NAS Blog

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jane Shaw and I argue that a free market in postsecondary education would not leave any students out or behind, but rather would benefit all. The heavy federal thumb on the scales favoring accredited college degree programs lures many students into options that are not good for them, while at the same time impeding the growth of alternatives that would be better.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jane Shaw writes about last week’s ACTA meeting, which featured former Harvard president (and current prof) Larry Summers. He has some interesting thoughts about grade inflation, tenure, and the curriculum. As an economist, Summers is part of the problem (he’s completely absorbed in the Keynesian view that the federal government can and should manage the economy), but with regard to higher education, he sees its problems and speaks his mind forcefully.

The higher education bubble was inflated by various pumps and gases:  expensive but useless degrees, an ideological straitjacket, grade inflation, administrative bloat, and proliferating programs, centers, and offices of enigmatic, malign, or Kafkaesque purpose.  As FIRE’s Robert Shibley recently wrote, “. . . tuition and tax dollars are funding an ever-growing army of bureaucrats that police everything from free speech to dating. Administrators now outnumber faculty on our nation’s campuses, and even students’ innermost thoughts are subject to their oversight.”  Basically, ye olde sheepskin has become a product whose cost in dollars and nuisance far exceeds its value.

Textbooks play their own part in this carnival.  For one, it’s not clear what textbooks are for in 2011.  Some students won’t buy them, preferring rent-a-texts, e-books, library reserves, Wikipedia, SparkNotes, et al.  Other students won’t read them because they can pass anyway after a Google click-a-thon.  Thus, M. W. Klymkowsky says, “Clearly, the issue of whether to use a textbook is complex,and it is dependent upon course and curricular goals. Students(and colleagues) expect a textbook; yet often, the textbook is not used, except as a reference.”

Jane Shaw, President of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, goes even further, suggesting that a textbook may often be nothing more than a security blanket for the professor.  In an email, she says, “I think that most faculty members still want a textbook because it provides an instantaneous organization for the course.”

Still, there are some courses students can’t pass without the textbook, and those are the jackpot for publishers and authors.  At $100+ per book, constant revisions and new editions, websites, CDs, and DVDs keep that money pump humming.  James Stewart made so much money from his Calculus textbook that he built a showplace home/performance space for an estimated $30,000,000 after auditioning architects such as Frank Gehry.

In an email, Evergreen Valley College’s Sterling Warner says, “Publishers . . . like the idea of electronic textbooks—not because they will serve students as well or better than paperback texts (or reduced costs per textbook).  No, publishers are asking for paper and electronic rights to reprint works because they can make greater profits.”  Warner continues:

I see publishers rushing after the glitz, bells, and whistles (maybe even clickers!) placing pedagogical substance second. Soon they’ll all be using Go-Daddy girls to use a bit of sex to straighten out slumping sales . . . .”

Enter Zachary Mason, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and author of the celebrated The Lost Books of the Odyssey.   Mr. Mason has just launched a new company in what seems a virtuous attempt to shrink textbook prices by using a mixture of new methods and new technology.  Zach, a very bright and talented man, is interested in hearing from all the players in the textbook casino:  teachers, administrators, students.  If you have ideas and/or needs you would like to share, just shoot me an email at dclemens@mpc.edu and I will forward your contact information to Zach.

Go-Daddy girls need not apply.

Take the notion that every child deserves to attend college (egalitarian liberalism) and add crony capitalism (banks with the power to squeeze you despite bankruptcy (i.e., kind of like the IRS!). The result is the warning of several commentators recently of a coming student loan crisis. In last week’s Wall Street Journal, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus are quoted from an Atlantic.com story they wrote:

As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. . . .

If you want to get a name as an economic seer, try this one. The next subprime crisis will come from defaults on student debts, starting with for-profit colleges and rising to the Ivy League. . . .

Still, there’s a difference. With mortgage defaults, banks seize and resell the home. But if a degree can’t be sold, that doesn’t deter the banks. They essentially wrote the student loan law, in which the fine-print says they aren’t “dischargable.” So even if you file for bankruptcy, the payments continue due.

Hence these stern words from Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. “You will be hounded for life,” he warns. “They will garnish your wages. They will intercept your tax refunds. You become ineligible for federal employment.” He adds that any professional license can be revoked and Social Security checks docked when you retire.

Read the full article because it is worth the read.

At a recent Liberty Fund Socratic Seminar on “Education and Liberty in the Digital Age,” the conferees considered whether the Internet cum computer constitute “disruptive technology” that will subvert and fundamentally change today’s crumbling educational monolith.  We paid particular attention to online education, innovative for-profit programs, and the educational potential of videos on YouTube.  We watched the rap video “Fear the Boom and Bust” (better known as “Keynes vs. Hayek”) which has racked up over 2,000,000 views and 1100 comments plus its sequel, “The Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two.”

Can you really educate or stimulate serious interest in economics with a music video?  I was dubious.  From 1984 to 1994, I wrote a column for Media and Methods analyzing music videos for their use in education (Joan Logue’s dream-like video for Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”).  Back then, the teacher popping in a rare videocassette of a music video was cool, hip, and sexy.

Eventually, however, I decided that in fact there was no educational value in music videos.  At one time, showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up a “Young Goodman Brown” discussion stimulated students but by 1994, videoland was where students already spent most of their time; no buzz.  So the Keynes vs. Hayek vids looked stale and artifactual to me.

However, since YouTube arrived in 2005, maybe lower production costs and vast accessibility have revived music video with a disruptive potential.  Just last week, The New Republic editor Jonathan (“I hate George W. Bush”) Chait penned a sniffy refutation of “Fear the Boom and Bust.”  Yes, a completely straight-faced fisking of . . . a rap music video.

