Education is Our Generation's Big Problem. Let's Fix it.

http://blog.bloc.io/education-is-our-problem

by hanibash • 14 years ago

121 167 14 years ago

blog.bloc.io

I'm not sure that education is the big problem, but it's definitely up there. I think probably the financial climate leading to unemployment/underemployment is a bigger one, but significantly more difficult to fix.

choxi2• 14 years ago

but I think that lack of relevant education is the largest contributing factor to unemployment. for example, american manufacturing is actually doing great right now, the problem is that it's become more efficient and can do without labor workers so while the businesses flourish there are less people to employ.

source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/10/144978487/the-tues...

hanibash7• 14 years ago

In regards to relevant education, I think Amazon's career choice program is a good example of targeting the right industries.

From Jeff Bezos letter: "We’re offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.

The program is unusual. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon."

randomdata• 14 years ago

> I think that lack of relevant education is the largest contributing factor to unemployment.

I hear this often, but I am always left wondering what jobs will rise out of the woodwork if the condition became true?

It is easy to say lack of education is the problem because it is the common filter used when hiring, so it is highly visible, but one only needs to look to the software industry to see perfectly capable programmers struggling to find work in what is supposed to be a hot market with companies crying for help.

I believe it is far more complex, and may not relate to education at all.

codegeek• 14 years ago

Education itself is not the problem. Education is good. Problem is in the fact that to prove education, we need degrees which means we need to come up with outrageous amount of tuition fee to pay. Why do we have an ever rising tuition fee ? Probably because colleges know they can get away with it due to funding/subsidies. Colleges also know that a degree is a major rquirement to even try and get a decent job these days that pays more than minimum wage (outliers are there of course). So it does not matter if they charge 100K for a degree.

jfarmer3• 14 years ago

Imagine a world where you can retrain yourself on the order of months, not years, and take on little or no debt to do it. How would that impact unemployment or underemployment?

When Obama stands in front of a bankrupt auto factory in Detroit and says, "We'll retool these factories and retrain these workers to produce wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars!", how do we do it?

People are desperate to answer that question and services like bloc.io, Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, University Now, etc. are just our best first answers.

Education is more than a big problem: it's the root problem.

Caveat lector: I help run http://devbootcamp.com and the bloc.io guys work out of our offices 2-3 days per week.

jellicle4• 14 years ago

>Imagine a world where you can retrain yourself on the order of months, not years, and take on little or no debt to do it. How would that impact unemployment or underemployment?

It would have very little effect on un- or underemployment, since un- and underemployment are driven by demand, not supply.

There is zero evidence that unemployment in the United States today is driven by a mismatch between skills-employers-want and skills-workers-have, for instance.

Paul Krugman discusses this in a few of his columns.

slurgfest7• 14 years ago

Thank you for articulating this.

The US government can't sustainably provide a safety net that provides basic needs (whether this is because of finances or because of ideology is a debate I'm not getting into).

And getting rid of the free market is not an option for us either.

So if we are not going to let people starve in the snow every time the raw forces of economics kill a market or shift all production somewhere else, they should have some help to find new footing.

Kaedon• 14 years ago

"Do I even need to mention which segments of our population rely on student loans the most, and thus are getting screwed the most by the student loan crisis? Hint: It's not the happy white suburban family of 4."

Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044424690457757...), the upper-middle class has seen the sharpest jump in student debt since 2007. Households with less income have an easier time finding student aid and those in the upper class can more readily afford the rising costs. This puts the upper-middle class in a kind of purgatory for financial aid.

griffindy• 14 years ago

+1 I made it through college with hardly any debt because my family's income wasn't high enough to warrant loans (instead of straight up aid) until I was a senior. However, I have a friend whose family makes more money than mine, but also has a sibling in school so they have a lot more debt.

slurgfest7• 14 years ago

If a private college wants to give financial aid to a student who is poor, that is its business and it gets to define what 'poor' means for its purposes.

Kids from households making $200,000/yr may not be Maybach rich, but they don't need Pell Grants. and I certainly wouldn't describe their state as "purgatory" just because they aren't getting handouts.

The basis for giving this kind of handout (which I understand along with the general opposition to any handouts) is to improve class mobility and give poor kids a chance (after all, they did not choose to be born to the 'wrong' family). What reason is there for people with plenty of money to get that sort of handout? This I don't understand.

LockeWatts7• 14 years ago

If a private college wants to give financial aid to a student who is poor

just because they aren't getting handouts.

Why is it when the kid is poor, its financial aid, if the kid is middle class, its a handout? The language seems twisted to articulate your point, rather than the point speaking on its own.

Also, let's take my situation. My mother made $102,000 last year. We're well off, by any metric. Making 100% over the median income makes you upper middle class.

My in-state total costs for my public university are $10,099 a semester. I didn't choose the crazy private school, I didn't go out of state, I'm at literally the cheapest school I can be at.

