All of the Ivy League schools have proven remarkable for their inability to innovate, sitting idly with more than $100 billion in capital while startups such as University of Phoenix revolutionized American higher ed. Yale University in particular supplied some excellent material for “Universities and Economic Growth”, with a professor from one of their most popular courses spending a full 22.5 minutes of a lecture giving tuition-paying students the street address of a bookstore that had gone out of business some years earlier, reeling off the names of important people he knows, and discussing the content of courses other than the one being taught. But the $50,000 per year well has not run dry. This New York Times story reveals that Yale administrators were unable to answer correctly when asked whether or not a particular person had received a Ph.D. from the university. Perhaps it was the commonness of her name, “Shin Jeong-ah” …
3 thoughts on “Yale University in the news”
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If you believe in the signaling model (i.e. that a diploma from an elite institution draws its value from prestigious scarcity, not the actual content of the education, the tuition will essentially converge towards the 99th percentile of US wages, or the inverse of whatever the desired proportion of ivy leaguers is. Course content and professioral involvement is irrelevant to what is essentially a potlatch.
As inequalities in income distribution in the US increase, the Ivy League schools will essentially revert to what they were in the 19th century, a haven for the sons of the monied elite, no matter how cretinous. This in turn will fuel their irrelevance and ultimate fall, as people with drive and brains but no trust fund will eventually find a way to route around them. Statistics already show there is no medium to long term benefit in terms of earning power to show for the price premium for a prestige school.
I’m not sure I’d agree with you on the usefulness of the UoP model. From what I understand, the courses are prepared centrally, and are delivered by “facilitators” across their hundreds of campuses. The person delivering the course may or may not be familiar with the material — he may just be reading it out. The quality of instructors is said to vary widely from campus to campus — its the luck of the draw. Also google for “plagiarism and University of Phoenix”
When I did my MBA, I decided to avoid both UoP and online schools and instead, went with a relatively small but well regarded school in RI, Bryant University. The overall educational experience was excellent; virtually all of the professors were talking about research and consulting work that they personally done, and could thus speak authoritatively. The total cost was nowhere near the $50,000 figure. In fact my whole education cost less than $25,000 including books.
There are plenty of smaller, lesser known universities that offer a pretty decent education — without having to go to commercial providers of questionable quality.
Jagadeesh: You’re disagreeing with a point that I did not make, i.e., that University of Phoenix is the best school in the world. I said that UoP and similar upstarts have revolutionized higher ed and that is certainly true for UofP’s 500,000 students. Those 500,000 students did not sign up to an online branch of an Ivy League’s extension school (e.g., Harvard Extension, which aims to make some of Harvard’s teachings available to a broader audience, but which was unable to move beyond the methods of instruction that were state of the art at the time of Harvard’s founding in 1636). It could well be the case that the Ivy League schools would have done a better job teaching the hundreds of thousands of University of Phoenix graduates. However, as the Ivies made no attempt to innovate or compete, we cannot know for sure.