Yo, J-Chay, it’s two old econ dudes acting like gangsta rappers.  Laffs, namean?  Your sermon to the TNR choir disses the vid but thanks for driving more page views!

So maybe Chait should fear the educative possibilities of YouTube, even if Neil Postman was right that electronic media turn everything into entertainment. Perhaps right now millions of entertained fanboys are reversing their course down the road to serfdom having been schooled up by “Hayek’s” rap

The question I ponder is who plans for whom?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.”

Mos def.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included a letter from a writer who thought that he could counter a recent op-ed by Charles Koch, arguing that the federal government does too much, costs too much, and menaces our future prosperity, with a 1995 comment by the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Schlesinger, venting after the Democrats lost control of Congress, saw big government as a line of defense for the common people against rapacious “corporate interests.” He did not see that those corporate interests only have power due to their alliances with politicians. Here is the letter I just sent to the WSJ in response:

Writer George Kovac evidently believes that the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. penned a brilliant “critique” of the government-downsizing movement (letters, March 14). Writing after the Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 elections, Schlesinger opined that it was an “assault on the national government” that would merely transfer power to “the great corporate interests.”

It is inane to offer Schlesinger’s 1995 comment as a rejoinder to the arguments made by Charles Koch in his March 1 op-ed.

First, the serious case for downsizing the federal government is no more an “attack” on the government than were liberal arguments against governmental policies made by people like Schlesinger back in the 50s and 60s when they argued that the government should stop waging unnecessary wars, stop enforcing racial segregation, stop trying to stifle dissent and so on. To maintain as Mr. Koch does, that the federal government is doing things it should not do and thereby imposing undue burdens on our prosperity while undermining our freedom, is a rational criticism. Brushing it off as “an attack on the government” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that liberals like Schlesinger used to decry when conservatives used it.

Second, Schlesinger poses a false dilemma in suggesting that we must choose between big government domination and domination by “great corporate interests.” Corporations cannot compel people to buy their products, to subsidize their losses, to support whatever agendas they may have. Politicians, on the other hand, can and do subject us to coercion with innumerable taxes, mandates and prohibitions. Often, they enter into alliances with businesses, unions, and other interests to give those interests favors and privileges they would not otherwise have. It is exactly that sort of crony capitalism that is the main target of Koch and others who wish to restore the government to its proper constitutional limits.

Schlesinger may have been a good historian, but his understanding of the effects of expansive government was badly flawed.

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in USA Today about the ongoing unionization of public higher education. The sprawling labor force of an ever-expanding academy has become a fertile recruiting ground for the labor movement. The results could be unfortunate for scholarship, schools and the public.

Riley and others have cited the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report indicating that public sector union ranks continue to swell and now exceed the total number of private union members (7.6 vs. 7.1 million). While overall union membership rate dropped from 12.3% to 11.9% in 2010 according to BLS, the writer notes that faculty and graduate student membership in collective bargaining units has increased 17% over the last five years.

Educators, administrators and policy actors should resist public university system collective bargainning, as Gov. Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin. In the long run, higher-ed unionization threatens not only state budgets but the ability of public universities to compete deftly with private counterparts.

The ed-blogosphere overflows with predictions of a “higher education bubble” inflated by worthless degrees, crushing student loans, dumbed-down majors, country club student life, bloated administrations, and throwdowns such as for-profits vs. non-profits, credentialing vs. educating, and tenured Brahmins afloat on the backs of disposable adjuncts.  The bubble produces graduates who spend years “academically adrift” just to be pitched up on the rocky shore of reality waving a diploma which neither signifies anything (knowledge or skill) nor produces anything (higher earnings or happiness).  A search of Instapundit, law professor Glenn Reynolds’s Libertarian poli/tech blog, turns up 24 “higher education bubble” stories in the last month alone.  Google spits out 248,000 occurrences of the phrase.  Still, I find no mention of one thing that epitomizes the whole sorry mess:  the Ed.D.

For many Ph.Ds, the Ed.D. represents the ticket to the administrative high life, the white flag to academic scholarship, and the tramp stamp of the compromising careerist.  Back in 1911, Frederick Taylor declared the necessity for an industrial mittlere Führungskraft to deliver the factory owner’s orders to the working proles.  The California State University (CSU) system has a more grandiose, if unintelligible, plan calling for Ed.D. programs that produce

future leaders [who] study and contribute to significant reforms that can result in measurable improvements in student achievement.”

So CSU Sacramento’s Ed.D. program offers a

distinctive interdisciplinary curriculum in which classes have integrative connections focused on transformational leadership, critical policy analysis and action, and strategic, informed decision making.”

CSU East Bay offers an Ed.D. in “Educational Leadership for Social Justice” where students

will be engaged in studies, activities and skill building that fosters courageous school leadership that will demonstrate bold, socially responsible leadership to address and resolve issues that have impacted the achievement and success of students of color, and other marginalized students and communities . . . .”

Yes, that does say “fosters leadership that will demonstrate leadership.”  Maybe the “higher education bubble” is really over-inflated from so much pretentious and vaporous doublespeak.  It is the narrator of Pete Dexter’s Spooner who asks, “Can the world ever have enough doctors of education?”

California certainly doesn’t think so.

A line we often hear from the mainstream media is that nobody saw the housing bubble coming, as if it were like a sudden plague that struck with no warning. Loyola University professor Walter Block, however, points out here that quite a few Austrians predicted it, based on their method of analyzing changes in incentives and their logical consequences.