enough on aid.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:48 am
not to improve the quality of the education but to use it to improve the quality of the students.
I work with two firms that have a totally different theory when it comes to hiring recent college graduate engineers. One firm hires from the best school and pays in the 50s, the other hires from far less prestigious schools and pays in the 30s. You really get a sense that those from the top schools are smarter and harder working.
That being said, I don’t’ know what a school can really do to make a student smarter or harder working. It can maybe improve written and verbal communication and perhaps impart some technical skills – but I’m not sure how much it can do to change the fundamental nature of the student.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
There is no reason your average student can’t get a bachelor’s degree in three years, adding in summer school, removing unnecessary coursework, etc. But I get the feeling that a lot of students don’t want to enter the real world quite that soon, so they are satisfied with the standard schedule and don’t demand changes. If colleges were to offer flat-rate annual tuition (an expansion of the flat-rate semester tuition), they could reach more students. (And I don’t know what world you live in, but I’ve never heard anyone reject a college because it was too inexpensive(!).)
Also I’m not sure about this idea of “quality of teaching students.” It seems to me the value of a college is exposure to new ideas, new fields of study, etc., and less the details of pedagogy.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Danton,
Compare a 300 student lecture class to an online webinar. Does the value of actually being in the class outweigh the cost in terms of time and accumulated debt?
October 20th, 2009 at 9:52 am
It may be a bit of symptom of our flabby, distorted economy. Education is more a consumer good than a calibrated tool for becoming more productive, effective or valuable in the job market.
There are numerators out there, such as return on investment measures for business school, but really most consumers of education do not care. You buy the Lexus because it is a Lexus, and because you can afford it, not because it is such a better car than the Camry.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:53 am
3 Years!!?? Hell, I’ve got email in my inbox telling me I can get a degree in 5 minutes online. What’s the big deal?
October 20th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Lamar Alexander has a pretty interesting piece in Newsweek pushing the idea that you should be able to get a bachelor’s degree in three years.
Every university that I’m familiar with already allows you to finish a bachelor’s degree in three years (and have for decades), so I have no clue why anyone would think this is some kind brilliant new idea. It’s just that most college students don’t want to go to class full time straight through the summer and take 18+ hours of credits each semester during the regular school year. I’ve never heard of a school that forced students to attend for four full years without regard to how many credit hours they’ve completed.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:59 am
On the 3-year thing: I’d say it depends on the major. An engineering, physics, or chemistry major for example is hard-pressed to get through everything, and frankly the good students take more than the minimum. They are taking required classes from the first semester and everything build up. Hardly anyone could take a real Quantum Mechanics class in their sophomore year.
The liberal arts BA degrees typically have much fewer major requirements and it’s easy to meet people who decided on their major late in sophomore year. Don’t misunderstand me and think I’m putting them down, but you could imagine reducing the number of total credits yet they’d have the same number of classes in the major. So it’s a trade off whether the extra 20-30% of classes are worthwhile in the long run. For the science/engineering, you’d compromise the content of the major, and you’d probably have to abandon the humanities requirements, which I think is a big mistake.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:00 am
1) What is hilarious is that the overall rep of Harvard’s big undergraduate class is driven mostly by the rep of it’s much smaller graduate groups in the Professional Schools of Law, Medicine, and MBA. And some of THOSE professionals studied at unknown schools as undergrads.
2) Pace Matthew, the solution is simple: define what should be installed by the undergrad education and define a way to measure it. Mandatory Upper-level SATs given in the Senior Year, for example, segregated by academic major. GREs already partially serve, but you can’t get the scores segregated by student’s undergrad college.
3) Big problem with that is that schools would scramble to teach to the test and unmeasurable things — like creativity, higher order thinking,etc would suffer.
4) The biggest indictment AGAINST the Ivy League, Stanford,etc is their curriculum.
It is all the same –across ALL institutions — and it is an education designed to create FOOLS.
That is no accident, of course.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I graduated in 3.5 years of classes plus a 1 semester internship, but only because retro-credits are the greatest thing since sliced bread.
There should be enough input (SAT, ACT, AP, IB) and output (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, EIT, etc) data to arrive at some utility of higher ed. Seems like it would take some heavy-duty database work a whole lot of regression analysis to sort through the numbers, but stats are out there if the universities are willing to play ball. (Hint, they won’t be.)
October 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Maybe. I think it would have been possible to do it at my undergrad school, but then you’d be looking at 2-3 courses every summer and one during each winter break; and even then it’d be tight. That’d also pretty much kill any chance of a summer internship, which is (IMO) an absolute requirement, unless you don’t actually want to find a job once you graduate.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am
It is not simply aid that attracts better students. Amenities such as newer facilities, dormitories, athletic centers, and successful football teams serve to attract more applicants. This improves the quality of the student body.
