You ignorant capitalist prick - comment from one of our biggest fans.

"Wow. What an ignorant bastard you are. Enjoy your 8-hours-a-day of television you ignorant capitalist prick." Anonymous
Follow us at twitter @ValueOfCollege

Come explore our website at www.ValueOfCollege.com

This blog communicates in tandem with our website http://www.valueofcollege.com/. This blog is updated more frequently but the website is organized around different topics.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Home Schooling

“We thought about home-schooling our kids and then we realized public school was free. And college cost like $50,000 a year. So we are going to wait until they are college age and then home school them.” Brian Kiley on the Late Show with David Letterman April 29, 2011.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Perhaps we can match Tunisia's college education stats

An excellent American Thinker article about Obama’s mindless fixation on the college completion goal.

Of course Obama never differentiates between the number of Political Science majors (Obama's major) we are producing versus the number of engineering majors that graduate. Currently only 2.5% of all college graduates are US citizens in engineering. Another 2.5% are foreign students graduating with engineering degrees.

“Consider the dire warning that the U.S. has fallen to 9th place in the college graduate listings (in the world). The Administration takes it on face value that 9th place is bad, and 1st place is good.” “Of the eight nations above us, only Norway has a higher standard of living as measured by per capita income.”

Tunisia offers free college education, which has resulted in one of the highest college graduation rates of 57%. “Unfortunately unemployment rates among Tunisian college graduates is 45%.”

Replace the lecture format in many college classes

This article by Dr. Marty Nemko is the kind of thinking that should allow us
to provide many college classes for a fraction of the cost.

He suggests: "StarProfs Classes would enable every student at any college -- from the best- to the worst-funded -- to receive, in a single course: -- exposure to 15 of the nation’s finest instructors."

Marty Nemko asks what these people have in common

What do these people have in common relative to their college?

Saturday, April 23, 2011

A give and take about the value of college.

Here is a lively give and take on the benefits, cost and value of college today. I received this link from a Facebook friend in Minnesota. He graduated from Harvard in the Liberal Arts, went on to become an MD and sees far more value in today’s college study of the humanities that I do. But he knows that I am an advocate of change to our college system and we debate and discuss the subject regularly.

This Minnesota Public Radio blog includes opinions on both sides of the ledger but I will summarize the major arguments for the “College for everyone at any cost and any major” mainstream:

College increases critical thinking skills. A regular assumption of the college advocates is that college is the best way to increase our citizens’ critical thinking skills. And yet a recent study casts doubts on how much improvement in critical thinking skills actually occurs in college today.

We would expect the curious, the intelligent, the well-read, the personable on average to do better financially than those with fewer of these qualities. One post stated: “The opening of one's mind to new ideas and experiences certainly is less likely to happen if one doesn't choose to further one's education.” Absolutely, but there are plenty of ways to further one's education at a lower cost (frequently for free) than spending $50,000 a year attending college.

The prevailing thought is that if one does not attend college, and instead, works, travels, joins the military or starts a business that they are forever scarred intellectually. And the data rarely studies high school grads with equal SAT scores and IQs versus comparable individuals that take other paths.

One post went as far as to state: “A well-educated, well-informed populace is the best insurance against falling into tyranny. “ Is that so? Obviously we are not advocating an illiterate citizenry, but where is the evidence to support the view that a few more grads in Ethnomusicology are saving the world from tyranny?

College is a good investment at almost any cost. A blogger said: “For at least the last 25 years we've been told that a 4 year college education is worth nearly any cost.” The societal thinking is that a college educated workforce (even if they spend $200k over six years and studied Gender Studies or English) will make America more competitive. But I have yet to see any studies that show that recent 26 year old graduates in History consistently earning more than their high school buddies that got a technical certificate in welding. Likewise, I have seen no studies or empirical evidence that 40 year old Medieval German majors have created more jobs for other Americans than their neighbors who are entrepreneurs in the trades.

And we know one thing for sure: the cost curve for college has gone up much faster than inflation for decades. And we see increasing levels of college debt (greater than credit card debt) as well as more government debt, increasing college loan default rates and higher unemployment rates for recent grads. Much of this inflation is due to the fact that since more high school grads than ever are going to college this increase in demand, absent other mitigating factor, tends to push up prices (Econ 101). And since more of the cost of college is subsidized (via programs like government college loans) this reduces the push back on costs because the 18 year old college student perceives a lower cost than the total real cost and the student will not have to pay the piper for several years to come.


My prior blog pointed to a study entitled: “Going to an Elite College Won't Get You More Money; Being Good Enough to Get Accepted at One Will.” Yet most still believe that spending for an elite and usually more expensive college education is a great investment (by the student, his family and the taxpayer).

