In the interest of fairness and consistency– the estimable Yves Smith reacts to the Times article from this weekend on student loan debt. (I should give credit where due: I thought that article was excellent, remarkably even-handed and sober.) Suprisingly for someone so bright, Smith repeats the standard canard that our problems largely stem from students taking the wrong, “impractical” majors.
First: as I will continue to shout from the rooftops, lists of the most popular majors are dominated by those that are considered practical, and the trends largely show this “rush to practicality” growing, not shrinking. Yet we still see broad unemployment for recent graduates. Second, every major indicator is that employment is broadly depressed across almost all fields and sectors of the economy, suggesting that the fundamental problem is dependent on economy-wide factors of demand. Third, again, skilled labor is subject to supply and demand; pushing large swaths of college students into areas that have short-term demand for workers seems remarkably shortsighted to me. Fourth, Smith is overly credulous of worker self-reporting that their jobs don’t require a college degree, which is troubled by the terrible employment metrics for people without college degrees. It’s still difficult to say with a straight-face that college is not worth it. The metrics for those without college degrees are vastly worse than for those with them.
The idea that choice of major is largely determinative of a student’s post-collegiate success keeps getting thrown out there, but I have seen nothing resembling a convincing empirical case for this notion. And whatever correlations one could draw between major and future financial success would likely pale in comparison to where one went to school, and (especially) to the socioeconomic status of one’s parents, which is still about the most highly-correlative metric for a child’s eventual income. I think this narrative flourishes thanks to the “wag the dog” dynamic: if the problem is that college students are taking the wrong majors, the fix is easy. But that doesn’t appear to be the problem and the fix is not easy, and despite the constant attacks on the university in the media, nobody has offered an even remotely credible replacement.
Smith does end on the necessary takeaway: we need to make college more affordable in large part by holding costs down, but more, we need to fund it publicly again. The Times piece describes how Ohio has slashed public support for college education, at the same time as the state has eliminated its estate tax. The Ohio estate tax, like all estate taxes, was a tax on the wealthiest. Eliminating that tax while cutting funding to state universities is a straightforward transfer of resources from the less well off to the rich. We are currently wrestling with the question of what kind of society we want to have; the collapse of the job market for recent graduates undercuts our self-conception as a society of opportunity and social mobility . Governor Kasich has thrown his lot in against that self-conception, and towards a “winner take all” vision that favors low taxes on the wealthy over social mobility and opportunity for most people. What has to be impressed on voters is that this represents a choice: we can have the mobile society that we say we want, or we can have artificially, historically low taxes. We cannot have both.
liberal
Well, in terms of professional schools, it’s certainly true that there’s a bunch of people who went to law school, accumulated huge amounts of debt, and now are unemployed, IIRC.
First thing that needs to be done is make student debt dischargeable.
Hunter Gathers
Give them that choice, and voters will choose lower taxes every time. No, that’s wrong. White voters will choose lower taxes every time. We got 2 wars and 2 tax cuts that weren’t paid, the debt accumulated for those two things get blamed on the black guy who had nothing to do with them, so yeah, lower taxes.
Snarki, child of Loki
Doesn’t anyone remember recent history?
The bankruptcy “reform” that got pushed through, made it very difficult to get rid of credit card debt in bankruptcy, thanks to massive lobbying by card issuers and banks.
So what happens when there’s an economic downturn, and people have financial problems? Can’t get rid of the credit card debt, so walk away from the mortgage.
Worked out really well, didn’t it?
Villago Delenda Est
Once again, facts have a deplorable liberal bias that gets in the way of douchebag plutocrat ideology.
Roll the tumbrels. The sooner the better.
BGinCHI
That’s it, right there. Spot on.
Xboxershorts
To be fair to Yves Smith, whom I greatly respect, far too many college students ARE taking the wrong majors.
Also, too…far too many colleges are offering the wrong majors.
I refer, of course, to the pathetically wasteful MBA programs that dominated higher education for the last few decades.
r€nato
@liberal: do that, and the interest rate would skyrocket, and/or it would be much more difficult to obtain such loans. It’s the non-dischargeable status of student loans that keeps the rate relatively low.
of course, you could have the government simply hand out dischargeable student loans at a low interest rate; but the losses would pile up, it would become a scandal and before long Congress would end the program entirely.
The real issue is college and university student aid advisors telling students not to worry about how much debt they are piling up; that’s such a crock of shit and so obviously self-serving.
For most majors, there are plenty of ways to get a quality education without going into hock for six figures or high five figures.
Pavonis
“And whatever correlations one could draw between major and future financial success would likely pale in comparison to where one went to school…”
If I recall correctly, studies have shown that it is where one applied to school that matters, not where one actually went. For example, most students rejected by Harvard do have the academic and social abilities to do well there but Harvard has to reject many qualified applicants. These same students are still ambitious and confident and find success shining at their safety schools. In fact, lighter competition at less selective schools may give ambitious students more opportunities to land good internships or leadership positions.
cathyx
Part of the problem about choosing the right major is that not everyone is cut out for the medical field or computer science, two of the majors that are hiring right now.
Flying Fox
Back at my alma mater, Colgate, the advisors and alumni used to warn us away from the rush to practicality. Don’t be afraid of the humanities, they told us, because employers want people who can be trained.
Course, they told me and my friends this before the economy really tanked and introduced a new problem I’ve been running up against. Amidst all the layoffs, the work force here and in other advanced economies had a great shuffling. Employers that are not downsizing have had and still have the pick of experienced people, available for less money who could skip the training stage, unlike fresh graduates. I first encountered that when I started teaching English abroad. It’s very curious. In Japan and Korea a lot of private English schools closed, but demand for English and other foreign language lessons rose (especially among children). The jobs existed, but the market was full of experienced applicants. Lots of schools wouldn’t consider anyone else. I’m in a similar fix now as an internship-seeking grad student.
debg
I noticed the same thing when I read her post and wondered if you would jump on it, Freddie. Great post here.
