Higher Education Is Morally and Financially Bankrupt

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/higher-education-morally-financially-bankrupt.html#more-54972 

A system that piles debt on students in exchange for a marginal or even zero-return on their investment is morally and financially bankrupt.
Every once in a while you run across an insider’s narrative of a corrupt, morally bankrupt sector that absolutely nails the sector’s terminal rot. Here is that nails-it narrative for higher education: Pass, Fail: An inside look at the retail scam known as the modern university.
Here are excerpts of the article, which was published in Canada but is equally applicable to higher education in the U.S.:
A university degree, after all, is a credential crucial for economic success. At least, that’s what we’re told. But as with all such credentials—those sought for the ends they promise rather than the knowledge they represent—the trick is to get them cheaply, quickly, and with as little effort as possible. My students’ disaffection is the real face of this ambition.
I teach mostly bored youth who find themselves doing something they neither value nor desire—and, in some cases, are simply not equipped for—in order to achieve an outcome they are repeatedly warned is essential to their survival. What a dreadful trap.
One in particular matches perfectly with the type of change I’ve observed on my watch: the eradication of content from the classroom.

All efforts to create the illusion of academic content are acceptable so long as they are entertaining, and successful participation requires no real effort and no real accountability.
Remove your professor hat for a moment and students will speak frankly. They will tell you that they don’t read because they don’t have to. They can get an A without ever opening a book.
But don’t worry—you won’t go bust because of this failure, not in the modern university. So long as your class is popular and fun, you’ll be favoured by the administration and probably receive a teaching award. This, even though your students will leave your class in worse condition than they entered it, because you will have pandered to their basest inclinations while leaving their real intellectual and moral needs unmet.
There is no clearer example of administrators’ contempt for faculty. But there is also no clearer example of their contempt for students.
As money is siphoned from academic programs through attrition, it is channelled into a host of middle-management positions.
From 1979 to 2014, central administration and staff ballooned by three and a half times, while the size of the faculty merely doubled.
Parents, students, and governments keep supplying them with capital, assuming there will be a genuine return on investment. But since the institution no longer produces anything, no such return is forthcoming.
Spending on the student services sector in Canadian universities increased an incredible six-fold between 1979 and 2014.
The student services cabal is no longer there to support faculty in their work of educating students “but to compete with them to define the student experience.”
Insiders are quiet after they read this, because they know it’s true.
The financial burden created by the higher education cartel is immense and expanding:

To mask the enormity of the sums squandered on “education” that has little measurable results, the federal government has purchased most of the debt:

No inflation here–just a 137% increase in 15 years:

A system that piles debt on students in exchange for a marginal or even zero-return on their investment is morally and financially bankrupt.
We can do better and must do better, which is the subject of my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy.

The Problem Isn't Student Loans - It's Higher Education

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2015 13:40 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-16/problem-isnt-student-loans-its-higher-education
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of ofTwoMinds blog,
Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem, which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students for the economy of tomorrow.
Everyone understands soaring student debt is a problem: burdened with $1.3 trillion in student loans, young people are unable to start businesses, buy homes and start families. The high cost of housing and meeting regulations to launch businesses add additional burdens, but the weight of $1.3 trillion in debt right out of the starting gate is crushing.
The "solution" being pursued by the federal government is obvious: take over most of the student debt and then eventually bury it in the zombie-loan graveyard (i.e. defaults are ignored but the debt isn't officially written off), write it down via forgiveness programs, or some other mechanism to reduce the burden.
If this wasn't the plan, then why has federal ownership of student loan debt skyrocketed from zero to $900 million in a few short years?

This is a decades-old problem that's finally reaching critical mass: student debt has leaped from less than $500 billion in 2006 to $1.3 trillion today, a mere 9 years later:

The problem isn't student loans--it's the explosive rise in the costs of higher education. This chart depicts the exponential rise of higher education costs:

Apologists claim the student-loan crisis is the result of underfunding of colleges by states. While it's true that some of the cost burden has been shifted from taxpayers to students, the real problem is soaring costs of the higher education cartel, which fixes prices via the artifical scarcity of accreditation.
The extraordinary rise in administrative staffing and costs and the boom in building costly temples of higher education are well-known. This chart depicts the rise of the educrat class, at the expense of teachers/professors:

I cover the rise in costs and the the equally extraordinary failure of the higher education cartel to prepare students for work in the emerging economy in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
So the problem is two-fold: it isn't just the insane cost of higher education that's the issue; the cartel is failing to prepare students for an economy that requires the 8 essential skills in addition to whatever technical skills are needed in a particular field.
Consider the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses which concluded that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."
New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators:
In all, from 1987 until 2011-12--the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, according to the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”
The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.
The number of employees in central system offices has increased six-fold since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a factor of more than 34.
Paying a bloated institution for the privilege of sitting through four years of lectures, online courses and a few labs no longer makes sense for the vast majority of students. What makes sense is dispensing with the entire bureaucracy of the cartel and costly campuses altogether, and designing directed apprenticeships which combine the best of online coursework with on-the-job training in workplaces.
The top research universities (numbering around 125 out of thousands of colleges and universities) can continue to train the relatively small cadre of academics and researchers the economy can support. (Just issuing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees doesn't magically create jobs for the graduates.)
The vast majority of student are better served by mastering the 8 essential skills required in the emerging economy--skills that students can acquire on their own, a process of accrediting yourself that I address in detail in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students for the economy of tomorrow.

It's a racket... Look at the education systems in other countries. We have been robbed!

By

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Updated Jan. 7, 2014 12:20 p.m. ET

In the field of higher education, reality is outrunning parody. A recent feature on the satire website the Onion proclaimed, "30-Year-Old Has Earned $11 More Than He Would Have Without College Education." Allowing for tuition, interest on student loans, and four years of foregone income while in school, the fictional student "Patrick Moorhouse" wasn't much better off. His years of stress and study, the article japed, "have been more or less a financial wash."
"Patrick" shouldn't feel too bad. Many college graduates would be happy to be $11 ahead instead of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, behind. The credit-driven higher education bubble of the past several decades has left legions of students deep in debt without improving their job prospects. To make college a good value again, today's parents and students need to be skeptical, frugal and demanding. There is no single solution to what ails higher education in the U.S., but changes are beginning to emerge, from outsourcing to online education, and they could transform the system.
Though the GI Bill converted college from a privilege of the rich to a middle-class expectation, the higher education bubble really began in the 1970s, as colleges that had expanded to serve the baby boom saw the tide of students threatening to ebb. Congress came to the rescue with federally funded student aid, like Pell Grants and, in vastly greater dollar amounts, student loans.
Predictably enough, this financial assistance led colleges and universities to raise tuition and fees to absorb the resources now available to their students. As University of Michigan economics and finance professor Mark Perry has calculated, tuition for all universities, public and private, increased from 1978 to 2011 at an annual rate of 7.45%. By comparison, health-care costs increased by only 5.8%, and housing, notwithstanding the bubble, increased at 4.3%. Family incomes, on the other hand, barely kept up with the consumer-price index, which grew at an annual rate of 3.8%.

