A New York Magazine article about the value of higher education, "The University Has No Clothes" is making the rounds on FB and Twitter. It's a decent length article that explores the issue in some depth but the thesis boils down to this: a college or university education is a huge investment for a young person and their family. It creates an enormous debt hole before they even have employment. The question is: is the return on investment worth it? As a staggering statistic: student loan debt is outpacing credit card debt for the first time in history.
Not surprisingly, a number of folks, particularly entrepreneurial advocates, say 'no'. The argument is that the two to four years that person is paying to learn skills and gain knowledge of questionable value, they could instead be gaining real-world experience and generating entrepreneurial energy and value for themselves and others. I see this as motivated by the same cultural forces that have seen the positioning of social entrepreneurship against traditional NGO models.
There are a number of points advanced in favor of the anti-higher education thesis:
- It's a closed system - college grads only hire college grads resulting in price gouging for those who have no choice but to attend
- The cost of college has gone up 10x over the last 30 years while inflation has only risen 3x. Implication: it's a scam and those running it know.
- It's another bubble (like tech and housing) - "hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns"
- It's immoral to ask millions of youths to incur debt for an education for which they are ill-equipped. I.e. an indictment of primary and secondary education.
- Corollary: we should push more people into vocational programs instead of college
- You don't learn to read, think and network in college; you learn to drink and chase women (yes, the male bias persists)
- Youthful energy should be spent on industry, travel and/or charity instead of school. You can return to school later
- There's a glut of students (over-demand): 70% of high schoolers go to college/university now vs. 48% 50 years ago
- Only a little more than half of the students who go actually end up getting their bachelor's degree (the US has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world)
Additionally, there is the claim that the quality of higher education has dropped. A direct quote from the article:
Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa...In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”
Ouch. The article is concerned to take an economic look at the value of higher education, and pays only lip service to the non-economic value of an education (i.e. to refute the 'chase women' point above). It makes no attempt to enumerate and give an economic value to the 'soft' value of an education - exposure to the wealth of knowledge of ours and different cultures, community with others outside of your limited social, economic and geographical sphere, opportunities for national and global travel, the ability for individual growth and experiment in a structured environment, etc. Rather, it asks whether higher education is an investment (more money over a lifetime of earning vs. high school diploma) or a luxury good - a status symbol that can be leveraged for greater opportunities.
As should be evident, the article lacks a little focus, but the implication is clear: for most people, higher education is way too expensive, doesn't provide promised value or does a terrible job at it, that much of what you learn isn't of worth (read: doesn't translate into money) or you can explore and learn yourself, and/or it limits your options. A self-directed, entrepreneurial path is preferable and the article ends describing a Fellowship designed to suss out and support budding entrepreneurs.
I'm not going to argue the point about the value of education - to me it's self evident. The author notes that two strong opponents of the higher education system cited are grads themselves and I certainly wouldn't be writing this blog post or doing PEL if I hadn't attended both undergrad and grad school. I'm also no opponent of entrepreneurship - I've tried myself and plan on doing so again. And it's not at all clear that entrepreneurs are stifled by higher education. To cite two paragons in my field, Michael Dell and Steve Jobs both started college and dropped out when needed to found Fortune 50 companies. [Side note: Jobs went to my alma mater Reed College and Paul Allen wanted to go too - check out this article. He didn't, but he did drop out after two years and go to Boston to hang with Bill Gates. So Hi-Ed doesn't seem to destroy tech entrepreneurial spirit anyway. Oh, and the article mentions Reed grads who went on to found companies too.]
My concern is whether PEL - and other podcasts/blogs like it - can be cited as evidence that you can "explore and learn yourself", bypassing higher education altogether. If you put all the resources of the interwebs together, can you not, with the appropriate self-discipline and engagement of like-minded fellow souls, equal or surpass what you get at august institutions of higher learning at no less time but certainly a fraction of the cost? Are you better off investing your time in us and our peers instead of some mid-level public institution? In short, are we encouraging a move towards the immediate creation of value and entrepreneurial energy vs. a smooth entry into adulthood through the academy?