Improving outcomes could be accomplished by making more connections with prestigious employers and graduate schools or offering aid to help students work in unpaid internships that lead to more prestigious jobs. The benefits of a place like Harvard are that it makes those prestigious employers like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs more accessible, the students are able to afford and access summer positions with places like CAP, and experience in undergraduate research gives them better access to graduate programs. This is going to be less available at your average state school.
There are two kinds of engineering programs, in my experience. One kind will teach the material, and the problem sets and tests will ask questions found in the book chapter, just to make sure that the student is paying attention. The other kind will teach the material and then grade students based on a lot of abstract difficult questions that requires the student to apply the material in ways that takes a lot of thought to work out. The former is essentially selling engineering degrees for a price. The latter is teaching students to be engineers. The latter program might graduate fewer students, but the ones that decide they want to endure that kind of program will come out as better. I think it does change the fundamental nature of the student, because they have to learn to be harder workers and better thinkers in order to get the degree.
That’s with engineering programs. How do you improve the quality of your English Literature and Philosophy programs? What is the ultimate result of that improvement?
October 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Oh, I’d also like to agree with Just Dropping By. Every college I know of let’s you do in three years if you want to (and with AP credits, frankly many people can), and in fact I’d guess everyone here who went to college knows someone who finished in three years. It’s just not that attractive.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I’ve never heard of a school that forced students to attend for four full years without regard to how many credit hours they’ve completed.
Many schools don’t offer much if anything in the summer. My college certainly didn’t–maybe it’s because the professors (no TAs there) want to do research and go on vacation.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Of course, the value of Harvard is that the undergraduate student gets to engage in prolonged discourse with some of the top minds in his fields of interest. Receives the benefit of their personal interest in nurturing his intellect and showing him the wider horizons of the intellectual life.
ha ha ha
October 20th, 2009 at 10:07 am
This sounds like the typical Republican anti-intellectual hostility to a liberal arts education. Of course it is possible to have a 3-year program: it is common in Europe. This comes at the cost of any liberal arts component: everyone specializes right away. There is a reason why students come from Europe to the USA and not the other way around: because the US system is actually much more flexible (you’re not totally up the creek if you change your mind while in school.)
You could ask the folks who teach what the goals of their programs are – this isn’t exactly something that no one in a university has ever thought about before. But it’s easier to pretend that those eggheads don’t actually know anything useful.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:07 am
College doesn’t really matter when much of the lower socioeconomic quintiles getting subpar service from K-12 education, esp those that are not even graduating high school.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:08 am
undergraduate student gets to engage in prolonged discourse with some of the top minds in his fields of interest
Are you being serious… I can’t tell. I was under the impression that the “better” the school, the more likely you were to be taught by TAs.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:11 am
That’d also pretty much kill any chance of a summer internship, which is (IMO) an absolute requirement, unless you don’t actually want to find a job once you graduate.
The unpaid internship should be abolished, full stop. If employers think that internships are valuable (and they evidently do, based on hiring practices) then they should compensate students accordingly for their time. Otherwise, the practice serves little purpose but to give leisure-class students a chance to make expensive (in both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs) connections while students on a budget who take classes instead of fetching coffee and making copies are left out in the cold.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Don –
You’re completely wrong here.
1. Harvard’s undergrad rep is a result of the fact that its admission rate is 7%, which means they can fill up the entire class with the best of the best, who all really want to go to Harvard b/c of its rep. Reputation can be self-fulfilling in that sense.
2. There isn’t any agreement on “define what should be installed by the undergrad education.”
3. As you note.
4. Here’s where you’re wrong – the Ivy curricula vary tremendously, from Columbia’s Core Curriculum, to Brown’s make-your-own-major.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Time required to get a degree is one thing, numbers of credit hours required for the completion of a degree program is another thing altogether. Credit hour requirements aren’t exclusively up to individual institutions. Accrediting bodies for particular disciplines have considerable sway over what gets taught, and how much gets taught in a particular degree program. So a university can change the requirements all it wants, but if they lose their accreditation, then no one will want to attend there.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:15 am
If employers think that internships are valuable (and they evidently do, based on hiring practices) then they should compensate students accordingly for their time.
In my case I could arrange my scheduale so I had one free day a week and do my internship then. It was worth 3 credits and was obviously an easy “A”. Don’t all schools allow internships during the school year for credit?
Your notion that you can only do an internship during the summer is a mistake.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Compare a 300 student lecture class to an online webinar. Does the value of actually being in the class outweigh the cost in terms of time and accumulated debt?
Two things to mention. First, you’re begging the question of why higher education at public universities has gotten so expensive in the first place. Maybe because it’s not been adequately funded over the last 20-30 years. Second, I wouldn’t reduce higher education to either sitting in a lecture class or a webinar.
That said, you seem to have bought into the notion that the value of higher education is measured merely in terms of debt and salary.
