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The real education bubble is the number people willing to borrow nearly $200,000 for a BA (or PhD) in Anthropology that exceeds the number of positions availabl

The real education bubble is the number people willing to borrow nearly $200,000 for a BA (or PhD) in Anthropology that exceeds the number of positions available that require that degree at that price. I read an article yesterday that mentioned a detective with a PhD in Anthropology. [1] While it seems to be working for him, I just don't see it as economically efficient. If we look at the causes of this inefficiency and bubble, we see similar government incentives and payouts to those that drive up the price of houses and medical care. As far as the increase in AP goes, the real push behind that is the lack of curriculum standards in the US and the unfairness of the GPA system. If you have a class of students taking the AP exam where none of them get higher than a two, I would expect that someone in that class would still be getting an 'A'. There's nothing "bubble-like" about AP- it's simply fulfilling a gap in the educational system. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/09/AR2009050902458.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...

krschultz 17y ago
I don't understand why you aren't getting more upvotes for this. AP exams are no indication of a bubble at all. I took as many AP exams as I thought I could pass - a bunch of them I didn't even take the class for I just bought a review book and passed them on my own. If you have a choice between 40-100 hours of hard studying, $30 for a review book, and $90 for the AP exam vs 4 months of work and $3,000 in tuiton what rational person would NOT take a bunch of AP exams? The thing the article misses is that the number of tests taken is not really correlated to the number of people taking tests. Maybe 20 years ago people only took what they were good at, I took a dozen AP exams in subjects I couldn't care less about becuase then I avoided taking those in college. Plenty of other people did the same. I am one of the people inflating the number of AP exams arbitrarily. That has nothing to do with me thinking a lot of people in college are not getting their money's worth in their education. The bubble is the cost of tuition vs the payoff afterwards.

krschultz 17y ago

I don't understand why you aren't getting more upvotes for this. AP exams are no indication of a bubble at all. I took as many AP exams as I thought I could pass - a bunch of them I didn't even take the class for I just bought a review book and passed them on my own. If you have a choice between 40-100 hours of hard studying, $30 for a review book, and $90 for the AP exam vs 4 months of work and $3,000 in tuiton what rational person would NOT take a bunch of AP exams? The thing the article misses is that the number of tests taken is not really correlated to the number of people taking tests. Maybe 20 years ago people only took what they were good at, I took a dozen AP exams in subjects I couldn't care less about becuase then I avoided taking those in college. Plenty of other people did the same. I am one of the people inflating the number of AP exams arbitrarily. That has nothing to do with me thinking a lot of people in college are not getting their money's worth in their education. The bubble is the cost of tuition vs the payoff afterwards.