My answer would be "no", but it is only justified with a true exploration of the value of education I avoided above. The only way to counter the claims laid out in the article is to state a case for the non-economic value of higher education, perhaps combined with an economic analysis of the true realities of the entrepreneurial spirit and evidence of its rarity. Entrepreneurs are typically unaware or unsympathetic to the differences between themselves and others and unrealistically generalize their experience. A system which rewards the qualities that few possess at the expense of the majority is hardly a suitable replacement for what we have, however flawed it may be. PEL is intended for all who are curious, but it wouldn't be what it is - or even possible - without Mark, Wes and I having spent the time studying, debating, reading, networking and the like on subjects we were both interested in and not, within the confines of the ivory tower. Then again, we aren't making any money off of this, so...
--seth
The argument against higher education is compelling for all its substantive points relayed by Seth. On the other hand, is more entrepreneurialism the ‘alternative’? Isn’t the ‘financial racket’ aspect of higher ed itself driven by the culture of entrepreneurialism? On the one hand you have edu institutions increasingly finding that their only normative justification, legitimation, authorization — their raison d’etre — is to be science and technology factories, rather than to fulfill the antiquated, traditional cultural-spiritual mission of the humanities. On the other hand you have the entrepreneurial culture of business simply asking edu institutions to drop any remaining pretense to the latter. They are two sides of the same beast: a consumer culture without ends or aims beyond self-perpetuation of the production-consumption cycle.
On the other hand, I did not come from a family of any means. If not for the opportunity to go to college vis-a-vis the universalizing or liberalizing of access to it, I wonder whether I would have developed the ability to this very sort of judgment about the system.
Cheers,
Tom
Well put!
Clarification: while my argument implies I have four hands, I do in fact only have two.
Perhaps the problem is the advent of “Dead Studies”, ‘Grateful Dead Studies’ that is:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2011/05/06/improvisational-structure-in-dark-star-1969-1972.aspx
-tom
Though we should probably agree with Bob Weir about this:
“It’s risky to teach popular culture. People still look down their noses at it … People need to get over it. Pop culture is American culture.”
http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/73031/
-tom
Mr. Jobs has told of his unofficial auditing of undergrad courses while at college, and of the profound impact the aesthetics in a caligraphy course had on him, and how this stayed with him as he developed the multi-font, attractive, and fun Macintosh. You could argue that all the mega-successful innovative Apple products have been further examples of applying design aesthetics to create Quality for customers. So, ‘soft’ sells!
My disillusionment with academe and departure therefrom is all about money and how it has fucked everything there. Students come with handsful of money from any number of sources (usually supplemented by full-time employment) expecting to purchase a piece of paper so they can make more money. Unlike any other product one purchases, students want the least quality education for their dollar, typically seeking instructors who demand little for an A. And forget Ds and Fs – even Cs – they paid too much to receive such an insult (plus they really didn’t have time to study with a 50 hr/wk job).
Despite the above state of affairs with students (I was never averse to an easy A), my main beef is with administrators and faculty, both of whom are mere ‘pigs-at-the-money-trough.’
These are the most overpaid, underworked gang of sniveling weenies on the planet. Having typical administrative positions (for which they have no developed skills) paying 6 figures and provosts easily at 7, do you wonder why tuition sucks?
Faculty have managed to never teach more than 2-4 courses A YEAR, as long as they can point to some grant dollar to which they managed to get their name attached. You ask one to teach an ‘extra’ class, or advise a student group, and witness the outstretching of a grubby, grasping little hand. They want additional compensation for passing gas!
And the quality of their work – from advising, teaching, publishing, and researching – sucks. As for community service, just as with their post-burrito efforts, they will demand extra $ for actions that demand no more effort on their part than digestion.
If the taxpayers who did not go to college only knew…The football-crazed alums, state/local policymakers, businessmen, and lawyers/politicians do know the ways of the monetary abuses at universities, but each seems to be getting something he or she wants from the institution.
So, everybody is feeding from the college trough – oink, oink.
Pirsig idyllically referred to college as the Church of Reason. It is a den of thieves.