About 8 years ago, the VP for Academic Affairs at my small midwestern state university came to our department telling us we needed to redesign our majors. My department offers BA/BS in history, political science, social sciences, and social sciences education. He actually told us we had something of a finishing school mentality because we weren’t willing to embrace his cool new ideas: majors in Homeland Security and Crime Scene Investigation. Yep, he got his great ideas about sexy majors from network TV. I’m still seething over that remark and this guy was in charge of our academics!
Yevgraf
My thought is to make them dischargeable after 7 years (and have a hardship path out), and have a rigid qualification requirement for the institutions that can receive the loans.
I’d also impose a tax deduction cap on contributions to capital projects and endowed, named chairs. You want your name on it, you REALLY get to pay for it. Otherwise, only allow 100% deduction on money kicked into general funds, and give the donor a nice plaque.
JCT
The effects of these huge debt loads at the undergraduate / professional level have had a major effect on my field. In the past, medical students used to view academia/research as a viable career path and MD-scientists were responsible for many of the major findings in biomedical research that underlie many of our current clinical approaches. Those days are gone. Period. Newly-minted MDs cannot afford to make 1/2 (or even 1/3 in my specialty) of a normal salary in order to pursue a research career.
It’s becoming a slow motion train-wreck (and is picking up speed) because of the mounting role of undergraduate debt.
I have not been to a single meeting or NIH conference in the past 2 years without this situation being discussed in detail.
Very hard to pursue “translational or bench-to-bedside” medicine without the translators (MDs).
Suffern ACE
Honestly. What is needed is curriculum reform at the high school level, given that more students are staying in high school and not dropping out. But instead they want to talk about curriculum reform at colleges and cutting the costs of high school.
Corey
Freddie, your whole argument here is based on the idea that “business” is a practical major. In most cases, undergraduate business degrees are worthless.
I mean, I agree with you that education or lack thereof is not the major determinant in youth unemployment. But you’re really overselling this.
jibeaux
There’s also the stories, I hope they’re rare but I fear they’re not, of starry -eyed kids who just aren’t realistic about the earning power of a 4 year degree or the type of check they’ll have to write every month. I just read one this weekend about a young lady graduating from Northern Ohio, maybe? It sounded like a public school but was private. She liked the school when she visited and the administrators downplayed her concerns about loans and basically told her to chase her dreams. I hope she liked college, because she’ll be paying back $120k for quite some time.
For my kids, they are welcome to apply for private schools and their scholarship programs. If they can’t get a scholarship, however, they are going to the public schools. We should be able to float most or all of that.
cat
US Students are picking the wrong degrees. Your chart isn’t broken down by nation of origin, but even if we ignore that STEM degrees are ~15% depending on how you cut them. Thats not nearly enough when you factor in many of the STEM degrees require MS or “ABD” for employement. Both my wife and I work in STEM fields in the ‘STEM’ departments and the only people with just a BS are the IT people.(And some of the Engineers)
Pavonis
I started college right around the peak of the dot-com boom. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to study computer science. But potential teachers could make much more money in Silicon Valley rather than teaching at a U.C. So we had several teachers who were moonlighting as lecturers in late evening classes after their Silicon Valley day jobs. But the best lecturer, and the one who had the most students, had actually flunked out of the very school he is now teaching at! I guess he got over it since he gave out many Ds and Fs to those caught up in the computer science fad but lacked the determination or the ability to really succeed. I think you really need to have passion and interest in what you’re doing; otherwise, you may really flounder.
Suffern ACE
@cat: if you want more STEM college students, you prepare them for STEM starting in middle school.
BGinCHI
@Flying Fox: What you describe fits exactly what Freddie is arguing: the way unemployment works right now has to do with the overall economic system we have and the shape it’s in, not with what people major in.
The whole idea that a major determines what someone is trained in, narrowly, is just silly and misunderstands both undergraduate education and the way labor markets work.
BGinCHI
@debg: An ignorant Provost? No!
I’d say people at that position are running about 50% stupid. All they want to do is “innovate,” but they don’t know how their schools work well enough to get them to do that, and don’t recognize when they are already doing it.
It’s a fail upwards culture in too much of academic administration.
liberal
@r€nato:
Respectfully, I strongly disagree with your viewpoint.
If the interest rate has to rise, then so be it. If it rises too high, then other policy solutions should be used.
The loans being nondischargeable is simply evil.
Flying Fox
@BGinCHI:
Yeah, that’s why I bring it up. Not just at Balloon Juice, where I know people will agree with me. I mention it all the damn time in meatspace. No one else is saying it, but it’s true. It’s not like college advisers could have warned us about this, how do you prepare students for a period that will just have low aggregate demand? I don’t think you can.
jibeaux
Further thoughts from xkcd.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
There’s something else that I think people overlook when it comes to getting work. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and have an M.A. from George Washington. By all rights, I should be rolling in good jobs. Only I have A.D.D. Serious A.D.D. Like 99 on a scale of 100 A.D.D. And that’s held me back from ever having a real career in anything (I only found out what was, for lack of a better word, “wrong” with me until 2 years ago).
So we really end up missing the point when we blame joblessness on “bad” majors. There are all kinds of reasons that people are out of work, but people always want to look for one big, easy -to-point-at reason to explain a whole, big, complicatd problem.
Yevgraf
Nondischargability was born of the tendency of middle to late boomers coming out into a less than optimal economy and immediately defaulting their loans.
divF
@r€nato:
Some numbers to focus the discussion, from UC Berkeley:
Academic Year 1969-1970 (my Freshman year):
Fees for CA state residents (tuition): $300.
Residence Hall room and board (double occupancy): approximately $1400.
Academic Year 2012-2013:
Fees for CA state residents (tuition): $12924 (proposed).
Residence Hall room and board (double occupancy): $14169.
