I will go a different, likely even more unpopular direction.
The article stated the problem clearly, there are too many graduating with the proper credentials who want these jobs. Resorting to union representation is the sign of a system where oversupply being met with stubborn resistance to that fact.
This is not to say that schools are not middle or top heavy. Education as a whole has become far to expensive for the value of the education provided. This is because of the simple fact money is loaned nearly without question to what studies the students want or receive.
The real fix is reigning in the loans. Set costs either at the class or degree level and have colleges comply with it to have students eligible to receive the federal loans to attend that school. The government already restricts cost in the payouts for medical treatments and such, there is little reason it cannot do this in the realm of education if its the one providing the funds. Just like how government money brings along rules with how students are treated so can it do with how degrees if not courses are valued.
Surely many colleges will step up to the plate to offer acceptable cost degrees. There is too much money on the table for them to ignore it.
Still as he points out, there is oversupply because colleges are not required to tell students that while there may be jobs they don't pay what students expect nor pay what they once did. Firing others to raise that pay is not the solution, the solution is guiding students into good careers adn reigning in the costs of obtaining the degrees necessary
If you are offering elimination of credit availability as a solution to the oversupply of professors, fine, but let's be clear that you believe wealth of parents is a good metric by which to decide who does and doesn't get to be a professor. Let that sink in.
If you believe that colleges will lower costs to meet the lower supply of tuition money, then we'd be looking at an even larger oversupply - more people would be able to afford college.
Also, let's keep in mind that when you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, engineering and computer science graduates stop being hard to find and become worthless.
Actually, someone who supports decreasing the loans available for non-remunerative degrees may believe that wealth of parents is a good metric to decide who gets to be an unemployed professor manque.
And actually, since wealth of parents is already a major factor in whether a person makes irresponsible decisions that end in unemployment, that's kind of OK.
No one has a right to be a professor. That doesn't exist. The market for them has evaporated. But we have enormous institutions concealing how bad the market so they can keep cranking out graduates. They're largely doing that with government funds. US citizens should oppose that. I know I do.
If colleges lowered costs for useless degrees, they would at least be doing graduates the favor of burdening them with less debt.
> Also, let's keep in mind that when you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, engineering and computer science graduates stop being hard to find and become worthless.
When you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, most of them wash out.
Having taught a fair share of liberal arts majors in intro CS courses, I am absolutely certain that there is essentially no difference in skill between people who choose to major in CS and people who choose to major in the liberal arts.
No. Most liberal arts majors either doubled in a "harder" field, or minored in Education/Business/etc. as a back-up option. The Edu and Business major and minor required a CS course. So most of the liberal arts students ended up either minoring in a STEM field or else taking CS1.
If anything I would assume the opposite of a selection effect.
I, personally, double majored in philosophy and computer science. I think the upper level CS classes would have washed out most of the philosophers, but I agree that the intro classes were fairly accessible.
Liberal arts majors (especially art majors) probably work harder than CS majors in many cases. I still think they would wash out of a STEM major. Not for lack of intelligence, but just because they're not wired that way. They'd be miserable in higher level classes.
Lots of CS majors also aren't "wired that way" (lots of gamers who've never been good at math or science but are "good with computers", kids who hear the jobs pay well or are enamored with prospect of striking gold, etc.). I've tutored a lot of juniors who have trouble in an algorithms course because for loops are still difficult for them.
I don't think these people are more well-represented at the beginning of Liberal Arts programs than at the beginning of CS programs.
This may be less true about some of the less "hot" STEM fields.
Any college offering an engineering degree that wants to maintain their ABET certification also has to graduate a certain number of their students; pumping unqualified or uninterested students into these programs leads to watering down of curriculum - further making the degree worthless.
It's an interesting choice though. Wealth of parents is not a fair metric. But on the other hand, letting the demand-side have its pick of the lot and leaving the chaff to rot is wasteful and cruel.
I got to thinking about this a while back when learning about Patton. You could say he was born to be a general- a wealthy, military family, extensive military education. Most of the rest of the world, from the moment he was born, never had a chance to be what he was. But you can't give that lifetime of military education and training to everybody, and isn't that OK? You might like to be fair and give everyone the same chance, and maybe there's a guy out there who would have been even better with the same opportunity, but can we afford to do that?
It's a similar story with racing drivers and many athletes.
Edit: It occurs to me one can point to the failure of communism to determine how many potatoes should be grown, as a reason why we should not try to predict the number of professors that will be needed. I'm not sure where to go from here. Perhaps the next question is, have we gotten in the way of the invisible hand, the traditional savior from this kind of problem? If so, what next?
>If you are offering elimination of credit availability as a solution...you believe wealth of parents is a good metric...
Perhaps a better solution would be merit-based grants. If you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, Uncle Sam will foot the bill for the equivalent of in-state tuition/room/board. As long as you keep your GPA above some threshold, we keep paying for 4 years.
Why 10% and not, say, 90%? Or 100%? (100% and maintain a GPA seems the most workable.)