It seems your personal experience validates the criticism about exploding salaries and bloated bureaucracy. The point about the students being part of the problem is interesting.
In the realm of sports, there is the question of whether universities are still ‘amateur’ – when the football programs are bringing in millions of dollars and everyone is making money – except the students. My view is shaped by an interest in that: the higher education “system” is not a system, it is an industry which has managed not only not to pay a cost for its raw materials (students) or product, but has managed to get them to pay for the privilege!
I suppose the capitalist criticism of academe is the same as that of government: that it isn’t run enough like a business. I think sound principles of management apply across the public, private and education sectors but the institutions don’t have the same aims and aren’t equal.
–seth
Seth
With the exception of perhaps a few highly independent and/or ideological institutions committed to one mission or another, higher ed is a governmental/capitalistic agency. The two entities equally share and control what/how programs exist. Universities are political training grounds in the humanities and behavioral sciences, and in technologies/sciences, simply perpetuations of professional automatons – proudly patriotic tools with a comfortable income to justify it all.
Let me state, that when Higher Education works, it often works very well. That said, when it fails, it can fail miserably.
As there is a strong pragmatic argument against making any changes to the parts where Higher Education works well, I think the task then becomes, to identify, of the parts that fail miserably are there any that can be improved and/or discarded.
I’ll also state that I think the pragmatic argument for the parts of Higher Education that work well, is still strong enough to overwhelm the urge to meddle with the overall Higher Education system in the case that the parts that fail can not be distinguished from the whole.
That said, to the question asked, “Does PEL Support Entrepreneurship vs. Academia?” How is this not a false dichotomy?
I think you would at minimum need to show that PEL could not do anything except support one or the other of these two. Basically, you would need to draw a 3 section venn diagram of ‘the Universe’ (everything), ‘Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Academia’, and hope that E+A = U. As E+A does not equal ‘U’, at least one of the basic premises of question is false.
Additionally, where does the imperative that either of these must be ‘supported’ originate?
Does the oceanic food chain at the bottom of the mariana trench support ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’? Or, do the mating cries of crickets on the banks of the lower Mississippi support ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’? How about the writings of Shakespeare? How about the SNL skits of Tina Fey?
To the degree that PEL is about Examining Life, and to the degree that Examining Life is an activity that reaches back well before anything that vaguely resembling what we would today label ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’, I think you are going to have to find a higher/older imperative than either of these, even if you were to assume they were obvious imperatives.
Once you have found this higher/older imperative (perhaps the ‘Examined Life’), I think the better question would be, does ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’ support the living of an ‘Examined Life’? And to the degree that they do or do not, we should judge the need of ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’, on this.
Why would we want either ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’ if/when they do not support the ‘Examined Life’? And, to the degree that PEL does support an ‘Examined Life’, who cares if it does or does not support ‘Entrepreneurship’ or ‘Academia’?
-p_a
P_A
Let me rephrase: does PEL provide legitimacy to the view that higher education is an over-priced, low return economic good that can be bypassed or supplanted?
–seth
Clearly our podcast is parasitic upon academia, in that we owe most of what we’re sharing with listeners to our experiences in it.
While I’m very glad that people can learn philosophy on their own using us and other tools, and hopefully actually reading some of the texts themselves, the missing element is help with your own writing. Posting to forums is something, but doesn’t really do the job, as people are generally too polite to tell you when you’re not making yourself clear. Much as I hated writing actual philosophy papers and having the prof. put question marks all over them, that was a pretty key element in improving my communications skills.
Wait, wait, wait — what about these NON-academics?: Bacon, Descartes, Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz? I’ve always found it striking that some of the most significant modern philosophy was done by non-specialists, non-academic professors like these guys. It’s really with Kant, and ever since him, that philosophy has become equated with an academic profession of technicians. Not to say that this is Kant’s fault, since it coincides with the rise of modern natural science and technology seemingly self-sufficient operations without need of philosophical considerations. Perhaps this era is coming to an end, and the advent of media like PEL express why/how philosophy shouldn’t be / shouldn’t have been / so excessively specialized and turned into an engineering-like pseudo-profession.
