NAS Blog

The Regents of the University of California just voted to embrace a pilot program testing the efficacy of an online undergraduate degree.  Until now, like most research universities, UC has been leery of the online environment because of the thorny problems it poses:  questionable security, dubious academic integrity, loss of “voices around the table,” substantial and perpetual costs.

Conversely, online education does seem inevitable given our technological dependence, a Beltway “college-for-all” mindset, corporate customer service business models, and ruthless competition.  ”It’s the future,” gushed Regent Bonnie Reiss.

Despite teaching online for years and running an online program, I remain ambivalent about the marriage of technology and education.  Showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up “Young Goodman Brown” used to be stimulating; now it’s just disruptive.  Why jerk students back to the terrain they already inhabit, filled with insistent, continuous, cognitive shifts whose interruptions prevent learning?  Handling electronic information, Nicholas Carr says,

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

As one online student just posted, “During the time it took me to read for this assignment, I received 1 phone call, 6 emails, 4 text messages and 1 Skype message.”

At the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in June, the most instructive point about online education was made by Porsche, a young African-American college student, who said, “I don’t want to study organic chemistry on my computer.  My computer is where I go to have fun.”

The UC Regents would do well to heed her words because Porsche really is the future.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting opinion piece by Seth Godin called “The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as Seen by a Marketer)” [subscription required]. Godin suggests alternatives to the four-year college, such as “gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school,” and believes that “There are tons of ways to get a cheap liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter, and teaches you to make a difference (see DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz)” without going to a mainstream college.

Godin argues that from a marketer’s point of view, the typical American college is headed for obscurity for these reasons:

• Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students. [See "Seven Imaginary Curricula"]
• College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
• The definition of “best” [college] is under siege.
• The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
• Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

Recently, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that the new policy of forgiving student loan debts for those who “follow their heart” and enter public sector employment will do wonders for the U.S.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I say that it’s utter nonsense. Public sector employment pays very well and gives much greater job security than those who labor in the competitive world. A very large number of college graduates want those government jobs and forgiving some of their student loan debt because they’ve worked at them for ten years is just a gift from the overburdened taxpayers.

One more thing — with the private sector (where wealth is produced, unlike the government) struggling these days under the many burdens and obstacles the government has put in its way, shouldn’t we worry about the government luring away talented people it needs?

The budget crunch need not cause the sky to fall on campuses, writes Herb London.

High time, he says, that higher education institutions adapt — by adopting innovative approaches to financing and imparting knowledge to students, for example, by weeding out professors who “preach rather than teach.”

Amen to that.

Cross posted from NAS.org

NAS President Peter Wood appeared on the University Talk radio program to speak about federal direct lending as included in the reconciliation bill. He talked about how the former student loan system was rife with corruption, but that the new system will be even worse because it will give the government a foothold in higher education.

To listen to the segment, click here.

A reply to Lawrence Auster‘s blog post:

ObamaCare as you rightly point out is a life and death issue.  That means that the efforts to pass it necessarily overshadow everything else.  The Democrats,

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

knowing that, are using the “reconciliation” as cover to pass some other dubious and politically unpopular legislation.  They are stuffing Obama’s takeover of higher education into it as well.  What ObamaCare is to medicine, Obama Loans are to college.  They will consolidate federal control of higher education finance in the Department of Education.  Obama wants this as part of his plan to double college enrollments by 2020 (from 18 million to 36 million) and make the United States the nation with the largest percentage of college-degreed citizens in the world.  Right now, the nation that holds that enviable position is Russia, with 55 percent.  This level of higher education has made Russia the powerhouse of innovation and productivity we see today, hasn’t it?  Why would it work out any differently for us?  Showering the country in empty credentials awarded to tens of millions of young people who have neither the talent nor the motivation to succeed at a real college education won’t improve the economy, as Obama promises.  It will, however, create a huge cohort of government clients.

That’s how the Obama loans (called “Direct Lending”) come into it.  Anyone who wishes to attend college and needs to borrow money to do so will have only one choice:  borrow from the Department of Education.  DOE will choose who gets the loans, how much, and under what terms.  Voila!  The great majority of college students are instantly long-term government clients who will spend the first decades of their working lives paying down their debt to Obama Loans.

The new program also locks into place the position of the federal government as chief patron to almost all colleges and universities except the super-rich (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and the handful of scrappy we-take-no-government –funds exceptions (e.g. Hillsdale and Grove City).  Anyone who thinks the government will not make use of this leverage to impose its own priorities on what is taught, who teaches, and how colleges manage themselves, must not have heard of Title IX, the DOE Office of Civil Rights, and the host of previous infringements on the academy that grew up under the much weaker federally-guaranteed student loans program.