Since inflation (measured by the CPI) has been around 6x from 1969-present, the 1969 numbers total to around $10K in 2012 dollars, and the present-day costs are around $27K. The real kicker is tuition: in 2012 dollars, this has gone from $1800 to $13K, more than a factor of 7. I would like to see hard data as to what accounts for that increase. In any case, children from working-class and middle-class families could afford to go to Berkeley (and did), while incurring only modest amounts of debt (I graduated from Berkeley in 1973 with $8K of student debt (1973 dollars), a number that was pretty typical for the time). Now it is $68K more expensive (in 2012 dollars) to attend Berkeley for four years, and, all other things being equal, I would have graduated with more than $110K of debt (2012 dollars).
schrodinger's cat
@cat: It is extremely difficult to land a faculty job even with a post-doc in STEM disciplines. When quarterly earnings are all that matter, things like basic research which require years and decades worth of waiting time (before we get any practical applications, out of it) are bound to suffer.
r€nato
@Pavonis:
indeed. Way back when in the Reagan 80s, MBAs were all the rage and liberal arts majors were regarded as basket-weaving. All of the conventional wisdom was to get your MBA and you’d have a solid future.
Well, by the end of the 80s there was (predictably) a glut of MBAs, and when the dot-com boom arrived suddenly the lib-arts majors found themselves in high demand.
I’ve seen this play out over and over again. Newsweek, Time, NYTimes et al. pimp the majors that are in highest demand, without ever bothering to add the caveat, “if you have this degree *now*, you’ll do well; by the time you get out of school, things can and will change. Especially if everyone who doesn’t know what they want to do when they grow up, other than make a big fat paycheck, takes our advice.”
Flying Fox
@debg:
My grad school has what you could call a “homeland security major.” We call it security studies, and it requires a background in social science and quantitative analysis training. I hope someone brought that up.
Roger Moore
@Suffern ACE:
It wouldn’t hurt if businesses paid more than lip service to STEM as vital. Money talks, and what it’s saying right now is that middle managers are much more important to businesses than engineers or scientists.
roc
I went to a smaller university. Far less expensive. And I’m doing as well or better than my similarly-educated friends who went to name-brand schools.
Sure, I don’t have chit-chat with recruiters about college sports. And it may possibly have gotten me weeded out of a resume pile or two. But I’ve been lucky enough to never want for work. And this, in Michigan.
College is too expensive, largely because those who are paying are not those who are going – spending is a key social signal – and credit is cheap.
But individuals can opt out of the madness.
velouria
@cathyx: So much truth in this.
I’m so tired of people acting like everyone is cut out for a STEM major/career. Many people aren’t, myself included, so the constant cry for people to go into these fields seems a little pointless to me.
BGinCHI
@Flying Fox: Exactly right. That’s why you prepare smart students and make them critical-thinking good citizens.
We are preparing them for life, not just for labor.
Why does the right always set such a fucking low bar for the future of people in this country. It’s insane.
divF
@divF:
Correction: I would have graduated with $100K of debt (should not do arithmetic in my head before coffee).
slim's tuna provider
isn’t the whole concept of upward mobility kind of silly when there’s no econcomic growth, which is what we currently have? and, while we seem to be educating more and more people, it’s not growing the economy, which was the point of educating all those people in the first place. everything else seems like shifting about the costs. i’m not blaming it on the students, before anyone starts yelling — but all of this seems like arguing about who is responsible for filling the gas tank of a car whose engine just exploded.
Skerry
@r€nato:
yeah. One way would be to have a stock portfolio you can use to pay expenses.
Chemist
@cat:
Count yourself lucky to have a job. The job market for chemists at all degree levels is the worst it has been in at least 30 years (http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/). Even Ph.D. students from top 5 institutions are having a rough go finding gainful employment. The reality is that STEM = TE. Math and science are perilously close to being dead-end fields in the US.
BGinCHI
@divF: One answer to your question about these numbers is very, very simple:
the state contribution to the UC budget has gone down significantly in that period, and this shortfall is made up through tuition dollars.
This has happened in almost every state in the US, often very dramatically.
Shinobi
You need a bachelor’s degree to get a job wiping a CEO’s ass these days. They want a bachelor’s degree for you to answer phones or handle customer service calls.
The idea that a 4 year education is required to schedule meetings, order food, and generally be polite is laughable. Not to mention the many jobs for which most of the required knowledge is gotten on the job.
I also think it is ridiculous that some fields, including mine require a masters degree or more to get a job. (I have so far managed with only a BS from a VERY reputable university.) With the exception of medicine, what that means to me is that they are not getting enough important information in undergrad. The point of a 4 year degree in a STEM field is to prepare you for a career in that field. A Master’s or ABD should be for people who want to spend time in academia.
This constant inflation of the amount of time people need to spend in school before they can become “productive” members of our society is just ridiculous. It is also classist, it means that only people with the means and the time to spend 4 or 6 years in school can get ahead.
It has been my experience that most of the real learning takes place after college anyway.
martha
@divF: This. In the late 70s, I paid $243.50/quarter (3 quarters a year) in “fees” to go to Berkeley. Now, I likely couldn’t get in because of academic standards and budget constraints (my own).
Also, I was an evil liberal arts major. This self-indulgence taught me to read/analyze things critically, write, evaluate, reason, and manage. All those things that business majors and engineers have real problems with…
r€nato
@liberal: There’s no need to be apologetic; it’s a clear policy trade-off. If you want those loans to be dischargeable, then far fewer will be able to obtain those loans. If you want student loans to be widely available, then they can’t be dischargeable.
I’ve witnessed a shift in student aid from the 80s to today. Back then, student aid in the form of scholarships and grants and tuition discounts was far more available. Over time, that’s been shifted very much towards steering students into loans.
So if we’re going to pursue a national policy of helping people to get that college degree (or tech school certificate), and if we’re going to do that mainly via student loans rather than grants/tuition reductions/scholarships, they either:
a) can’t be dischargeable, the interest rate is low and they are widely available;
b) are dischargeable, keep the interest rate relatively low and accept the losses from those who choose to discharge them in BK (this is not politically sustainable, as the gov’t would have to guarantee these loans in order to keep the interest rate low, or would have to make the loans itself)
c) are dischargeable and interest rates are set by the market and likelihood of each borrower being able to pay them back. The creditworthiness of young college students is difficult to ascertain unless their parents can co-sign, and this also subjects completion of one’s course of study to the whims of the market. What if you complete two years of your four year degree, then the economy takes a tumble, credit markets contract and you’re no longer able to obtain loans to complete your degree?
