June 10, 2009
A Higher Education Bubble?
Considering people are starting to sense that many higher education programs are a complete joke, I would be shocked if the current economics of the model didn’t cause it to pop:
With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care. Patrick M. Callan, the center’s president, has warned that low-income students will find college unaffordable.
Meanwhile, the middle class, which has paid for higher education in the past mainly by taking out loans, may now be precluded from doing so as the private student-loan market has all but dried up. In addition, endowment cushions that allowed colleges to engage in steep tuition discounting are gone. Declines in housing valuations are making it difficult for families to rely on home-equity loans for college financing. Even when the equity is there, parents are reluctant to further leverage themselves into a future where job security is uncertain.
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5 Responses to “A Higher Education Bubble?”
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Thanks for posting this, Andrew. As a person who had a career in public education, it has been one of my peeves for a long time that “we” (the educators) are supposed to prepare every 18-year-old for college even though the very idea is ludicrous. There aren’t enough jobs for that many college graduates; there are many jobs which require vocational training and not a degree; and most 18-year-olds aren’t interested in what a college education ought to mean.
I’ve been wondering this myself lately. Maybe this is more of a critique on the educational system, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been interviewing job candidates for a job that’s been open for over a month now. I can’t tell you how many masters degreed yahoos I’ve had to outright reject because they couldn’t answer basic questions.
But on another note, I’ve been seeing quite a few ads for local vocational schools recently and have to agree. I can’t help but wish that I hadn’t poopooed the idea oh so many years ago. Looking back, I know there would’ve been many things I would’ve wanted to take in high school, but vocational options were never presented, it was always Honors this, AP that.
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” You bet.
No, I did not spend years in graduate school only to drift away embittered, having stopped short of the ‘terminal degree’. I say “you bet” because my bullshit detector remains in good working order, and my suspicions about the graduate-school racket date back to the wayback days.
Undergraduate/college education? Even that amounts to little more than a holding tank for an awful lot of people.
Oh, man. Don’t get me started.
Carl, I like your comment about the degreed yahoos you’ve interviewed. Multi-degreed ninnies irritate me no end, and I applaud interviewers and employers who resist rigid degree requirements in favor of judging whether a job candidate has anything on the ball.
There has long been a cult of ‘higher education’ as a ‘way to get ahead’ in the US, and so many fall into lock-step simply because . . . well, because that’s the way it is.
[...] universities pretty hard, leading to many questioning whether or not we’re in a kind of higher education bubble. The fact of the matter is not that a degree is being overvalued, but that large amounts of funding [...]