At any rate, I doubt Lamar Alexander sent his kids to the University of Tennessee. I suspect he sent them to private schools.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:24 am
In my case I could arrange my scheduale so I had one free day a week and do my internship then. It was worth 3 credits and was obviously an easy “A”. Don’t all schools allow internships during the school year for credit?
That’s a good system, and I’m glad it worked for you, but I think it’s an exception. I was in Physics/Engineering and the co-op / internship gigs were ALL entire summers or semesters, and generally paid (not much, though). I don’t think liberal arts students were as lucky.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Many schools don’t offer much if anything in the summer.
But if you want to finish in three years, the availability of summer courses is something that’s pretty easy to ask about during the admissions process. Some universities also allow you to take courses at community colleges for transfer credits while you’re also regularly enrolled, so if your school doesn’t have many summer course offerings that’s another possibility.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Otherwise, the practice serves little purpose but to give leisure-class students a chance to make expensive (in both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs) connections while students on a budget who take classes instead of fetching coffee and making copies are left out in the cold.
Or, to put it another way, it allows students who already have connections, usually via their parents, to make even more of them.
Given that the standard American undergraduate degree is basically not worth much, and American students only catch up to their foreign peers in the expensive world of grad school, the 3/4-year thing is a wash, and if it saves a few thousand dollars in terms of debt burden, it’s probably not a bad thing. It’s not really addressing the structural problems with American education, though.
There is a reason why students come from Europe to the USA and not the other way around:
Actually, it does happen the other way around, and increasingly often for certain subjects where the overseas tuition rate is competitive with domestic fees.
because the US system is actually much more flexible (you’re not totally up the creek if you change your mind while in school.)
This is true, though the reason for that flexibility is that the first two or three years of college in the US are really just about completing the work that wasn’t done at high school.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Why, “Man is the measure of all things.” Word.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:49 am
So what exactly is the problem here? According to MY:
“you can wind up generating a higher quality of graduate through pure selection effect. And that improves your reputation, and thus your fundraising and your applicant pool.”
The key to this quotes is “you can wind up generating a higher quality of graduate…”
Does it matter why? If I have a plumber and he does a great job of fixing my sink, I don’t care if he does that by paying his workers more, or by sprinkling pixie dust in the toilet and chanting to elves. All I care about is the sink.
So I guess the question is what the “product” of higher education is and should be. The quest for some metric of “quality” indicates that we want an objective measure of what people learn, or something. But I think that’s going to be impossible to measure. On the other hand, if what the college offers is a signal to employers/grad schools and other interested observers, the current system appears to do a good job of that. As MY points out, the colleges do seem to know how to “improve the quality of their graduates.” Whether this service is worth $200,000 for four years is another question.
To answer this question, I might pose it to MY himself. He went to Harvard. Was it “worth” it? If he had to do it all over again, would he choose Queens College? Something in the SUNY system? A community college?
October 20th, 2009 at 10:53 am
JustMe’s last couple questions are fair ones for the humanities. After all, it isn’t certain what our (I teach in the humanities) students are supposed to be taking away from their education. Or rather, it is often clear, but there’s no good “numerator” for it. The idea of thinking “better” or “more critically” seems to approximate the general goal of a humanities education, and IMO it’s a laudable, important one. The trouble is that it can’t be easily measured by comparing incoming SAT scores to outgoing GRE scores, as Matt B suggests. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m also not convinced that trying to trim a year off a typical college education (whatever that is) is something we should be striving for.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Hopefully if Matt had to do things over again he’d get put in less of a shit house. Kirkland sucks.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Re StevenAttawell at 22:
“Here’s where you’re wrong – the Ivy curricula vary tremendously, from Columbia’s Core Curriculum, to Brown’s make-your-own-major.”
—————-
Yes, yes –but that was my point. They all teach irrelevant trivia while leaving the important stuff unmentioned and unspoken. Rearranging the low value clutter in various ways does not matter.
Do ANY of those schools teach the following as a Core Course:
The Global Power Structure: How it Controls, Shapes, and Manages the Mass of Humanity
A rough example –just to give the idea
a) Major Global Military Powers: Relative Power Rankings, Strengths and Weaknesses of Each Power, Nations which can project major power beyond their borders, Nuclear Powers and relative capabilities,relative military expenditures, Growth Trends, Disruptive Technologies Arriving in Next 10 years, Major Global Transport corridors and chokepoints , Alliances
b) Major Economic Powers: Relative Power rankings, strengths and Weaknesses of Each, Major trade powers, relative wealth rankings, Growth Trends, Mid Term Disruptive Technologies, Essential Raw Materials and their locations and remaining stocks/depletion rates,
c) Detailed Domestic Power Structure of each Major Military and Economic Power : Major Holders of Wealth, Major Political Groups and their Agendas, National Input-Output Economic Matrices, Exports/Imports, Flow-Of-Funds Accounts,
What is subject to change laws that may be changed by national governments
d) Major Population Powers: size, level of education, age cohorts, , demographical changes over next 20 years
e) Major Technological changes arriving in next 30 years and their likely impacts
f) Disruptive events that could significantly impact the above: pandemics, resource depletion, environmental changes,
religious crusades,etc.
