This is just absurd. Non-accredited, branded schools will provide better education for less money? Really? I assume he's referring to the growing for-profit college industry.
Yet for-profit colleges are actually the biggest culprits driving up the student debt. Students at for-profit colleges run up more debt, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to end up under-employed than those at traditional universities.
This paragraph also bothers the crap out of me:
> The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear. Particularly in the tech world. Online and physical classrooms are popping up everywhere. They respond to needs in the market. THey work with local businesses to tailor the education to corporate needs. In essence assuring those who excel that they will get a job. All for far far less money than traditional schools.
Yes, students need relevant, modern, education, but education that is "tailored" to corporate needs is a little worrisome. Extremely targeted education might be sweet for the corporations hiring the graduates, but it sucks for the students themselves.
Economists draw a distinction between general human capital and specific human capital. General capital includes things like math and critical thinking, skills that can be applied in a variety of situations. Specific capital includes things like how to use a particular piece of software or knowing which forms need to be filled out for a requisition.
General capital benefits employees because the employee is free to take his capital and go elsewhere; the skills are transferable. This is what we see in silicon valley where companies acquire startups just for their employees.
Specific capital, on the other hand, benefits the employer since the capital is only valuable to a specific industry or company so the employee is limited in where he can take his skills.
Everyone needs a mix of general and specific capital. But the balance has implications for the economy as a whole.
One of the things that traditional universities have been pretty good at is general capital. This provides flexibility and resiliency to the economy. People can move between jobs and even careers, from dying industries to growing ones. They can fill jobs that hadn't even been invented when they were in school. And they can actually acquire specific capital more readily (the "ability" to learn).
Shifting focus to specific capital by allowing companies to control our educational system threatens to turn the entire country into one big company town, and that's a little frightening.
I agree about the non-accredited schools. That statement made me cringe more than a little bit.
I also cringed when tech was pointed to as a model of innovation in education assuming he is referring to codeacademy and the likes. Don't get me wrong I like those services for what they aim at but I absolutely do not think they are a good model for core education - the kind of education that produces general capital as you note. Core education consists of building critical and analytical thinking skills - something that is very difficult to teach effectively through online or automated education.
Agreed. While job-training is certainly a significant component of the value of education today, it isn't even close to being the most important one.
Most of us live in countries with representative governments (those who don't probably would like to if the movements in Africa and elsewhere are any indication). One of the funny things about this sort of government is that in order for it to function properly, it requires that all participating citizens have a basic understanding of the issues of the day. For better or worse, in the modern world, this requires a fairly extensive, general (liberal, little 'L') education.
For example, there aren't many people who apply the scientific method directly at work (though many jobs benefit from clear, logical thinking). But having an understanding of what "science" entails is critical to a number of public debates.
The same goes for economics, history and even literature and philosophy. These are all subjects that most people don't really need to do their jobs, but that are incredibly important for countless public issues.
For example (and at the risk of starting an unrelated argument, please refrain), Ayn Rand seems to be popular these days. But I wonder how many people out there have actually read "Atlas Shrugged" or "Fountainhead" carefully, or even have the skill necessary to do so.
When education costs so much that one needs to take out a loan that then takes decades to repay, it must necessarily be job-training. It's practically impossible to justify otherwise.
IMO it's impossible to expect the education system to be more holistic and less training-oriented unless the costs drop to the point where it's realistic to pursue it knowing there is not necessarily a monetary reward at the end.
I see your point, but I think you've made a couple assumptions that aren't necessarily accurate.
First, higher education needn't be solely one or the other. There have also been some important points brought up elsewhere in the comments about the "sticker price" versus what students actually pay.
Additionally, this is a complex issue, especially in the US where the perception of the value of a degree can vary wildly depending on the institution in question. One part of the original article that struck me as true is that high school students should be better coached during the process of choosing a college or university and then choosing a major or concentration.
The idea behind general human capital, though, is that it actually increases the ability of the student to thrive in a dynamic economy. The returns on an education with a significant "holistic" component are, at least in theory, higher than those on an education that is weighted toward job training.