This development has come up so suddenly—just last week!—that few people outside higher education have awoken to the danger.  What danger would that be?  Just as ObamaCare threatens to destroy high quality health care in America by reducing medical services to sub-mediocrity for all but the elite, Obama Ed threatens to destroy higher education by making it the intellectual equivalent of today’s high schools.  College for everyone regardless of ability is college for no one.

Part of the Obama Loan program is to take the “savings” (currently estimated at $67 billion over 11 years) from eliminating fees to private lenders and recycle the money as grants to low-income students and favored colleges.  So the government program will have the additional angle of forcing the students who borrow from the government to pay for the educations of others who will be spared the borrowing.

I have written about this twice at “Obama-Care Meets Obama-Ed” and “Obama Loans, Who Collects?”

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a letter from Rep. John Garamendi (D – CA) who says that he’s siding with the protesting students because raising tuition is “bad economics.” Why is it bad to insist that heavily subsidized students bear somewhat more of the cost of their college education (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “college experience” for many)? Because higher education is great for the economy.

“It is no accident that the Golden State’s golden age of economic innovation coincided with the establishment of and continued investment in the best public university system in the world,” Garamendi writes.

Actually, it is mostly an accident. There is a correlation between higher ed spending and economic growth, but it’s not the case that economic growth would not have happened if it hadn’t been for graduates of state universities. Few of the people responsible for the growth of industry in California in the 19th century were college-educated.

More to the point, conditions today hardly indicate that higher education drives the economy forward. Many young Californians (and indeed young Americans across the nation) go to college, learn little of lasting benefit, then enter the labor force and wind up with jobs that most high school students could easily learn. Garamendi points to “studies” purporting to show that there is a large “multiplier” for higher education spending, but given what we know about the low productivity of colleges and universities and the dismal learning of many graduates, those numbers are laughable.

As everyone knows, state funding of higher education is notoriously unreliable. After a nationwide surge in direct spending to universities (the boom years), the bust has arrived. Big surprise.

While direct appropriations to state universities have foundered, the state and federal money spent on students increased. This follows public choice theory: politicians spend money to gain the greatest number of votes. There are far more students (and their parents) who vote than there are institutions who want government money.

This is good for those students who use the money wisely and it is good for “school choice”: unlike K-12, students can choose their state college or university. Universities with declining enrollments moan and groan when students head to their competitors. To wit: my own university consists of two campuses: one with skyrocketing enrollment, the other in perpetual decline.

No doubt the news for those wedded to the status quo is bad. Nevertheless, recent trends in nontraditional education have taken off during this crisis. Even before the fiscal bust, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others noted that colleges had gotten flabby–not with money but with their way of delivering education in the 21st century.

Campuses facing fiscal difficulty need to get aggressive with educational innovation. Online learning is up (again). Philanthropist Bill Gates is expressing interest in putting his money into improving online education. For the first time, I am using a free online textbook funded by the federal government and distinguished foundations.

Institutions with enrollment and/or funding shortfalls are turning to for-profit alliances. One of the biggest surprises: the National Labor College has formed a for-profit joint venture that retains faculty unionization (NLC is dedicated to promoting unionism). “Bread-and-butter” union faculty ought to take notice: Change or die.

Here’s to a new year hoping that my own institution (Southern Illinois University) starts lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review the new book by Rutgers sociology professor Jackson Toby, The Lowering of Higher Education in America.

Toby makes much the same case I have — we’ve badly oversold higher education by making it easy (and seemingly imperative) for just about anyone who graduates from high school to go to college. The change he advocates is to make the federal college loan system meritocratic. Instead of blindly promoting “access,” we should make eligibility for federal loans depend on demonstrated academic ability. I think that’s at least a step in the right direction. I’d like to see the feds get out of education entirely and the arguments Professor Toby makes will help that cause. He also says a lot of “the emperor is wearing no clothes” kinds of things about higher education that need to be said.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan contributes a piece entitled “Banks Don’t Belong in the Student Loan Business.”

What he opposes is federally subsidized bank loans and I’m with him on that. Subsidizing student loans is no better policy than subsidizing home loans.

Where we part company is in his approval of direct government loans, which he wants to increase so that more students can “realize the dream of getting a college education.” As I have frequently pointed out, a college degree is what many students want. Relatively few dream of education. Low-cost loans entice large numbers of young people who gain little if anything in the way of lasting knowledge and skills into college, where they pile of debts they’ll have a hard time repaying once they get into the labor force and get a job that most high school kids could do.

Besides that, nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to lend money for this or any other purpose.