What about someone in the 50% range who decides after 10 years in the workforce to go to college? With no second chances, this is the tyranny of the Permanent Record.
What about someone who gets a GED to graduate early, to start college early; or someone who had to drop out to support the family and then get a GED finish high school and go on to college? What of home schoolers?
I can also envision school swapping. If I'm at the border of 10% in a very good school, then in my last semester (after the submissions for college have gone out) of school I could switch schools to an academically poorer high school and have a much better chance of getting the grade. It's worth $40,000 in tuition money, so some people will do it.
Or in my case, I took a lot of classes in high school, including some that were dual-enrolled with the local community college. While AP calculus had an extra boost in the GPA calculation, my differential equations class did not. What luck it would be if by taking more advanced, unweighted classes I happen to be below the 10% mark, filled by those who maximized GPA instead of education.
Or we could just give back a bunch of state-level funding to state universities on the condition that they use it to reduce in-state tuition, fees, and room/board costs, then let the academics admit people according to academic merit.
And then, just for kicks, we could fix our public school system so as to remedy the disgusting inequalities that show up at the college-admissions level before they have a chance to happen.
I believe Texas had a system like this for admissions. The top X% (I forget what number X was) of students in the senior class of each high school were accepted. This created some strange side effects where students were effectively punished for going to a high school with better students.
I'd say the issue at hand is that as a society we have an over saturation of universities and a lack of vocational training. We churn out 3rd tier MBAs and Attorneys by the dozen, but you cannot find a plumber with a clue under 50 to save your life.
Are you saying that the government should put a cap on tuition costs? So instead of a student spending $40k on an English degree, that degree might be capped at $20k or something to that effect?
Ideally the government should scrap all private tuition costs.
That's how it works in most of Europe, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with the quality of learning or the facilities.
That's how it used to work in the UK, and the main result was a strong middle class with plenty of disposable income.
But... not everyone likes the idea of a strong middle class with plenty of disposable income. So now we have financial-rape loans and a weakened economy - a combination guaranteed to create huge default/delinquency issues over the next decade or two.
The student loan system allows more people from every social class to go to university and join the middle class. Loan repayments are linked to income after graduation so nobody has to pay back more than they can afford.
Your "and join the middle class" step isn't happening. There are two classes of people who graduate from college at this point.
The first graduate with degrees and skills that are useful - or can be made useful - in the professional world and start working immediately.
The second graduate with degrees that are useful for the sole purpose of teaching others those exact same topics and nothing else. They get paid a fraction of what the first group is.
While we need some teachers, professors, etc, the low pay in these roles point at an overabundance. If there were less people seeking those roles, recruiting them would become a priority and pay would rise. As we're seeing in software development every day.
You know what works even better to up the system to people from diverse backgrounds? Direct payment of tuition costs by the government. It's well documented that the rising tuition has reduced access for people from lower income families. Students have no power to negotiate tuition costs with the politically entrenched adminstrative class. Politicians, on the other hand, would have the power and career training for that kind of negotiation.
In the UK increases in tuition fees (by up to 3x) has had no effect on the diversity of university applicants. This is because repayments are income linked (and have an income floor) so that a graduate on a low income makes no repayments at all. Only those who earn a large salary will make significant repayments.
If tuition is funded by the government then this will force those without a university education to subsidise those who do go to university. Also university places would have to be limited to control costs.
suggest there was a slight increase in the percentage of lower-middle and working class students in 2012/13, but this was set against a drop in total UK student numbers of around 6%.
Those are the most recent numbers I can find. They don't break out the details.
>If tuition is funded by the government then this will force those without a university education to subsidise those who do go to university.
There's absolutely no reason why this would have to be true. There are plenty of other possible income sources, not least a much less tolerant attitude to off-shore tax avoidance, raised property taxes and the removal of loopholes that support tax-exempt foreign trusts, and taxes on quick-flip investment speculation.
The UK is actually swimming in cash. It's just not very evenly distributed.
The article stated the problem clearly, there are too many graduating with the proper credentials who want these jobs. Resorting to union representation is the sign of a system where oversupply being met with stubborn resistance to that fact.
This is not to say that schools are not middle or top heavy. Education as a whole has become far to expensive for the value of the education provided. This is because of the simple fact money is loaned nearly without question to what studies the students want or receive.
The real fix is reigning in the loans. Set costs either at the class or degree level and have colleges comply with it to have students eligible to receive the federal loans to attend that school. The government already restricts cost in the payouts for medical treatments and such, there is little reason it cannot do this in the realm of education if its the one providing the funds. Just like how government money brings along rules with how students are treated so can it do with how degrees if not courses are valued.
Surely many colleges will step up to the plate to offer acceptable cost degrees. There is too much money on the table for them to ignore it.
Still as he points out, there is oversupply because colleges are not required to tell students that while there may be jobs they don't pay what students expect nor pay what they once did. Firing others to raise that pay is not the solution, the solution is guiding students into good careers adn reigning in the costs of obtaining the degrees necessary