For example, while it is certainly true that borrowing $100,000 to study pottery at a large university is probably not a good idea, there are enough colleges and universities in the US that if a student really wants to study pottery, he can do so for much less (for example, at a community college, where tuition costs are still quite reasonable).
But really, pottery (to continue the example, though this is applicable to many fields frequently cited as "useless") is closer to specific human capital. This actually helps explain why the students commonly featured in articles about these issues can't get jobs. They have been given "job training" for jobs that don't pay well or hardly even exist.
If their programs of study had been more "holistic" then perhaps they would be in better shape today (of course it should go without saying that there are counter-examples out there, I'm just talking about trends and averages here).
So in some sense, it seems that part of the problem is that we already focus too much on "job training", especially for low-return jobs. Of course a degree in finance (business schools do a great deal of job training) is far more lucrative, but the principle is the same.
Actually, the largest single undergraduate major is "BA in Business". This signifies the problem: the plurality of undergraduates are not majoring in a Liberal Art or Science (those arts and sciences worthy of a Free Man and forming the basis of his intellectual life, hence "liberal") but in General Hope-I-Get-a-Job Studies.
I think the problem is that people do not understand that better education raises the ceiling in almost any job.
For example, a web developer might think that studying English or history would not help them do their job at all, but business is filled with contracts, memos, emails, and other writing that carries all kinds of subtext. The abilities to critically analyze and construct written arguments are invaluable in the business world. English or history educations teach these abilities.
It's like a mental martial art...you might not need it much, but if you don't know it, you're easier to beat up.
I do agree with you, but the job-training thinking has reinforced the core, historic problem of seeing education (from K-12 into higher ed) as a private investment made with private money for private returns. We invested plenty of state funds in keeping education cheap back when we treated it as a public good.
We must differentiate between 'Education' in the ideal sense, and 'technical education' or 'training'. People don't go to technical colleges for 'Education', but for competency in a knowledge domain, and in applying it.
> Yet for-profit colleges are actually the biggest culprits driving up the student debt. Students at for-profit colleges run up more debt, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to end up under-employed than those at traditional universities.
They're also the people that traditional universities don't admit for the most part.
We can find a subset of students at traditional universities who are like the students at for-profit schools. Are you certain about the results of comparing apples to apples?
I think that's an excellent and important point. Certainly there is some sample bias going on: if you're qualified for college in the first place you are probably at a traditional college.
However, I think my original point remains relevant for two reasons:
First, the author of the article used rising aggregate debt as evidence that the traditional college system is broken beyond repair. But if a significant portion of that debt is being taken on by unqualified students attending for-profit colleges, then the growing debt could have absolutely nothing to do with traditional colleges (likely the reality is somewhere in the middle, but the author's "doom and gloom" outlook on traditional colleges seems a bit extreme to me).
Second, the author presented for-profit higher education as a replacement for traditional higher education. But the incentives faced by for-profit colleges seem every bit as broken as those he claimed are faced by traditional colleges.
If traditional college presidents have an incentive to grow their endowments and build grand edifices on the backs of their students, then for-profit college CEOs have an incentive to cut large dividend and bonus checks on the backs of their students. This just doesn't seem like an improvement to me.
> Second, the author presented for-profit higher education as a replacement for traditional higher education.
So the question is "what would for-profit schools do with university-qualified students?"
> But the incentives faced by for-profit colleges seem every bit as broken as those he claimed are faced by traditional colleges.
Your description of the incentives and behavior seems very facile.
For one, the cost of traditional colleges is not driven by "grow endowments" and "build grand edifices".
They also operate in very different environments. Traditional universities have significant govt support and enjoy a great deal of deference.
Meanwhile, when GM produces crappy cars, folks jump to Toyota. (Yes, as with GM, we're going to end up bailing out the employees at traditional universities.)
Not trying to complain since it looks like a good program, but why does Dev Bootcamp lump Jquery, Coffeescript, SASS, HAML, AJAX, and others under Advanced Rails Technologies? Shouldn't that be Advanced Web Technologies or are they just simplifying things for their Rails program?