Should higher education be measured in terms of economic return? I like to think that truth and wealth are two completely different kinds of good and there is such a thing as selling out. Imagine, for example, that there were right-wing think-tanks funded by corporations and let’s suppose those funders have a financial interest in discrediting the notion that climate change is a real problem. See, there is something about money that corrupts our truth seeking practices and academia, for all it faults, needs to be as independent as possible. One of the most important tasks of the intellectual is to critically examine political and economic powers. You know, those are the gods of our time and so we apply good old fashioned Socratic doubt to our own consumerist pantheon.
There’s room for trade schools and such. We need people who can build stuff and fix things. But employment training and higher education are two different things. What if all the science departments were directed toward the development of consumer electronics or oil production? Tons of money would be made but science as we know it would have disappeared. What if all the artists worked for ad agencies? It’s a nightmare of inverted values, no? It feels sleazy, no? On the other hand, if market values are the measure of all things, maybe philosophers would get rich and have groupies like rock stars. They’ll produce the best ideas that money can buy, ideas that serve whoever is writing the check. Yea, and each school of thought will have its own team of cheerleaders.
*See, there is something about money that corrupts our truth seeking practices and academia, for all it faults, needs to be as independent as possible. *
Sorry, David, but that ship done sailed far, far away a long time ago.
*One of the most important tasks of the intellectual is to critically examine political and economic powers.*
Consider just one example why this never happens – there are many, but this one gets to the character of the players – I have seen it so often it is painful to watch:
After spending years grovelling at the feet of dissertation advisors and committees, out pops a green doctorate who finds a cherished tenure track position. The expectations of the new assistant prof are to keep your mouth shut, diligently seek and grab any and all grant $, and find something to write and someone who will publish it somewhere – anything, anywhere will do (quantity trumps quality, here). DO NOT OFFER YOUR OPINION on any departmental or university policy. Bow to your tenured peers who will vote on yours.
After 7 years of such indoctrination, a fearful, malleable, disillusioned, resentful, milquetoast of a creature emerges to turn the tables and inflict the same crap on the new hires. But even though they think they are now free to exist as they would have preferred to throughout the past 7 years, whoops, one learns that integrity lost is not easily regained. Ask such a person “What is your favorite color?”, and if you get an answer at all, it will likely be “Plaid.” Watch how the young professors strain to speak when giving any personal opinion or assessment.
*On the other hand, if market values are the measure of all things, maybe philosophers would get rich and have groupies like rock stars. They’ll produce the best ideas that money can buy, ideas that serve whoever is writing the check.*
I’d like to know one important idea that a philosopher has had in the last 100 years that has benefited mankind and continues to do so now.
Hi Seth,
So, just personal opinion, but along the lines of ‘to study philosophy is to learn to die’, I think ‘to study philosophy is to learn to live’. As both living and dying are not optional tasks in life, I think everyone would be better off knowing how to do one or the other well.
Also, questions of ‘over-priced’-ness, are highly philosophical questions.
Note: Again, you have 4 questions all complied into one, ‘over-priced’, ‘low return economic good’ that can be ‘bypassed’ or ‘supplanted’. If we had time, I think there is a whole debate that could be had on any of these, and any combination of these. Either side of any of these could be amply supported.
If you wanted to have fun one day, a podcast on the ‘philosophy of trade’ would be interesting. As the core problem, that I think you are getting at are the inefficiencies of trade, when the need to plan trade occurs, but the planning is done poorly due to a lag between when the planning happens, and when the outcomes occur.
But, let’s take the question of ‘pricing’.
Personally, I like the problem of bubbles, as it show very plainly, many of the problems with pricing.
The easy economic bubbles to study are those where the economic loop is short. Take the old black tulip bubble. Tulips don’t take long to grow, so as soon as you have a shortage and the price goes up, you can get stuck in an escalating bubble, which can continue until there is enough time for the bubble to pop.
Now imagine that you have the same black tulip shortage, and spike in demand, but now these tulips take 10 years to grow. You’ll have a bubble that has the same problems as the quick growing tulips, but the problem will be highly exacerbated, due to the lack of information for many years as production increases and demand increases as an input to increasing supply.
