College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)

http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2008/11/20/college_an_overpriced_monopoly

by _zhqs • 17 years ago

56 41 17 years ago

open.salon.com

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

Seeking a college degree forces a person to learn a lot of material in a short span of time. I am fully aware of MIT's open-courseware and I've watched a few lectures, read syllabuses and assignments, but I still plan on enrolling in my local university's distance education program in order to take their core computer science courses in preparation for the masters program.

Could I just read some books on assembly language, data structures and operating systems? Sure. But I don't trust myself to crack open the books and do assignments every night unless my money and grades are on the line.

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

And what about the college campus? The atmosphere, the people, the resources.

ohlol3• 17 years ago

The atmosphere, the people, the resources.

---

... are worth $100k+ in total??

locopati2• 17 years ago

If social networking online is good, real social networking even better.

ohlol3• 17 years ago

If you want to network, go out to the bar. It'll only cost you tens of dollars.

sayrer• 17 years ago

Exactly. The value is the other students. That's certainly the factor that influenced my experience more than any other.

The author may have a point about universities being overpriced, but he missed a pretty key point, so his analysis is suspect.

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

I have read enough of these articles now to think that the points the author makes cannot be rationally argued against. In other words, the foe is simply the status quo.

I wonder if this is how society moves, or fails to move? Nearly everyone, at the individual level agrees with a sentiment, but we're all too entrenched in the current system to find a way out.

Anyway, If I'm correct about how solid the argument against the expensive four year degree is, I hope we're in for some interesting changes.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

Do the people who write these articles not realize that other people have said the exact same thing before?

shalmanese• 17 years ago

And they'll keep on saying them again and again until things are different. That's how revolutions work.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

Or they'll keep on saying them again and again and things will stay almost exactly the same. That's how revolutions fail.

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I'm incredibly torn....

On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown.

On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers.

Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.*

What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses.

* To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

Living at home during college would suck. If they were willing to put up with that, imagine how much crap work they might have been willing to put up with at your office.

hack_edu• 17 years ago

Why not start this now? Even if you're seasoned, I'm sure the experience and refresh would be a nice experience to anyone. I'm in a distance grad program right now and could use a real cohort.

dangoldin• 17 years ago

There are a substantial number of people who go to med school and law school while living off campus. Those are of course different and many of the people probably had on campus under grad experiences but I wouldn't be so quick to discount living at home.

Scriptor3• 17 years ago

Are those med/law students actually living at home or in their own apartments?

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I did mention off-campus housing as acceptable. Most med/law students I've known did live in apartments close to campus, but they were definitely immersed in their respective student communities.

Perhaps the issue with living in your parents' home is that you aren't forced to opt into the campus community because you can still hang out with your old friends from high school.

kragen• 17 years ago

I've learned lots more from hanging out with grad students than I ever did from dropping out of college.

AmericanOP• 17 years ago

I really enjoy MIT's free course material. I loaded every lecture pdf onto my iphone and slowly but surely have been making my way through their mba program. Based on my experience, I do not think a dedicated school program would work based on this material, and I am someone who is ALL for reform in higher education.

The main reason is the nature of the content. Anybody can work their way through a management psychology or communication class, but you'd have to be very far out on the bell curve to teach yourself optimization models and statistical data mining based on this material alone. You could be familiar with how to do it based on lecture notes, which is my goal, but without help not one of your 18-year-olds could correctly solve these problems in the real world. They could educate to a degree, but their ability would be nowhere near traditional students. The pedigree's value will be preserved.

Most of the classes have missing or incomplete material since OpenCourseware is clearly an afterthought. Someone would really have to go through the course reading list to be able to say they took the class.

jdminhbg• 17 years ago

He missed his chance to really connect the housing bubble and the education bubble in their causes -- well-meaning public policy meant to encourage home ownership/college education that provides an endless fountain of easy credit to do so. If you dump the kind of money into an industry that we've dumped into real estate and education, there will be people available to soak it up.

tedunangst• 17 years ago

Regarding the part at the end, with the idea that we could take 10 students' tuition money and use it to "rent" an exclusive professor for a year, he's assuming that 100% of tuition pays for a professor's instructional time, completely ignoring the other things that money pays for.

Given the choice between one year of "visit the professor at home" or four years of college, I'll take the latter. And gladly pay more for it.

Did the people dreaming up these end of college ideas actually attend college? They're not talking about college, they're talking about college reductio ad absurdum.

applicative• 17 years ago

The problem with this sort of college price hysteria is that it is completely fact free. Here's a randomly googled CNN Money report:

"After grant aid and tax benefits, full-time students at public four-year colleges are paying an average $2,700 a year in net tuition and fees."

So, if they commute, like I did, it's just over $10,000. I hit an inflation calculator and that's almost exactly what mom and dad spent for me, 1977 - 82. So in fact, there's been no change in 30 years. Maybe we should complain that the price hasn't fallen, like it has for computer hardware; shouldn't technical advances have made it cheaper? ...But wait, it isn't a commodity....