h) Mechanisms for Social Control:
1) How the US Constitution Protects Holders of Great Wealth (aka strategic purchase of US senators from small states)
2) Foucault Et Al
3) How the News Media Lies to You: That’s What It’s There For
g) How the Individual can survive and thrive
1) Survivalism in the short term
2) Survivalism in the long term for major catastrophes
3) Entrepreneurism
4) Skills of the Spy, Activist, and Insurgent
October 20th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I agree with Carl. Kirkland is for pussies.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:59 am
What we DO have is a rapidly growing number of students who place into remedial courses, which makes Lamar Alexander look like a big fat idiot.
There are a variety of reasons for this but the two biggest are: the effect of No Child Left Behind in essentially shortening the school year by two months. One of those months is now taken up by drill and kill exercises in how to take multiple choice exams. The other is just play time. Once the high stakes test is over, there is nothing left that is important to do, and anything that you do isn’t important anyway since it won’t affect the test scores.
The other is the drive to equate rigor with difficulty. This has led to the cramming down of advanced material into earlier and earlier grades. Many schools now do matrix algebra in eighth grade and regular algebra in fourth, well before they are developmentally appropriate and at a point where they can be regarded as little more than a collection of meaningless recipes.
I teach at an elite college. Well over half of our incoming freshman science majors place into two semesters of pre-calculus. They are simply not prepared for college. The statistics for remedial english are equally depressing. And it didn’t used to be the case.
If students are already starting a year behind intellectually, and are not positioned to do college level work, AND you propose to lop a year off the end of college, you have become a two year college.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:02 am
1) Re Craig at 31: “After all, it isn’t certain what our (I teach in the humanities) students are supposed to be taking away from their education. Or rather, it is often clear, but there’s no good “numerator” for it. ”
Given that the Humanities has been engaged in a 3000 year long Great Conversation — and has yet to come to any firm conclusions of any value — I think our numerator should be to scrap the Humanities until they dispense with the airy bullshit and come up with something tangible –vice con games for the Rubes from the countryside.
2) Re Craig at 31: “The idea of thinking “better” or “more critically” seems to approximate the general goal of a humanities education, and IMO it’s a laudable, important one.”
Er ..as in : “Give me $200,000 and 4 years of your life and I will give you an education that will leave you unemployed and in great debt 4 years hence”
ha ha ha. Good one.
Although that is an “education” in a sense.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I heard that Kirkland is the house with the highest incidence of pederasty. Doesn’t surprise me one bit.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:08 am
This sounds like the typical Republican anti-intellectual hostility to a liberal arts education. Of course it is possible to have a 3-year program: it is common in Europe. This comes at the cost of any liberal arts component: everyone specializes right away.
Yep. You want to cut down on indoctrination by liberal professors as much as possible.
Some of the best courses I took as an undergrad were GE classes outside my major area. And even apart from those courses, spending four years as an undergrad exposed me to all sorts of people and ideas that were most important to me.
Also, for many students universities backfill writing and math skills that should have been learned in HS. All the more reason not to cut down time in college.
@30 Some universities most certainly turn out better students than others, though a great deal of that is a function of, I think, the quality of students that enter that university.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Er.. post 37 was made by an imposter, not by myself.
Besides, those who know me know that I would doubt whether Harvard has the vigor to even engage in pederasty. Eunuchs don’t have sex lives.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Re jmo’s question at 20: “Are you being serious…?”
Of course not — for the reason you go on to mention.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I have a three year bachelor degree, but I’d be skeptical of the value of such a degree in a system like America’s where you don’t specialise early. There are huge swathes of my field I couldn’t cover in anything but superficial depth despite spending three years studying nothing but English Literature (well, I did a term of Latin but it didn’t actually count toward my degree).
October 20th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Not enough vigor? That’s not what your mom said during her threeway with Ben Bernanke and Pete Seeger in the Kirkland House basement.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:15 am
My senior year of public high school, I dual-enrolled in my local state university, with tuition paid for entirely by the government (whether the state directly through the university or my local school district, I don’t know), and I was able to graduate in four semesters, including one summer, with a bachelors.
I did wind up having to take remedial english my last semester of college due to a requirement to take an english composition course and it being the only qualifying course available that would fit in my class schedule.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Don (36), we seem to agree on one thing: $200,000 is too much money to pay for a humanities degree. I think it should be taxpayer funded, just like it is elsewhere.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:21 am
If universities really educated, then the undergraduate would spend his first year just in figuring out what he wanted to study. Plus DOn Williams’s Patented Core Course partially defined in post 33 above.