The private education lobby also has a say in this; they would not want to see these loans made dischargeable as it would significantly affect their business.
Steve in DC
There seems to be far too much focus on the cost of education and far too little on actual wages in the work force. College graduates and even grad schools graduates are pretty much a dime a dozen now. So a position that doesn’t require any actual skills or talent is now staffed by a grad student. The past two places I’ve worked a masters in public health or equivalent translates into “bring me some fucking coffee and file my travel expenses” and the pay doesn’t add up either.
Both parties are partly to blame here. We have a problem with actual wages. And rather than address that problem (which would harm both college educated white Democrats and business Republican bosses) our solution was “go to college and get a degree so you won’t get paid like shit”, so now everybody has a college degree, so that degree qualifies you for what was a job for high school graduates and you still get paid like shit. Some fucking solution sending kids to school was.
The actual solution is raising working wages, so you can live just fine regardless of your educational level. Leave education open as a path for people that want to learn something.
We need to break the link between education and earning power. Sadly, far too many people in power want to keep that link.
eemom
Ah, so Wall Street whore cum “progressive” concern troll Yves is now an expert on education policy too? Quelle surprise.
And served up via Boy Wonder on a Monday morning. Win all around.
r€nato
@Skerry: or the Mitt Romney plan: borrow from your folks!
But seriously… you can take your 100 and 200 level courses at a community college for far less than what a big state college or private university will charge. English 101 isn’t three times better at USC or whatever big state school. Those credits are usually transferable.
If you’re determined to go to an out-of-state school, for god’s sake move there and work for a year and at least meet the residency requirements before taking classes, so you can qualify for in-state tuition.
Some majors are going to be expensive, period; and if you’re determined to graduate with a degree from a prestigious university, that’s going to cost serious bucks no matter what. But these tales I hear of people going $80K or much more into debt for a run-of-the-mill four-year degree just boggle my mind. I don’t care how expensive college has gotten, for most folks there’s no reason to spend that kind of money.
States have also slashed university budgets, of course, and that’s not helping things. Our state’s constitution actually states that university tuition should be, ‘as nearly free as possible’. The courts have repeatedly shied away from defining what, exactly, that means. Which means that it is meaningless in the real world.
Jay C
@r€nato:
Bingo.
I noticed that the NYT’s piece (frontpaged in Sunday’s dead-tree edition, btw) skipped around this very point: it tended to focus on the “human” side of the student-debt issue (like the young woman in their lede, with $900/month in debt-service to pay off: exactly the amount she could earn working two scutwork jobs) – and the facts-and-figures graphs, but elided what I think is a major factor in the whole debt mess. Which is the complicity of Higher Education as a whole in milking the entire student-loan system for big bucks (since the colleges get paid up front) while shifting the responsibility for payment – at hugely inflated levels – entirely onto the students: regardless of their economic prospects.
“Bad-choice-of-majors” is just a deflection, here, I’m thinking: what has happened in this country in Big Ed is just a recapitulation of what has happened in health care: a system of financial aid (loans/health insurance) meant to “ease” the average consumers’ burden has been exploited by Big (Whatever) into a lucrative cash-stream for themselves, while shifting the burden of uncontrolled costs back onto the consumer base they rely on, and whose burden is thereby increased. With little help in sight: just, as usual, blameshifting and bogeymanning.
Suffern ACE
@Steve in DC: The issue you run into for middle class entry level jobs though is that middle class entry level jobs are expensive. Your health insurance premium hires one worker in India. Your entry level salary hires two more. And they have college degrees that didn’t prepare them for the scut work all that well either.
Lorehead
Having read your source, I’m not convinced that it supports your thesis. The biggest story is the shift out of education and into business and health professions. Degrees in social sciences and history have increased, but not by enough to keep up with the total number of college diplomas. Those are the only six-figure categories.
On the other hand, we can score each major (that existed in 1971) in terms of whether it’s increased or declined as a share of the bachelors’ degrees being given. Let’s let a score of 100 mean that some major accounts for the same share of bachelors’ degrees in 2008-2009 as in 1970-1971, 200 to mean that its share has doubled, and 50 to mean that its share has halved. Or, to eyeball it: the total number of degrees has doubled, so a major would get a score of 52 for standing still, would have to double just to keep a score of 100, and a score of 300 means that six times as many students are getting degrees in it today as forty years ago.
Some of the largest increases are in “Visual and performing arts” (154), “Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies” (178), “Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies” (309), “Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities” (330), “Legal professions and studies” (368), and “Communication, journalism, and related programs” (396). Majors in decline include engineering (80.5), “physical sciences and science technologies” (55.0), and “mathematics and statistics” (32.8).
Cerberus
Well of course it’s kids choosing bad majors, because the other solutions (the ones that would actually do anything) would have us examining socio-economic inequality, inherent problems with the economy or the lack of an adequate social net, etc…
By making it all about how those dirty hippie kids choose humanities majors, we can continue the discourse that studying social phenomena on any real level isn’t “real” education and are “fluff majors” and thus discourage kids from taking those classes and thus more correctly seeing the origins of their oppressions.
And as a bonus, those kids who become “bad kids” by taking the humanities majors blame themselves for the difficulty in finding a job after college by assuming it was their major choice rather than any larger economic problems. Science majors who find the same thing will assume that they are just the minority, because after all they picked the “practical” major.
As long as the goal is misdirection, it’s a fabulous solution.
r€nato
@Jay C: at the risk of sounding like a glibertarian… when the hell did common sense fly out the window? Just because some advisor says you shouldn’t worry about racking up $100K in debt… you should listen to them? Of *course* they are going to say that! They’re not going to have to pay back that money.