It still cost 27% of her net income per year. That's a reasonable amount of money? I don't think it is.

Now, you can say you're supposed to save beforehand, except back then we were poor as dirt and couldn't afford to. Does that get factored in into any kind of federal aid? Nope. Last years tax return, only.

I have enough merit based scholarships that she can afford to send me there, but I think it's ridiculous to ignore that there is a larger problem in academic costs.

EDIT: The argument could also be made that students should be working through school to offset the costs. I personally find that rather backward, (Why is college the only education not funded by taxes?) but it's the most practical solution currently available.

mgkimsal6• 14 years ago

I suspect we've had quite a lot of class mobility recently, just not in the direction everyone wanted.

hanibash7• 14 years ago

Good point. I'd be interested to see what student debt is like as a proportion of income, across different social classes.

natrius4• 14 years ago

I found the race factor particularly odious. I'm pretty sure a large majority of white college students take out loans.

wheremiah• 14 years ago

Yeah, I agree. As a for profit company it seems like a really immature thing to write.

I think it's pretty clear there is a problem in education finance. That problem affects a lot of people of different racial backgrounds. Comments like that create discord among the very people you are claiming to want to help.

hanibash7• 14 years ago

I didn't intend to offend anyone.

I don't think you can have a discussion about education without bringing up issues of race and class. I admit, that was a pretty untactful way to bring it up.

It's an uncomfortable subject. I'll handle it more sensitively next time.

spitx• 14 years ago

The approaches to education in the past five decades or so have produced mediocre results in producing a more civic individual. I wonder if the fundamentals of logic are imparted in any elementary school curriculum.

Our electorate is already pitifully informed. However what's really woeful is that a large portion of the vote bank cannot dissect a simple election campaign claim or promise.

revscat• 14 years ago

The adverse effects of a warming atmosphere is a more existential problem, and I would argue that it is for this reason that it is a more fundamental one. Education is irreelevant if food supplies are increasingly scarce.

rimantas• 14 years ago

I would argue, that educations and science are the most likely sources of the solution to food problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

patdennis3• 14 years ago

There are serious problems with the for-profit university model (like the University Of Phoenix) as outlined in this article.

I think it's worth pointing out that these businesses are aware that they may have a problem, and have stepped up their political giving massively to protect their interests. Mostly, to Republican candidates, and especially to Mitt Romney. [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/politics/mitt-romney-of...

yummyfajitas9• 14 years ago

Similarly, the non-profit education sector donates heavily to Democrats.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04

Also, purely coincidentally, non-profits are exempt from the "gainful employment" rule and all the other new rules being levied against competitors to the non-profit education sector.

Weird. It's almost as if the politicians don't care much when their cronies rip students off, only when other guys do it.

patdennis3• 14 years ago

The chart you linked to doesn't refer to giving from educational institutions themselves. The chart is tracking contributions from individual employees[1] of those institutions. Seems to me that simply represents the fact that professors tend to be Democrats.

On the other hand, with for profit colleges, institutions themselves [2] are contributing directly to superpacs and other political groups. It's a totally different metric.

[1] from your link: "Since school districts, colleges and universities are generally prohibited from forming political action committees, political contributions from the education industry generally come from the individuals associated with the field."

[2] The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, contributed $75,000 last month to Restore Our Future, a super PAC run by former Romney aides. The pro-Romney super PAC is one of the biggest players in the GOP's long-running nomination fight, pumping more than $38 million into commercials, direct mail and automated phone calls that promote Romney and attack his GOP rivals. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-03-26/romne...

slurgfest7• 14 years ago

Wait: are you saying that non-profit education is ripping students off and making lots of money? edit: with the help of connivance from the Democrats? Because that seems to be what you are implying...

yequalsx2• 14 years ago

Perhaps there are reasons for this that have nothing to do with money. Many for-profits have very shady marketing and admissions policies. Almost all of them have very low academic standards. Mostly their money revenue comes from student loans that have very little chance of ever being paid off. Public institutions aren't quite at this stage of immoral behavior. This is why, I presume, that the for-profits are being targeted. Teachers who fail students at for-profits tend to get fired. Their incentives to just pass anyone. Working at a community college I do get nudges to increase the pass rate but I know I'm not getting fired for failing students who don't know enough to pass.

twoodfin2• 14 years ago

There's another fix: Hire these graduates into the public sector or a random non-profit, let them make income-based payments, and then forgive their loans after 10 years, regardless of how much they've paid back. The taxpayers pick up the rest.

Thanks, Congress!

http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellatio...

natrius4• 14 years ago

I think encouraging people to make better education investments is a better idea than making other people pay for their poor choices.

twoodfin2• 14 years ago

I agree. To a first order approximation, "Thanks, Congress!" always has an implied sarcasm tag.

danielweber9• 14 years ago

Why "non-profit"? What's the fundamental difference between surplus going to shareholders instead of going to directors?

armored_mammal4• 14 years ago

I agree education (and even more particularly, the method and quality of teaching) is a problem, but it's not the same problem as student debt.