PS Item G-3 in the Course –Entrepreneurialism — should include an intro session: Why You will be a Slave to Billionaires Smart Enough NOT to be in this Class with You –Unless you DROP OUT NOW!
October 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Matt B @12: There should be enough input (SAT, ACT, AP, IB) and output (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, EIT, etc) data to arrive at some utility of higher ed
Do we have any reason to believe that what you’ve learned in college has anything to do with GRE and LSAT scores? I don’t recall having had a puzzle-solving class or a tenth-grade Algebra 2 / Trig class in college. I guess college keeps your test-taking mind honed, and if you’re a non-scientist who has to take a few quantitative classes for distribution requirements, then that might keep your quantitative mind honed for the quantitative parts of the graduate/professional school standardized tests.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:23 am
I believe your last two sentences, but not the first. The arms race in elite college admissions has meant that most applicants won’t even merit consideration by the admissions committee unless they’ve taken AP Calculus, especially if they claim to want to be science majors.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I think, however, that any innovation around this theme is ultimately going to be hampered by the same problem that befalls nearly all efforts to provide cost-effective higher education: Nobody knows what the numerator is.
I hear radio spots (targeting, one presumes, “busy professionals”) advertising the quickness with which one can obtain a graduate degree at this or that institution. I agree with some of Matt’s thoughts here, but I suspect on this one point it’s just that there’s not much demand for rapidly-acquired bachelor’s degrees. Young people apparently enjoy the four year college experience, and are (shockingly!) usually in not much of a hurry to enter the real world.
Although, now that I think about it, some of these spots do advertise rapid bachelor’s degree programs, too. I bet Matt just doesn’t listen to much in the way of AM/FM radio (a prime advertising vehicle for reaching “busy professionals”).
Indeed, now that I think about is some more, I’d argue that higher education is an industry that actually exhibits quite a bit of innovation, and aggressive efforts to serve customers. There’s an aggressive financing sector. And lots of competition. And thousands of small niche schools (trade schools, that is). And a fairly robust use of the internet. It’s just that there’s kinda two segments: the traditional sector serving the under 25 crowd, and the entrepreneurial sector focusing on oldsters.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Re Craig at 44: “$200,000 is too much money to pay for a humanities degree. I think it should be taxpayer funded, just like it is elsewhere.”
I agree — if someone is going to spend their life begging for various forms of Welfare, then you might as well break him in at the start.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:37 am
What’s the numerator? What’s the fraction? How about expected return on investment (i.e., average salary) divided by expected cost? And isn’t this something that people and universities calculate anyway? Schools can rank each other within a given discipline based on that ratio. And the benefit of three-year vs. four-year education (at a given institution) then becomes obvious.
I doubt the University of California system has this problem.
I’m not sure this is a problem. The academic quality of students and faculty should determine the prestige of a university. It shouldn’t depend on how many theories du jour they’re willing to try.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:39 am
As many commenters have pointed out, it’s already possible to get a 3-year degree at most universities by taking summer courses. I know several people who have done so. The only difficulty involved is scheduling, since the major concentration coursework is generally set up on a 4 year timeline and some classes are not available in certain semesters.
So the question is this: whose interest is served by organizing a public university around the model of a 3 year degree as the default option.
Universities? Maybe not. They’ll need more teaching staff during the summer sessions and keep more buildings open during the high-energy-usage summer months, so they’ll likely have to hire more adjunct faculty and raise tuition and fees. With higher turnover they’ll be able to educate more students with the same facilities, but the incentives would push toward being degree mills that provide fewer services and fewer elective courses.
Lower-income students? Maybe not. The overall cost of attending school will be lower, but it would almost certainly result in higher monthly payments and reduce the opportunities for part-time jobs, thereby increasing the reliance on debt financing.
The zombie student loan industry, which continues to parasitically feed on a function the government can and does provide for fewer tax dollars by buying off blue dog democrats, and seems well on its way to surviving Obama’s attempts to drive a stake through its heart? You betcha.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:44 am
The key to this quotes is “you can wind up generating a higher quality of graduate…”
Does it matter why?
Yes. Selection effect means you’re not really educating anyone any better than anyone else is, you’re just rounding up the smartest people you can find and declaring them “yours”. Now your graduates are smarter than anyone else’s, so pour yourself some champagne and call it a day.
This is not improving the cause of education. And it’s not a business plan that can be expanded to the whole sector. But it happens at all educational levels and it’s mainly responsible for the status of “elite” institutions.
Refusing to let ignorant people into your school is a form of education the way refusing to let sick people into your hospital is a form of health care. The problem doesn’t go away, you’ve just redefined it as not *your* problem. The government doesn’t have that luxury.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:45 am
I am actually using this- because it’s such an absolute no-brainer as policy- as my personal yardstick of whether our system has become so hopelessly corrupt that its level of dysfunction has reached 100%. As you say, it’s not looking good.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:46 am
“Do we have any reason to believe that what you’ve learned in college has anything to do with GRE and LSAT scores?”
