An unhappy lesson for US colleges

This is important, so please excuse the length!

Markets work. But sometimes they take time. That’s the uncomfortable lesson now being learnt by the US’s colleges and universities. For decades, they enjoyed a boom in demand that led them to believe that market forces didn’t apply to them. The government inflated the demand by handing out loans to any young person who wanted to attend, regardless of academic ability. Students avidly competed to get into elite colleges on the assumption that a degree would guarantee a good job; and colleges in turn sought to boost their ratings by building ever-swankier facilities and offering discounts to the best students. In recent years, the annual tuition costs of many colleges soared past $50,000 a year.

But the “higher education bubble” has now burst in a big way. With unemployment stubbornly high, a growing number of students are deciding that a college diploma is not such a great investment after all – “particularly if it entails six-figure college-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy”. This has left many private colleges desperate for custom: last year they awarded incoming freshmen an average discount rate of 45% – an “all-time high”. For institutions that are “not used to being disciplined by market forces”, and which in many cases have been run more in the interests of administrators than students, it has come as a rude shock. (Michael Barone, The Washington Examiner)

Things Michael Barone does not point out are the grade inflation that makes grading an increasingly less reliable indication of achievment, and the huge rise in the pay of college heads and administrators, who have lined their own pockets while simultaneously reducing the pay of the teaching staff. This is particularly true of adjunct professors, who do a lot of the actual work. He doesn’t mention one year contracts for university workers, nor does he mention the perverse effect of the ratings system, introduced by US News and World Report This has had the effect of prioritizing college buildings and facilities ahead of actual education and academic excellence. The worst thing of all allowing young people to think that job training courses are the same thing as education. Learning to design (violent) electronic games, for instance, is job training, which only prepares you for – designing (violent) video games. All in all the overpaid heads of American colleges and universities have a lot to answer for.

2 Comments

  1. Excellent and spot-on post. Especially agree with this: “All in all the overpaid heads of American colleges and universities have a lot to answer for,” and include the entire category of “administrators.”

  2. College graduates seem to find jobs more readily than people without further education. But some of the teaching turns out to be useless and the poorly taught pay the price. Without vital critical thinking skills, they’re less likely to get a job and more likely to lose the jobs they get than students who received a good education.

    And yet the poorly taught imagine they have had a first class education because they know no better. Employers can tell when an employee can’t think outside the box, but the employee cannot. They are being let down by an over- expanded university system that employs a proportion of incompetent teachers and is accepting kids who shouldn’t be there. Not everyone can benefit from further education.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.