College, the Great Unleveler

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/college-the-great-unleveler/

by lkrubner • 12 years ago

81 60 12 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

tokenadult• 12 years ago

I read through the whole article before asking myself, "Just who is this author, and what is the author's background?" The article byline reports, "Suzanne Mettler, a professor of government at Cornell University, is the author of Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream."

These days, when I look at suggestions for national policy for the United States (which show up here on Hacker News with alarming frequency, even despite the differing topic emphasis of this online community), I really like to hear from other countries about what is already working in public policy on the same topic. Is there some country in the world that does a better job in setting higher education policy than the United States? If so, which one? What improvements can United States policy gain by studying the example of other countries? As an American who has lived abroad for years during my adult life, I find it tedious to consider policy suggestions here in the country of my birth without reality-checking them by the experience of other countries. In this light, what we should consider as we ponder the suggestions in the article kindly submitted here?

(Disclosure: I have a college degree, gained at a state university in the United States at the time the article author identifies as a time of policy transition. I have close relatives who have never completed college degrees, and I wonder what factors matter most for college degrees being accessible, and also what factors matter most for college degrees being useful to their possessors and to the broader society.)

jamesaguilar3• 12 years ago

What are you trying to convey with your first paragraph?

jcampbell1• 12 years ago

Just take it at face value.

> I really like to hear from other countries about what is already working in public policy on the same topic.

I think that explains it.

Perdition• 12 years ago

In Australia we just have more regulation and standards on what gets to call itself a university and so is allowed to offer "commonwealth supported" courses. There are still "University of Phoenix" type places around but because they can't call themselves a university they don't trick many people (they mostly prey on foreign students).

In our system the government sets prices and directly pays the education provider for "commonwealth supported places". The student has to repay the government only a part of that cost, and it is indexed to inflation and you don't have to make repayments until your income is around ~$50,000 AUD.

As an outside I think Americas two big problems with higher education is the lack of national standards, which is feed by your student loan system.

mjn• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how generalizable it is, but Denmark has a fairly strong split between the "proper" universities, which are all state-funded and tuition-free, and private "academies", which may be for-profit or nonprofit, and don't have degree-issuing rights. The for-profit ones typically teach vocational programs. Some of these are reasonably well respected, but as a result of not being able to offer degrees, they tend to compete more on the skills gained than on the certificate. For example they will want to be able to argue that if you spend time/money there, by the time you're done you'll be a skilled 3d animator with a portfolio to prove it. So these are relatively unregulated besides not being able to issue degrees (they can issue private certificates). They also don't receive state support, and students don't receive state financial aid.

There are a few weird in-between things. For example the National Film School is very well respected and mostly publicly funded, but doesn't issue degrees, because historically it grew out of the film production scene and doesn't see itself as "academic" (nowadays they could probably gain degree-granting rights, but it's become a point of principle that they're a "film school", not a "university").

girvo• 12 years ago

Australia is similar, as far as I'm aware. There are private colleges, that are paid up front etc, but they're sort of looked down on and are usually very industry specific (QANTM being the tech and game programming one in Brisbane, for example).

bottled_poe• 12 years ago

So... kids from affluent backgrounds have been given better oppotunities than the have-nots. I'm shocked!

Nav_Panel• 12 years ago

Here, I'll summarize the article for you, as I think you've misinterpreted it:

1. Programs were put in place throughout the last 60 years to help provide better opportunities for kids who did NOT come from affluent backgrounds.

2. Over the last 20 years (and perhaps even earlier, posits the author), these programs have been increasingly abused by for-profit universities. Additionally, these programs have become less effective as the cost of tuition grows.

3. So, if we want to restore the opportunities for aspiring students from less affluent families, we need to regulate the for-profits and we need to bring government aid programs back in line with the current state of higher education.

Of course the kids from affluent backgrounds have better opportunities -- that's not the point of the article. The point was that kids from less affluent backgrounds have fewer opportunities than they did within our parents' lifetimes, and that systemic corruption/abuse is responsible for this change.

JPKab3• 12 years ago

Not too long ago, I took advantage of my large, corporate employer's training benefit and took a week off for hands-on Hadoop/Hive/Hbase training. My company required I get a cert as part of the benefit, so I went and bit the bullet to take a cert test. The location of the cert test was at a local Westwood College campus. Westwood is a for-profit institution. This particular campus earns extra money by acting as a testing center for certifications. The first thing I noticed was the staff was overly-numerous and hugely, unbelievably unprofessional. Despite an appointment made two months in advance, the staff member in charge of administering the tests was nowhere to be found. The staff member present simply told me "She hasn't called. She was here but she went to get lunch." This meant that I had to wait in the admissions office waiting room for an hour. What I saw deeply disturbed me. Person after person was shepherded in, and guided through the entire student loan application process. The awful part was how completely, utterly unprepared and unequipped these folks were for any kind of academic learning. A young man came in desperately begging the receptionist for help with his Metro fare, telling her that he "had to jump the turnstile" because he couldn't afford to pay for the fare. He was in his 20s and was profoundly ignorant and juvenile in his behavior, at a level one would expect from a middle schooler. I saw a lot of that. This institution has zero consequences if the hundreds of students walking around that campus are unable to get jobs with the skills taught to them. No, the burden is entirely on the student and the US taxpayer. These for-profit institutions have no admissions requirements. They are nothing more than a giant machine designed to pump subsidized student loan money into their coffers. And in the grand fashion of "iron triangle" style politics in the US, they have huge swarms of lobbyists crawling DC (financed with government loan moeny) to ensure they keep getting the government loan money.

GabrielF00• 12 years ago

I'm all for cracking down on for-profit colleges that have low graduation rates and offer poor career prospects. However, that's only one aspect of the problem. There are also students who are well prepared and go to good schools but still manage to rack up crippling debt. There are a lot of people who have gone into a lot of debt to get, say, a law degree but their earnings aren't nearly sufficient to handle their debt.

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

There are many low quality non-profit colleges as well, with negligible admission requirements, and no consequences when students fail. Why do we obsessively focus on the for-profits while giving the non-profits a pass?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...

The non-profit colleges have far more lobbyists crawling DC than the for-profits, so it can't be that.

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

JPKab3• 12 years ago

Good point. I agree. I recall something being proposed in the state of Oregon: students don't pay tuition up front. Instead, a fixed percentage of a student's income for a designated time period after graduation is paid to the institution. I think this would have some amusingly rapid effects on ALL colleges. You wouldn't see schools like the University of Florida which recently axed their CS program in favor of expanding their English and History programs. My university is a decent one, but efforts to help graduating students get jobs were minimal and token: job fairs? I've attended your school for year, paying tons of money, and your best effort at job placement is a fucking job fair? And let's not forget the out of touch, tenured professors teaching out-dated skills. I'm looking at you, Virginia Tech, for continuing to teach your Introduction to Computer Science class with C++, while MIT and Harvard use Python. Students leave THEIR classes having learned to build things. They leave your shit C++ class having learned to build nothing other than homework solutions that have zero applicability in the real world.

madengr• 12 years ago

WTF is someone with an 840 of 2400 on the SAT even doing in college, much less engineering (and the kid has an inflated 3.6 GPA in high school)? 20+ years ago an 840 wouldn't even get you into college, and back then the maximum score was 1600. I think this explains why they flunk out.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

From my time in the military, I've noticed that many who leave the military and have the GI bill available for them for use don't end up using them at good schools, causing it to be a waste of their time, education, and the government's money.

I strongly agree that more regulation of the higher education industry is needed.

mindvirus3• 12 years ago

I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system.

Private schools let the wealthiest, most influential people take their children out of the system, and so have no motivation to fix the system. Meanwhile the people who are least able to fix the system are left stuck with it. Take NYC as a great example of this - extremely high incomes, $45k/year private schools, and some of the worst public schools in America.

It's not that people are bad for using private schools - it's hard to take a moral stance when your children are the cost (I will certainly send my future kids to private school). But by having an easy out, it lets people avoid fixing the system.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

New York actually has some of the best public schools of a major U.S. city.

Also, your proposal would cause a collapse of U.S. cities, as all the middle class and wealthy families moved out. Schools are a key battleground for race and class warfare in the U.S. Even in wealthy Manhattan, 70% of students in public school are on free or reduced price lunch. Wealthy and middle class families would simply leave cities rather than send their kids to schools with students who skew poor and skew minority.[1] Even liberal San Francisco had to give up on its progressive policy of randomizing public school assignments (to prevent wealthy people taking advantage of neighborhood-based assignment to create enclaves within the public system).