SAT scores predict GRE scores pretty well: which college you attend seems to have no effect. Looking at that, it would seem that between-college differences are all sorting.
College costs _have_ gone up. Actual costs, not just what the student pays. The main reasons seem to be growing administrative overhead and much lower teaching loads.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Re Gmor etc at 50: “And isn’t this something that people and universities calculate anyway? Schools can rank each other within a given discipline based on that ratio. ”
————–
Er.. if you look at the academic peer ratings of Universities in US News and World Report, you will find that there is a DIRECT CORRELATION with the size of the university’s endowment — and hence with the salary, benefits and security that that university can provide to an academic.
ha ha ha
Harvard is highly rated because it is Exceptionally Rich, NOT because it is Exceptionally Smart. Whenever it needs Smart in some area, it just hires it away from a lesser known institution.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I thought the ideal goal of higher education was to produce an indisputable national football champion via a tournament of poorly paid minor league teams.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I teach at an elite college. Well over half of our incoming freshman science majors place into two semesters of pre-calculus. They are simply not prepared for college.
I believe your last two sentences, but not the first. The arms race in elite college admissions has meant that most applicants won’t even merit consideration by the admissions committee unless they’ve taken AP Calculus, especially if they claim to want to be science majors.
Oh, I’m sure they have taken AP Calculus, but that doesn’t mean they can place out of it (or even into it) based on an actual math placement test used for math and science majors at an actual college. AP Calculus in high school is pretty much a joke. It’s almost impossible to learn any actual math in a high school, though they will teach you nursery rhymes that allow you to get answers, which of course ignores the fact that the entire purpose of calculus is how to ask the question.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Well, you know, it’s possible to learn everything you need to know for a career in just two years – and learn it well.
The trick lies in knowing what you need to know ahead of time
As to the rest, it’s possible to graduate in three instead of four years if you take on an increased course load. Will you learn as much, or graduate with as high a G.P.A. as you would have otherwise? Probably not. As it is now, too much material is being crammed into the course loads already, at least on the math side in the lower-level courses. You get, for example, people who really should have a trigonometry class before going on to calc, but are told that “it’s not absolutely necessary”, and that “any trig you really need will be covered in class.” Practically, that results in weeks being wasted in covering elementary trig for the students who haven’t been exposed to it, and worse, the remaining material being rushed through in the shortened time.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Exactly. Ivy League schools sell rosters of high school kids with high SATs to prospective employers.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
When evaluating overall school “quality”, I agree that the results can be distorted by a high-qualified student body. You’re forgetting the other issues pointed out in the thread: refusing to let ignorant people into your school means less time wasted on remedial instruction and less slowing down of advanced classes to fill in the background information that less-well-qualified students might have missed.
A hospital that wants to focus on improving the cardiovascular fitness of marathon runners is probably well-served in sending chronic asthma patients elsewhere.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Do we have any reason to believe that what you’ve learned in college has anything to do with GRE and LSAT scores?
There are GRE subject tests in addition to the general verbal + math + analytical one that everyone takes. I happened to take the Engineering one, but few grad schools required it.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Re: This sounds like the typical Republican anti-intellectual hostility to a liberal arts education. Of course it is possible to have a 3-year program: it is common in Europe. This comes at the cost of any liberal arts component: everyone specializes right away
WTF?
“Specializing right away” is what students do in those well-known Republican strongholds of Sweden and Denmark. As well as in most of the rest of the world outside the United States. There’s nothing ‘Republican’ about it. If anything, it’s the idea of a liberal arts education where you _don’t_ specialize till very late which is a relic of an older, aristocratic model of education, and in the eyes of many people, not well adapted for an egalitarian society in which education is intended to be available to all qualified people.
Frankly, I think that the American undergraduate educational system would do well to cut out the fluff and BS, and focus more on actual learning (with an eye towards getting people to specialize right from the start). Less English Literature classes, more subjects where the right answer is objective and unambiguous. Also get rid of the insane expenditures on collegiate football and basketball teams, which is something of a pet peeve of mine.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Hector,
I’ve agreed with you twice in two days – I’m scared… very scared.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
That’s a funny definition of egalitarian. In the United States, anyone with the drive to do so can get a college education: part time, at night, and/or via community colleges. In the “egalitarian” societies, you are given an exam early on in high school to determine whether or not your will pursue a college education.
Then they would have less time to learn all of the philosophical and theological things you would expect of them.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Also get rid of the insane expenditures on collegiate football and basketball teams, which is something of a pet peeve of mine.