As far as I can tell, much of the (debt) problem is caused by bad decision making by clueless parents and teenagers who think they need to send their kid to an Ivy League or think that their child somehow needs to spend 40k a year to go to an in-state school.

Let's be honest. The cost of education is going up, yes. But getting into debt is also bad and a poor choice. Yet nobody is responsible enough to consider it when making college choices, just to whine about it after the fact.

Students do not need to own a television or get cable or even have a video game console. Students probably don't even need a car, definitely don't need smartphones, and at least where I went to school, could probably do just fine without owning a computer, too. Likewise, instead of getting into debt they could go to cheaper community colleges or a whole slew of things.

Instead many college students, regardless of economic background, seem to have smartphones, Macs, and 42" TVs.

When I see someone complaining about college debt, I see somebody who went to an overly expensive school, without a plan, and did whatever they felt like without ever stopping to consider first if they could make a living when they were done. I see a child.

As someone who looked at the big picture when making college decisions and now has no college debt two years out of school, I have no sympathy.

I turned down the University of Chicago (among others) so that I wouldn't be in debt and to hear all the whining about it from entitled feeling kids who didn't make smart decisions makes me angry.

Now I'll agree that you may need to take on some debt to complete college. But if you're taking on more than the cost of a new car, you're doing it wrong.

Don't get me wrong, either. I concur that colleges waste lots of money.

jfarmer3• 14 years ago

I attended the University of Chicago, paid for it myself, and took on 100% of the debt.

I'm still paying it off, but it was worth it! My life is without question 100x better for it.

Your point is fair, though: with few exceptions student's expectations of how transformative their college education to be absolutely eclipses the reality.

armored_mammal4• 14 years ago

Yeah, sometimes I think I might have had a better experience there, but then I think "I'd probably be more than 150k in debt" and the feeling passes. Plus I'm doing fine without having gone there. It's definitely a great school.

I can't imagine what it's like to have that debt hanging over your head. It seems like it'd only be worth it if you get hired out of school for something really amazing or with a ridiculously high starting salary.

lrs2• 14 years ago

I think the OP's characterization of the decisionmaking process that leads to crippling educational debt is somewhat unfair. It's definitely driven by the parents and children who he condemns as "clueless." But I think it's important to consider that many of these "clueless" have been told their entire lives that "education is a great investment" and "graduates of prestigious universities all become successful and rich," and have never really been confronted with any reason to question these pronouncements, which have appeared consistent with their own observations and experiences. Colleges and universities don't hesitate to trot out these tropes in their recruitment literature, though I suppose it's a mark of the "clueless" that they hold educational institutions to a different standard of credibility than used car salesmen or carnival barkers.

I see a parallel to the recent mortgage crisis. Sure, fundamentally, the crisis was just huge numbers of people defaulting en-masse on their mortgages. They all made "clueless" decisions by taking on more mortgage debt than they could handle. Maybe they deserve what they get, and maybe the appropriate response is to be angry at these entitled whiners who made worse decisions than the OP. But these decisions were facilitated by lenders and securities brokers who were acting in less than good faith.

I'm inclined to view both the homeowners in the mortgage crisis and the students and families struggling with education debt right now more as victims of poor information availability and outmoded decision heuristics that fell behind the times, and less as entitled whiners.

I guess I should note that I also went to the University of Chicago (hi Jesse) and it's fairly clear by now that it was a terrible choice for me. So maybe I'm just grasping for rationalizations while desperately fleeing from the crushing psychological weight of the responsibility for that choice and the long and uninterrupted sequence of related bad choices that have more or less ruined my life.

danielweber9• 14 years ago

It used to be transformative because the student would spend several years living like a poor student.

But schools have seen that their customers hardly respond to price, while they do respond to amenities. Everything follows from that.

gpcz• 14 years ago

I think a big aspect of the problem is that people literally are children (or less than a year into adulthood) when social proof from their high school classmates dictates that they choose a college. As PG said in "Why Nerds are Unpopular," if he could go back and give his thirteen year old self advice, he'd tell him to realize the world around him was fake. Most students coming out of high school simply don't have the perspective to know "the big picture" like you did, nor do they know that they should be seeking that perspective. By the time they might realize this, they may already be half-way (or fully) invested in a bad decision that has significant barriers to fix.

(edit: "Nerds are Unpopular" => "Why Nerds are Unpopular")

icegreentea• 14 years ago

While I agree with many of your points in principle, I think your rhetoric is a bit off. For one thing, I think it's ridiculous to even bring up Ivy League when discussing overall student debt. Ivy League's total enrollment is something like 100,000. Assuming every single freshman took a full debt load, thats 'only' 5 billion or so. The government report linked in the article states that in 2010-2011, $117B of student debt was generated. Ivy League doesn't even matter.

