Break the college oligopolies and set the students free
My distinguished former colleague Neil Cavuto, host on the Fox Business network, got into an entertaining back-and-forth on air last week with student protest organizer Keely Mullen.
The subject: How to solve our country’s student debt crisis — and who should pay for the solution.
Mullen says she wants student loans to be forgiven, and future degrees at public colleges to be free for students.
Cavuto argued that would slap incredible burdens on taxpayers.
Mullen said the “one percent” could afford it.
With all due respect, they’re both wrong. It would be easy to solve the looming student debt crisis — without costing U.S. taxpayers a penny.
How? Easy. Break up the college oligopoly. End the outrageous racket where the institution that awards degrees is also the institution that does the teaching.
If you can pass the exams for a B.A., why isn’t that enough? Why should you also be forced to cut a check for $100,000 or $200,000 as well?
In the last 40 years public colleges have raised their annual tuition costs by a factor of 20 — far, far in excess of the inflation in wages, consumer prices, or pretty much anything else you care to mention.
Why? Because they can.
They know almost every good job today requires a degree. And under the current system anyone who wants one of those degrees has to pay. If you don’t pay up, you’ll be cleaning pools for the rest of your life. The old factory jobs have gone to China. Too bad, pal.
Hmmm. How exactly does this differ from a protection racket?
No wonder students are up to their eyeballs in debt. The chart above shows how the cost of tuition at public four-year colleges has gone up since 1971, compared to average weekly earnings.
Once upon a time a year’s tuition was equal to the cost of about 120 hours’ labor. Today it’s four times as much.
I can see why it might cost a lot of money to teach science and engineering students. You need laboratories and so on. We could offer targeted public subsidies to bring down the costs.
But a liberal arts degree? Private colleges are charging $40,000 a year. It is almost impossible to believe.
But to break this destructive cycle we don’t have to hit taxpayers. We just have to break the protection racket.
All it would take would be for states to start offering degrees to anyone who can pass exams, and can pay a minimal administration cost.
Why not? Imagine the scenario. State U administers exams once or twice a year. Those who want a degree have to pass two, or three, or even four sets, of rising difficulty. But they aren’t required to get their tuition from the college as well.
They can hire private tutors. They can self-study. They can join small independent cooperatives run by professors who want to free themselves from college bureaucracy.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, as they say. One of the best student experiences I’ve had was at an unaffiliated, uncredited writing workshop.
This is already how a lot of professional and technical education takes place. The Chartered Financial Analyst qualification, for example, involves highly complex financial knowledge. You have to take three sets of exams. But how you study for them is pretty much up to you.
And this is how, for example, the prestigious French Baccalaureate and British “A” levels are administered. Both are roughly the equivalent of the first one or even two years of an American degree course. The exams are set by institutions completely independent of the schools.
Yes, once upon a time a college was an entire experience. Campus life, the community of scholars, the whole nine yards.
But you have only to look at a typical campus today to see how far that’s gone the way of the dodo anyway. And if you think four years of campus life is turning Missy and Junior into intellectuals, try quizzing them on anything that hasn’t appeared on YouTube.
People employed by the college-industrial complex will doubtless scream with outrage at my suggestion. So what? They’ve been running a racket for years. It’s time to end it.
Student loans, which were designed to help students, have instead made matters worse. Giving free credit to 18-year-olds: Gee, what could go wrong with that?
It’s going to be a challenge reducing the $1 trillion-plus in student loans already accumulated. But at least we can stop that mountain from going up and up and up any further.
Break the college oligopolies. Set the students free.
….I fucking love that idea. You hear me? I FUCKING LOVE IT!
I would have GLADLY become an ACS certified chemist by just studying my ass off and taking a hand full of exams!
Instead I did all of that, AND worked my ass off at the same time so I could pay off student loans, and here I am years later still paying on the retarded loans.
I’m fucked, the only person that will help me is myself, but hopefully this shit can get straightened out before my children are of age.
Or, stop the govt from backstopping the loan process. As soon as you need to qualify for a loan, instead of just get one, it will revert back to how it was. Personally, with the advent of the net, I am not sure why anyone would go to college at all. Any information you need or just want to learn is right there. Free. Employers could simply test people for the precise knowledge they need for the job. My first job, part of the interview process was to count everything in the store within a time limit, and do a simulated nightly closing. Same thing, only different.
@destroyerofsolesnikesales: “Personally, with the advent of the net, I am not sure why anyone would go to college at all. Any information you need or just want to learn is right there.”
WTF – must be a millennial speaking?
” Employers could simply test people for the precise knowledge they need for the job.” So sad, so simplistic, so confining.
This idea was proposed by Charles Hugh Smith , in an essay entitled, “Why the Higher Education System Is Unsustainable” (i.e. Doomed) (September 18, 2013)
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept13/NFU9-13.html
Stop accrediting the institutions, and start accrediting the individual via testing/certifications.
In the first half of the 20th century, a more serious time, with more serious people, those who attended college did so because they had ideas that they wanted to do more. It was the people.
By 1960, the general populace, observed that college grads had better jobs, wages. However the masses wrongly attributed the success to ‘going to college’.
By 1969, colleges invented all sorts of Liberal Arts degrees, none of which ever existed. Then they added on mandatory requirements – like 8 credits of a foreign language. We were told ‘it’s to make you a more rounded person.’ When in reality, the foreign language department would go out of business if it didn’t have us captives who were required to waste our time and money.
Then came sports, this may be the biggest reason some people go to school.