I think this is part of the reason why college tuition has gone up so much; inflation due to the amount of money that’s available out there to be had. Never mind that students are mortgaging their future to the university or college. This preying on those young and inexperienced with money matters has to stop. Perhaps there should be some way to force colleges to have some skin in the game, so they have something to lose if the student can’t pay back those loans.
Larkspur
We are so screwed. Maybe this is OT, but I just finished a great book, published back in 2004, The Great Inluenza, by John M. Barry. So much information about the epidemic, World War I, the effect of war-time censorship in exacerbating the disaster. Leaving aside the huge scientific effort over decades, Barry wrote this book from information assembled by thousands and thousands of historians, librarians, curators – all of whom somebody is gonna claim selected impractical fields of study. God knows they are not money-makers, and these days, getting a BA in history, not to mention the necessary advanced degrees, is going to leave students with great big debts. We need these people even though they aren’t necessarily going to make stuff that leads to a zillion-dollar industrial application.
I’m so tired of this “Bobby Jindal vs. the Volcano” crap. Civilized people study history. Civilized people support science. Civilized people support this stuff whether or not it’s lucrative.
Cacti
@r€nato:
That would be my recommendation for any aspiring college student in high school today.
Unless you have a substantial scholarship to the 4-year institution of your dreams, do as many of your gen-eds as possible at a community college. There’s nothing special about the English, World Civ, or Biology 101 that they’re teaching at State U vs. your local junior college.
r€nato
@Jay C: well, this illustrates what economists have to say about subsidies in Econ 101; some portion of them tends to get captured by those who sell what is being subsidized for the benefit of the buyers.
The problem is that if we shifted to a pure market-based system for tuition, there would be tremendous dislocations for both students and the colleges as they shifted their cost structure and weaned themselves off of funding via easily-available student loans. A market-based system also would mean that only the fortunate-born would be able to afford college if it had to be paid for out-of-pocket with little aid or loans, and we have decided as a society that we *don’t* want higher education to be off-limits to all but those who already have financial wherewithal.
I really don’t have a solution to offer; I just don’t see any end in sight to the spiraling of tuition. It really sounds like another bubble waiting to pop.
Mumon
I can’t agree too much with this article.
NEW THINGS COME FROM UNLIKELY PLACES. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS ALWAYS LOOKING IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR.
Better advice is: BE GREAT AT SOMETHING. Anything.
Raven
In Georgia we have the grades based Hope Scholarship that pays college tuition. It’s funded by the lottery. Guess who plays the lottery? Guess who has the grades to qualify?
eta Hint, “some” call the lottery a tax on the stupid.
Older_Wiser
As someone who worked for 50 yrs, I can tell you that no one needed a college education to do many of the jobs out there over those years, and they still don’t, if they have critical thinking skills, excellent English and some math. Everyone should have a good foundation in basic skills to move forward, even without college. When I first started working, most college grads were real professionals, like teachers, doctors, lawyers. Business was something you could easily learn on the job with just a HS diploma. Today, companies have abandoned the discrete type of training on the job that used to go with hiring and changes in technology and want the worker to pay for that training by attending some type of college.
I’ve worked with college graduates (programmers) who couldn’t write a business letter and left it up to me, the secy, to correct spelling, grammar and form, and that was in the early 90s. Now that emailing and other forms of communication have taken over, English skills are getting even worse.
What we need are more skilled mechanics of all stripes, technicians, etc. Put vocational programs back in high schools, such as trades and lower level health jobs, and eliminate all those “for profit” schools that promise the moon for $15K a year which teach the same thing. HS students are very capable of handling core courses and the last 2 yrs of some type of voc training.
Zagloba
Not anymore. Most private schools take AP credit but not credit for classes taken at other colleges unless the student is a formal transfer student, and they don’t admit a lot of transfers.
Where transfers are a smart move is inside a state school system: VA Tech, for example, is required to transfer just about everything from all instate community colleges, and admits zillions of transfer students to finish their last two years of specialized programs like veterinary medicine.
negative 1
This goes against my profession (educators union), and probably against many people’s beliefs, but here goes anyway:
If you want to see why college tuition has skyrocketed, check the staff/student ratios, as well as the amount of new construction in the past 20 years. New buildings cost lots of $$, are generally paid for by bond and state colleges often are on the hook for part of the cost of the interest. Additionally, the ‘associate dean of student housing dispute resolution’ and other such quality of life positions on campus are a.)somewhat recent (’90’s and beyond) and b.) not free, and c.) not without departments. Since states do not help NEARLY as much as they used to with costs, students pick up those costs. However, bear in mind that there is some traction to the argument that states subsidize heavily the construction of buildings on campus, and that subsidation is crowding out tuition subsidation.
One higher ed category that does not usually build one new building a year? Community colleges, which most states still subisidize heavily. Yes, many people can remember when a new community college was built, but think of the amount of time between construction projects, which allows them to save for it not borrow it.
Zifnab
@Suffern ACE: This. Although, to a degree I think high schools really have been tackling this by offering AP Courses and utilizing their Honors program to track college-bound students into material that will be relevant for a collegate career.
On the other end, I really think we need more vocational training. I mean, graduating my high school and going for an engineering degree was trivial. But if I’d wanted to become a plumber or an electrician? I’d be completely on my own.
r€nato
@Zagloba: I believe I was, indeed, speaking about state schools. I don’t know about private schools and I would not be surprised to hear that they largely don’t accept transfers. I think if one chooses to attend a private school, one should be prepared for a large tuition bill, period.
@Older_Wiser: I agree with much of what you wrote, particularly regarding voc-ed. But the question isn’t *can* someone do the job; the question is can you even get your foot in the door without that piece of paper? In many cases, no. Or if you do, your possibilities for advancement are limited – even if you’ve proven you can perform and excel – without it.
Good luck getting employers to change that point of view.
PeakVT
@divF: An inflation calculator can be foundhere.
