

College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman) - joubert
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2008/11/20/college_an_overpriced_monopoly

======
ShabbyDoo
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.

~~~
dangoldin
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.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
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.

------
applicative
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.)

------
bkovitz
_"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
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?

~~~
bkovitz
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.

~~~
abalashov
That's the thing, though; it's only a differentiator for the first level, the
entry level, _in the absence of any other significant information_. If you
have anything of substance in your resume to get past it, most likely that
will be considered far more important than your formal educational background
by a factor of 10.

I worked nearly full-time while in college (also full-time) for 2.5 years
before dropping out, much of that time spent at a small local ISP in Georgia.
I came in as tech support out of high school, and a year and a half later
ended up its chief system administrator and basically operating the facilities
side of the place. After that ended, I dropped out. Noone at any job I have
held since or in between (and I've held quite a few) has - after a look at my
resume - thought to inquire about my degree, whether I had gone to college,
whether I had graduated, or anything like that. The focus was all on the
experience. And since that point I have not been considered an "entry-level"
applicant at any subsequent job, so there's no interest whatsoever in using
entry-level criteria to differentiate me.

The only problem is that first hurdle, and it's not impossible to overcome. It
may be challenging, but it sure as hell is cheaper and easier to overcome that
challenge than to go to college to achieve the same end -- assuming, of
course, that that's your only purpose in going to college.

~~~
bkovitz
And let's not forget the most effective way to get a job: contacts.

Sending out résumés is pretty weak, even if you have a degree or two.

~~~
abalashov
Of course. Out of my 6 or so jobs in 3 1/2 years I think the first one was the
only one gotten that way. I think there was another one where the hiring
manager found me on a job board, if that counts. The others - and everything
that's happened since in the consulting world for me - are all predicated on
relationships build in the course of working, as well as being socially
involved in the discursive space of my profession.

------
tedunangst
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.

------
jdminhbg
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.

------
euroclydon
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.

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

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

~~~
fan
The cohort there is different.

~~~
elai
If you want to network in your industry, it's probably just best to get some
small job in whatever industry your interested in, go to the local ___
industry club, (Linux user groups, iphone developer groups, mechanics'r'us,
etc), make friends and teach yourself. I found doing that helped my carreer
more than local college buddies who didn't have much in the form of
connections or experience anyway.

~~~
locopati
There's something to be gained by networking outside your industry. Not all
great ideas exist within the group. Artists talking to coders talking to
scientists talking to historians produces connections that may go unnoticed.

------
euroclydon
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.

------
swolchok
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.

------
nazgulnarsil
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.

------
Alex3917
Do the people who write these articles not realize that other people have said
the exact same thing before?

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

~~~
Locke1689
Or they'll keep on saying them again and again and things will stay almost
exactly the same. That's how revolutions fail.

