5 ms·

College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)

56 points by joubert 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
euroclydon 17y ago
Seeking a college degree forces a person to learn a lot of material in a short span of time. I am fully aware of MIT's open-courseware and I've watched a few lectures, read syllabuses and assignments, but I still plan on enrolling in my local university's distance education program in order to take their core computer science courses in preparation for the masters program. Could I just read some books on assembly language, data structures and operating systems? Sure. But I don't trust myself to crack open the books and do assignments every night unless my money and grades are on the line.
- quizbiz 17y ago
  And what about the college campus? The atmosphere, the people, the resources.
  - ohlol 17y ago
    The atmosphere, the people, the resources. --- ... are worth $100k+ in total??
    - aneesh 17y ago
      For many people, probably not. But there is a huge variance. How much more money did Steve Ballmer make in his career because he met Bill Gates at Harvard? Nobody knows, obviously, but the odds on anyone becoming a multi-billionaire (like he is) are incredibly slim. I'm not saying his story is at all typical, just that the decision can pay off in completely unexpected ways.
      - ohlol 17y ago
        True, but the odds of that happening are probably similar to the lottery. I'm not trying to argue that college is worthless or of low value (I think the answer can only be subjective). But if one is to argue that it is valuable, they should probably base it on the learning opportunities. Equivalent networking and social opportunities exist in plenty other areas of life that don't cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
        aneesh 17y ago
        I'm not trying to say that's the only reason you should go to college -- meeting smart people is simply one of many reasons. There are a lot of valuable payoffs that come with minimal risk, like the degree itself. And there are plenty of good colleges you can go to that don't cost 100k. If going to college was truly not worth it, then you'd see a lot more people not doing it. The fact that going to college is a such a common course of action says that people actually find value in it (or there's a giant inefficiency in the market -- which is the argument of this article, but I think it's worth considering the alternative as well). And I don't think the lottery analogy works. Regardless of what you (legally) do, you can't influence the chance that a single lottery ticket of yours wins. But you can improve the chance that certain low-probability events happen to you (like founding a successful startup) by your actions. And I think going to a good college can be one of those actions for many people.
        quizbiz 17y ago
        Sadly, many force themselves to go to college because the alternative is scary and shameful.
        Scriptor 17y ago
        [Disclaimer: I'm a college student] Depending on your industry and (sometimes) on your college, you're more likely to get in touch with those more influential and powerful than you (for science it might be renowned researchers, for law high-up law offices, etc). Since your friends went through the same college experience, the same goes for them. Therefore you're all in a good position to help each other. I personally want to go into biology-related research. College is pretty much vital for this since I have access to professors who can go beyond what's in the textbook as well as have numerous opportunities to work in actual labs. Now, if I were to start a software startup I admit that college is not necessarily the best option. Teaching yourself is easier and more likely to give you a good-enough foundation and if you're in the right place it'll be easier to hang out with the right crowd. However, for people who otherwise live in places far-removed from tech hotspots, college can give them a chance to move somewhere with a better chance of being noticed. Also, besides startup-related events, what other non-college ways are there to have access to lots of networking opportunities?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
- locopati 17y ago
  If social networking online is good, real social networking even better.
  - ohlol 17y ago
    If you want to network, go out to the bar. It'll only cost you tens of dollars.
    - fan 17y ago
      The cohort there is different.
      - elai 17y ago
        If you want to network in your industry, it's probably just best to get some small job in whatever industry your interested in, go to the local ___ industry club, (Linux user groups, iphone developer groups, mechanics'r'us, etc), make friends and teach yourself. I found doing that helped my carreer more than local college buddies who didn't have much in the form of connections or experience anyway.
        Scriptor 17y ago
