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This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and in

This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and increase the graduates". The problem is they mistake causality with correlation. If you focus strictly on graduation, without improving the students, then you will find that graduates will earn less. This same problem happens in high school - lowering the standards of students does improve graduate rates, but not necessarily life outcomes. An extreme example of this is to observe, "On days when there is a lot of ice cream sold, violent crime is higher, therefore let's make it harder to sell ice cream." The reality is hot days cause the rise in both ice cream sales and violent crime. If you only address the visible metric of ice cream sales, you miss the underlying cause. This abuse of statistics is rampant in education.

strictnein 9y ago
College graduation and home ownership were markers of success that were misinterpreted as the source of success.
- mathattack 9y ago
  Very good point. I saw some research that suggested that once you control for income and SAT scores, where you applied to school (Signaling ambition) was as much a predictor of success as where you actually attended.
ThinkingGuy 9y ago
In my opinion it is part of a wider trend, of both public- and private-sector schools, moving away from the "education business" and more toward the "diploma business."
- mathattack 9y ago
  Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft anecdotal observation is... - At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom. - At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.

strictnein 9y ago

College graduation and home ownership were markers of success that were misinterpreted as the source of success.

mathattack 9y ago
Very good point. I saw some research that suggested that once you control for income and SAT scores, where you applied to school (Signaling ambition) was as much a predictor of success as where you actually attended.

ThinkingGuy 9y ago

In my opinion it is part of a wider trend, of both public- and private-sector schools, moving away from the "education business" and more toward the "diploma business."

mathattack 9y ago
Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft anecdotal observation is... - At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom. - At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.