Is there a higher eductaion bubble?

[Rusty Edge]

My Dad was a banker when I was a kid. I heard a lot of stuff. I knew a lot of bankers. I rode along on collection calls and repossessions for businesses and individuals.

So several years ago when the Bush Administration and other tried to make it easy for people to become homeowners in hopes of stimulating the economy I scratched my head. Why give mortgages to people who aren't qualified ? You won't be doing them any favors. Surely the banks don't want to do that.

 I know politicians like to blame it on deregulation, but 75% of the "predatory loans" were made by federally related institutions of the Sally MAE sort, so federal legislators had blood or money on their hands regardless of their intentions. We know the consequences- The Great Recession.

QUESSTION- Is there a higher education bubble?

I'm seeing the same signs. The cost of college in America has been outpacing inflation year after year. Millenials have acquired a lot of debt, without getting lucrative careers in return. They call it indentured servitude. I find this disturbing.

I see it in my nieces and their friends. Not that most of them would listen to advice from geezer boomers like us, but they set their sights on college because that's what their high school guidance counselors told them, got deeply in debt because it was easy, and they pursued useless arts and criminal justice degrees with support from their college advisors. Employment prospects suck.

I understand that it's $Trillions, collectively. How are they going to buy a car, a home, or start a business with all of that debt? They'll be stuck in their parent's  basements working three part-time service jobs ( each ) with no benefits.

Hillary, Bernie and Green Party frontrunner Jill Stein all have proposals for making college affordable, if not free.
Well, Stein says we should just write off student debt with quantitative easing, as we did for the banks.

If there is a bubble, what do we do about it?

Somehow I have concerns about making college free, or saying it is a right, especially if an academic is the one recommending it. In the same way that I mistrust doctors suggesting free universal healthcare, or GM saying free cars to every adult. Why? Because if they wanted to give away their goods and services for free they can do that already.

What they really want usually is taxpayer support, and when that happens, and you separate the payer from the user, they usually lose incentive to control costs and/or quality.

Is there something to this?

Most of you are better educated or smarter than I am. If there is a real issue here, what's to be done about it?

(edited for spelling and pronoun clarity )

[Spacy]

Yes, and Free Tuition will only make it much worse.

K-12 teacher education (the making of new teachers) assumes that 50% of new teachers will leave the profession entirely in 3 years.  They are designed to recruit and push through their programs enough teachers each year to fill the market with that in mind.

Many of the tier 2 colleges (such as Eastern Michigan - who compete nationally but really are a local school) spend $1 out of every $4-5 tuition subsidizing sports.  They hide it by doing things like putting arena funds under infrastructure development instead of sports.  (look up NPR and Ann Arbor news stories on it a few months ago).  This is the norm for many universities.

There are only so many jobs that can be supported with a college degree.  How many social workers can the nation support?  How many civil engineers (who as a profession get most of their work from government jobs)?  How many of any field, really? 

The debt many pay for school is crazy.  I wouldn't go unless I had a scholarship (which I did for getting my masters degree). 

The population keeps increasing, but the number of kids needing seats is not growing as fast as the number of seats themselves are growing.  You can find the numbers buried on the NCES web site.  Schools have been fighting hard over kids for the past 15 years, and the fight is getting worse as marketplace competition (online universities) offer the same degree at much more convenience (and usually better pricing). 

K-12 is broken, and 13+ is in the process of breaking.  This is one of the many symptoms that are signs of it breaking. 

It can all be fixed, but so far nobody has the political will to do so.  It will take a major education crash for it to happen, and even then I see just patches instead of actual reimagination of the system.