Hector, that shit makes money. Women’s volleyball and the rest of the Title IX crap don’t. If we eliminated men’s football and basketball universities would be poorer.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
To follow Hector’s recommendation to cut out the fluffy subjective classes, I’d hope that kids focus on The Classics: Physics, math, chemistry, and biology.
Too much of technical education tries to teach a narrow subject in a short time frame, so that you can go out and Make Money Today. Which is fine, until your job is shipped overseas or you realize that you hate your boss.
In my very humble experience, more time spent on basic science subject prepares you to pick up new skills on your own. Plus, you end up really understanding all this very neat stuff.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
When I was going to high school here in Ontario, we had 5 years of high school – if you wanted to go to an Ontario university you had to go through grade 13. The tradeoff was that we could get a 3 year university degree.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
“In the United States, anyone with the drive to do so can get a college education: part time, at night, and/or via community colleges. In the “egalitarian” societies, you are given an exam early on in high school to determine whether or not your will pursue a college education.
”
If you’re going to include night school and part time education as “a college education”, there’s nothing stopping you doing that in Europe. And in the UK, anyone can enrol at the Open University (over 200,000 people are enrolled at the moment) and can get bachelors and masters degrees or a PhD.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I’m with Sam M, above — I suspect the key thing that makes a good school better than a mediocre school is having better students, better TAs, and better professors (probably in that order), not some kind technocratic tweaking of the curriculum. If this is right, though, then the dysfunctionalities of elite American universities are inevitable.
Students are locked in an arms race to get into the top schools. There’s no way to mitigate the competitive pressure, because “winning” really produces an objective benefit. It’s a sort of natural monopoly: you can’t make 20 schools as good as the 10 best schools, because *being* one of the 10 best schools is what makes them good.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
there’s nothing stopping you doing that in Europe.
As I under it you can’t attend university in Germany without an Arbitur. An Arbitur is a series of tests equivalient to the US AP Exams. If you don’t pass you don’t get it. If you “don’t test well” you S.O.L.
As I also understand you only have a chance of passing your Arbitur is you go to gymnasium – if the decision is made when you’re 10 that you’re not college material – again you’re SOL… unless you find a means of independently studying and passing the exam.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Actually the data I’ve seen don’t clearly support that. A CEO of a major corporation, for example (since you seem to be talking primarily about material benefits) is more likely to have graduated from one of the major land-grant universities than from an Ivy school. Before the go-go days came to a crashing halt, by the major pathway to big bucks for Harvard grads was via one particular, fairly narrow channel- Wall Street. I’m thinking that’s looking a bit less attractive at the moment (though the government certainly is doing its best to keep that gravy train running, at your and my expense.)
October 20th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Americans’ neverending quest for academic credentials without any actual academic knoweldge is always funny to watch.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Everyone is more likely to have graduated from one of the major land-grant universities than from an Ivy League school. It’s of interest whether CEOs of major corporations are more likely to have graduated from Ivy League schools than your average person.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Re: That’s a funny definition of egalitarian. In the United States, anyone with the drive to do so can get a college education: part time, at night, and/or via community colleges. In the “egalitarian” societies, you are given an exam early on in high school to determine whether or not your will pursue a college education.
And yet, those societies manage to be more egalitarian, at least with respect to income, than we are. Funny how that works.
No doubt the Scandinavian system s*cks for those people who don’t start off high school doing well. But our system has costs too, a lot of them, and not all of them financial.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I believe the answer to that one is probably also at least a qualified “no”. Of the 2006 Fortune 50 CEOs only 7 went to Ivy League schools. Given the small sample size, the obvious fact that going to an Ivy League school and coming from a privileged background in the first place are hardly independent variables, and the fact that quite a few went to definitely non-”elite” schools, I don’t think that’s actually such an impressive advertisement for the down-the-road advantages of an Ivy education.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
academic credentials without any actual academic knoweldge
Huh?
E&Y or Deloitte higher people from decent schools because they know they are (relatively) smart and hard working and if they send you out to set up a new materials management system at some Midwest manufacturing company you’ll be able to figure most of it out yourself.
The fact that you got an “A” in “Theory of Compilers” just means you can learn random shit in a reasonable amount of time – not that Theory of Compilers is every going to be usefull in your career.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
As I under it you can’t attend university in Germany without an Arbitur.
I don’t deny that traditional, bricks and mortar universities are far more restrictive academically in Europe than in the US. But the comment I mentioned specifically included night school and part time education. You don’t generally need qualifications for those, even in Europe. And, at least in the UK where I have most experience, you can get proper, respected degrees from the OU, which requires no qualifications.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
If a student is on financial aid, then they are expected to work 10-20 hours/week during the semester and during the winter and summer breaks. The three year option would only be viable if the student contribution was close to zero.