[1] Peruse the school profiles in Chicago: http://schoolinfo.cps.edu/schoolprofile/SchoolDetails.aspx?S.... Note how prominently racial and economic demographics are featured. D.C. school profiles even have a handy pie chart for racial demographics: http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Anacostia+High+School. This information isn't prominently displayed because parents don't care about it...

winterswift• 12 years ago

The idea that we should create a ban on private primary and secondary-ed institutions to fix the public system is incomprehensible to me. Should we force people with enough time and effort to devote to quit homeschooling, too? How about those who can afford private tutors? How far do you plan to take this to eliminate any economic advantage? Inciting conflict and anti-governmental feelings is a great way to inspire creative workarounds by the upper class, not creative solutions to a broken shitpile of an educational system. Ask yourself: would you really be inclined to fix something that someone else broke because you were forced to by the government?

The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?

What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.

The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.

mindvirus3• 12 years ago

You are making a reductio ad absurdum.

I'm not proposing that private schools all close their doors tomorrow - of course there would be chaos - but that in long term planning of the education system, we should consider that that privatization of education perhaps leads to a greater socioeconomic gap.

Likewise, I'm not saying that the problem magically fixes itself. It's a long, hard road to undo all of the damage. But if the most influential people aren't on board, it becomes significantly harder. I don't think there's any hard and fast reason that we can't have a public education system that serves the needs of everyone.

As a means of affecting change, I think it's important that the wealthiest, most influential people are involved. Consider - I think it's not a stretch to say that a congressman with no kids in the public system would be more willing to vote to cut funding or vote for a counterproductive measure. And we do rely on the wealthy more to contribute to society. Someone making $500k/year is required to contribute at least $200k of that labor to the government - while someone making $30k might be barely required to contribute anything. And so one might say that it's not without precedent.

cpwright• 12 years ago

If you take away school choice through private schools, then wealthy people will exercise residential school choice. That is, if you have the $45K for a private school, but suddenly they become unavailable in NYC; those same people have the means to move outside of NYC. Once they do that, they no longer have to pay income or other NYC taxes, and will simply select an excellent school district in the suburbs, move there, and have their children receive a quality public education. They'll pay for it with high property taxes in that new district, and they will no longer significantly contribute to the NYC tax base, putting NYC public schools at a greater disadvantage than if they had to compete with the private schools.

cdoxsey2• 12 years ago

Perhaps you don't realize this, but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons. Are you willing to trample all over their religious liberty and lock them up in pursuit of your utopia?

You probably just didn't think about them. So thank you for posting this, as it demonstrates a growing problem in America: ignorance of religion. I don't care if you're religious or not, this is a country with a lot of people who are.

People these days love words like "tolerance" and "diversity" but then they suggest the most intolerant policies you can imagine.

catshirt2• 12 years ago

> but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons.

at the risk of sounding naive how does attending a public school limit one's ability to practice religion?

i am particularly confused because all of the private schools where i grew up were Catholic, which i assumed were even less religiously tolerant.

bsder• 12 years ago

Perhaps you don't realize this, but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons.

Tough. Between the fact that data shows that the religious schools produce sub-par academically trained students as well as promulgate a set of bigoted, intolerant social mores, yeah, I'm kind of against the idea of opting out for religious reasons.

Let's see how tolerant these "religious reasons" objectors are when the school has "Scientology" or "Madrassa" in its name.

judk4• 12 years ago

Thank you, Harrison Bergeron.

Will you also ban those families from reading to their toddlers, teaching their kids music, helping their kids doi homework, and having rich friends?

I'd prefer to tax those folks and invest the funds in improving public schools.

mindvirus3• 12 years ago

No, I don't think any of those things, but you're the second person to get that out of my post, so I apologize for being unclear. First, see my reply to winterswift above (below?).

I think that by having a two tier system, you end up promoting inequality. Consider American healthcare - from my perspective, it's fantastic, with world class doctors, no wait times and modern machines. Certainly better than my experience in Canada! However, this is a system that serves 20% of the population very very well, at the expense of the rest. I just happen to be in that 20%. And because it works well for that group of people - which includes congressmen, senators, celebrities and chief executives - there's not a huge push to fix it.

The same goes for education. I can more than afford to send my kids to private schools, and honestly, probably will. Small classrooms, modern materials, great teachers. It's a system that I'll be very well served by. Yet the American public education system is largely failing, but this failure does not affect the most powerful people, there's not a huge push to fix it either. Indeed, they benefit from it - their children have a competitive advantage by having fewer people well educated (although I don't claim there's a conspiracy here, just that the value of good education is so much more).