The bigger questions come up very quickly. How do you determine pricing in a black tulip bubble? Sell too low, and arbitrageurs quickly enter the market. Tell the average person that the black tulip market is just a bubble, and that they should stay out, and then you leave the whole market to be captured by people with the long-term disposable income to make highly risky (short-term) investments with an eye on the (lower risk) long-term payback. Don’t tell the average person to stay out of the market, and demand increases, increasing the price even higher and making the effects of the bubble all that more adverse.
Even when everyone know there is a problem, the problem with bubbles is much harder to solve that anyone initially realizes.
Higher-Education is the slow growing black tulip problem. You can’t ask people to stay out without risks, and you can’t ask people to stay in without risks. The least likely path is to ask people with high levels of disposable wealth to stay out.
Also, education isn’t a demand problem. Unlike black tulips, we want demand to be very high every day of every generation. Rather, Higher Education always a supply problem, and supply problems lead quickly to higher prices.
Does PEL play a role here, yes, as people get priced out of the market, they will look for secondary sources, and if there are people who are purely taking these courses because a good/entertaining Podcast does not exist, then you may have a small effect on the demand as well.
On the second set of questions as to can higher education be ‘bypassed or supplanted’. Yes, apprenticeships do this well. But, now you get into the ‘how soon do you decide who’ problem.
How do you pick the best computer programers from all the kindergarden kids? Well, perhaps the ones who’s parents are computer programers? No, its better to wait until the kids are a little older. Middle school? Well, you can tell who’s good in math by then, but computer programing has more skills than just math. Maybe after high school? Easy to find a few that are going to go on to good things in CS by the end of HS, but the industry needs more than just a few, best to wait a few more years..After a BS in CS? Yep, some good people here, grab a few more. But, the really interesting candidates are now doing Phd’s in some interesting fields. Some of these will pay out, others will not, best to wait a few more years to get the right ones for your industry.
The problem supply/demand/pricing/planning is extremely complex, and hardly one that is open to quick off-the-cuff analysis.
The bigger problem, I might suggest, is in the continuous propensity for people to reach for the ‘Ad Hominem’ explanation. Akin to, ‘The reason that Higher Education doesn’t pay out is because people in that industry are ‘thieves”.
As a rule, I’d like to suggest that Ad Hominem arguments not be accepted ‘a priori’, and that accusations of intentional ‘fraud’ and ‘theft’ be restricted to the type of evidence required by the Courts.
Personally, I have a BA in Japanese, and work in the Data Mines of Silicon Valley in a job that has nothing to do with Japanese. Was my education over priced? Of low economic return? A good that could be bypassed or supplanted?
Hindsight bias, is a very dirty lens to view the world through. You would be amazed how much money you could make if your foresight was as good as your hindsight. To hold your own foresight to a standard of your hindsight would be too high a standard to even judge yourself. How is it that we think its fair/just/reasonable to use this standard for others in areas we have but a fraction of the information that they do?
Are Universities to ask of every applicant; ‘Do you swear to take a job in the field that we train you in?”, or, should we have Universities swear, “We swear to provide opportunities for every student we admit.” Perhaps we could have every company in the Market swear “In hindsight you will feel better about our product than you did at the time you purchased it.”
The concern here is how is the Producer to know the Hindsight of the Consumer? They have a hard enough time predicting their foresight, let alone hindsight. And how are we to enforce hindsight levels of standards? Anyone can claim, no, I really didn’t like the hamburger as much as I thought the person in the picture appeared to enjoy the hamburger.. Clearly you are overpriced if you are pricing off of that picture. Let’s take my picture, and we can reset your prices to how happy I look in it…..
Having said all of that, again, I think a podcast on the ‘philosophy of trade’ would be interesting…
-p_a
*Watch how the young professors strain to speak when giving any personal opinion or assessment.*
Fast-forward to the mid-career assoc prof. The authenticity/integrity likely remains lost (integrity is related to Quality, which the prof was never focused on, nor likely ever to be). The prof has learned the lessons that you keep your real views to yourself, maintain public neutrality, privately engage in all manner of scheming for professional advancement, and remain ever-vigilant for opportunities to grab for yourself from the trough. In the latter full prof years, such creatures become ready to express their views, only no one seems to want them.