As one blogger put it: “Ah, if only I knew then what I know now... there is no way I would pay as much as I did for three degrees again. I would work my way through school even if it took me ten years. I would experiment with actual jobs (intern, volunteer, etc.) before starting in on a degree path.”

Another post noted: “It doesn't seem worth it when you realize you're not able to afford a house because of your monthly student loan payments.”

It does not matter what one majors in - any degree will do. And this is where some point to the old data that shows college grads on average earn $1 million more over their lifetimes than non-college grads. But the data never delineates how Petroleum Engineers did over their lifetimes versus Greek Mythology majors. As my Minnesota friend exemplifies, some of those Liberal Arts majors went on to Medical or Law School and did very well. But how do you think those average Joes that went to the State U, took six years to graduate in Journalism, and are now $80,000 in debt are faring in today’s economy? You might find a few examples that are thriving but my observations indicate this is rare.

One post asked: “Is college a trade school offering just a ROI? It didn't used to be. We used to want 'liberal arts' education to learn how to question, think, and become a responsible citizen.” Well that is never what I wanted for those that I am footing the bill (via my tax dollars or parental support). It is not that I don’t want educated, thinking and responsible voters; it is my doubt that our current college system is the best way to achieve this goal or that it now actually achieves this goal very often if at all.

It is important to do what you love - money is not everything. One post opined: “It depends on how one measures ‘worth the cost.’ I reject the premise that the sole criterion is whether it's a good financial investment. How much is wisdom worth on the free market?”

The “college for everyone” advocates start by bragging about the higher earnings for college grads and when this argument fails they fall back to “money doesn’t matter”. But earning enough to live independently has got to improve one’s sense of well-being and accomplishment. If one is starving then you had better really love the field you are in. More importantly, I have seen no studies (and I am always looking) or empirical evidence that recent English grads that are still unemployed or back working at an entry level position at Home Depot have greater life satisfaction than journeyman diesel mechanics.

It is time to question our assumptions about college. One post stated : “It seemed like everyone in my class was expected to go to college. If they did not pursue it they were looked at as people who would be unsuccessful in life.” is exactly the norm that we are questioning. Most of the discussion about college is anecdotal (both pro and con), from “it was a waste of time” to “I became so enlightened that it allowed me to enjoy the spirituality of my minimum wage job”. The debate is essential because if we continue the trend of primarily producing college grads that are deeply in debt and have no in-demand job skills then it will challenge America’s way of life and prosperity.

If critical thinking is the end result of non-practical post-secondary education, how do we know how much critical thinking we are getting for the dollar spent? It is hard for me to conceive of a critical thinker today that does not understand basic statistics and the inferences one can draw from different size samples. And it is hard to envisage a critical thinker that can not differentiate between the concept of correlation and causation. And I know few critical thinkers that do not understand the basics of college logic classes. And yet, I see little evidence that these skills are being learned broadly in college today, let alone at an affordable cost.

Is college the only way to expand one’s intellect? Obviously not. It may be great fun, and may expand one’s horizons in unique ways but in this era of instant information available on the internet, the Khan Academy and their free online schooling, Wikipedia, the many books available free via GoogleBooks, inexpensive computer-assisted learning materials (like Rosetta Stone for learning a foreign language), is the college model the best way to economically learn today?

This post summarizes much of our thinking about college: “Over the last 15 years, tuition costs have grown without added value or other valid justification. And only now are people asking the question. It's too late for a generation of students, but hopefully 11th grade math and economics classes will put this question front and center in their curriculum. Selling the blind faith that it's always worth it is a disservice to students everywhere.”

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Peter Thiel on College


Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

"I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious."

"Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. 'Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”"

"Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says."

By the way - a the full price of a Harvard Education today is much more than a quarter million dollars.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Marty Nemko with a great perspective on college

Parents, high school students and politicians should be paying attention to Marty Nemko. A former academic that thinks outside the box and is not afraid to establish the status quo relative to college.

A few of his recent comments:

"Perhaps even more surprising, even high school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive sufficient benefit (see below) to justify the often six-figure cost and four to eight years it takes to graduate --and only 40 percent of each year's two million freshmen graduate in four years; 45 percent never graduate at all!"

"At a typical university, only 30% of the typical student's class hours will have been in a class with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor. That's not to say that professor-taught classes are so worthwhile. The more prestigious the institution, the more likely that faculty is hired and promoted much more on how much research they do than how well they teach. And indeed, contrary to colleges' self-serving claims, researchers are not the best qualified or motivated to teach the basics to undergraduates."

"Yet the government requires virtually no accountability or transparency from colleges. That, despite a college education, next to a home, being the largest purchase most people ever make and one that may have even greater impact than a home on the person's life."

Thanks for speaking out Marty!