@1 I’d like to see some evidence of this – USC
USC actively pursued increasing the “quality” of its undergraduate student body by offering full scholarships and other perks to Merit Scholars and other high achieving students. From 1994-2008 the number of Merit Scholars enrolling more than tripled and USC reached the top five in that measurement. Focusing on high achieving students paid enormous dividends in increasing the quality of the applicant pool. In 1996 USC had an admit rate of 72%. Ten years later it was at 25% and the average SAT score of an admit had increased by over a 150 points.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I believe the answer to that one is probably also at least a qualified “no”. Of the 2006 Fortune 50 CEOs only 7 went to Ivy League schools…going to an Ivy League school and coming from a privileged background in the first place are hardly independent variables … I don’t think that’s actually such an impressive advertisement for the down-the-road advantages of an Ivy education.
Whoa, you’re answering two different questions here. 35% Ivy is, quite obviously, far more than the general population. Whether whatever they learn from that Ivy League education (obviously not spelling or grammar) is responsible for that 35% is a different question. And while there is a strong correlation between being rich and well-connected to begin with, going to an Ivy, and becoming a successful businessman are correlated, it’s premature to say that the “Ivy League” part of that means nothing. It may not mean much, but we don’t know, for example, how many of those 7 Ivy League CEOs were rich and connected to begin with vs. the other 43 CEOs.
October 20th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Sigh. The problem is that people don’t tend to know whether or not some bit of knowledge will be useful ahead of time. Those hundreds of hours I spent on measure theory, Lp spaces, etc? Wasted time – I’m an algebraist. But I didn’t know that’s what I’d be doing when I took those classes. And the same could be said of any profession – law, medicine, engineering, etc. Yes, it would be a very nice trick indeed if I could know ahead of time exactly which parts of education I’d be using, and which parts I wouldn’t. Since that’s not the case, I did what most people do and covered my bases, rather than hoping I’d get lucky on what I did decide to study.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:05 am
One thing that always seems to be missing in discussions of higher education is an evaluation of the results. Considering the huge dysfunction of the present global system, and the fact that it’s mostly run by college graduates, it would seem that the educational system is simply, and obviously, a massive failure.
There is certainly something salvageable there but the enterprise as a whole needs to be re-thought.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Matt,
Theory and numerators be damned
In England virtually all BA degrees take 3 years – and that is with the same 14 week long summer vacations and lengthy Easter and Christmas breaks that seem to be standard across the Anglosphere.
In fact our only private university (Buckingham) has cut this down to just two years by cutting back on those vacations and teaching 4 full terms a year.
My niece who has just started her university degree course over here (in the admittedly not hugely onerous subject of Public Relations) actually feels seriously ripped-off as she is effectively paying for less than 7 hours of class-time a week.
What possible explanation can there be for our being able to cram into 3 or even 2 years a degree course that American students and teachers seem hard pressed to complete in 4?
Are our degrees any less rigorous? – certainly not.
Are American students of such low quality that even in elite universities they need to spend a whole year on foundation courses that barely bring them up to the standard of an English school-leaver? (which believe me is not all that high these days).
Certainly this is exactly what a former tutor who is now a full Professor at Harvard told me.
I wonder myself if there is an analogy with your healthcare funding problem.
Although students are now expected to pay some of their own fees English universities are still largely funded by a single-payer state grant.
As a result of having to go cap in hand to a parsimonious and rather philistine state for funding, English universities deliver relatively cost-effective and high quality tuition.
They also manage to exert some – but not quite enough – pressure further down the educational food chain to ensure that the students that they receive are not completely illiterate and innumerate and can begin undergraduate study at 18 wthout what amounts to remedial teaching first.
Despite being supposedly more market-driven, American universities have clearly become bloated behemoths with legions of tenured staff paid multiples of what their European colleagues earn, grandiose facilities, what amount to professional sports teams maintained largely for prestige reasons and so on.
Yes as with healthcare the US system at its high end produces world-beating results – but does it really have to be so vastly expensive and does it really provide the best quality education to the non-elite masses of students?
If Comrade Obama wants a theme for his second term making all state subsidies to universities dependent on their providing three year degrees and cutting the real cost of education to the student and taxpayer accordingly sounds like a real winner to me.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I hadn’t closely read the Lamar Alexander piece so missed the stat that it takes 6 years and seven months for an average US student to complete a Bachelors degree.
If that’s the average what are the outliers?
That is simply laughable and in any other business than education or country other than America would be regarded as grossly exploitative of the market.
(’OK I can easily build your house extension in three months – but because you clearly don’t know or give a fuck I am going to drag it out to six or seven months and charge you for every extra hour – and at the end of it you’ll recommend me to all your friends because I took such exquisite care over every detail and never put you under the slightest pressure to actually decide what colour you want the walls or what style of light fittings you need’)
On these sorts of figures could you not afford to fully state-fund and even pay a liveable maintenance grant to every undergraduate student as long as they completed in three years?