Furthermore, while its easy to criticize the students themselves - obviously many of them are not paragons of responsible spending, but it also kind of misses the point. For one thing it's easy to wave away and say 'many' students have shit they 'don't need', but how many really do? And how much is that really contributing. Without data, its just a gut feeling. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Because I can tell you that where I live, very few students have 42" TVs. Yes, we have smartphone and Macs, and some of us have video game consoles, but how much does this really add to our debt load? Certainly not trivial, but when you consider the average student debt is like 25k, you certainly can't say that the extra 4-6k on random gadgets is what is driving the problem. After all, if you can pay a 20k loan and avoid defaulting, you probably can also pay for a 25k load and avoid defaulting.

And finally, how does one even approach solving a systemic problem (it obviously is systemic) like this if all you do is place the blame on the actors. Clearly the problem is large enough for blame to be ladled on everyone.

danielweber9• 14 years ago

A lot of private schools follow the "charge just as much as the Ivies, so you can tell employers we're just as good" model.

As a percentage of students, the Ivies are small. As trend-setters that lots of other people follow, they are very significant.

hanibash7• 14 years ago

Well said.

Mostly, I see student debt as a glaring indicator that the system as a whole has some serious problems. I don't like to place blame on who is responsible.

But, it can't be denied that student and family responsibility is a factor in the massive student debt problem.

But keep in mind there are external pressures on families and students as well. Schools will sell students very hard. Peers. Our entire culture. When your president gets on air and says "We are dedicated to sending every kid to college", that's a very strong cultural message.

I commend you for making wise decisions when you went to school, though.

onitica3• 14 years ago

One thing that really bothers me is how much universities are allowed to raise their tuition on existing students. I started college paying about $6k a year in tuition my freshmen year. My senior year cost me $11k. The difference in tuition raises overall probably increased my total loan amount by ~$10k by the time I graduated. This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college. I don't know why there are no laws protecting students by requiring fixed tuition rates for students? Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year, which students must take into debt or leave.

*Edit - Ok, the tuition when I first went to college was $20k a year. I had a $14k scholarship, so it was a manageable $6k a year. Now the tuition, 5 years later, is over $27k. That is a 35% increase at about 7% a year. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me, especially for a state school which should be affordable.

newbie12• 14 years ago

The federal government's Medicaid mandate is destroying state education budgets-- Medicaid is literally crowding out state public university education spending.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/medicaid...

onitica3• 14 years ago

I'm talking about out-of-state tuition though, which from my understanding was not subsidized by the state government at all. The funny thing is, the university I went to was still cheaper and better than my in-state alternatives.

hanibash7• 14 years ago

This report's theory is that if the government stopped pumping so much money into the system, tuitions would cease to rise. It's tricky to answer. There's definitely good reasons for public money in education. But it seems to be hurting for the most part, not helping.

[University bloat report](http://goldwaterinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Administra...)

praxulus2• 14 years ago

It's not that they're pumping money in that's the problem, it's the place they decided to pump that causes the issue. Financial aid and guaranteed loans are on the side that increases many student's ability to pay. The alternative is to give money directly to schools (perhaps based on enrollment numbers to mimic the "market based" approach of tuition aid). This brings student's ability to pay back down and would force schools to lower, or at least freeze tuition,.

natrius4• 14 years ago

"This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college."

"Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year"

These statements conflict. Tuition increases should be taken into account when planning a college education. Some schools have a policy of constant tuition over four years. Students who aren't okay with tuition increases should choose those schools.

onitica3• 14 years ago

It is one of those things that is obvious in hindsight. No one informed me that tuition increased at that level when I was looking at colleges (certainly not the schools). The only way I could even find past tuition levels for my university was by looking at my financials for the loans, there was no where on their website or easily googled where I could find past tuition costs. The outrage over college costs and debt was nowhere as publicized five years ago as it is now. OWS, trillion dollar college debt stories, many of the new education startups didn't exist yet. I am certainly not the only student who felt screwed by a ~30% higher tuition rate their senior year. Universities are also notoriously good at selling a college education and tacking on the hidden cost.

Maybe you as an 18 year old would have been smart enough to figure it out, but I doubt most do. I actually planned out my college finances based on the freshmen tuition rates before even going and had a plan for what I was going to do.

Constant tuition is a very rare thing, I can't even name a school I know that does that.

japhyr2• 14 years ago

I was excited to read this article, because I want to see more attempts to improve education. But then I saw that this is a for-profit education company.

I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.

Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.

jerf3• 14 years ago

How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?

We've created a system in which the reward for being an excellent teacher is... what, exactly? More paperwork? More friction from the ever-larger administration for not doing the same as everybody else? More frustration with not being allowed to be the good teacher because they have to teach ever harder to the test?

Until you fix the incentive system you're not going to get better teaching, and yeah, that's probably going to involve someone making some money, because it's beyond me how to fix the incentive system in the presence of an open-ended promise to keep the money hose opened and pointed at them no matter how much they fail. I suppose we could always try giving the same people even more money if they just promise to try really, really hard to do something else a couple of times until they give up.

