How not to talk about the crisis in higher ed
by zunguzungu
(You may, for your amusement, speculate where the seven swearwords I originally employed in this piece originally resided. My original reaction was considerably less charitable to Mr. Yglesias.)
Nonsense like this makes me wonder why I ever read Matt Yglesias. First he cites this:
College tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades. Between 1990 and 2008, tuition and fees rose 248 percent in real dollars, more than any other major component of the consumer price index. Raising the Pell grant’s maximum doesn’t address this underlying problem. Constant transfusions of public money help keep the patient alive but do not stop the bleeding. What’s to be done about dropout rates and outstanding student-loan debt that currently totals over $730 billion, or $23,200 per graduating senior in 2008? At first, I stood with progressives who say the federal government should increase grants and rein in the parasitic student-loan business. But while the student-loan industry has been part of the problem, and more grants are part of the solution, there is more to this story.
And then he parodies himself by declaring that “the only viable solution is to find ways to apply technology to the problem.” His commenters rightly took him to task for the incredibly underthought notion that replacing teachers with the internet will somehow save education, and though Anya Kamenetz isn’t nearly as dumb as he makes her sound (she doesn‘t claim the things he has her claiming), the way he takes her work to frame the problem and the solution are simple-minded and wrong-headed to the extreme.
Here’s why. As our Harvard educated pundit looks out on the world of higher ed, he agrees that the problem of rising tuition and student loan debt is a problem. And he thinks to himself “Hey! Costs of the product are rising! We must find a more efficient method of production.” And so, as industrialist-of-education, he decides to turn to technology to lower those costs of production. Open source! Public domain! University 2.0! Google U!
What he’s missed is the real substance of Kamenetz’s analogy to health care. Tuition isn’t rising because the costs of education are suddenly on the upsurge; tuition is rising, for one thing, because the “public option” is getting the shit kicked out of it.
Of course, to my mind, Kamenetz mostly misses the point as well. She writes:
The higher-education system has a lot in common with another great challenge our country is confronting: health care. Colleges, like hospitals, have little incentive to conserve resources or compete on price. They can actually gain prestige by raising tuition. They shift costs to students to make up for gaps in state funding and then hand out grant money to the applicants they want the most, not the ones who need the most help. Community colleges dedicated to serving the poorest get a fraction of the public money that goes to flagship state universities.
And this isn’t all wrong. Ridiculous textbook prices are an important part of why university education is so expensive, and open source stuff is a way to address that (which universities have been mighty slow and mighty feeble in making use of). But as Peter Levine points out, open source course materials only cut tuition costs if the price of course materials is a significant portion of tuition. And they’re not. It’s a deck chairs on the titanic sized part of the larger problem, which is this:
1. Because a huge proportion of the jobs that provide an even moderately comfortable and secure living require, at a minimum, a college degree, universities provide an enormously valuable commodity.
2. To the extent that universities can charge whatever they want, they will. And they will, as a result, price that commodity — which represents one of the few real avenues for class mobility left — out of the reach of anyone not already comfortably ensconced in the middle class.
In other words, by approaching the problem of tuition costs by reference to production, Kamenetz and Yglesias seem to docilely assume that university administrators and Boards of Trustees and so forth are just mechanically passing along the cost of the product to the consumer. Tuition is rising, they notice, so the cost of education must be rising. And yet isn’t it strange that in the same period of time in which tuition has risen, steadily and consistently, we have also seen the steady and consistent replacement of tenured full time faculty with part time and contingent faculty in those same universities? Which is to say, as costs of instruction have fallen dramatically, the price of an education has risen!
Shock! Could it be that universities are acting like corporations? Could it be they’re focusing on the bottom line by minimizing expenditures and charging as much as the market will hold? And could it be that, since the market demand for a college education is extremely robust, universities are able to charge quite a shitload of money and the fact that they are, in fact, is the reason that tuition, fees, and student debt are all rising? As a passenger in the “University of California” section of the Titanic that is American higher ed, I’m pretty much convinced that this is the case. And if it is, then the methods of cost containment that people like Kamenetz describe will simply make the universities themselves more robust, having a much less direct impact on student costs themselves.
