We Americans never worried about our public school system too much because we had a lot of good colleges. Whatever Johnny didn’t learn while his brain was on Hold for 12 years he could learn during 4 years at State U. This New York Times article has an interesting graph, however, that shows that ever fewer Americans will be able to afford college. Unless there is a big boom in free online educational resources, most of us are doomed to being as dumb as we were on the day that we left high school.
I wish that a source were cited for one quote in the article: “Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.” Can this be true if measured by credentials? It seems that one can’t spit in the street without hitting someone with a master’s degree of some sort.
Free online learning will never substitute for traditional colleges. Why? A signification portion of undergraduates are not self-motivated to learn. Most are responding to external pressures, often from their parents, who expect them to get a college education and are spending their life’s savings on tuition.
If a student signs up for a free online university, he suffers no loss if he decides he would rather alt-tab over to World of Warcraft instead of watching today’s dull lecture video. At least in a real-world lecture hall, the professor has a slightly more captive audience.
This type of student may not be the movers and shakers that the US really needs to remain relevant in today’s world, but I think these folks do comprise a big chunk of our college-educated population. They are better off for having gone to college, even if they weren’t sure at the time why they were doing it. The ends justify the means.
To paraphrase an economist: The best cure for high tuition is high tuition.
Why does the cost of college in the US always have to go up? When was the last time the prices decreased?
Maybe if everyone didn’t treat high costs an inevitability and shove all of this government money towards colleges, they might look for ways to make it cheaper.
I’m 31, and I had to drop out of college because I couldn’t afford to both go to college and eat. I am flabbergasted at how dumb the average person in my general age group (say 27-35) is, even the people with graduate degrees. Just because they have that Master’s doesn’t mean they have any intelligence; I’m noticeably smarter than the majority of them. It gets worse when you’re talking about people younger than that; I know people who are shooting for their Bachelor’s who can’t write a coherent sentence longer than 6 words, have a 7th grade vocabulary and can’t multiply or divide without a calculator.
I read an article that said college tuition has gone up over 400% in the last 20 years (don’t know where I saw that or if it’s even true, but it seems believable). I think the only reason colleges can charge so much is because students were able to secure loans. I’m thinking the cost of a college degree is about to get a lot cheaper. Schools will have to lower the cost or face closing their doors. Isn’t that how supply and demand works? Now, if the school truly needs those high tuitions to stay in business (I don’t know if they’ve been greedy over the years or their costs really have skyrocketed), then there will be a lot of campuses closing across the country.
Philip,
Try going to a good library booksale sometime.
Poke around in all the used books, the older library and school discards. Try to locate some from before, say, 1960. It won’t be hard — schools and libraries are agressively dumping these books now. Look for English titles, history books, art books, science books.
Now try reading through them. If you’re as lucky as I was recently you might find some elementary school discards from the 1920s and 30s on the topics of government, history, health, general science and poetry and literatury.
Try actually reading through them for a while, and think about the age of the student they were written for.
Now carry out part II of this experiment. Ask a friend with school-age children if you can look at their textbooks. Go to local library and find books on the same topics as the old books you found. Read through them. Note the language, not the ideas presented. See a striking difference?
I did this and was very depressed at the way things have changed for the worse.
Unfortunately, those masters are in French film criticism. My colleagues from India are astounded at the number of people in this country who have unemployable degrees. Incidentally, I notice that reading for meaning seems to be a lost art and has been replaced in the schools by reading for emotional response. Thanks to post-modern theory, students now realize that it is impossible to know the external world beyond what lies in their heads.
Perhaps this is the cycle of things, life, et al. Even if one is older, more educated, and more capable, the chances of you getting hired is still much lesser than one who is younger, lesser experienced, and much less capable.
What does this say about education?
It does not matter – the ability to conform to masses standards is all important – be it good or bad.
Is tuition 400% higher than it was 20 years ago? Well, that would be five times as high; the twentieth root of 5.0 is around 1.0838, so the would mean an average increase of 8.38% per year. (This is the miracle of compounding in its evil form.) Even for colleges, that seems a little high.
Let’s assume the journalist who wrote the article is about as good at math as your average journalist (or six-year-old), and meant to say that tuition is 400% of what it was 20 years ago — i.e. four times. That gives us 7.18% per year average increases.
Still more than the 6% per year that sticks in my head (and would give a 220% increase over the same period).
Twenty years ago, the sticker price for my Ivy League education was $36,000 a year. Even if the education is just as good now, triple that ($108,000) would be a terrible ripoff. It gets to the point where you can’t even imagine how they would spend the money, and you figure they must be burning most of it in a homecoming bonfire or something.
Richard Vedder over at the Center for College Affordability has more information than you can probably stomach about these questions:
http://collegeaffordability.blogspot.com/
I plan to homeschool my kids for college.