Add to this the government schools that pump into the children’s heads that they need to go to college.
So we now have curriculums / degrees that are irrelevant and bloated with filler, being perused by children who don’t know why they are doing or where they’re going.
Greetings,
I agree with this 100%. When the collapse came and I lost my post production facility, I decided to teach myself electronics and come up with some products I could sell so as to survive. I had no place to live other than my small workshop where I slept on the floor. I had a budget of $1 per day for food. I went from knowing NOTHING ZERO NADA about electronics to a product with world wide distribution in 18 months.
I asked my old business partner to join in with me as I needed help. In a matter of day, he taught himself 3D Cad design & circuit board design – things people go to school for years to learn. It took him 3 days to figure out circuit board design.
Anyone that wastes money on a college degree today isn’t even worthy of contempt. I could care less about the crybaby millennials and I’ll outsource my work to the Taliban before ever ever ever hiring one of these self-entitled pussies. They can starve for all I care.
Student debt is untenable. I hate the fact that it got to be this bad, and have railed against it every step of the way. But now that it is here I believe I have a fair solution:
IF you hold student debt AND you cannot find a job which pays enough money to maintain a healthy student debt to income ratio, then a PORTION of your monthly loan payment will be forgiven. This portion will be based on your rank in academic achievement. If you hold a GPA that is higher than 90% of your graduating class, then 90% of your monthly debt payment is forgiven. If you hold a GPA that is higher than 50% of your graduating class, then 50% of your monthly debt payment is forgiven. And so on. This way, we at least ensure that anyone who is drowning in student debt is guaranteed to be a certified idiot who probably shouldnt have gone to college.
@NickelthroweR
You’re right but it’s a deeply-entrenched mindset, parents and students alike “buying into” the illusion that brick-and-ivy parchment means career success. It was maybe 3 years ago that a report came out showing that for the first time in more than 40 years those with “certifications” made more on average then a newly-minted college grad.
It’ll change but like most institutionalized crap in this country it’s going to take a little time. Your approach is one more young people need to be made aware of – then again, it also takes a certain “can-do” attitude and willingness to go against the norm.
Not something in big supply at the moment.
A lot of young people would be better off going to a tech or trade school .I live near a Duke Power nuclear plant. After a year of welding school to get certified a young welder can start off at 34.00 dollars
An hour + benefits.Not bad.Saw this last month in a magazine add. They were also hiring pipe fitters , electricians and power plant mechanics.(What ever that is ).
Also Duke Power was willing to pay for the school.Not a bad deal.
@destroyer – “Personally, with the advent of the net, I am not sure why anyone would go to college at all. Any information you need or just want to learn is right there. Free.”
I assure you, my job is quite beyond the ability of the internet to do at this point.
Though I wish it was otherwise, my life would be simpler.
This has already been done by some enterprising entrepreneurs back in the 80’s. They offered some college credit for life experience but required work over and above that. Imagine earning a degree for $2,500! Even the Fedgov accepted these degrees, including advanced degrees, and many Fed workers paid the $ and took the tests to advance their employment with an MBA, Masters, or Doctorate. Where it went off the rails was at the state level; state schools couldn’t stand the competition.
There would be very few folks with degrees under this scenario. Most college kids cannot even pass a decent high school exam, much less an exam that actually tests college grad level English, Math, Science, plus a major.
It has been shown around half of college grads learned exactly zero after 4 years of college, based on pre and exit exam comparisons. Hell, they had to add points to the SATs to hide the fact that HS grads have become dumber than a bag of rocks over time.
Are you shitting me? Hell, they cannot even get a nation-wide HS curriculum sorted out.
I am all for requiring kids to pass an exit exam. That will sort the wheat from the chaff.
But very few people indeed could pass a proper university exit exam without formal training at a real college or university.
What are you going to do with the hundreds of thousands/millions of kids that now attend college that will never be able to pass such an exam?
This is a dream. Never gonna happen.
Self policing institutuions are alway straight forward and honest. Aren’t they?
Institutions! Aren’t they? There should be a national high school test that must be passed to get a diploma which would be required for college admission. That would reduce the numbers of potential college students by about 75%
Overthecliff – they kinda already have that. I’m t is called the SAT. When kids could no longer get high scores because they could not spell cat if you spotted them the C and the A, the fuckers just raised everyones scores to make it seem like they actually could read, write and calculate 2+ 3 = 5.
No one wants to openly admit that the US population is dumber than the average monkey overall.
Now the textbook publishing companies have plunged feet first into the greedfest. They didn’t like it when students would buy used textbooks it cut into their profits. In cahoots with the college professers, they put access codes in textbooks so that they could only be used once. Then they upped the prices to 200.00 per book. The college would require that the students buy that particular book only.
bb says: They were also hiring pipe fitters , electricians and power plant mechanics.(What ever that is ).
Isn’t that big thing under your hood a ‘power plant’? Therefore, they have engines at the electric company.
They use jet engines here. And solar generators – you may have seen one off the 95 between Laughlin and Vegas or in Lancaster, CA on Sierra at Avenue E.
The crew chief was tickled to hear those things can cook a bird in flight.
Achromatic Chromosomes: I know of a case (location, system name, type beam, purpose, results etc) where a police or news helicopter crashed and the crew was cooked. I was told it remained a big mystery the police and FAA couldn’t solve because our end of the beam was Top Secret; I agree that it is justified. After that, the airspace the beam passed through was monitored to avoid any more accidents. If a bird was killed by it, any moron would see that it had been cooked.