And I am also pretty sure that true 21st century education isn't going to just a tweaked 20th century education. It's going to be something totally different, and the non-profit system simply won't get us there. Why would they? They don't get defunded for using decades-old totally outdated education systems. (In contrast to the decades-old non-outdated parts, which do exist, but are not 100% of the curriculum by any means.) We know that, because that's already the current situation. They've got no reason to move.

endlessvoid942• 14 years ago

In the short term, there's just no way being a teacher in public education has any financial incentive.

Until you can pay a teacher the same salary as a silicon valley engineer, the best people will not be teachers.

japhyr2• 14 years ago

That is part of the failure, and I am deeply affected by it right now. I am a pretty good teacher, and I watch terrible teachers get paid more than me because they've been at it longer. I can't pay off my family's student loans, and I can't afford anything more than a small condo.

But I still don't think privatizing education is the answer. There is always the possibility of taking education back from the politicians, and setting up a system that does incentivize good teaching. It's not as simple as paying teachers more if their students pass tests.

One fix that would go a long way is restructuring our approach to tuition in service sectors. If you take away my student loans, I would be a happy, hard working teacher the rest of my life. I will get some portion of my loans forgiven for teaching in a high-need area, but that won't go a long way. The same goes for other service sectors, where a reasonable job will leave you paying off student loans until you are past retirement age.

There are bureaucratic fixes. You can give more professional freedoms to highly-effective teachers. Measuring effective teaching is difficult, but not impossible.

As soon as you give up on public education and only see privatization as the answer, you give up on addressing the education gap between different socioeconomic groups.

JumpCrisscross4• 14 years ago

Given that neither system is working but both have evidence of having worked historically or in other countries, it would seem premature to assume sans evidence that education must be in the public sector.

Note that non-profit private institutions are not public schools and are highly effective research institutions.

When things aren't working it's a good idea to rethink the base assumptions we are making on faith alone.

scoofy• 14 years ago

Obviously, matters relating to shortfalls in our education system are important, but the real problem is campaign finance. With election candidates raising the vast majority of their funds from special interests, there is little incentive to fix problems that are profitable for said special interests.

zanny• 14 years ago

I just graduated with my CS degree this May, and I only took on a total of 20k debt and lived on campus, and that 20k was just the stafford loans that 3 of my scholarships mandated I take in order to qualify. Note, now that I graduated, I already paid off over half that on just reserve funds from summer jobs that I have had dating back to High School.

While I was there, only about 1 in 5 students actually had a full financial aid package. Most of them didn't fill out FAFSAs, or didn't even use subsidized stafford loans - they had direct bank loans from their parents for upwards of $60k a year.

In my opinion, the people of the 22ed century will look back and think we were hilariously dumb. We have instantanous communication of ideas and knowledge via the internet, and our internet speeds are only getting better. If you want to learn something, it is easier than ever to find a community of fellow learners for a subject, find tons of free learning materials on that subject, and buckle down without the financial obligations and classroom environment (which doesn't work for everyone, and you inherently have less engagement there because one teacher can not effectively engage with even just 10 people all the time).

Like the article said, the degree is the problem. But I don't think thats the real problem - moreso the problem than that is the inability for individuals to have ideas and persue them in business ventures, because upstart small business will demand much less degree knowledge from employees (even if they are very skilled) since they draw from a local pool.

You get the degree because you will be applying to massive companies with huge HR that don't want to try to interpret you as a person but want to get a quick diagnostic of if you are capable or not from a one word answer to a 3 word question: Got a degree? If hiring was more based on individual accomplishment and demonstratable knowledge rather than paper, we would all be better off for it by getting off the degree treadmill.

dpeck• 14 years ago

As others have said before, education is incredibly cheap now, but credentials are becoming more and more expensive.

blackhole• 14 years ago

While I strongly support educational reform, I should point out that it is not just higher education, it's also high school, middle school, elementary school, kindergarten, and daycare. Every single aspect of the entire educational system down to the time spent on kids when they're too young to speak properly is broken. Consequently, fixing this is not as simple as having an online university, but I agree that the solution is very likely to be some sort of private, for-profit company, simply because that's the only feasible catalyst.

trafficlight• 14 years ago

It's not a financial problem (well it is), it's a cultural problem. American culture just doesn't value education and learning in general.

Isaac Asimov articulated this very well:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.

j_baker• 14 years ago

I don't buy it. We have a culture that rewards everyone going to college, even if they'd be better off not going to college. And your explanation for this is that we don't value education? I'd argue the exact opposite. We value education too much.

Jtsummers2• 14 years ago

That's inaccurate. We have corporate cultures which value the possession of a certificate of achievement, not a culture which values education.

Depending on the survey you have up to 50% of the US denying evolution. A process that is clearly evident without any leaps of faith. That's not indicative of a culture that values education. There are many other aspects of math, science and technology that large swaths don't understand or misunderstand that would not occur if education were truly valued.

vrishabh• 14 years ago

People with a college education are definitely rewarded.