So to pay his imaginary $100,000/annum Purdue prof, our writer will need to get not the cozy group of 3 or 4 others -- but 37 or 38 others. So much for his little utopia, the fruit of careless headline scanning.

If your parents are willing and able to spring for the country club, great, you'll make lots of contacts; that's the point, and of course it costs a pile; though frankly I'm surprised how cheap it is, given how far colleges do compete on a country club basis with indoor rock-climbing, etc. ... And it may be worth it, if money is what you're interested in. Lifelong friends can be made on the artificial rock-cliffs of University X; they might come in handy. (I wonder how much of the later-in-life dollar value of a college education as it is usually measured is like the possible dollar value of a country club. )

All these headlines about "average tuition" are a total fail statistically ... What they mean is the average of absolute tuition maxima across universities and colleges -- something that only the royal families of Persian Gulf principalities pay. The stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions.

Let me say that again: the stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Arguments based on them belong to the realm of fantasy and demagogical politics, not reality and truth.

I remember once hearing the provost of X -- a super-elite private univ., now president of another -- say that if it were up to her, she would make X's "tuition" infinite so she could collect "what they could pay" from the Saudi princes et al., and use it to fund other students. But, she said, the alumni always oppose this sort of thing; they didn't what X making the headlines as the most expensive school.

One can't help sympathizing with the alumni, but the massive "tuition increases" "far outpacing inflation" etc etc. is entirely due to the massive increase in trustees and others taking the point of view of the provost. Or put otherwise, the "massive increases" are in the degree to which stated tuition is an accounting fiction. This may be somehow stupid or corrupt or whatever, but it is a fact. If reality is under discussion a completely different set of data is necessary.

(I should add, by the way, that our writer might be able to get away with a cheaper prof. The average salary figures he is quoting include the salaries of medical and law professors at Purdue, which completely distort assume the salary facts. (And medical schools in particular are huge, remember). Thoughtless use of these sort of statistics stuns the mind. In humanities and suchlike faculties, at researchy places, people start around US 40 - 50,000 these days and end up at like 70 - 80,000. It is of course possible to be paid much more if the market has repriced you.)

bkovitz3• 17 years ago

"The first goal of college must be to get a proper basis for getting started with a job, and preferrably a career."

"I think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras."

He is arguing to replace colleges with vocational schools.

An undergraduate degree is not job training. It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture.

The fact that colleges have been marketing themselves as providing job training, using economic arguments like "See how much money you'll make with one of our degrees", is the real problem.

aharrison• 17 years ago

The real problem is not that colleges have been advertising this, but that companies require it. On the one hand, I have learned a hell of a lot about Computer Science in college, but I could have survived an entry level programming job damn near anywhere straight out of high school. The problem is that the degree is a barrier to entry; it is almost impossible to get a decent job without one unless you are absolutely spectacular at what you do.

My friend once had this argument with me, saying that college isn't intended to train people for the job. Regardless of its intention, that is what it has become...the real question is, what are we going to do now that it has transformed this way?

bkovitz3• 17 years ago

I skipped college and went straight for the job. Learned more in one year at a software job than most people get in four years at a college.

But that is a great point: a lot of organizations, particularly big organizations, use a college degree as a "credential" for their first level of sorting through job applicants.

Yes indeed, college has become a clumsy sort of job training. That's how it is, and we have to deal with that.

However, colleges are not all the same. Small liberal-arts colleges are keeping the "community of scholars and teachers" tradition alive. Community colleges have a peculiar split in focus: between vocational training and college prep. Big state colleges offer undergrads training mostly in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, in order to fund real research.

hooande• 17 years ago

From what I saw, the author was saying that the two functions of college should be separated. Part of college is classes and academic preparation. Part of it is social, meeting like minded and intelligent people.

He made the point that the social aspect of college is primarily a function of economic background...people who are middle class or above go to college to meet people and be exposed to new ideas, while lower income people have to work and make great sacrifices just to get a degree and the opportunities that come with it.

It would be nice if the two were separated so that more people could afford to get the piece of paper without paying so much money for the social experience.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture.

That's a nice way of saying it, not wrong but certainly rosy colored.

A more cynical person might say the degree is a low quality signal you're an adult. The community is about social stratification. And the classes are indeed just a formality.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

you can't call a monopoly overpriced. the only reason monopolies are bad is because you can no longer tell what a fair price for a service is since you don't have competition to bring the price down towards its supply cost.

without competing prices it is impossible to tell what is and is not an efficient distribution of resources.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

The theoretical economics are, potentially, even better, because there are many more PhDs than academic positions. The actual economics are probably worse. As the author briefly admits but never returns to and addresses, professors (in my experience) consider their job to be research first and teaching second. For some, teaching may be a first-order concern that they spend plenty of time on, but it doesn't seem to be why they got into academia.

College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)

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