Which is why real lesson here — and the important point Kamenetz and Yglesias seem to have missed — is that a not-for-profit government run public option would be the only meaningful way to reverse the trend. We used to have that; it was called “public universities.” But while the UC system has gutted the old master plan for higher ed in the state of California, it’s just part of a general trend you can see everywhere in public education. My alma mater in Columbus Ohio now charges double what it did when I was an undergrad, all of nine years ago, but most of that spike happened before the recession. And we’re seeing that everywhere; from a presumption back in the day that student fees were more or less nominal, the sort of thing my parents could pay for with a part time job, we have come to a point where student loans are virtually unavoidable, and we’ve gotten there steadily and consistently. The market will bear it, so that’s how education gets priced.
There are all sorts of ways to skin this cat. But the most basic piece of the puzzle is that upward economic mobility through education will happen only to the extent that an education costs less than it’s worth. Which is to say, if you have to buy your way into the middle class, you will only get there if you’re already there. That isn’t hard. But that means that if public universities don’t artificially depress the market value of a college education, the market will — as it does — ruthlessly redress any ineffieciencies that exist, pricing tuition upward and upward until higher ed ceases to exist (to the extent that it still does) as a meritocratic alternative to inherited privilege. And the United States Government has, as a body, ceased to regard doing so as a positive good.
zunguzungu 
My twenty-two-year-old brother, who went to work full time after high school instead of going to college, just bought a three-bedroom house. When I heard this, my first thought was, “how is he managing this with his student loans?” And then I remembered that he doesn’t have any. I wouldn’t want his job, but the more we make higher education out to be solely a class-mobility credential (rather than, say, a place where you learn things and/or transform yourself into a certain kind of thoughtful adult), the less reason students will have to go to college at all. If all you’re in it for is money, my brother’s route is definitely the more efficient one.
Yglesias is an interesting case. I often wonder if his blog isn’t some kind of Sokal hoax.
In any case, thanks for yours. I’ve been following for a while and I enjoy it.
I’m not sure I understand this post. Are you denying that if we could reduce the per student cost of producing undergraduate education that this would facilitate cheaper tuition?
Are you denying that if we could reduce the per student cost of producing undergraduate education that this would facilitate cheaper
tuition?
The short answer is yes. Tuition prices are not rising because the cost of educating students is rising, (because it isn’t); they are rising because the market will bear it and because administrators in both private and public universities are willing to charge it. Which means, in turn, that there’s no necessary reason to think that lowering the cost of educating students will reverse the trend.
The long answer: Obviously, businesses try to bring in more money than they spend, and since they make operating decisions based on the goal of maximizing that profit, they tend to be agnostic about the social good of what they do. And, in theory, both public and private universities make their decisions based on a different logic, the best interests of their students and their state. But n the case of a public university like the University of California, where I work, this was explicitly written into its charter: in 1960, the master plan for higher education specified that the purpose of the UC system was to educate the state’s citizens without regard to financial constraints on the ability of individual students to pay, that academic progress should be limited only by individual proficiency. In such a vision of the public university, tuition is a more or less nominal fee, somewhere close to being within reach of anyone who could work a part time job or two. It is, quite explicitly, not supposed to reflect the cost of a university education, and you control the problem of over-enrollment by raising standards for admission. Anyone who can get into the UC system will get a world class education at a fraction of its market cost (as reflected in the cost of a private school education down the road in Palo Alto), but only the top 12.5% of the state’s high school graduates are able to get in; the rest have places allocated to them at the Cal States or community colleges (while wealthier kids are able to buy their way in somewhere else). But the basic principle is very simple: the state foots the bill for the education of its citizens.
