
Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition - alanh
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/
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gozur88
>...maybe it will dawn on Barack Obama, by then retired and relaxing on the
beach in Hawaii, that maybe we shouldn’t have thought of education as a market
in the first place. Maybe college shouldn’t be about individuals getting rich.
Maybe there is another purpose.

Maybe the federal government shouldn't involve itself in private colleges at
all? What mandate does the US government have to interfere in college pricing
or the existence of an on-campus LGBT center?

College tuition has gone up for three reasons (in order of importance)

1) _Griggs v Duke Power_

2) The availability of huge amounts of credit to students combined with an
easy way to rank colleges, the accept:reject ratio.

3) Government mandates, particularly under Title IX and "dear colleague"
letter type nonsense.

~~~
alanh
0) Administration size and budget. Even public university presidents are paid
like CEOs.

~~~
gozur88
But that's all an outgrowth of #1. They wouldn't be able to do it if people
didn't need to go to college to get a job.

~~~
alanh
I read up on the court case, and the ruling was that you couldn’t require
people to have (in this case) a high school diploma without it having a
defensible relevancy to performing the job.

I do not understand your argument.

~~~
gozur88
You're missing the implications of the ruling. _Anything_ you do, as an
employer, that has a disparate impact on hiring is illegal if it's not
directly related to the job. If you're hiring programmers or, say, nuclear
engineers, you can give tests about programming or nuclear engineering. That
isn't affected.

But let's say you have a job position that doesn't require experience or a lot
of education. You just want to hire someone who's _smart_ , someone who learns
quickly and can communicate in English. You put out a job req and get back
1000 resumes. Having no way to winnow the field, and realizing you can't
interview them all, what you'd like to do is give everyone an IQ test,
something that used to be very common, and maybe some kind of reading
comprehension test.

But because of _Griggs_ , you can't. If your test has a disparate impact on
race or sex you're going to get sued. Not only that, your intent doesn't
matter, even if the test is fair, you're still going to get sued. What you
need is a proxy for intelligence. Some way the applicant can prove he/she is
at least reasonably intelligent and can write a memo.

So... you change your job req to require a college degree.

 _That 's_ why jobs that used to require only high school diplomas now require
college degrees. _Griggs_ created (or at least cemented) the practice of using
a degree as a proxy for intelligence.

But wait, there's more! Now that college degrees are as common as dirt, you
need some way to rank the people with college degrees. That's where #2 comes
in. As an employer, you figure the smartest people are the ones who got into
the the most competitive universities, and the most competitive universities
are the ones that rejected the most students for each one they accepted.

So when you get a resume from an MIT (7.9% acceptance) grad and a resume from,
say, an Arizona State (84% acceptance) grad, you figure the MIT grad is
probably more intelligent. Might not actually be true, but that's the way to
bet.

This is a positive feedback loop. MIT grads go right onto the lucrative
_Wunderkind_ track when they apply for jobs. Therefore more people apply MIT,
making MIT's acceptance rate even lower. Rinse, lather, repeat.

That's why you can stroll into a $300k+ job after graduating from Harvard
Business School (5.2% acceptance), but an identical graduate from Podunk U is
starting at $45k. Even if Harvard teaches you _nothing_ , the tuition is worth
every penny. It would be worth 10x what they charge. Your employer doesn't
care what you learned at Harvard. He cares that you were accepted to Harvard.

This is great for established universities, because it means they never have
to face competition from new schools. You see, if you start a new university
parents are not going to send their kids to your school, because they don't
know what that all important ratio is. And because of _that_ your acceptance
rate will be very high, meaning you won't get a lot of applicants next year,
either.

What it all boils down to is the competitive schools can charge whatever they
want. And because Harvard is charging $60k, mid tier schools can get away with
charging, say, $50k, even though they couldn't really justify it in an audit.

And ultimately, it's all because of _Griggs_.

~~~
Futurebot
"One banking recruitment manager summarized the typical approach this way:

I’m just being really honest, it [an application] pretty much goes into a
black hole. And I’m pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It’s
tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to
get someone to raise their hand and say, “Let’s bring this candidate in.” …
Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at … the Brown
candidates, you know, the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily
to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of
everything else. … Unfortunately, it’s just not a great situation. There’s not
an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school."

[https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-
recruitin...](https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruiting-
on-only-a-few-campuses)

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awinter-py
If I were bernie sanders, I'd push for it to be illegal to ask about education
status in job interviews (same as family status or sex stuff). This would
hamper the signaling value of a college degree and get us back to the value of
the skills conferred (if any).

... not that I'm bernie sanders.

~~~
alanh
You’re still buying into the myth/propaganda that higher education is only
good because it makes someone more employable by providing skills (and/or
connections) important for job-seeking.

Wouldn’t you much rather create and live in a world where higher education was
free or nearly free, so that your neighbors, fuck it, even those you will
never bump into, those on the other side of the country _are better educated,_
better able to reason about the world, more likely to understand evolution and
spot marketing and persuasion techniques around them, less likely to believe
the blowhard on the radio who is promoting conspiracy theories, and more
likely to have gone through a period of rapid personal growth during which
they met and grew with people from diverse backgrounds? … _without_ obligating
these strangers to a lifetime of bondage to a particular high-paying career?

~~~
avatar299
Because the only way someone can be intelligent, is if they wasted 5 years of
there of life, not working, but reading old theories and academic papers that
don't line up with the reality we actually live in?

I'll rather save 100k and listen to the blowhard on the radio, than be in debt
and listen to the blowhard on a podcast.