Brachiator
I don’t see this as a problem. People need to work and can’t always be choosy. On the other hand, there is nothing that says that they have to get stuck in any particular job.
True. All the hooply trying to “prove” either that college is unnecessary or that only certain majors lead to golden tickets seems overblown.
Maybe there is another factor at work here. Wages have been depressed for decades, and companies have to problem with laying off employees at a whim. The old model in which a person worked his or her way up within a single company, and retired after decades of long service is long gone.
Also, it may be that college only appeared to be a golden ticket over the years that Western economies were booming, but that in the long run it really didn’t matter since there was always job growth. People saw causation, but there was only a loose correlation.
Not only were there plentiful jobs for people who had college degrees, there were also plentiful, well-paying (often union) jobs for people without college degrees; and also programs that let people go back to school and take college courses.
However, in an economy with fewer jobs, fewer opportunities for advancement, and no long term security, the conventional wisdom that college guarantees higher earnings over a person’s life is no longer true.
And this would be the case even if you tried to make college more affordable.
Holding costs down or p more ublic financing may not be as sure an answer as people think.
Zagloba
Ah, you did say state school. I saw “USC” and jumped the rest of the sentence, I guess. (USC’s private, btw.)
Southern Beale
The Heritage Foundation, wankers of the day, quite possibly the week.
Craig
Well, on the subject of “things that do not follow,” we have a fairly yawning gap between
1. “It’s still difficult to say with a straight-face that college is not worth it. The metrics for those without college degrees are vastly worse than for those with them.”
and
2. “We need to make college more affordable in large part by holding costs down…”
We know that anyone with a pulse can borrow $100,000 or more for school, and your argument is that college is “worth it” and fears around poor major-selection are overblown. So what, exactly, is unaffordable about this? It would be _nice_ if college were cheaper, but worth it is worth it, and there are no prominent barriers to credit.
(I think you’re wrong about bad major selection, and far too glib about the value proposition of college in general. But a post that grips about “standard canards” and sloppy arguments ought to take more care to connect premises with conclusions.)
Raven
@Zagloba: The University of South Carolina is public.
Zagloba
@Craig: Are you intentionally splitting hairs? If we replace “worth it” by “valuable” are you happier?
Or perhaps another tack: have you considered the possibility that a college education may be “worth it” to the individual student (in the sense of raising their expected lifetime earnings by more than the cost of their student loans) and yet simultaneously the current system of higher education may be a net cost on us society-wide?
WereBear
None of this is complicated.
Look at the Eisenhower-era tax rates on the rich. Look at them now.
There’s your problem.
Reagan was elected to roll those back. Every single tiny mind on the Republican side, and not a few on the Democratic side, was recruited to roll those back. They rolled them back and back and back.
Where is all the money? It was systematically vacuumed from the 99% into the pockets of the 1%. That is what is killing the economy.
That is what has to be changed. And everything else will fall into place.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Corey:
You’re misidentifying the bar-setter here, I think.
Craig
@Zagloba: I think I’m just being meticulous about arguments. But I’m probably not the person to ask; you’ve got to make your own call.
In any case, I won’t replace “worth it” with “valuable,” because they don’t mean the same thing (I just ate a one-dollar hot dog for lunch. Totally worth it; not especially valuable. My neighbors bought a very nice house at the top of the bubble. Still a valuable property! Not remotely worth what they paid.)–and the post is clearing staking out territory around “worth it.”
That much is important, not a quibble.
The second consideration you raise is hugely interesting, and I have spent a lot of time mulling it over. But I don’t claim to have an answer.
Zagloba
Yes, true, but part of my point there was that in the absence of any context that you’re talking about a tier II.V school out in a cotton field somewhere, “USC” means the one in Los Angeles.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
This has been brought up time and again. Fact is, few people paid the top marginal rate. This is one of the reasons that the alternative minimum tax was passed in 1969 (and substantially modified in 1982).
The most useless analyses of tax policy are those that only look at the top marginal tax rates on the books instead of the effective tax rate.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Shinobi: My company has a really interesting policy on this: we require it for the clerical side of things. And that does include answering the phone.
But not for the techs. If they can do the work we don’t care if they have a degree.
Best programmer – by a good, long shot – I ever met, BTW, was a religious studies major.
Zagloba
There’s a joke in there about closely and literally parsing texts, but I can’t quite get it to line up.
gene108
@Southern Beale:
They’re wankers. They are always wankers. It doesn’t matter if it is for a week, a day or a year. They are always wankers from now till eternity.
Older_Wiser
@r€nato: Yes, as one who didn’t have a 4 yr degree (although many thought I did), promotions and my applications were always turned down for more than lower level jobs, even when I passed tests in the top 10 percentile of those taking them.
EconWatcher
I think a “practical” education is one that gives you a solid base to keep acquiring new skills. If you try to chase whatever’s employable at the moment, you’ll likely miss the wave.
My kids are still very young, but I’m planning to encourage them to get a solid liberal arts degree, that trains them how to think, read, and write with sophistication, and then follow it with some kind of targeted education or training, towards whatever is hot. They’ll probably need to get retrained and reeducated several times in their careers. That’s just how it’s going to work. At least, that’s how it’s been for me.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Zagloba: I don’t think anyone would even question the idea that state-funded higher education is a net cost on society. It is, if all we’re talking about is dollars. Most people don’t go to college, but every taxpayer pays.
The idea is that you get these folks into school and one of ’em will invent antibiotics or something like that where we all benefit. No guarantee, but that’s the idea.
We seem to have forgotten that.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Larkspur: There’s an inevitable conclusion here, I think.
Suffern ACE
@Zifnab: I agree. But I understand why those programs were cut back. The point isnt’ to graduate from HS and become a plumber. The point is to graduate with the skills necessary to enter a trade either in tech school or commmunity college or an apprentiship. Machine shop is expensive class to offer, though. So is Chemistry, Biology and Band for that matter. When the cuts come through, though, its probably Machine Shop and Band that get the axe. But its not like the kids who are in machine shop are going to be able to have an opportunity to work with all that equipment again to gain the basic skills rather easily after school.
