The Education Bubble: A Different Perspective

I think this article actually appeared in print in the New York Post (from what I was told).  For those who are unfamiliar with New York Newspaper Culture, the Post is the working man's paper.  It's filled with pictures. It's opens like a book.  The articles are short and sweet and refreshingly popular in nature.  So, when this op-ed was published in the Post, I was ecstatic.  In my humble opinion, the story of the education bubble is reaching the masses.  Of course, since the Post is geared towards the masses, the story speaks to them--not us.  Us meaning those with a higher education--which is only a small percentage of the population as a whole.

Anyway, it's worth looking at:

Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they're not getting their money's worth, and the bubble bursts.

Any day now.  I'm waiting and hoping for this day to come.  And he's not even talking about law school. He's talking about college.

My American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray has called for the abolition of college for almost all students. Save it for genuine scholars, he says, and let others qualify for jobs by standardized national tests, as accountants already do.

"Is our students learning?" George W. Bush once asked, and the evidence for colleges points to no. The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy. University of California scholars Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report that students these days study an average of 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours in 1961.

Wow.  So all the things that we say about law school are doubly true of college. I went to a great undergrad and I had a 4.0 and pumped it for it was worth.  It never occurred to me that college failed in in goals of educating students in the most basic ways.  Literacy?

I live in the hood, as many of you know.  How does one know she lives in the hood?  Well, if there are more people sitting on stoops then there are stepping off the bus in the evening, you probably live in the hood.  But my neighbors are not completely nonproductive.  Many are enrolled in a local college or community college.  They are continuously taking classes--aimlessly.  I have written many stories about my run-ins with local "students."  There's the retarded guy who works at the local Duane Reade.  You can tell that he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to be in college, but he's been going and will continue to attend college until he can get a Ph.D. in History so he can be a Middle School teacher (his goal, no joke).  Or the guy who I overheard on the train that said that he's been going to school for Criminal Justice for 7 years and he was too good to take a job in Customs through connections, where he will top out at $80K--even though he couldn't form a full sentence.  I don't mean to look down my nose at people, but I'm not sure either of these guys can even read.  So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  I guess the problem is more widespread than I thought:

The American Council of Alumni and Trustees concluded, after a survey of 714 colleges and universities, "by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum."

They aren't taught the basics of literature, history or science. ACTA reports that most schools don't require a foreign language, hardly any require economics, American history and government "are badly neglected" and schools "have much to do" on math and science.

So, the failure of college should be measured by the content of the curriculum and not the probability of scoring a job upon graduation.  That's the same analysis we've been applying to Law School, which fails on both counts.  Then these poor souls go from being an undereducated undergrad to an ill prepared lawyer.  Why are we paying so much more for so much less?  Well, isn't it clear?

Universities have seen their endowments plunge as the stock market fell and they got stuck with illiquid investments. State governments have raised tuition at public schools but budgets have declined. Competition from for-profit universities, with curricula oriented to job opportunities, has been increasing.

People are beginning to note that administrative bloat, so common in government, seems especially egregious in colleges and universities. Somehow previous generations got by and even prospered without these legions of counselors, liaison officers and facilitators. Perhaps we can do so again.

Yes, of course.  The parasitic administration that feeds off of other's misfortunes, i.e. your mortgaged future.  Yet the politicians of this country have sold education as the panacea to poverty and stagnancy.  Is it really?  Weren't we doing better just 50 years ago with so much less of an education?

A century ago only about 2 percent of American adults graduated from college; in 1910 the number of college graduates nationally was 39,755 -- smaller than the student bodies at many campuses today.

Wow. That is putting it into perspective.  I guess too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.

As often happens, success leads to excess. America leads the world in higher education, yet there is much in our colleges and universities that is amiss and, more to the point, suddenly not sustainable. The people running America's colleges and universities have long thought they were exempt from the laws of supply and demand and unaffected by the business cycle. Turns out that's wrong.

That's a little premature, Mr. Barone.  When schools stop opening up and start closing down, I will believe that they are no longer exempt.  But I think we're a few years from that, especially with federally backed student loans and the protections that affords them.  But I hope you're right.  They need to start worrying about customer satisfaction or suffer the consequences.

Not the Most Sympathetic Character--But She Did Everything Right.