Now, in today’s right wing environment, this sounds as bizarre and utopian as universal health care. Which is precisely why we are losing it: neither public nor private universities call it profit when they bring in more money than they spend (for one thing because can always find ways to spend what they bring in) but to the considerable extent that they are run by private sector types who think of education as a product, and who make budgetary decisions based on the profit-seeking logic of the private sector, you get a situation where they are pricing that product based on the amount the market will bear. Which is quite a lot. Again, in the UC system, since the regents are mostly former CEO’s appointed by a republican governor and they hire business world consultants to help them make their operations more fiscally efficient, they tend to act as if they’re still in the private sector: they raise the price of their product as high as the market will bear, and they work to keep operational costs down. The former results in skyrocketing tuition, while the latter results in replacing more experienced, more expensive instructors with whatever lower cost alternative they can cook up (massively increased reliance on adjunct labor, for instance, and graduate students has been a trend in the last few decades). If you are a “consumer” of higher education, you get less and pay more because you have no alternative. But your tuition goes to pay for all the things that universities do that aren’t actually related to the instruction of students (and it’s an incredible list; big universities have an awful lot of money that they choose to spend on things other than instruction, everything from bioscience research to the many prestige projects that administrators love so much).
But the point is that whereas public education used to be that alternative, the “public option” in education that gave working class students access to a quality higher education at a price much lower than it was worth (and thus depressed the price paid even by students at private universities), it is now quite common to hear University administrators talk about education as a commodity they’re selling, and explicitly to think of themselves as CEO type managers. In the UC system, for example, the master plan is almost as much a dead letter as the part of a corporate charter that talks about being incorporated for the “public good.”
Natalia,
Exactly. I have a friend I went to high school with who dropped out of college and periodically tweaks me on facebook to make fun of how little money I make; he works in computers, a job he learned to do quite well on the job, and now makes a comfortable living, all without a college degree. There are still a huge number of jobs that one is only qualified for with a college degree, of course, and people without one are being, for example, hit disproportionately hard by the recession. But macro-economic changes in the economy are giving us a world in which the promise of education is a lot less than it once was.
Red,
Thanks!
Thanks for posting this. I read Yglesias frequently, but whenever he talks about education I want to pull my hair out. He had a recent post (it may have been this same one, I don’t remember) where he concludes that the best way to get higher ed “under control” is to quantify its “results” through testing. “Quantifiably” testing undergraduate liberal arts degrees is, I think it’s safe to say, ridiculous and tells you nothing about how higher education works.
But it all seems part of the larger centrist/technocratic language surrounding education policy. When Obama says that we have to improve our educational system so that we can “compete” with India and China, I cringe. First of all: what’s so wrong with India and China having well-educated citizens? Is this some sort of competition? Second: why is education nothing but a means to create more profit, a way to bolster our greatness in the marketplace? (This is also why you always hear about our need to improve our teaching of “science and math” but nothing else. History majors don’t build computers.)
Mark Slouka’s piece in Harper’s last year said it best: we ought to be educating citizens, not employees.
The promise of education is only less if we insist on thinking of education’s value as measurable in future wages, which is, by the way, exactly what the UC commission does.
I agree with Elrod, Yglesias is not really someone I read for his thoughts on edumacation. On other stuff he is good.
Isn’t Yglesias a Democratic party hack?
Higher education is a racket and the students are the victims, both under and grad students. Cheap or free labor, for which the students pay enormous fees for performing. With little or no chance to get a job afterwards, and the dept. chairs know it, particularly in the humanities, particularly in English and history. But – butbutttttt — we have to keep recruiting students because who else will be the assistants that we tenured faculty are entitled?
It’s another ponzi scheme like the finance industry and, as pointed out, the so-called health industry.
Love, C.