        What if you're in a field where teaching yourself is not much of an option unless you're exceptionally dedicated and have very few distractions?
        locopati 17y ago
        There's something to be gained by networking outside your industry. Not all great ideas exist within the group. Artists talking to coders talking to scientists talking to historians produces connections that may go unnoticed.
  - sayrer 17y ago
    Exactly. The value is the other students. That's certainly the factor that influenced my experience more than any other. The author may have a point about universities being overpriced, but he missed a pretty key point, so his analysis is suspect.
euroclydon 17y ago
I have read enough of these articles now to think that the points the author makes cannot be rationally argued against. In other words, the foe is simply the status quo. I wonder if this is how society moves, or fails to move? Nearly everyone, at the individual level agrees with a sentiment, but we're all too entrenched in the current system to find a way out. Anyway, If I'm correct about how solid the argument against the expensive four year degree is, I hope we're in for some interesting changes.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 17y ago
Do the people who write these articles not realize that other people have said the exact same thing before?
- shalmanese 17y ago
  And they'll keep on saying them again and again until things are different. That's how revolutions work.
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    Or they'll keep on saying them again and again and things will stay almost exactly the same. That's how revolutions fail.
ShabbyDoo 17y ago
I'm incredibly torn.... On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown. On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers. Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.* What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses. * To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  Living at home during college would suck. If they were willing to put up with that, imagine how much crap work they might have been willing to put up with at your office.
- hack_edu 17y ago
  Why not start this now? Even if you're seasoned, I'm sure the experience and refresh would be a nice experience to anyone. I'm in a distance grad program right now and could use a real cohort.
- dangoldin 17y ago
  There are a substantial number of people who go to med school and law school while living off campus. Those are of course different and many of the people probably had on campus under grad experiences but I wouldn't be so quick to discount living at home.
jdminhbg 17y ago
He missed his chance to really connect the housing bubble and the education bubble in their causes -- well-meaning public policy meant to encourage home ownership/college education that provides an endless fountain of easy credit to do so. If you dump the kind of money into an industry that we've dumped into real estate and education, there will be people available to soak it up.
tedunangst 17y ago
Regarding the part at the end, with the idea that we could take 10 students' tuition money and use it to "rent" an exclusive professor for a year, he's assuming that 100% of tuition pays for a professor's instructional time, completely ignoring the other things that money pays for. Given the choice between one year of "visit the professor at home" or four years of college, I'll take the latter. And gladly pay more for it. Did the people dreaming up these end of college ideas actually attend college? They're not talking about college, they're talking about college reductio ad absurdum.
applicative 17y ago
The problem with this sort of college price hysteria is that it is completely fact free. Here's a randomly googled CNN Money report: "After grant aid and tax benefits, full-time students at public four-year colleges are paying an average $2,700 a year in net tuition and fees." So, if they commute, like I did, it's just over $10,000. I hit an inflation calculator and that's almost exactly what mom and dad spent for me, 1977 - 82. So in fact, there's been no change in 30 years. Maybe we should complain that the price hasn't fallen, like it has for computer hardware; shouldn't technical advances have made it cheaper? ...But wait, it isn't a commodity.... So to pay his imaginary $100,000/annum Purdue prof, our writer will need to get not the cozy group of 3 or 4 others -- but 37 or 38 others. So much for his little utopia, the fruit of careless headline scanning. If your parents are willing and able to spring for the country club, great, you'll make lots of contacts; that's the point, and of course it costs a pile; though frankly I'm surprised how cheap it is, given how far colleges do compete on a country club basis with indoor rock-climbing, etc. ... And it may be worth it, if money is what you're interested in. Lifelong friends can be made on the artificial rock-cliffs of University X; they might come in handy. (I wonder how much of the later-in-life