I'm not a huge fan of people in the educational industrial complex, but Demosthenes of America forwarded me this article that was right on point for BIDER readers and my general feeling regarding the big(ger) divide between rich and poor.  Not to mention the big nose dive that so many of us have taken since the recession--into the deep end of poverty.  Maria Ortiz, a bilingual Ph.D. who has never had to search for a job until January of 2009:

After working and teaching in California for 20 years, Ortiz was recruited in 2007 for a highly specialized job at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She left her stable situation to take a chance on a new program she believed in, but the program folded due to budget cuts less than two years later in January 2009, right in the middle of the recession.

Ortiz frantically applied for jobs for the next 18 months, running through all $15,000 of her savings, exhausting all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and eventually having to draw from Social Security and accept financial aid from her local church congregation to help pay the rent. 

Only in times like these can you go from the person leaving cash in the alms dish at church to the person knocking on the Minister's door to ask for a handout.  It only took 18 months.  Now, she's needy and broke.

How many months are you away from seeking handouts?  I think, if I had 3 bad months, I would be screwed.  And that is downright likely to happen.  After all, many of my clients are financially strapped, unemployed, underemployed, etc.  That's the honest truth. I imagine that there are people who have nothing in the bank at all, that are 2 weeks away from being evicted or losing their car.  We are all closer to poverty than we'd like to believe.

When I saw a homeless person in the 80s, I would think "crazy."  When I saw a homeless person in the 90s, I would think "druggie."  Now, I'll think "PhD."

Ms. Ortiz reflects on her life by citing our favorite line here at BIDER:

"I cried the whole day on Monday," she told HuffPost. "It's painful. It's embarrassing. I worked so hard. I have all this experience and education. I was careful and prepared. I kept savings -- I did everything right. Why am I living on handouts? I always felt like there were needy people out there that needed the help more than I did, but now I am turning into one of those people. Look at this. This is how the middle class is evaporating."

The italics are mine of course.  That's right, Ms. Ortiz.  So did we.  We all know why she's not getting a job, by the way.  The Universities that should be knocking her door down, are hiring graduate students for pennies on the dollar, to teach the same classes Mr. Ortiz would like to teach.  She probably costs too much, or they think she'd expect to be paid much more than she's actually willing to accept.  At least the educational industrial complex is blind.  It screws us and screws its own.

Another Law School Bites the Dust!

So happy to run into this bit of news.  Wilkes University, in Northeaster Pennsylvania (i.e. Not Philly, nor Pittsburgh) will not be opening a law school as planned, due to economic woes.  Can I hear a "Hip, Hip, Hurray"?  Best news ever.  They had hired the former Widener Dean to start this project and hoped that they could compete with Drexel, Duquesne and Widener--all shit law schools.  Anyone who lives or has lived in Pennsylvania knows that that state suffers from a saturation of attorneys.  Drexel and Widener pump out attorneys at a rate that cannot be absorbed by the local economy. Outside of Philly and Pittsburgh, there's not much else going on in that state and they cannot handle the 325 lawyers that Wilkes was planning on shoving into the legal world, annually.  I went to a law school that only had 160 annually and that was too much for that region. I'm not sure why law schools are dead set on these mega classes... oh yah, money.  But I'm happy that they won't be moving forward with this stupid, selfish and short sighted plan.

"I feel, personally, really a real sense of loss," Prescott said. "But I also recognize that the decision was well-reasoned by the president, by the trustees. And I think at this stage of the university's history, and under the current economic climate, I think this is exactly the right thing to do. Even though we had high hopes for the school, it's just not the right time to do it."

I don't feel a sense of loss at all.  I couldn't be happier for the students that will not fall victim to Wilkes' scam.  It's amazing that there is absolutely no analysis of the needs of the community. It's a math equation.  ROI=(cost of building school and hiring top notch faculty) - [(# of students) * tuition]* X years.  Is it that simple?  At some point, alumnae stopped making enough of a contribution to matter to schools.  If alumnae gifts were a large enough portion of schools' endowments, schools would care about their fate.  But a more likely culprit than the sharp decline in alumnae gifts is the greed of academia.  They just want more and more and they have lost sight of customer satisfaction.  I see their demise in the next few decades.  The World Wide Web had made so much of life cheaper and more convenient, but education has become costly and burdensome.  I know that the college experience is great, but I would love if brick and mortar education becomes a thing of the past.  It's the wave of the future.