Dave Whitefield
It’s not just the availability of jobs, it’s the wages… I earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from a good program at a state school in 1970. I paid most of my way, and accumulated $2,000 in student loan debt. Starting pay was good for the day, probably 50% to 75% above that of a business or liberal arts major. I chose to stay in technical jobs throughout my career, rather than go into management like many engineers do. After accumulating around 40 years of experience in my chosen field, and keeping pace with new technologies along the way, I now earn about twice what we pay a new engineer fresh out of college with a bachelor’s degree. I can guarantee that my value to the company is way more than twice the starting pay of a new graduate, but that value is not recognized by commensurate wages.
Nutella
Speaking of parasites getting a free ride, here’s Farhad Manjoo’s article on a particularly shameless leech.
via @ezraklein
ETA I see I’m late to BJ with this story.
doctor doctor
College has always played simultaneous roles of class maintenance and upward mobility, not just nor primarily the latter. College graduation has always been more a confirmation of a middle-class life than an entry to one.
Your college degree doesn’t get you the job (mine didn’t). It should give you the skills to make a career out of a job once you’re there, and having a degree is one less factor that might have disqualified you, but other factors are far more important than your degree in getting the job in the first place – as said before, family connections and other social capital are key, as are interpersonal skills and just kinda your ability to wiggle yourself on in there.
In the last two generations a lot of folks have been bamboozled into believing that correlation is causation, and just getting a BA in drinkin’ beers will guarantee them entry to a middle-class paycheck. Not so. Now it’s even harder because we have an oversupply of college grads, compared to demand.
This isn’t to say college is a waste of time. You can learn all kinds of great stuff there. But make sure you learn how to get a job too.
Bobbyk
I recently lost my IT job when the company I work for outsourced its IT department. I know dozens of people this has happened to, it is endemic in the so called “knowledge industry”. Please explain how something like this is demand driven.
Brachiator
Speaking of unspeakable twits: The UK Daily Mail is a conservative rag, but every now and then, they try to appeal to a wider audience. There is a current story about a Cambridge U social site shut down because the elite just cannot behave. One comment that caused uproar, according to this headline:
Supposedly, unruly students outraged the community with a spot of bad behavior: “Last week, students shocked locals by stripping off, vomiting and urinating in flower beds after drinking themselves into oblivion in a public park.” The accompanying photo says it all.
Good to see these goofballs setting such a good example before they take their place in proper society.
Dave
yes, yes, needs to be said, if you are attending a middling institution for the sake of getting a degree (a noble goal!) you should not be paying $50k for it. I don’t care how nice the smarmy recruiting people / professors are, or how fancy the rec facility, there’s nothing they can do for you that a community college won’t do just as well for much less money.
I’m not blaming incoming freshmen here, really the people at fault are adults for conning kids into thinking they ought to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a mediocre education. It’s a huge, systemic problem.
cckids
@EconWatcher: This is what we’ve encouraged our son, who’s now finishing his first year at college, to do. He’s been homeschooled since 4th grade, so he’s quite independent and self-starting, and those qualities have really paid off at university. He wants to go into designing video games; not the programming (tho he knows that, somewhat), but the storyline, logic, art direction areas. His plan is to have the solid underpinnings of all he’ll gather in a lib arts degree to bolster a later gaming design degree. Hopefully, he’ll be right.
Walker
@r€nato:
Up until 1998 student loans were dischargeable after a 5-7 year waiting period. We did not experience a student loan apocalypse then.
drew42
I’m kind of shocked to see that Computer and Information Science degrees have dropped steadily over the past 10 years (assuming the trend has continued since 2009). Even if some of those fields have been absorbed by Communications Technologies, it’s still a net loss.
JoyfulA
@Zagloba: USC doesn’t mean University of Southern California to me, especially in the context of state schools.
cckids
On the subject of “useful” degrees; it infuriated me last year, when we were touring a campus with our son (U of NV at Reno), while trailing our guide through the medical building, when he stated that they keep their nursing student enrollment artificially low, so that they can state that they have “only the best”. Also, those students get charged an extra surcharge because it is an in-demand major.
Not that I think they should make nursing into a by-the-numbers, crowded class subject, but it is an area where there is & will continue to be, a true need. Also, one where a passion for the career will get you further and make you a better nurse than a minor blip in your high school GPA or SAT scores. It is the kind of ratings-driven crap that is destroying colleges.
Maus
Wait wait, how is the NYT left-wing?
Amanda in the South Bay
@cckids:
Its that way at a lot of nursing schools, 2 and 4 year.
I think its partly due to funding, a massive demand (pays well and is fairly recession proof) and possibly a desire among nurses to keep the number of people entering the profession low enough so that salaries won’t be driven down.
Walker
@drew42:
We are seeing those trends reverse themselves in the past two years. The new enrollments are not really reflected in the numbers yet because many of those students have not graduated yet. But we are seeing a rapid growth in CIS related majors.
Dr. Squid
YM “fraud”. HTH.
Ohio Mom
@WereBear: The most recent example of tax cutting = more in the pocket of the already wealthy = less for the rest of us, is the estate tax Freddie mentions.
The Ohio estate tax was a big source of income for many cities and towns — those funds went straight into the general fund. Now that it’s gone, well, rich people are going to have even more money and all the rest of us who depend on services provided by our local governments are going to either have to do without those services or pay more in local taxes to make up the difference.
pseudonymous in nc
I mentioned this in the previous thread: the Australian system provides the money up front, tiered to reflect earning potential and national need, and it’s paid off through a means-based tax that only kicks in at a decent income level. It seems to work pretty fucking well.
The commenters on that NYT piece seem desperate to blame the students, and I think this attitude is endemic: a hearty “fuck you, I got mine” towards people who are being screwed out of the economic advantages that the boomers enjoyed. It’s a spiteful smirk that is going to send the US right down the shitter.
