It will take a sea change in the way HR departments operate, since so many use four-year degrees as weeding mechanisms for applications. Unless they are programmers, my friends who dropped out of college have had a hell of a time just getting an interview, much less a job, anywhere outside of the service sector or data processing. This is in an area with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.
I'd agree if the distinction was between tony private schools vs. affordable state schools, but online universities? I thought they weren't considered exactly "rigorous".
(I say this as a proud state school student)
Well, the O'Connor post was about the accelerating defunding of state schools, so that rich families can afford them and middle-class families often can't. There have been very few years since I graduated from UNC in '92 that the university hasn't raised tuition or dues.
Working your way through school is a far sight more than a four-year commitment now.
Well, the O'Connor post was about the accelerating defunding of state schools, so that rich families can afford them and middle-class families often can't.
This is the real sadness . . . . . I still think my Berkeley education was a great bargain for a resident, and it was certainly plausible to work one's way through it, acquiring minimal debt--hence the crowds of adult students. But it is rare to get that kind of value for money . . .there are probably what, 20 or 30 public ivies? I always appreciate a faculty member who considers the civic value of teaching at a public school as part of their life package. But it's rare.
There's a third, even cheaper alternative: go abroad.
O'Connor brings up that the average wage of college graduates is dropping, which is interesting, but still, how does it compare to the average wage of those with only a HS diploma? It seems the key equation is cost of college vs. the financial benefit of the degree. And, of course, there's the advantage of four+ more years of maturing and development before entering the workforce full time.
O'Connor: the median income of people with bachelor's degrees has fallen steadily for four straight years
Quick, what do the last four years have in common?
rich families can afford them and middle-class families often can't
Yeah. Also, students who come from poor families can get enough financial aid to attend a state school (+ working, of course). Again, it's the middle class that is getting screwed here. I went to a state school and was actually way better off financially than my friends whose parents made more money (but weren't paying for their kids - middle class) because I was able to get a pretty substantial Pell Grant that covered most of tuition, and then the Federal Loans paid for my living costs. I had several friends who kept having to take semesters off because they didn't have money to pay for tuition and the Federal Loans just weren't enough.
It's another example of how royally the middle class get screwed - I've been talking a lot lately about the income cutoff for legal services agencies. They are enforced pretty strictly, so if you make $50 above the cutoff, you're screwed. That extra $50 doesn't ake you any more able to pay for legal services. So, once again, the poorest get free legal services, the rich pay for them themselves, and the lower middle class (which are essentially poor but not considered as such) are totally fucked.
N.B. - My comment should not be construed as saying "the poor have it easy" or some such.
Whenever a benefit is given specifically to "the poor", and there's a cutoff point, there will always be someone on the wrong side of the line who's too rich to be poor and too poor to be middle-class. Everything should be sliding-scale, though the problem never disappears entirely.
A lot of Republican politicking zeroes in on those people. If you can get people heated up about some shocking anecdote (and often it's a true story they've seen themselves), you can get them to forget a lot of other stuff.
It's not just college where expenses seem out of all proportion to value, this is a phenomenon throughout the US educational system. Boston area public schools spend and average of 10K/pupil/year, and the high spender, Cambridge, spends close to 16K/pupil/year. That is a staggering sum of money, and it's substantially less than tuition at top private schools. In all this, one has to wonder: where is the money going? I do not believe Milton academy is recording massive profits, and their labor cost basis is likely substantially lower than education in the public sector. So again, what is the money actually going towards? 10 kids*15K = 150,000 for one (very small) homeroom class. That's not how the money is being spent. So what's the damage: special ed? Administrative overhead? Real estate and facility costs far higher than one would expect?
At the college level, admittedly, the costs are even more perplexing. How can an educational mission which amounts to running a lecture series for groups of 50+ cost 25K per annum?
At various levels within education, there's uncertainty as to who pays and who benefits. I believe that the uncertainty is greatest at the undergrad level, which is paid for by parents, students (jobs+debt), taxpayers, and various endowments and foundations. The beneficiaries, directly or indirectly, include the students, their parents, their future employers, the citizenry in general, the general culture, grad students, faculty, and researchers. Discussions in terms of input-output have to leave some of the major factors out in order to say anything at all; the real situation is a tangled mess.