dollar value of a college education as it is usually measured is like the possible dollar value of a country club. ) All these headlines about "average tuition" are a total fail statistically ... What they mean is the average of absolute tuition maxima across universities and colleges -- something that only the royal families of Persian Gulf principalities pay. The stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Let me say that again: the stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Arguments based on them belong to the realm of fantasy and demagogical politics, not reality and truth. I remember once hearing the provost of X -- a super-elite private univ., now president of another -- say that if it were up to her, she would make X's "tuition" infinite so she could collect "what they could pay" from the Saudi princes et al., and use it to fund other students. But, she said, the alumni always oppose this sort of thing; they didn't what X making the headlines as the most expensive school. One can't help sympathizing with the alumni, but the massive "tuition increases" "far outpacing inflation" etc etc. is entirely due to the massive increase in trustees and others taking the point of view of the provost. Or put otherwise, the "massive increases" are in the degree to which stated tuition is an accounting fiction. This may be somehow stupid or corrupt or whatever, but it is a fact. If reality is under discussion a completely different set of data is necessary. (I should add, by the way, that our writer might be able to get away with a cheaper prof. The average salary figures he is quoting include the salaries of medical and law professors at Purdue, which completely distort assume the salary facts. (And medical schools in particular are huge, remember). Thoughtless use of these sort of statistics stuns the mind. In humanities and suchlike faculties, at researchy places, people start around US 40 - 50,000 these days and end up at like 70 - 80,000. It is of course possible to be paid much more if the market has repriced you.)
bkovitz 17y ago
"The first goal of college must be to get a proper basis for getting started with a job, and preferrably a career." "I think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras." He is arguing to replace colleges with vocational schools. An undergraduate degree is not job training. It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture. The fact that colleges have been marketing themselves as providing job training, using economic arguments like "See how much money you'll make with one of our degrees", is the real problem.
- aharrison 17y ago
  The real problem is not that colleges have been advertising this, but that companies require it. On the one hand, I have learned a hell of a lot about Computer Science in college, but I could have survived an entry level programming job damn near anywhere straight out of high school. The problem is that the degree is a barrier to entry; it is almost impossible to get a decent job without one unless you are absolutely spectacular at what you do. My friend once had this argument with me, saying that college isn't intended to train people for the job. Regardless of its intention, that is what it has become...the real question is, what are we going to do now that it has transformed this way?
  - bkovitz 17y ago
    I skipped college and went straight for the job. Learned more in one year at a software job than most people get in four years at a college. But that is a great point: a lot of organizations, particularly big organizations, use a college degree as a "credential" for their first level of sorting through job applicants. Yes indeed, college has become a clumsy sort of job training. That's how it is, and we have to deal with that. However, colleges are not all the same. Small liberal-arts colleges are keeping the "community of scholars and teachers" tradition alive. Community colleges have a peculiar split in focus: between vocational training and college prep. Big state colleges offer undergrads training mostly in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, in order to fund real research.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
you can't call a monopoly overpriced. the only reason monopolies are bad is because you can no longer tell what a fair price for a service is since you don't have competition to bring the price down towards its supply cost. without competing prices it is impossible to tell what is and is not an efficient distribution of resources.
swolchok 17y ago
The theoretical economics are, potentially, even better, because there are many more PhDs than academic positions. The actual economics are probably worse. As the author briefly admits but never returns to and addresses, professors (in my experience) consider their job to be research first and teaching second. For some, teaching may be a first-order concern that they spend plenty of time on, but it doesn't seem to be why they got into academia.