The cultural problem is not that education is not valued, it is more on the lines of that education is often (most of the times) equated to "formal education."

cantankerous4• 14 years ago

I feel like this is just swapping degrees for certifications. In this case the certification is just saying you completed training with so and so (so and so being bloc.io). Either way, everybody's just chasing paper and maybe learning something in the process.

EDIT: What I meant by certification was more abstract. On a resume, saying you completed tutelage with an individual or a group (and have achievements to go along with them) is pretty similar to completing certification that implies knowledge attained prior to completing the certification...the disfunctional nature of certifications, degrees, and mentor-based systems notwithstanding. People market themselves with this stuff, no matter what precisely it is, or where they got it from.

choxi2• 14 years ago

we don't offer certification, we believe in the "your work is your resume" philosophy.

cantankerous4• 14 years ago

I like that policy! I'm just curious how it ultimately boils down to a difference in the mindset of people looking to market themselves with skills. I personally find this model to be really cool and wish you all the best in expanding into your other areas of teaching!

waiwai933• 14 years ago

I'm somewhat curious to know how big of a problem (and what forms it takes) this is around the world—if people could share what this looks like from where they are, I'd be tremendously interested.

JumpCrisscross4• 14 years ago

Allowing lenders (or providing greater incentive for them) to modulate rates on loans based on (a) the institution attended, (b) the major chosen, and (c) individual performance metrics, e.g. GPA, would be a solid step towards resolving education debt insolvency.

This could be achieved by switching government subsidies from loan guarantees to payment-share plans by which the government pays a portion of each payment but ceases to do so in case of default. These loans should be absolvable in bankruptcy - an immature decision made in one's adolescence shouldn't be a lifelong burden. Thus, the credit risk is retained by the lender while financial impact lessened on the student.

Unpopular as measures radically increasing costs on liberal arts majors may be, the present situation is a clear example of artificially locked markets producing inefficient outcomes.

jmtame3• 14 years ago

I was just about to suggest the same thing. The degree seems like a very important piece of information to a creditor making a decision. If I know that 60% of students of a particular degree will default within 4 years, why would I continue to loan that money out? If it's impossible for them to get out of it, that'd be good enough a reason.

It seems that most of my engineering friends have a very existentialist perspective on it: the person is entirely responsible for the actions they take. If they got themselves into debt, then they should figure out how to get themselves out of debt.

That's valid. The student wasn't forced to go study art history, but they were lied to by a lot of people, including their parents and society, which are two difficult groups to ignore. I think it's good that we're airing out some of college's dirty laundry--it needs to be known that if you go study art history, there may be a greater than 50% chance that you will be jobless or working as a waiter or waitress. I had this debate with someone last weekend where I made the same argument, and she got very defensive. It's hard to get specific and criticize certain degrees without being offensive to somebody because people feel they need to defend their choices. I later found out she studied art history, she was a waitress, and she had just quit her job. To her credit, she probably didn't realize her job options were grim when she chose to do that. If this issue is spoken about publicly, it should at the very least make the decision easier for people. Every graduating senior in high school should hear both sides of the story and fully understand they can't arbitrarily pick any degree and expect the same results.

mgkimsal6• 14 years ago

It's a greater likelihood, sure, but... people also need to learn to take control of their lives. Dude - the $80k Art History job ain't coming along - deal with it. Pivot. I have an undergrad degree in Philosophy, but have been working in software development for more than 15 years, earning a good living most of that time too.

This notion that "oh no, i have a liberal arts degree - my life is forever ruined and I'll be serving coffee part time until I die" is a tired meme. "There are no jobs!". Yes there are, in some fields. Hustle to get in to those fields, regardless of what your "major" was. Just do it.

Now... I realize not everyone can do this - life situations dictate that some people have more struggles than others. But I meet single, healthy unattached 20-somethings that complain about the state of things - this is the best time in your life to retool, readjust and get moving. And they generally don't.

LockeWatts7• 14 years ago

Perhaps we should stop telling kids they can be whatever they want when they grow up.

That's a rather depressing idea, but it's the truth. Unless you're independently wealthy or one in a hundred million, you will not be able to sustain yourself in certain pursuits.

They're great to have as a hobby, but sometimes you just need to pay the bills. The land of opportunity is closed for our generation, but nobody told us until we had already packed our bags and boarded the plane.

rmk23• 14 years ago

Maybe everyone should become an engineer, so everyone can be happily living in a technocracy were we make everything remotely tangible into money.

Maybe we should tell people to stop doing psychology, art history, history, political sciences, theology, literature etc. I mean, it's on Wikipedia, right? You can just go there and read about it, you know, as a hobby, so, why bother studying it?