I will say this, though: undergraduate education in the US currently does what the last years of high school should be doing. I don’t know how you get out of that cycle, because it becomes driven by paper qualifications and not skills — and by the education-industrial complex — but it needs to happen.
liberal
@Bobbyk:
That kind of stuff isn’t demand-driven.
That’s what’s so pernicious about the current situation: we’re recovering from a crash due to a credit bubble. Supposedly those crashes are extra-nasty, and the recoveries from them tend to be very slow.
Furthermore, superimposed on the bubble and its crash were some long-term secular trends, one of which is outsourcing.
A double helping of nastiness.
liberal
@Dr. Squid:
Yeah, how dare she have uncharitable views towards the banksters and—horror of horrors!—Obama.
liberal
@Brachiator:
Yep.
drew42
@Walker: Well, shoot. I was hoping for less competition.
At least I’ve got a good head start on them…
David Koch
freddie, you misspelled “surprisingly”, which is hilarious considering it was in the context of intelligence.
but more importantly, the “so bright” Yves has been conducting a jihad against Elizabeth Warren, calling her a conservadem who would make “a terrible senator”.
seriously, anyone who says that isn’t bright, but rather a dim emoprog bulb.
Ken J.
What I have been ruminating about is the difference between education and training.
It used to be that training was something that the employer did, but employers are now generally shirking that responsibility — they expect kids to appear fully trained for highly specialized (and probably shortly lived) technical positions.
At the governmental level, I see a desire to transform universities into technical training schools. There is no longer much interest in funding education, giving students tools for living and thinking and understanding of their culture.
PGfan
I worked in job placement related jobs for 12 years, before switching careers(!). I worked with recent college grads, dislocated workers, laid off professionals, and MBA students so I got a pretty good look at the “trying to find a job” side of the world at many levels.
Something that became very clear to me was the existence of a kind of “passivity” that our system ingrains in people. Articles about college, jobs, unemployment etc. always presume the existence of a sufficiently large group of employers who always have available entry-level jobs. The student’s job is to complete the required set of classes, collect the degree, and the job and he/she should miraculously connect. (If they don’t, it’s probably the student’s fault.) Parents and kids count a whole lot on the placement depts of schools (all you need to know about placement depts is the ratio of placement counselors to students). Colleges exaggerate the help they will offer and parents and kids agree to be fooled. Kids do short tours of schools and react emotionally to the campus. They go to OSU because of the football team. Etc. What parents and kids don’t do is take a hard look at curriculums, or what’s been happening to graduates. They accept whatever massaged stats the schools offer at face value. They don’t evaluate whether there are any/many companies offering the jobs they think they’ll want, or where those jobs might be located. All that will be reviewed only after the money has been spent and junior is struggling to find a job. Like so many things in America, the sale is what counts. Just as wingnuts love the fetus but could care less about the baby, colleges and loan providers love students but wash their hands of graduates. Which is something the kid and parents should know up front, not find out after it is too late.
Another very clear thing I learned is that our educational system simply sucks when it comes to helping prepare young people to grapple with what they should consider doing for a living. People start asking a kid “what do you want to be when you grow up?” at about first grade, and then provide zero tools to help the child answer that question. Since our educational system was designed to create workerbees for conditions 100 years ago, it is not surprising. Most people I know have very limited ideas about what people do for a living — they know what adults around them do and the lucky ones are attracted to something an adult around them does and mentoring of sorts will happen. But more people don’t luck into a relevant role model and they have to approach career goals from a place of ignorance and assumptions. Some have very clear aptitudes which helps a lot. But many people have a mix of aptitudes, often seemingly conflicting aptitudes, creating confusion for them rather than direction.
Many pointed to community colleges as an answer to high student loans, and that part is true, they are cheaper, and content-wise, presumably just as good. (I should add the caveat that I’m not talking about Ivy League schools or students — they’re the training ground for the 1% and the 1% lives by entirely different rules than the rest of us.) But what if your problem is that you don’t know what you should do for a living, or where you will need to do it? Community Colleges are better at reducing the bill while the student flails around, but not necessarily any better at getting the kid moving in the right direction for the kid.
Since we don’t have real career exploration and high quality aptitude and personality testing as part of our educational system, people looking for guidance have to take initiatives if they’re going to get it. Very few do. This is part of the passivity I mentioned earlier. Basically our whole country is filled with people who think it is someone else’s job to figure things out. The schools think it is up to the kids, the kids and parents think it is the school’s responsibility; business thinks it the schools faults for not graduating people with the right skills at the right time, etc. I have a BA in English so I am certainly not against Liberal Arts degrees, but an awful lot of Liberal Arts proponents definitely think someone else needs to figure out what Junior with his History of Ancient Greece degree should do for a living.
Separately from all that, we have entered into a new place historically. We can’t support full (or nominally) full employment in the developed world anymore because we’ve automated our way out of the need. We can keep pretending that there will be more jobs if only we graduate 50% more scientists and mathematicians who will presumably invent things that somehow generate more jobs. OR we could start to think about things like reducing work hours and having more people work less while paying them more. I think we should have 4 6-hour shifts instead of 3 8-hour shifts. Eventually we will because it will become self-evident that the way the employment world is structured no longer fits conditions on the ground. But of course there will be a lot of resistance first. And why? Because the last thing people are taught in America is how to find new solutions for problems. Or how to look at what is, not what ought to be, what we assume it is, or what it used to be. Look at Congress.
explosci
found this site via the above link to chemjobber…
I have to agree with the quote by “chemist” above….as a soon-to-be-graduated PhD chemist….the job market looks absolutely dismal….
I would have to argue that as education has become more available to everyone, the marketability of that degree decreases.
For example, 50 years ago a university education was less common than currently and as such was valued more by employers. Now with a higher percentage of university graduates the degree is not as marketable…
a potential solution would be to make everything in university harder, increasing the flunkout rate. Those that finish would be fewer and seen as higher performing increasing their marketability. Combined with free education only the best would be getting through and into good jobs.