56 points by joubert 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Seeking a college degree forces a person to learn a lot of material in a short span of time. I am fully aware of MIT's open-courseware and I've watched a few lectures, read syllabuses and assignments, but I still plan on enrolling in my local university's distance education program in order to take their core computer science courses in preparation for the masters program. Could I just read some books on assembly language, data structures and operating systems? Sure. But I don't trust myself to crack open the books and do assignments every night unless my money and grades are on the line.

quizbiz 17y ago
And what about the college campus? The atmosphere, the people, the resources.
- ohlol 17y ago
  The atmosphere, the people, the resources. --- ... are worth $100k+ in total??
  - aneesh 17y ago
    For many people, probably not. But there is a huge variance. How much more money did Steve Ballmer make in his career because he met Bill Gates at Harvard? Nobody knows, obviously, but the odds on anyone becoming a multi-billionaire (like he is) are incredibly slim. I'm not saying his story is at all typical, just that the decision can pay off in completely unexpected ways.
    - ohlol 17y ago
      True, but the odds of that happening are probably similar to the lottery. I'm not trying to argue that college is worthless or of low value (I think the answer can only be subjective). But if one is to argue that it is valuable, they should probably base it on the learning opportunities. Equivalent networking and social opportunities exist in plenty other areas of life that don't cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
      - aneesh 17y ago
        I'm not trying to say that's the only reason you should go to college -- meeting smart people is simply one of many reasons. There are a lot of valuable payoffs that come with minimal risk, like the degree itself. And there are plenty of good colleges you can go to that don't cost 100k. If going to college was truly not worth it, then you'd see a lot more people not doing it. The fact that going to college is a such a common course of action says that people actually find value in it (or there's a giant inefficiency in the market -- which is the argument of this article, but I think it's worth considering the alternative as well). And I don't think the lottery analogy works. Regardless of what you (legally) do, you can't influence the chance that a single lottery ticket of yours wins. But you can improve the chance that certain low-probability events happen to you (like founding a successful startup) by your actions. And I think going to a good college can be one of those actions for many people.
        quizbiz 17y ago
        Sadly, many force themselves to go to college because the alternative is scary and shameful.
      - Scriptor 17y ago
        [Disclaimer: I'm a college student] Depending on your industry and (sometimes) on your college, you're more likely to get in touch with those more influential and powerful than you (for science it might be renowned researchers, for law high-up law offices, etc). Since your friends went through the same college experience, the same goes for them. Therefore you're all in a good position to help each other. I personally want to go into biology-related research. College is pretty much vital for this since I have access to professors who can go beyond what's in the textbook as well as have numerous opportunities to work in actual labs. Now, if I were to start a software startup I admit that college is not necessarily the best option. Teaching yourself is easier and more likely to give you a good-enough foundation and if you're in the right place it'll be easier to hang out with the right crowd. However, for people who otherwise live in places far-removed from tech hotspots, college can give them a chance to move somewhere with a better chance of being noticed. Also, besides startup-related events, what other non-college ways are there to have access to lots of networking opportunities?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
locopati 17y ago
If social networking online is good, real social networking even better.
- ohlol 17y ago
  If you want to network, go out to the bar. It'll only cost you tens of dollars.
  - fan 17y ago
    The cohort there is different.
    - elai 17y ago
      If you want to network in your industry, it's probably just best to get some small job in whatever industry your interested in, go to the local ___ industry club, (Linux user groups, iphone developer groups, mechanics'r'us, etc), make friends and teach yourself. I found doing that helped my carreer more than local college buddies who didn't have much in the form of connections or experience anyway.
      - Scriptor 17y ago
        What if you're in a field where teaching yourself is not much of an option unless you're exceptionally dedicated and have very few distractions?
      - locopati 17y ago
        There's something to be gained by networking outside your industry. Not all great ideas exist within the group. Artists talking to coders talking to scientists talking to historians produces connections that may go unnoticed.
- sayrer 17y ago
  Exactly. The value is the other students. That's certainly the factor that influenced my experience more than any other. The author may have a point about universities being overpriced, but he missed a pretty key point, so his analysis is suspect.

euroclydon 17y ago

I have read enough of these articles now to think that the points the author makes cannot be rationally argued against. In other words, the foe is simply the status quo. I wonder if this is how society moves, or fails to move? Nearly everyone, at the individual level agrees with a sentiment, but we're all too entrenched in the current system to find a way out. Anyway, If I'm correct about how solid the argument against the expensive four year degree is, I hope we're in for some interesting changes.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Alex3917 17y ago

Do the people who write these articles not realize that other people have said the exact same thing before?

shalmanese 17y ago
And they'll keep on saying them again and again until things are different. That's how revolutions work.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  Or they'll keep on saying them again and again and things will stay almost exactly the same. That's how revolutions fail.

ShabbyDoo 17y ago

I'm incredibly torn.... On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown. On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers. Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.* What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses. * To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.

euroclydon 17y ago
Living at home during college would suck. If they were willing to put up with that, imagine how much crap work they might have been willing to put up with at your office.
hack_edu 17y ago
Why not start this now? Even if you're seasoned, I'm sure the experience and refresh would be a nice experience to anyone. I'm in a distance grad program right now and could use a real cohort.
dangoldin 17y ago
There are a substantial number of people who go to med school and law school while living off campus. Those are of course different and many of the people probably had on campus under grad experiences but I wouldn't be so quick to discount living at home.

jdminhbg 17y ago

He missed his chance to really connect the housing bubble and the education bubble in their causes -- well-meaning public policy meant to encourage home ownership/college education that provides an endless fountain of easy credit to do so. If you dump the kind of money into an industry that we've dumped into real estate and education, there will be people available to soak it up.

tedunangst 17y ago

Regarding the part at the end, with the idea that we could take 10 students' tuition money and use it to "rent" an exclusive professor for a year, he's assuming that 100% of tuition pays for a professor's instructional time, completely ignoring the other things that money pays for. Given the choice between one year of "visit the professor at home" or four years of college, I'll take the latter. And gladly pay more for it. Did the people dreaming up these end of college ideas actually attend college? They're not talking about college, they're talking about college reductio ad absurdum.