Wow, Burl. Your posts are so bitter that any legitimate point they seem to make is drowned beneath a crushing ocean of vitriol and contempt.
That said, I believe that there’s really only one thing to deduce from this article: we must make university education more affordable. It’s really as simple as that – then the “economic value” argument becomes much less poignant as a university education becomes less a market investment and more a social good, like all our other social goods, such as welfare, infrastructure and the environment.
I’m in school right now, taking comp-sci, but I wish there was an easier alternative. I’ve always had this idea that there should be valid correspondence degrees: it would be nice to study independently for most of the year, show up to an auditorium, pay a moderate price, and take a test. Passing the test would be the equivalent of completing the first year of a bachelor’s degree. Students would, of course, have an idea of what would be tested. It would be up to them to seek the information out.
This might not work for all degrees. And I’m sure many people would be scared to learn so much information without a teacher’s help. But this focus on independence would be part of the system’s strengths. Instead of being spoon-fed information, student’s would learn to learn. I see a lot of spoon-feeding at my school– student’s even ask for help, and get it, during math tests. If you can’t teach yourself, what hope do you have after school?
And about the original question: I took a phil course and dropped after 2 weeks to get a refund. I couldn’t stand paying to learn what I know I could teach myself. This podcast has done more to inspire my imagination than this or any other humanities course I’ve taken at college. Because of these facts, I am all for abolishing the humanities in the university system. It would cut down on tuition.
My favorite part:
Inevitably, perhaps, both Altucher’s rhetoric and Thiel’s philanthropy have appealed most to that segment of the college population that is bound least by the college system. With their sophistication, self-motivation, and autodidacticism, these students don’t truly need college. Lock the gates of the campus behind them and you can be reasonably certain they’ll do just fine—maybe better.
The anti-college argument suffers from survivor biase, i.e. looking at all these successful people and saying, see, they didn’t need college to do what they’re doing.
The problem comes in when you look at the 99.9% of people that didn’t go to college and were also not successful (defined in the narrow way of what our society values: wealth, influence, status).
As for PEL, it’s complimentary rather than a substitute for studying these subjects in an academic setting, if only because of the greater resources available there. I find that people who never did much with or were interested in the “humanities” underappeciate the rigor with which those subjects can be approached (though not that they always are).
Philosophy is a great example. Everyone get’s in their heads something like Hamelet’s “to be or not to be,” and think it all some wishy-washy acid trip into abstracttions. But in order to accurately and rigorously parse arguments and reason through problems takes a lot of work.
Now are those skills applicable to ventures that have economic utility? That’s a tougher question, though I think unequivocally yes. Many people defending education like to shy away from the utilitarian scoreboard and move over toward the “it’s good in and of itself” approach. But I think there’s more than enough evidence that the goals of a classic liberal arts education are beneficial to demoratic societies, and that the real problem is just figuring out how to make sure higher ed institutions continue to do so, and don’t venture off into being corporations in disguise.
Hi Ethan,
First, liked your post!
Second, I wonder if the part of education that doesn’t have an ‘economic benefit’ doesn’t need a new model.
I mean, I can understand the Higher Education Institution requiring this curriculum, either because the public think this is a necessary part of a full education, or because the shareholders believe that its part of a ‘full education’, but I wonder why the Student ultimately has to pay for this, to the degree that we acknowledge this is actually ‘without’ economic benefit to the individual.
Personally, I wish we had a dual-stage higher education system. One where they focused on the ‘economically beneficial’ part of higher education, and then a second stage after people have gone out and become economically beneficial to the World, where it was easy to go back and learn how to be a ‘full-person?’ or whatever we call someone who has the full liberal arts education….
What doesn’t seem viable, is for the Public to ask students to take on the lifetime economic task of paying for an education that they may not be able to afford, or that later causes so much interference with their later adulthood that they never get to actually live life but end up working two jobs instead….
-p_a