Maybe we can all become engineers and convert everything into profit. What do you mean I probably shouldn't track someone's every movement? Why? It's the logical solution, it's possible, it's doable, it gives the greatest monetary return. And it's the best developmental solution! It's perfect!

danielweber9• 14 years ago

to payment-share plans

I see that ending really badly. We have seen that schools have no price pressure, so the standard price for school will end up being "50% or more of your future earnings."

You must have price pressure on schools. Even more money at even more onerous terms to the students will just exacerbate the problem.

JumpCrisscross4• 14 years ago

We know that students and parents value degrees irrationally. We also know lenders have a lesser propensity to make the same mistake.

By introducing market forces on the lender's side we are side-stepping educating high school students and their parents about the returns on education and instead making the lenders be the bad cop who says "no, you're not walking out with $200k debt and an art history degree".

This should, in theory, reduce demand for university degrees in preference of community college or trade school certification, a system that has shown its merits in Deutschland.

It may also be useful for schools to own a portion of the credit risk of its students. The stick approach to this would be having schools buy a tranche of the loans each semester. The carrot would be the lender offering the school a small payment each year after graduation that the loan is paid on time, or alternatively, a larger payment if the loan hasn't defaulted in 6 and 10 years.

eli_gottlieb5• 14 years ago

The price pressure used to be state-subsidized public universities with tuitions deliberately kept very low. As in, $600/semester low, or even zero-tuition low.

erikpukinskis• 14 years ago

At Texas A&M, the default rate for Liberal Arts majors is 5.9%, compared to the school average of 4.7%. Engineering majors default at a rate of 3.8%.*

http://www.tgslc.org/pdf/tamu_default_study.pdf

I don't think modulating loan rates based on whether you're a Liberal Arts major will really solve the problem, and I also think it's also unfair.

* These numbers are percentages of students who entered repayment of their loans between 1997 and 1999 and defaulted by 2003.

xanados• 14 years ago

A default rate of 5.9 vs. 3.8 is significant. That means that if two groups of 1000 students take out loans, the group made up of liberal arts majors will have 55% more defaults than the engineering group. Given that loan interest rates are on the order of 5%, I fail to see how a 2.1% difference in default rate would ever not be significant.

danielweber9• 14 years ago

And it won't change course decisions at all.

If an engineer is allowed to borrow $30,000 and the liberal arts major is allowed to borrow $10,000, then the school will just charge the engineer $20,000 more. (They'll probably frame it in a much better way that looks like a discount to the liberal arts major, but it's important to not be fooled by that.)

JumpCrisscross4• 14 years ago

Is it fairer to over-allocate to the major where the graduate has a 2.1 percentage point higher chance of defaulting on a loan they will never be able to escape? The cost of an artificially levelled playing field is the present malaise.

anamax6• 14 years ago

> These loans should be absolvable in bankruptcy

The current bankruptcy rules wrt student loans came out of some experience with different rules. (For example, speciality MDs had some cute hacks to dump their undergrad loans, which were very old by the time they had money.)

How does your knowledge of those rules and that experience inform your proposed policy?

HarryHirsch4• 14 years ago

In the present environment it is people who got a worthless degree from a third-rate technical school, like Devry, Kaplan or the University of Phoenix that are saddled with student loans they cannot ever hope to repay.

The legal environment has changed, as have those who take advantage of it.

pnathan• 14 years ago

Yes, education is our generation's (18-30) problem.

Schools are lousy and degrade basic skills, as well as degrading deep cultural literacy and history. Idiots are held as heros. College costs are skyrocketing and dysfunctional buildings are being built by the colleges. The list of problems could go on... reams of paper have been spent documenting them.

Yes, there's a problem. I argue the essence of the problem is the deification of money.

mw63214• 14 years ago

Agile Education. Is that a thing? If not, why? If yes, how?

Edit: serious question.

rflrob• 14 years ago

> Why administration had to grow 4x the pace of enrollment is beyond me.

While I won't claim that every single administrative dollar has been well spent, between 1993 and 2007, this would cover things like on campus tech support and IT staff and equipment (email, online registration, transcripts, etc), more broadly available and diverse student support (counseling, LGBT support organizations, ombudsmen, etc), and presumably tutoring services that help the growing fraction of the population in college thrive, rather than simply prep-school graduates. Again, I'm not going to claim that 4x increase relative to enrollment is the right amount, but compared to universities 20 years ago, they are providing more services.

DevMonkey• 14 years ago

Here are a couple of random thoughts:

Maybe we need to start outsourcing our education to China and India. We can send our kids to India for their undergraduate degrees and then they can come back here to get their post-graduate degrees.

Move towards knowledge certification instead of a degree that states you completed your degree. Bar Exam, MCSE, Board Certifications, etc. If you have the drive and capacity to learn without attending college then you should be rewarded only having to take a certification exam.

Once enough schools go belly up people can just start listing those institutions on their resumes. Since the school is close there won't be an easy way to verify. (Just kidding of course)

ap22213• 14 years ago

Maybe the problem is that there's less and less need for most types of workers.

We have a global population steadily lurching toward 8 billion. And, the richest of us seem to need less and less. And, that's coupled with aggressively commoditized global services industry that is providing more and more value for less and less cost.

Seems like major equilibrium shift waiting to happen.

marknutter2• 14 years ago

I think the biggest problem with higher education today is the fact that colleges aren't the one issuing the student loans. If a student enters the workforce and can't find a job to pay back their loan, the colleges aren't the ones on the hook; the students are, and eventually, the taxpayers. I understand that government-backed loans are a way to try to make higher education available to more people but all this easy money has resulted in a huge cash grab by for profit institutions who frankly could care less whether or not their graduates actually pay the loans back. Couple that with the almost religious belief that a college education is the only way to achieve the American dream and you have a recipe for the exact disaster we're flying head first into today.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

The traditional name for this: The agency problem. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/agencyproblem.asp#axzz23...

grecy2• 14 years ago

> Once you default on a student loan, you'll be hounded for life: student loan debt is the absolute worst kind of debt you can have, as it is not absolvable by bankruptcy.

I've always wondered two things about this.

1. How is that even legal? I thought the whole point of bankruptcy was to raise a big flag that says "I can no longer pay my debts", and they go away. Why is student loan debt different?

2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.

eli_gottlieb5• 14 years ago

2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.

Just look at this thread: Americans are so incredibly enamored to market fundamentalism that they often can't see public policy when it's punching them in the nose.

GFKjunior• 14 years ago

1) Congress passed a law after a lot of lobbying. The reasoning was that when a student graduates they have substantial debt and no assets, so every student would just declare bankruptcy the day after graduating and wouldn't have to pay back the providers.

grecy2• 14 years ago

So the lenders wanted protection.

They are now 100% guaranteed to make money by lending it to uninformed children.

Crazy.

stretchwithme• 14 years ago

As with most things government is involved with, the education industry has evolved for the care and feeding of the providers and not the consumers.

In a normal market, the customers have the power. In a market where the consumers don't really pay or think they don't, they have no leverage.

And students are just passing through, are quite busy, so they aren't exactly lobbying Congress. But rest assured everyone else involved is.

roguecoder2• 14 years ago

Re-introduce cheap, accessible, well-funded public universities that people can study out, without subsidizing for-profit or even private universities. Public options allow the market to work while overcoming the underprovided nature of education.

Crake2• 14 years ago

I don't think there's a private solution to this problem. If we look to functional educational systems (example: germany), we see that other countries are often much better at matching people up with careers that match their talents (or lack thereof). Instead, we have colleges that will take whoever can pay over whoever might be the brightest academically. The people who can pay aren't necessarily the sharpest crayon in the box, and the people who can't might be the next cure for [insert x here].

State universities at the very least should be tuition free so as to not completely fuck over students from dysfunctional families who won't help/families that can't afford it. Of course, it would also be wiser to raise entrance standards and somehow figure out how to stop the ridiculous GPA inflation that goes on in the liberal arts fields. STEM still pays relatively well, but that's because our standards haven't dropped; unfortunately, many requirements for maintaining a scholarship fail to take choice of major into account when setting a minimum GPA.

Anyone can get a liberal arts degree if they have enough (or can borrow enough) money, which is why it means shit nowadays as a measure of IQ.

HarryHirsch4• 14 years ago

I am at a state university, and there's a couple of issues that people here aren't really aware of.

University funding comes from three sources: tuition, state funds and research grants (federal or industrial). The last two have been steadily declining, so that leaves tuition as an ever more important source of funds. The university is building new dormitories to get new paying bodies. It doesn't matter just how damn incapable the students are, what counts is that they pay. You can't encourage anyone to drop their chosen degree, if you do you might have to apologize to the chair and the parents.

Again, funds are scarce, and the administration tries to hive off teaching of introductory courses to adjuncts. It takes anyone a year or two to learn the ropes, then people leave because working conditions here are poor, the classes are too large and the workload too heavy. No one is concerned about the revolving door for introductory courses. Besides, you have to have an excellent command of the subject matter to be able to teach a beginners' class, you just cannot put a bottom-of-the-barrel type in front of an introductory course and expect the students to do well.

Again, it's the undergraduates that pay, and they money goes primarily into teaching facilities. Meanwhile the research space is neglected. There is no money to replace the fifty year old rotting tiles in my office, everything goes to provide a nice environment to the dear undergrad kids.

Someone might notice that mathematics and computing are peculiar in that there is not much capital equipment or education needed to be productive. One can be a decent programmer with a bachelor's degree and grow into software engineering. But consider the physical sciences, biology, chemistry physics. To produce any results one needs capital equipment and a PhD. No one goes anywhere far in biology even with a Masters.

Startup mania. I'd love to join a startup in my field. Try that with a sick wife. Can't afford it.

Education is Our Generation's Big Problem. Let's Fix it.

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