applicative 17y ago

The problem with this sort of college price hysteria is that it is completely fact free. Here's a randomly googled CNN Money report: "After grant aid and tax benefits, full-time students at public four-year colleges are paying an average $2,700 a year in net tuition and fees." So, if they commute, like I did, it's just over $10,000. I hit an inflation calculator and that's almost exactly what mom and dad spent for me, 1977 - 82. So in fact, there's been no change in 30 years. Maybe we should complain that the price hasn't fallen, like it has for computer hardware; shouldn't technical advances have made it cheaper? ...But wait, it isn't a commodity.... So to pay his imaginary $100,000/annum Purdue prof, our writer will need to get not the cozy group of 3 or 4 others -- but 37 or 38 others. So much for his little utopia, the fruit of careless headline scanning. If your parents are willing and able to spring for the country club, great, you'll make lots of contacts; that's the point, and of course it costs a pile; though frankly I'm surprised how cheap it is, given how far colleges do compete on a country club basis with indoor rock-climbing, etc. ... And it may be worth it, if money is what you're interested in. Lifelong friends can be made on the artificial rock-cliffs of University X; they might come in handy. (I wonder how much of the later-in-life dollar value of a college education as it is usually measured is like the possible dollar value of a country club. ) All these headlines about "average tuition" are a total fail statistically ... What they mean is the average of absolute tuition maxima across universities and colleges -- something that only the royal families of Persian Gulf principalities pay. The stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Let me say that again: the stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Arguments based on them belong to the realm of fantasy and demagogical politics, not reality and truth. I remember once hearing the provost of X -- a super-elite private univ., now president of another -- say that if it were up to her, she would make X's "tuition" infinite so she could collect "what they could pay" from the Saudi princes et al., and use it to fund other students. But, she said, the alumni always oppose this sort of thing; they didn't what X making the headlines as the most expensive school. One can't help sympathizing with the alumni, but the massive "tuition increases" "far outpacing inflation" etc etc. is entirely due to the massive increase in trustees and others taking the point of view of the provost. Or put otherwise, the "massive increases" are in the degree to which stated tuition is an accounting fiction. This may be somehow stupid or corrupt or whatever, but it is a fact. If reality is under discussion a completely different set of data is necessary. (I should add, by the way, that our writer might be able to get away with a cheaper prof. The average salary figures he is quoting include the salaries of medical and law professors at Purdue, which completely distort assume the salary facts. (And medical schools in particular are huge, remember). Thoughtless use of these sort of statistics stuns the mind. In humanities and suchlike faculties, at researchy places, people start around US 40 - 50,000 these days and end up at like 70 - 80,000. It is of course possible to be paid much more if the market has repriced you.)

bkovitz 17y ago

"The first goal of college must be to get a proper basis for getting started with a job, and preferrably a career." "I think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras." He is arguing to replace colleges with vocational schools. An undergraduate degree is not job training. It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture. The fact that colleges have been marketing themselves as providing job training, using economic arguments like "See how much money you'll make with one of our degrees", is the real problem.

aharrison 17y ago
The real problem is not that colleges have been advertising this, but that companies require it. On the one hand, I have learned a hell of a lot about Computer Science in college, but I could have survived an entry level programming job damn near anywhere straight out of high school. The problem is that the degree is a barrier to entry; it is almost impossible to get a decent job without one unless you are absolutely spectacular at what you do. My friend once had this argument with me, saying that college isn't intended to train people for the job. Regardless of its intention, that is what it has become...the real question is, what are we going to do now that it has transformed this way?
- bkovitz 17y ago
  I skipped college and went straight for the job. Learned more in one year at a software job than most people get in four years at a college. But that is a great point: a lot of organizations, particularly big organizations, use a college degree as a "credential" for their first level of sorting through job applicants. Yes indeed, college has become a clumsy sort of job training. That's how it is, and we have to deal with that. However, colleges are not all the same. Small liberal-arts colleges are keeping the "community of scholars and teachers" tradition alive. Community colleges have a peculiar split in focus: between vocational training and college prep. Big state colleges offer undergrads training mostly in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, in order to fund real research.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

you can't call a monopoly overpriced. the only reason monopolies are bad is because you can no longer tell what a fair price for a service is since you don't have competition to bring the price down towards its supply cost. without competing prices it is impossible to tell what is and is not an efficient distribution of resources.

swolchok 17y ago

The theoretical economics are, potentially, even better, because there are many more PhDs than academic positions. The actual economics are probably worse. As the author briefly admits but never returns to and addresses, professors (in my experience) consider their job to be research first and teaching second. For some, teaching may be a first-order concern that they spend plenty of time on, but it doesn't seem to be why they got into academia.