Part of it is that I don't think that money is the main issue - there's a ton of money in the education system, it just goes to the wrong people. And if someone is required to pay money into a system that doesn't affect them, why do they care what the results are and how well the money is spent?

So my only claim is that we should consider that for major public services (health, education, safety), that allowing two tiers can cause major divergences that cause long term negative consequences, and that we should seriously think about this.

cafard3• 12 years ago

NYC also has some of the best public schools in America, or anywhere. There is some saying to the effect that if the Bronx High School of Science were a country, it would rank very high on the list of countries for the science Nobels.

In general, I wonder how strong the correlation is between availability of private schools and disfunction in the public schools: low, I suspect. The Washington, DC, area has three very strong school districts: Montgomery and Howard Counties in Maryland, Fairfax County in Virginia. And there are four pretty fair public magnet high schools in Washington, DC. Yet side by side with excellent public schools there are private schools. And though I don't know this, I suspect that in places where the public schools are uniformly bad (not this neighborhood or that, but whole counties), the private schools aren't much better.

philwelch• 12 years ago

How exactly are parents going to "fix" bad public schools? That's like saying countries shouldn't accept refugees or grant political asylum so that those people could go back and "fix" the failed state they're trying to escape.

keyhole_downs• 12 years ago

Well, shouldn't they?

Beliavsky• 12 years ago

"I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system."

My three children are in public schools, although they all did KG and preschool in private schools. Since the government does not own our children, I don't think it has the right to compel our children to attend a certain school. Are you going to ban homeschooling too?

busterarm• 12 years ago

I went to public and private schools in NYC.

There's absolutely two tiers of private schools and the secular and protestant schools are on one (top) tier and the catholic ones are on another.

Many parents end up sending their children through catholic school because they would otherwise be (or have been) removed from public school for behavior or are not performing at their grade level. Many of my classmates' parents donated their childrens' way through school. I met a lot of kids who couldn't hack it but their parents exploited every trick to get their kid passed through unimpeded. After I finished things in the diocese got even worse.

Neither my public or private school experiences were very good. In fact, now that my former public school principal is now the NYDoE Chancellor of Schools I have no hope or positive feelings for the education of anyone in NY... ...unless you can test into the super-exclusive private & public schools.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

What bothers me is that we have a very nebulous idea here in the U.S. of what it is that we hope to gain from educating people in colleges. I met someone a number of years ago (mid 2000's, before the recession), who had done his degree in aerospace engineering from a regional state school (not bottom of the barrel, but not an MRU). He was working as an HVAC technician. Not a bad living, of course, but I couldn't help but think it was overkill considering that a 2-year degree is an entirely adequate preparation for such a job.

In my opinion, Americans are overeducated. We shuffle people through colleges, but the jobs waiting for them at the other end hardly merit all that preparation. We're drowning in college debt because we're spending vastly more to educate people than is warranted by the sorts of jobs available in the economy.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

I don't believe in the usefulness of "overeducation" as a concept. No amount of knowledge or learning should ever be considered too much. What I do believe, however, is that vocational training should be decoupled from education, and that everyone should be seeking both.

selmnoo• 12 years ago

If you decouple it, a lot less people will go on to seek both. I actually think they shouldn't be decoupled for that very reason -- I'd rather have a population learned in a variety of subjects.

What is the main problem is the cost of higher education. I really hope the experiment at Georgia Institute of Technology (CS degree at less than $7k) works out wonderfully. I really think that with some more improvement here and there, it is the way to go.

SamReidHughes2• 12 years ago

Are you arguing that spending more effort educating yourself on a particular subject never becomes suboptimal? Are you just talking past the parent? Or do you actually believe in storing information in brains for storing-information-in-brains' sake, even if it's ten years of study of pokémon glitches?

Jare• 12 years ago

Universal demand and lack of accountability for supply create cancerous markets and bubbles. This is true for any market, including education, health, housing or internet portals.

com2kid• 12 years ago

Ugh I'm sick and tired of this.

but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s.

As someone who came from a working class background, college has enabled me to move up multiple socio-economic classes.

I'll admit I was lucky when I attended, graduating in 2006 right before huge price increases went into effect. Even so, I believe college offers a huge opportunity for social and economic mobility.

In the bottom half of the economic distribution, it’s less than one out of five for those in the third bracket and fewer than one out of 10 in the poorest.

So what I am seeing here is that college does offer opportunities at mobility. Compared to the almost 0 opportunity so many would have had otherwise.