[Elok]

The HEB is something newspapers have been talking about for some years now.  So you're definitely not the first one to wonder about this.  As to when it will crash, I don't know.  My general feeling is that much of education has very low intrinsic value, and mostly serves as a very expensive and inefficient means of class-signaling.  That is, when you get a degree, you are essentially saying to a future employer, "Look, I scraped together enough cash to do this, and kept at it for four-plus years.  I went to X college, which is this level of prestige, so bear that in mind.  In general, you can assume that I am not a scary uncouth poor person, since those typically don't have either the means or the motivation to do such stuff.  You can trust that I am not on any really hard drugs, will not bring a knife to work and threaten my supervisor if he gives me crap, will not misappropriate any work supplies above a certain value which are not nailed to the floor, etc."

You could get the same thing by hiring some official to certify your parents' profession, incomes, neighborhood and the like, at a fraction of the cost.  Of course here I'm speaking mainly of the vast body of degrees--liberal arts, social sciences--that don't have a solid profession waiting for them.  I think college would work beautifully if it were restricted to people seeking careers which actually require years of study, such as medicine.  Then you'd only have the problem of too many people trying to get into prestigious but flooded occupations (like law).  The rest of us could go to vocational schools, community colleges, or the equivalent, and save a great deal of time and money without subsidizing dance clubs and sports teams and tenured professors of Queer Theory.

[Rusty Edge]

It can all be fixed, but so far nobody has the political will to do so.  It will take a major education crash for it to happen, and even then I see just patches instead of actual reimagination of the system.

What would you suggest? I'm wide open to ideas.

Posted by: Elok
« on: June 15, 2016, 12:13:29 PM »

You could get the same thing by hiring some official to certify your parents' profession, incomes, neighborhood and the like, at a fraction of the cost.  Of course here I'm speaking mainly of the vast body of degrees--liberal arts, social sciences--that don't have a solid profession waiting for them.  I think college would work beautifully if it were restricted to people seeking careers which actually require years of study, such as medicine.  Then you'd only have the problem of too many people trying to get into prestigious but flooded occupations (like law).  The rest of us could go to vocational schools, community colleges, or the equivalent, and save a great deal of time and money without subsidizing dance clubs and sports teams and tenured professors of Queer Theory.

That sounds sensible, I don't know if it's achievable. Maybe after the bubble bursts.

[Lorizael]

Somehow I have concerns about making college free, or saying it is a right, especially if an academic is the one recommending it. In the same way that I mistrust doctors suggesting free universal healthcare, or GM saying free cars to every adult. Why? Because if they wanted to give away their goods and services for free they can do that already.

Teaching is not the service most academics think they're providing. 

[Bearu]

Somehow I have concerns about making college free, or saying it is a right, especially if an academic is the one recommending it. In the same way that I mistrust doctors suggesting free universal healthcare, or GM saying free cars to every adult. Why? Because if they wanted to give away their goods and services for free they can do that already.

Teaching is not the service most academics think they're providing. 

The position of most instructors remains that of the administration's arm in the classroom with some flexibility in higher education. The instructors provide students with both instruction and social connections into the business world.

[Bearu]

I found the below article on the issue of higher education:

National SDS Demands Education for All



Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has decided to engage in a new national campaign, demanding education for all! A place where students of all genders, races, sexual and romantic orientations, etc. are supposed to attend for higher education, the U.S. University system grows ever more exclusionary via individual university policies and policies made by the state, which enable them. These academic institutions would not exist if it weren’t for students, yet they continuously fail to meet the needs of the population they were created to serve. This is why we are demanding education for all; it’s time for schools to listen to the students’ voices and work in our interest.


Public universities all over the country engage in restructuring and molding university policy in order to sustain profit growth. This manifests in tuition hikes and budget cuts. And the money and resources students lose to these policies go into the pockets of rich administrators that supposedly work in the student body’s interests.

Many schools also practice legacy - affirmative action for the rich alumni - or base admissions on racist testing, while they continuously reexamine whether affirmative action should be enabled for African American students, whose enrollment has dropped over the years.