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“What they’re really doing is trnyig to encourage NAMs and (especially) white women to feel aggrieved at their “oppressors” – white (gentile) men. It’s just a way of stirring up contention among one dominant group, white gentiles, to help another. It’s a way to destroy traditional American culture.Are women really better off since they started doing this shit? Nope.”Well… women aren’t really a one big clubs that plots together every other Thursday. Here’s how I see it:Women who are high quality people only ever wanted equality before the law, both because they thought it would benefit society as a whole and because they wanted a fair chance to self-actualize to their fullest potential. Today, they generally feel embarrassed and handicapped by the exploits of what passes for modern feminism, but they count on the ability of the people they respect to judge them on their individual merits. I think a lot of them manage to arrange their lives and development to their satisfaction, despite their frustration with the modern political climate. But then again, a lot of them managed to arrange for satisfactory fulfilling lives in previous political climates as well.The women who are easily indoctrinated with (questionably) flattering crap and are able to enjoy sincere moral superiority from a fake victim status are either damaged in some way, or, more likely, mediocre in talents and intelligence. From what I can tell, they are REALLY frustrated right now. They are stuck in boring, stressful jobs and have the frustrations of the mediocre men directed at them. They also don’t seem to understand how and why they end up in their current situation. That must suck. But then again, they used to be completely dependent on and controlled by mediocre men and thus susceptible to all kinds of stupid misfortunes. Who knows which is worse? Hey, at least, those of them who are lesbians or autistic are probably a lot more comfortable now. Lastly, we have the intelligent sociopaths of the female sex. This must be the golden era for them, as they’ve been given a go ahead to rape and pillage for personal gain, which is all that can make these types of people happy anyway. So, even if the relatively recent shifts in culture haven’t produced a large net gain in women’s well being, I’m not convinced that they produced any sort of a net loss. In conclusion: 1. Laws that put limits on the rights of a whole gender are stupid. 2. Laws that are based on presumed victimhood are stupid. 3. Stupid laws hurt the masses, but those with well functioning heads and stable tempers will (almost) always find a way to not be screwed up by stupidity. 4. Evil will always find a way to benefit from any situation, especially a stupid situation.And the world keeps going round, and it’s still so beautiful in so many ways. Time to try to work off these 3 cups of espresso which were supposed to make me professionally productive, but instead are causing me to tweak. Excuse this stimulant induced message. I’m gonna go for a run, force a deep tissue massage on my husband and mash bananas for banana bread. And i wish you the same, dear sir.Cheers!
We’ve arrived at the end of the line and I have what I need!
Most help articles on the web are inaccurate or incoherent. Not this!
I agree with you, Judith. For me those courses were worth no more than that but it’s bzrirae to think that they were heavily subsidized by the government. There is now no longer a presumption that you study things to better yourself but only to better yourself by investing in knowledge as a way into the marketplace. Or not even knowledge but qualifications. It’s the saddest thing.
Another trend is the stock market may conutnie to grind higher, until the housing market begins the upturn (the S&P 500 had a “triple top breakout”).And pigs may learn how to fly. While the US market will have to turn up in REAL terms some time in the future there is no evidence that valuations are sound at this time. The S&P 500 has been falling against real assets since 2000.
There does seem to be an odd cost component, though.
I’m a research scientist at a university, and it seems to me that there’s a second feedback loop in addition to the one that you describe. With the university taking in more and more money (and not paying it out as dividends), the extravagance of university expenses gets out of hand. By now, even a mid-ranked regional university (like mine) has a lot of expenses that would have been seen as luxuries 30 years ago (the sustainability center, the LEEDS platinum buildings, more sports facilities, abundant wifi, etc). Since students and parents (and legislators and funding agencies) have no way of knowing how good the college faculty is, these expenses serve to display quality (or a quality-like proxy variable) to the university stakeholders.
What I’m saying is: the university doesn’t need that money to teach students (in many classes, 20 desks in a room will do). It needs the money to cover the marketing expenses to get more money.