"Adv. Rails tech" is just one part of the single course which aims to get someone a job in 10 weeks as a web developer ... from the looks of this they have been fairly successful ...
Did you take a course called Advanced Rails Techologies? Did you take the course in question and find it lacking? If not, you shouldn't insult people you don't know who might be interested in such a program.
How about you explain, nicely please, why taking something called Advanced Rails Technologies is a bad thing?
How about you explain, nicely please, why taking something called Advanced Rails Technologies is a bad thing?
Because "Rails Technologies" have changed drastically in the past 5 years and do so again in the next 5 years. "Modern Web Programming" would have been a good course. "Advanced Rails Technologies" is so ridiculously over-specific and over-current that I simply can't see how it has any value for the future.
So you do not see the benefit in learning what is considered advanced technologies today because it'll change in the future? Why bother learning anything in this field at all?
Or is it just the name they chose? Because it seems really rude of you to insult an entire group of people simply because they wish to take a course of which you do not like the name.
So you do not see the benefit in learning what is considered advanced technologies today because it'll change in the future? Why bother learning anything in this field at all?
The core of any field should be eternal. For example, `while` loops and `lambda` expressions are simply not going to change that much in the next 5 years. Neither is the Model-View-Controller architecture, say.
Portable, core skills are valuable. Particular syntaxes, you can just learn in your first couple weeks on a job.
I think he is referring to startups like codeacademy, not for profit schools. He's saying and betting that people like kahn will start more kahnacademy online schools and education. People who aren't driven by greed will cause the for profit schools, rising tuitions, and maximum student loan amounts to be unneccesary.
Isn't it a tad ridiculous to compare something like codeacademy to a college degree? Less than a semester's worth of time spent learning programming is not at all the same as a computer science degree, and I doubt employer's think they are comparable.
Yes. Training (skills) is not the same as fundamental [low level] understanding of the "Science" of computers and computing. Let's be honest though, most of the programmer openings don't require a Computer Science[ist] education. The programmers may need a Lead Developer with such knowledge and understanding who is capable of mentoring and transferring that knowledge of low level details when necessary to explain why we do something a particular way. Many employer's are requiring a degree that really truly is unnecessary and resulting in paying higher salaries. There are many many high school grads who didn't go on to college that could be taught programming, they may just need a little oversight and mentor in the real [business] world.
Yet for-profit colleges are actually the biggest culprits driving up the student debt. Students at for-profit colleges run up more debt, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to end up under-employed than those at traditional universities.
This paragraph also bothers the crap out of me:
> The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear. Particularly in the tech world. Online and physical classrooms are popping up everywhere. They respond to needs in the market. THey work with local businesses to tailor the education to corporate needs. In essence assuring those who excel that they will get a job. All for far far less money than traditional schools.
Yes, students need relevant, modern, education, but education that is "tailored" to corporate needs is a little worrisome. Extremely targeted education might be sweet for the corporations hiring the graduates, but it sucks for the students themselves.
Economists draw a distinction between general human capital and specific human capital. General capital includes things like math and critical thinking, skills that can be applied in a variety of situations. Specific capital includes things like how to use a particular piece of software or knowing which forms need to be filled out for a requisition.
General capital benefits employees because the employee is free to take his capital and go elsewhere; the skills are transferable. This is what we see in silicon valley where companies acquire startups just for their employees.
Specific capital, on the other hand, benefits the employer since the capital is only valuable to a specific industry or company so the employee is limited in where he can take his skills.
Everyone needs a mix of general and specific capital. But the balance has implications for the economy as a whole.
One of the things that traditional universities have been pretty good at is general capital. This provides flexibility and resiliency to the economy. People can move between jobs and even careers, from dying industries to growing ones. They can fill jobs that hadn't even been invented when they were in school. And they can actually acquire specific capital more readily (the "ability" to learn).
Shifting focus to specific capital by allowing companies to control our educational system threatens to turn the entire country into one big company town, and that's a little frightening.
EDIT: Typo