Economically, the big gap between the average incomes of those college-educated and those not masks the enormous range of variation within each group. In England arts majors earn less than non-college HS grads.
From the student's point of view undergrad ed can be: a four year party; job training; personal cultural enrichment; a place for networking; and the ratification of middle-class status. Most of these ends can be met with only the most minimal involvement in what used to be called "education".
At my URL, much more.
baa--Milton probably pays higher salaries. They also have a campus to maintain.
Private schools can get away with paying lower salaries in the beginning, because you don't need to be "qualified" to teach there, and the New England boarding schools often include housing as part of the package.
In the UK fee-charging schools pay the teachers more.
I've started to wonder whether you could go to a really good private school and skip portions of college. I know somebody who worked catering for a while and is now going to the University of Maryland at night to get a journalism degree, because she's been working as an online editor at the Washington Post. (She graduated from National Cathedral School and knew someone who knew someone. The post had had high turnover before she took it.)
It's true that she needs a BA to get promoted above a certain level, and this is a function of the HR department, but really a good high school education ought to be enough.
Speaking of a good high school educations. I was talking to a Humanities teacher over a potluck dinner the other night. He had just taught the Symposium to his 11th graders, and he was looking for a good crib sheet for himself on Plato's Theory of the Cave that would help him explain it to that same class. And does anyone know of any review papers on why Socrates was executed? (I should know that stuff, but I really only ever learned philology.)
Socrates was executed for being a wise-ass. Would that this were still a capital offense.
JE, I'm not sure I agree with your assessment about "enrichment" (in the link you provided) that it should just become something you do on your own throughout your life - one important thing that college does is (hopefully) change and inform the way you read. The stuff I am able to read and understand and criticize now (and am actually interested in) is completely different than from when I was graduating high school, even though I was a total slacker in college and didn't even read half of the stuff I was assigned. It's hard to just "pick up" that sort of rigorous analysis of text/ideas that a liberal arts education forces you to do, on your own.
Also, I doubt that Milton salaries are higher than the publics. Usually -- although not always -- private school salaries are lower than public school salaries.
Being an artist is one of the few pursuits in which education really doesn't matter, and even there, it matters more than you'd think.
(By "artist" I mean performance and/or creative arts.)
I left college after a year for exactly the reasons stated above: it wasn't remotely clear that I was getting my money's worth. Also: I was an arrogant prick who thought he knew everything.
I regret not getting a four year degree only when it comes to cocktail party conversation. Whether or not I'd graduated, I'd still be doing roughly the same thing I'm doing now -- living in New York, working a job that pays the bills, trying to write and get my work produced. The difference is, I'd have been doing it for less time, and with four times as much debt.
baa--private school salaries are very low for starting teachers, but I think that they go up later. And yes in the US the situation is different from the UK.
Brad DeLong says that the earnings gap between college-educated and non-college-educated is almost 50%. But he also points to an article that suggests that more and more lower-income kids are dropping out--which seems like it might be more of a problem for state school profs like me than for tony liberal arts profs like the Gayatollah.
I don't know of review papers, but I was reading The Trial of Socrates earlier this year. It had some interesting stuff; though I didn't finish it.
Derrida's "The Pharmakon of Plato" explains the reasons for Socrates' death very clearly. I have no idea whether there's any truth in what he says at all. It was a little like reading Borges.
Silvana, I wasn't proposing that college be enrichment-free, just that it's not worth it for someone to go into debt $20,000-$40,000 for pure enrichment with no job enhancement. And I was also pointing out that, while theoretically cultural enrichment is a life-long activity, most people forget the liberal arts BS as soon as they get a career job anyway.
My father (a college professor) wouldn't help me pay for college and wouldn't let me take out loans because he thinks undergraduate education is worthless. His belief is that undergraduate degrees have been so devalued that you should just go to whatever undergrad institution you can attend for the lowest price and focus your energy and money on graduate school. I was really upset with him at the time and still disagree with that premise because I think better schools can provide more opportunities but I will admit that I have had a lot more freedom since graduation than my friends who came out owing $60,000. Still, I view my choice of college is one of my biggest "what if?..." questions I'll never get to know the answer to.