Let us remember here that we are talking about fifths and tenths of hundreds of millions of people. Ok discount that to only college aged, and we still have tens of millions of people we are talking about.

Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend public universities and colleges, historically the nation’s primary channels to educational opportunity. These institutions still offer the best bargain around, yet even there, tuition increases have bred inequality.

Ah now, here is a real problem! The cost of in-state tuition has sky rocketed. Let's do something about that, rather than say "college is useless".

As for private educational institutions, the problem seems to be that they have better advertising. They sell a slick message. (Though I have had positive encounters with a few of them that have convinced me that private education does have a role in the overall educational system, sometimes direct skill training is exactly what is needed!)

AllTheThings• 12 years ago

As someone who came from a working class background, college has enabled me to move up multiple socio-economic classes.

I'm really happy someone brought this up. Where I went to school, the average student just ended up working in their parents/relatives' car wash, nail salon, or sandwich store, those that didn't fall into the grips of drugs and gangs. Even into high school, a few of us didn't even have an internet connection. Though I used to code a lot as a kid, I never thought of coding as something of inherent value because I never saw anyone around me go into a job that involves coding or even math/science as a skill. Forget working at a startup as a teenager! To me, the folks at Google and Apple (Facebook didn't really exist yet) wore white labcoats and tweaked giant machines and took notes on their notebooks. I was just a kid who could visualize math and physics better than his peers.

It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that I might end up working for a company like that or making a difference in the world of technology. And it's college I thank for giving me the self-confidence and technical ability to work in the world of tech.

College isn't useful for social mobility? Bullshit.

notacoward2• 12 years ago

"Compared to the almost 0 opportunity so many would have had otherwise."

There's no such comparison to be made. Those people who expended that much effort going to college only to flunk out could have expended that same effort doing something else. Most of them might have failed at that too, but a few might have succeeded. At least none of them would have been saddled with tons of student-loan debt. "College or immediate and irrevocable failure" is the myth that for-profit-college hucksters love to promote, and I'm sure they'd be glad to see that it's working.

The problem is not that college exists as a possible route to prosperity for poor people. The problem is that it's presented - including by comments like yours - as the only route. Instead of comparing college to nothing at all, we should be comparing the real odds of achieving success via college vs. the odds of achieving it by other means. If we're morally compelled to consider the 1/5 or 1/10 who benefited from going to college, we are also morally compelled to consider the 4/5 or 9/10 for whom it failed and left them worse off financially.

judk4• 12 years ago

Flunking out seems at odd with extracting maximum tuition. Which are you accusing the schools of?

icebraining• 12 years ago

The idea that the prices have skyrocketed seems mostly a result of bad analysis. The price that people actually pay hasn't really increased that much: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/22/153316565/the-pric...

jerf• 12 years ago

Then where is the unambiguous and enormous rise in student loan debt coming from?

Honest question, for anybody who has a real answer.

lambda• 12 years ago

Ah now, here is a real problem! The cost of in-state tuition has sky rocketed. Let's do something about that, rather than say "college is useless".

Except, the author was not saying "college is useless". The author was saying that college has become no more useful at educating a wider population than it was in the 1970s, while costing the federal government and students more.

Part of the reason was the increase of in-state tuition; basically, state colleges shifting the burden to the federal government and student debt. And part of the reason is the rise of for-profit colleges, which are essentially business optimized to extra as much free federal money as possible with no concern for the well-being of their students.

Because these for-profit colleges have no admission standards, they tend to be attended by people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds who haven't had as much opportunity to get good high school educations and test prep. So while college is still plenty useful for people from better socioeconomic backgrounds, or those from poorer backgrounds who are able to beat the odds and get into a good school that will cover a large portion of their tuition, people who are stuck paying more at state schools or getting tons of debt and crap education at for-profit schools are getting the short end of the stick.

I don't know how you read "college is useless" out of that article. As far as I could tell, it was all about how useful some colleges are, but how expensive or inaccessible they can be.

fredgrott• 12 years ago

a question, in Germany there are coops between gov and industry to have both vocational and college programs result in 2 year and 4 year degrees.

An example is Siemens, if you get into a training program at Siemens you will if you complete it end up with a 2 year tech degree or a 4 year college degree complete with several years of on the job training paid both by the German gov and Siemens.

IS there any movement towards such a partnership between industry and the gov in the US towards education?

cafard3• 12 years ago

Some: the NY Times had an article about one such the other day. But they don't run to four-year degrees.

College, the Great Unleveler

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