We believe education is a right, not a privilege, and this right extends to everyone. This is why SDS has decided to embark on this new campaign, local in practice and national in scope. We demand that tuition is free for all students. We will not be victims of the privatization of our schools, forcing us into years of crippling debt that we cannot pay off. We demand that our schools practice increased enrollment and retention of non-white students. We will not allow students of color to be barred from colleges and universities. We demand that our schools provide equal access to undocumented students. Undocumented people should be afforded the same ability as documented people to access higher education.

It is in light of the aforementioned conditions that Students for a Democratic Society has taken up the Education For All campaign nationally. On several campuses we have already forced administrations to meet our demands, or are currently struggling to do so. SDS chapters in Florida won a vital victory in their statewide struggle for tuition equity. FSU Students for a Democratic Society is now fighting to maintain affirmative action on their campus. SDS chapters in North Carolina are currently fighting to repeal the transphobic HB2 that was passed, upholding the struggle for gender neutral bathrooms. Milwaukee SDS’ current campaign is to “Chop From the Top” which would redirect budget cuts from important educational resources to their administrators’ pay checks. SDS in Salt Lake City, Utah, is struggling to gain tuition equity for undocumented students. Amongst many other efforts. National SDS invites other organizations to join us, as we march forward to ensure a University system that supports the students, and not the other way around; for a University system that is dedicated to education for all!

I do not agree with the equal access for illegal immigrants, but I do agree with the increase in tuition as a public concern while the number of administrators continues to balloon in the University system across the country.

[Bearu]

Why do none of the candidates address the issue of increasing costs of higher education that far exceed the rate of inflation and wages? Why do the candidates ignore the fact that a significant number of students receive loans for an education so they can contribute to society in a meaningful manner?

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe Mr. Sanders did - Don't blame me; I voted for him.

[Bearu]

I believe Mr. Sanders did - Don't blame me; I voted for him.

I should have inserted a qualifier for the fact that none of the current candidates for the political parties hold a position on the higher education debt problem. I apologize for the miscommunication.

[Buster's Uncle]

[Rusty Edge]

I believe Mr. Sanders did - Don't blame me; I voted for him.

I should have inserted a qualifier for the fact that none of the current candidates for the political parties hold a position on the higher education debt problem. I apologize for the miscommunication.

Actually Gary Johnson has commented on it, and so has Jill Stein.

*Jill Stein thinks, or at least says,  that higher education is a right. It is the Green Party position. She also says that if she were president she would erase existing education debts with quantitative easement. Ordinary Americans deserve the same consideration as Wall Street investment banks ( she sounds pretty passionate about that last part to me. )

*Gary Johnson says that that the problem with higher education is that student loan guarantees have separated it from market forces, resulting in cost increases that are multiples of the cost of living regardless of the economy or the quality of the product. He also says that the problem with the education itself is that it doesn't do enough to prepare graduates to earn a living with what they know, such as teaching them how to go into business for themselves.

He says that he feels that Millennials were "sold a bill of goods", and now they are burdened with a crushing debt. He says that in his heart of hearts he would find a way to federally re-finance them at a negligible interest rate.

Going forward, he would turn away from the existing student loan programs which caused this problem.

He also tends to explain that there 's no "Man" keeping you down, and there's no white knight politician riding to your rescue, so don't hold your breath waiting for that. Become your own boss.


*As for Hillary, she's made a lot of concessions to Bernie, and is giving lip service to much of what he's said. But I don't find her to be very sincere or trustworthy , so I'm the wrong person to ask about her positions on higher education debt.

[E_T]

I agree with Micheal Moore that our education system s#cks and need to have well thoughtout reform in it.  But not as a political blundgion/party plank that gets forgotten after an election and/or gets even further screwed up...

[Buster's Uncle]

Point.

Politicians trying to reform seem to do education -public schools for sure- exactly as much good as they do NASA, which is to say they are a monolithic problem every single time one sticks a hand in.  I'm from a family of teachers, and not speaking from ignorance.

[E_T]

:rimshot: