Institutions of higher learning have a number of possibly contradictory goals. Among them are
- Scholarship
- Education
- Training
- Certification
- Indoctrination
- Warehousing
Scholarship is research, publication, and other related activities. Education is inculcating in students facts, theories, practices, and habits of mind that will help them to lead richer (not necessarily in a pecuniary sense), fuller lives. Training is the teaching of specific skills, especially job-related skills. Certification is warranting the possession of certain skills.
Indoctrination takes any of a number of forms, from attracting foreign-born students and scholars to the United States and convincing them to stay to organizing for political activism. Once upon a time institutions of higher learning served as places where the children of the ruling elite went to make the contacts and relationships that would enable them to take their places at the heads of companies, government, and other institutions. For all I know that still goes on and I would consider it a form a of indoctrination, too.
What I call “warehousing” is providing a place for nominal students, those who already have degrees. and others to appear to be engaged in productive activity when they would otherwise be unemployed.
In the United States at all levels of government we spend several hundred billion dollars supporting institutions of higher learning. The state of Illinois alone spends $2.7 billion per year on its system of state universities.
Here are my questions:
- Which of the functions above are legitimate causes for government spending? All? None?
- Are the functions above better uses for the funds than, say, infrastructure improvement or better pre-natal care for poor mothers (just to give a couple of examples)?
- Are we receiving several hundred billion dollars of utility from several hundred billion dollars of expenditures? Is what we’re spending worth the cost?
- Are there more efficient or more effective ways to provide the same legitimate functions?
- Why aren’t the states and federal government in the online education business?
I think you could add prestige to your list. With a college degree comes a certain amount of prestige within society even if that degree is worthless. If the degree is from an “elite” university, then the prestige is greater. And that is partly why colleges, even public ones, aren’t in the online education business as much as they could be.
It would take a long post to address all your items so I will only mention a few:
I think medical and hard science research benefit the country. I don’t think other areas of scholarship deserve government funding.
I think community colleges are frequently an effective way to give people training and certification for employment. They are certainly more efficient then universities because they don’t do research and spend much less on entertainment and recreation facilities. Some of them also offer online instruction
When I first heard of for-profit colleges I was positive. I think there is a lot of waste in college spending and thought businesses could give a decent education for less money than non-profit institutions. That is not what is happening. They are charging just as much as traditional colleges and have higher default rates for their students.
Colleges are not an efficient way to train and certify people for the job market. A lot of instruction is useless for students future careers, but employers demand four year degrees for most white collar jobs. As long as employers demand degrees money will be wasted on tuition.
Why aren’t the states and federal government in the online education business?
State universities are. But there’s not a significant price break. Why not? A couple reasons, I would wager.
First, in the college world campus students beat commuter students beat online students. They add to the prestige and for various reasons are more likely to donate money after graduation.
Second, the same reasons that for-profit colleges aren’t significantly cheaper. Why bother? Prices aren’t dictated by how much you can afford, but by how much you’re willing to borrow. There’s not much incentive to go downmarket.
And for new entrants, people associate price with quality. Some entrepreneur comes up with a program that costs $1000 a year, people will question how much they really got from the degree. So only established, state universities can really get away with it, and they lack incentive.
Texas Governor Rick Perry was making a big deal out of pushing downward the price of education, pushing for a $10,000 degree. He didn’t get very far with it.
Mercer,
You comment leads me to a theory – I wonder if there would be so many community colleges if our high schools graduated fewer incompetent people. It seems that a lot of the curriculum in 2-year colleges is remedial high school stuff.
Looking at the number of foreign students at our elite schools, it appears that they see as worthwhile. For Americans this has a large component of signaling. Not so sure if it holds for foreigners.
I remain ambivalent about the value of a liberal arts education. I think that when it is done well, it probably teaches enough critical thinking skills that it does what college really should, which is teach students how to learn for themselves. I suspect that online schools work better as the equivalent of technical schools. You learn to master specific information, but do not necessarily develop the ability to learn for yourself.
I think for profit schools are, to date, complete rip offs.
Steve
Costs could be cut drastically at universities virtually overnight.
I had a very interesting discussion with a couple of anthropology profs I know. They both are moving to online courses. Inferior to the usual in-class experience? They say decisively: no. In fact, it’s better. They claim they convey more information, get far better compliance on required reading by virtue of their ability to monitor same, and they even see improvements in participation.
There is no reason — well, no purely educational reason — why most college courses couldn’t be taught this way. You’d need fewer profs, far fewer facilities and people could learn from home eliminating the need for dorms, parking lots, commuting costs, etc…. It would slash the number of colleges and universities which would in theory allow the retention of the better profs which in turn would raise the overall level of education. It would cut costs dramatically. And not only is it possible, it’s being done — over the objections of old-line faculty.
If a college education cost a half or third of what it costs now it might look like a much better deal.
Which of the functions above are legitimate causes for government spending?
Scholarship, education, training, certification*.
Certification only if done properly; if done improperly or poorly, it’s evil. I don’t think indoctrination is a valid government function at the level of higher education, nor warehousing, which reminds me of a sci-fi novel where they put everybody in suspended animation for six days to make the economy function better.
In terms of benefits to a state, we’ve certainly seen industries spawned by faculty and graduates. Silicon Valley is a Stanford thing. I forget what they call the MIT corridor, but same thing. But of course, over-graduating in the wrong majors won’t do the same.
When it works though, it works. The state gets tax revenues and the graduates get benefits for life.
Obviously we’ve burdened and hobbled that golden goose in all kinds of ways, discussed here previously.
FWIW, my latest theories are shaped by an NPR show about the rise of Phoenix University. It apparently grew into a monster concerned only with enrollment (subsidized students) and not at all with their success. Tremendous money is going down the drain, and thousands of students are left as failures.
It would be so nice if community colleges were cheap these days, and students could pass them by dint of hard work, without the debt risk. Then, sure, with that proven to themselves and the unis, strap on debt if needed, for something beyond AA.
As it is, some community colleges cost $15K/yr, and Phoenix is taking the overflow.
While there are successes like Silicon Valley and the Route 128 Loop in Massachusetts to point to (add to them the Raleigh/Durham Research Triangle), there are probably thousands of failures. I seem to recall that at one point every junior college was touting itself as the rootstock for the next Silicon Valley. So, for example, Northwestern University tried to get a research park going in Evanston. I fought the development tooth and nail 30 years ago on the grounds that a) the building that was done required the uprooting of an historic black neighborhood, b) Evanston does not have the infrastructure to support the kind of facility they had in mind, and c) who the heck would move to Evanston when they could go to San Jose or Raleigh/Durham?. I was right and they were wrong. The research park, like so many others, has extremely low occupancy.
If that’s the strategy I think the money used to support universities would be used more effectively by funding more government research labs. IIRC an enormous number of major companies these days can point to government research labs as their start.
However, I don’t think it’s an effective strategy. Gold is where you find it and, as you note, Romance language departments don’t typically spawn Silicon Valleys.
While the “hot spots” are easiest to prove, I think I can show a widespread smaller effect, thus:
Graduates from colleges are still getting hired in preference to those high school. Thus, a business need, which would go unfilled.
Now, you may recall that I’m the one big on tracking, particularly of salaries, 5 years out, by major.
THAT will let you drill down to see what’s working. If you want to in-state and out-state hires of those graduates, by all means.
On education, Felix Salmon points to a total absurdity
The Times reporter says:
“I’ve seen a lot of strange things in two decades as a reporter, but nothing quite as disgraceful and weird as this inquisition the LAUSD is inflicting upon more than 80 school librarians”
Incredible.
jp, seems to me that the treatment of the librarians is the direct result of making their jobs a legal issue, i.e. union contract rights and administrative law judges.
LA City Schools are f’d up in more ways that that, but yes.
My view of large school systems is that they exceeded the point of increasing returns to scale long, long ago and have diminishing returns to scale, i.e. each additional student costs more to educate than the one before. Large bureaucracies.
The reason that archdiocesan school systems defy this (IIRC the third largest school system in the country is the Chicago archdiocesan school system) is that like the Catholic Church itself they’re autocracies. That eliminates a couple of levels of bureacracy.
As it is, some community colleges cost $15K/yr, and Phoenix is taking the overflow.
??!! A lot of state flagship universities don’t cost that much with room and board (my urban research university alma mater is a little more, with R&B). What gives? Further evidence of California’s indifference to cost of living?
My view of large school systems is that they exceeded the point of increasing returns to scale long, long ago and have diminishing returns to scale, i.e. each additional student costs more to educate than the one before. Large bureaucracies.
I’m not sure economies of scale really apply to schools. I know back home, there was a linear relationship between size and per-pupil spending even among districts with similar SES demographics. The PPS spending at the local school district (not sure of the total student population, but the single high school has about 500) is dwarfed by that of the district I substitute at (single high school population of 1,500).
I’m talking about districts not schools and about mega-districts like LAUSD in particular.
So was I, but I guess I wasn’t clear. By schools I meant collections of schools (districts), not one school against the next. I mentioned the single high school populations as a reference point, but they’re two different districts of several schools.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that I’m not sure it’s the case that only the “very large” districts buck economies of scale. I think that the relationship is actually pretty linear and beyond a really small number of students (enough to support at least a school of each level), don’t really apply at all.
Lot’s of good stuff here, but you’ve all missed the point: sex, drugs, rock’n roll……..plus beer and the football team.
Before you dismiss that, think long and hard.
Milton Friedman has a good section on the topic in ‘Free to Choose.’
One can find and have sex just about anywhere. Drugs get handed out like candy these days. Rock’n’roll can be had easily enough from the mobile computing platform of your choice. (And if you mean the overall lifestyle, just carry your pills and cellphone to the gathering point of choice.) And beer is readily available, especially if one is below the legal limit.
That leaves football. Let’s be honest here – there’s only 50 or 60 teams (TOPS) that matter in college football.* Does college really merit the hundreds of billions spent every year so the rubes in Alabama and Nebraska can feel some team spirit? Can’t we just relocate some NBA and NHL teams there instead?
* I grant that the members change over time. Thirty-five years ago no one would have picked Florida State and Miami to have been the forces they became. We may feel similarly about Boise State in a couple of decades, though I doubt it. (Demographics were on the side of the Florida schools – but are 15 million people going to move to Idaho?)