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.
Today’s Pope Center piece is a somewhat abridged version of a talk Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, recently gave at a meeting of the UNC Board of Trustees. She urges trustees to find out what’s actually going on at their schools and to stop sitting around like potted plants and do something about the clear erosion of academic standards and student learning.
Today both Peter Wood and Jason Fertig observed that Paul Krugman, whom Peter calls one of the “stalwarts of the left,” has gone on record to doubt the value of the college degree as the best path to prosperity for the majority of Americans.
Krugman began his recent op-ed:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”
But what everyone knows is wrong.
Krugman goes on to argue that more education does not necessarily lead to a stronger national economy, an argument that NAS and our friends at the Pope Center and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity have been making for some time.
Peter and Jason note that when someone as prominently on the left as Krugman acknowledges that the value of the college degree is weaker than it’s cracked up to be, we must be nearing some broader consensus about higher education’s worth.
In this extensive Inside Higher Ed piece, Rich Vedder responds to criticism by Anthony Carnevale, who takes issue with Vedder’s argument that many college graduates derive no financial benefit from their degrees.
I will just add a bit regarding the notion that there is a “college wage premium.” Carnevale (and other higher ed establishment defenders) keep asserting that employers “pay a premium for college education.” Not true. The guy with a college degree working at Starbucks is not paid more than the barista next to him who dropped out of high school. The college (or even law school) graduate who ushers you to a seat in a theater is not paid more than the usher in the next aisle who only finished high school.
Yes, on average people who have college credentials have higher earnings than people who don’t, but that should not lead to the conclusion that a college degree is so valuable that employers pay extra to those who possess one.
The establishment’s defense line on the alleged college premium was always weak, but the revelations in Arum and Roksa’s new book Academically Adrift really ought to cause it to retreat. If, as they find, many college students gain almost nothing from their coursework, why should anyone believe that they are nevertheless significantly more valuable to employers than those who did not go to college? Many schools are eager to recruit and retain students who have very poor academic preparation and scant interest in rigorous work. They string them along with easy courses where no one ever fails. These poor kids are not adding to their human capital; they’re just adding to their indebtedness. We should stop luring them into college with talk about the wage premium they’ll allegedly enjoy.
In this video, Anne Neal of ACTA discusses how well (or poorly) the schools that took part in the big football bowl games do when it comes to having a good core curriculum. Arkansas gets an A from ACTA for its curriculum (covering everything except economics), but Oregon and Wisconsin earn D grades for their porous curricula.
Anne makes an important point when she says that students who want to get a rigorous and well-rounded education can do so at almost any school but that students at many don’t because they can fulfill their requirements with niche courses. She gives some good examples.
I’m thrilled about the launch of Inside Academia! Here’s a description of it from Thomas A. Shakely at Phi Beta Cons:
And so, in the spirit of directness and accessibility, I’m pleased to introduce “Inside Academia,” a new project aimed at slicing through the jargon. Inside Academia, hosted by Andy Nash, is a weekly video interview program distributed at InsideAcademia.tv. In split-screen format, Andy Nash will speak with a new guest each week in these short, direct, 10-15-minute-long episodes.
The aim is to engage the uninitiated by distilling complex debates into accessible, coherent narratives that will themselves form, over time, a catalog of knowledge on a wide range of issues impacting academia and our nation.
What Bloggingheads.tv is to politics, InsideAcademia.tv aims to be, in its own simple way, to education.
Inside Academia recognizes the centrality of higher education to our nation’s culture and character, but it also acknowledges that the value of the college degree is becoming more and more dubious. It thus aims to cultivate national debate through these online video conversations. I’m excited for the influence this initiative can have on the academic reform movement.
So welcome, Inside Academia! We’re looking forward to what you’ll do.
At Minding the Campus, writers responded to a new report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), which “has unearthed…the single most scandalous statistic in higher education.”
Which is: “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.”
Stefan Kanfer, Fred Siegel, Mark Bauerlein and Daphne Patai unpack this figure, agreeing with CCAP president Richard Vedder that the drive to put more students through college is not in Americans’ best interests.
In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I discuss the recent study done by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity on higher ed accreditation. The authors conclude that college accreditation served some useful purposes back in the day when it was voluntary, but now that federal policy has made it almost mandatory (schools aren’t able to accept federal student aid money unless they have been given the stamp of approval by a “recognized” accrediting body), its value is questionable. I think they’re correct. 
Accreditation does virtually nothing to ensure educational quality, but it does impose substantial costs, more implicit than explicit. It also raises a significant barrier to entry into higher education by new and innovative providers.
Until we cut the Gordian Knot and get the feds out of financing education, we ought to find a better means of keeping people from using Pell Grants to purchase bogus degrees from colleges that only offer a pretense of education. Accreditation is a poor tool for accomplishing that.
Our friends at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) have released the first in a 5-part, book-length report called “25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College.” NAS applauds this initiative and looks forward to reading the report in its entirety. Peter Wood recently blogged about how colleges transform increases in federal student aid into higher tuition and fees. And we join with those who predict that either (a) the higher education bubble will burst or (b) the college degree will become a nearly empty credential.
What can we do to forestall these unwelcome outcomes? The CCAP has some ideas. The first part of its report is “Use Lower Cost Alternatives.”
1. Encourage more students to attend community college
2. Promote Dual Enrollment Programs
3. Reform Academic Employment Policies
4. Offer Three Year Bachelor’s Degrees
5. Outsource More Services
Click on the links to read each section.
h/t Minding the Campus
Friends in D.C., we hope to see you on Monday, Nov. 1, when FIRE president Greg Lukianoff will address the D.C. chapter of the National Association of Scholars. He will speak on “CLS v. Martinez and the Campus Freedom of Association Crisis.”
To RSVP and for more details, see this flier.
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