Here's another reason why private schools cost more:
They can. It has nothing to do with how much they pay teachers. It has to do with the private school culture, and the parents' desire not to have their kids go to public school. So they are willing to pay not to have their kids go to public school. It's supply and demand.
Right, but the earnings gap between college and non-college educated doesn't speak to the human capital that college education produces. 90% of middle-class and above kids with something on the ball will end up going to college. This goes a long way towards explaining the earnings discrepancy cited by Prof. Delong.
The data will also show, e.g., that alumni of highly selective colleges outearn alumni of unselective colleges. Evidence suggests, however, that this effect largely derives from the type of people these students are before they enter college, not to any benefits provided by the selective institutions themselves.
I suspect the effect of a college degree on earnings is analogous. Being possessed of bourgeois cultural competancy (literate, ambitious, able to show up on time) predicts higher earnings, and also predict college matriculation. Specific types of education -- an engineering degree -- do provide obvious financial return. It seems unclear that a college English degree falls in this category.
(there are, of course, other reason to pursue an English degree)
I graduated from Caltech in 1987,and recently attended Columbia (2003-2004) for a career change. I was astonished at the poor quality of education offered--multiple choice exams, little contact with professors, severe grade inflation, etc.
On paper, those two institutions appear to be of similar quality, and I assume they charge about the same--although Caltech does usually win the "value for the money" category in USN&WR. After personally experiencing the difference, I'm quite worried about eventually shipping my kids off to a very expensive diploma mill.
Evidence suggests, however, that this effect largely derives from the type of people these students are before they enter college, not to any benefits provided by the selective institutions themselves.
This (and other observations) suggests to me that one reason (I don't know how large a reason) people go to college is because if they don't employers will draw a negative inference about them. To expand, even if person A & person B were exactly the same upon exiting high school AND person A didn't gain any skills in college, employers will still assume that A is more qualified because B made the non-standard choice of non-attendance. So even though it might be better for us as a society to have fewer people going to college, everyone individually feels compelled to. This is a prima facie case for government action to disincentivize college education, as long it retains its current structure.
It should be said that fancy private high schools have revenue sources aside from tuition, so comparing tuition to per pupil expenditures at public schools is misleading. Also, public schools often have to dedicate a very large portion of their budgets to things like special ed and teaching ESL kids that private schools can largely avoid doing by not admitting those students. Most generally, it's much easier to educate kids when you can refuse to accept the ones you think will be problematic than when you need to take all comers.
baa writes:
"Boston area public schools spend and average of 10K/pupil/year ... That is a staggering sum of money, and it's substantially less than tuition at top private schools. In all this, one has to wonder: where is the money going? ... [S]pecial ed? Administrative overhead? Real estate and facility costs far higher than one would expect?"
BPS FY06 budget:
Instruction (principally, teacher salaries) 58.6%
[Regular ed. 33.7%, Special ed. 20.4%, Bilingual 3.9%]
Employee benefits 13.5%
Transportation 9.5%
Physical plant 8.8%
Student/school support services 6.5%
General admin. 2.4%
Teacher base salaries range from $41,521 to $80,092; the average salary is $70,215. Principals make $20K-$30K more.
Source: http://boston.k12.ma.us/bps/BPSglance.pdf
Alkali--those numbers are misleading. I don't know anything about Boston, but almost all large school systems have a substantial number of administrators. I will bet that the "Instruction" category is barely even half teacher salaries, simply based on big-city system norms--the rest goes to principals, curriculum designers, school secretaries, central office administrators, etc.
Re:28. Tuition at St. Paul's is $38K. Now, of course, boarding costs something, but they think that their per pupil expenditure is more like $60K. They've got the endowment, and the annual fund.
SamChevre: The document referenced indicates that Boston's FY05 school budget includes 7,695 full-time-equivalent staff positions:
4,471 teachers
506 administrators
438 support personnel
880 aides and monitors
310 secretaries and clerical staff
693 custodial/safety/technical
395 part-time & summer staff
I don't know if principals are counted as teachers or administrators, but in any event substantially more than half of the positions are teachers.