The Saturday Essay

For many families, the gap between soaring tuition costs and stagnant incomes was filled by debt. Today's average student debt of $29,400 may not sound overwhelming, but many students, especially at private and out-of-state colleges, end up owing much more, often more than $100,000. At the same time, four in 10 college graduates, according to a recent Gallup study, wind up in jobs that don't require a college degree.
Students and parents have started to reject this unsustainable arrangement, and colleges and universities have felt the impact. According to a recent analysis by this newspaper, private schools are facing a long-term decline in enrollment. More than a quarter of private institutions have suffered a drop of 10% or more—in some cases, much more. Midway College in Kentucky is laying off around a dozen of its 54 faculty members; Wittenberg University in Ohio is eliminating nearly 30 of about 140 full-time faculty slots; and Pine Manor College in Massachusetts, with dorm space for 600 students but only 300 enrolled, has gone coed in hopes of bringing in more warm bodies.
Even elite institutions haven't been spared, as schools such as Haverford, Morehouse and Wellesley have seen their credit ratings downgraded by Moody's over doubts about the viability of their high tuition/high overhead business models. Law schools, including Albany Law School, Brooklyn Law School and Thomas Jefferson Law School, have also seen credit downgrades over similar doubts. And now Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing legislation to give colleges "skin in the game" by clawing back federal aid money from schools with high student-loan default rates. Expect such proposals to get traction in 2014.
America's higher education problem calls for both wiser choices by families and better value from schools. For some students, this will mean choosing a major carefully (opting for a more practical area of study, like engineering over the humanities), going to a less expensive community college or skipping college altogether to learn a trade.
For their part, schools must adjust to the new economic reality, as some already have. In 2011, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., cut tuition by 10%. The discount not only increased enrollment but, ultimately, brought in more money. For academic year 2014-15, Ashland University in Ohio has cut its tuition by 37%—more than $10,000. Faced with plummeting applications, the law schools at George Mason, Penn State, Seton Hall and the University of Iowa have rolled back or frozen their tuition fees.
Many colleges, according to a survey released last spring by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, are also offering hidden discounts in the form of increased financial aid. The survey found that for the fall of 2013, the average "tuition discount rate" for incoming freshmen (that is, the reduction of the list price through grants and scholarships) hit an all-time high of 45%. Such variable pricing is likely to become more widely publicized in the future as competition for students increases and as parents paying full tuition object to being taken advantage of.
But discounts don't address the real problem: high costs. What's really needed in U.S. higher education is major structural change. To remain viable, colleges and universities need to cut expenditures dramatically. For decades, they have ridden the student-loan gravy train, using the proceeds to build palatial buildings, reduce faculty teaching loads and, most notably, hire armies of administrators.
Most of the growth in higher education costs, according to a 2010 study by the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank, comes from administrative bloat, with administrative staff growing at more than twice the rate of instructional staff. At the University of Michigan, for example, there are 53% more administrators than faculty, and similar ratios can be found at other institutions.
Under financial pressure, many schools have already farmed out the teaching of classes to low-paid adjuncts who have no job security and often no benefits.
This approach could be extended to administration, replacing salaried employees with low-paid "adjunct administrators" to handle routine functions. Many in the corporate world have reaped considerable savings by outsourcing back-office functions, and there is no reason this approach can't work in higher education. (If U.S. News & World Report wants to improve its widely cited college rankings, it might start by giving schools credit for leaner administration.)
Another reform that would be useful at both public and private institutions is budget transparency. University finances are notoriously Byzantine, and administrators generally like it that way. But change is afoot here too.
Several years ago, the state of Oregon launched a website, updated daily, that shows where every state dollar is spent. The result: Anyone can see how much Oregon's higher-education system is spending on things like travel, instruction and athletics. This is the sort of transparency that taxpayers should demand from public universities—and perhaps even from private universities that receive significant amounts of public money, as nearly all do.
New instructional methods can also contribute to cost savings. Online courses are already making inroads, and the model makes intuitive sense for many subjects: Take the top teachers in a field and give online access to their lectures to students at many different colleges. There isn't a lot of one-on-one interaction in such courses, but how much genuine interaction is there in a live 200-student lecture class?
Once students have acquired basic instruction in larger, less personal classes, they can apply it in smaller advanced classes, where they would deal with faculty face to face. This approach is already used to great effect by the popular Khan Academy, a sophisticated not-for-profit website where primary and secondary students view lectures at their convenience and perfect their skills through video-game-like software. Students can then use classroom time to work through problems with teachers and apply what they have learned. The idea is to take advantage of mass delivery where it works best and to allow individualized attention where it helps most.
Traditional universities are experimenting too. The Georgia Institute of Technology is offering an entirely online master's degree in computer science for $7,000. This isn't a ghettoized offering from the extension school but rather, in the words of Georgia Tech Provost Rafael Bras, "a full-service degree." The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has already put many of its courses online; you can learn from them and even get certification, but there is no degree attached. If  US were to add standard exams and a diploma, its online degree might be worth a lot—perhaps not as much as an old-fashioned MIT degree but more than a degree from many existing bricks-and-mortar schools.

Neil Shah explains how young people have become more wary of taking on more debt in general as student loan debt has reached record levels. Photo: AP Images. (3/5/2013)

Another alternative, already beginning to get some traction, lies in the rise of various certification systems. A college degree is often used by employers as an indication that its holder has a reasonable ability to read, write, show up on time and deal with others. But many employers are unhappy with the skills that today's graduates possess.
This has led to the rise of certification schemes from within the higher education world, including the Educational Testing Service's Revised Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) and ACT's WorkKeys, which is explicitly aimed at employment skills. Manufacturing companies are working with online schools and community colleges to create "stackable certificates" that vouch for specific competencies. Such programs may someday bypass higher education entirely, testing and certifying people's skills regardless of how they obtained them.
But what about the "college experience"—late-night dorm bull sessions, partying and pizza? Won't it be ruined by these new approaches to instruction? Not necessarily.
We may eventually see the rise of "hoteling" for college students whose courses are done primarily online. Build a nice campus—or buy one, from a defunct traditional school—put in a lot of amenities, but don't bother hiring faculty: Just bring in your courses online, with engineering from Georgia Tech, arts and literature from Yale, business from Stanford and so on. Hire some unemployed Ph.D.s as tutors (there will be plenty around, available at bargain-basement rates) and offer an unbundled experience. It's a business model that just might work, especially in geographic locations students favor. Grand Cayman is awfully nice this time of year.
On the other hand, for some students, avoiding the traditional campus-based college scene might be a boon in the long run. Recent research by the sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong of the University of Michigan and Laura Hamilton of the University of California, Merced, points to the problem of what they call the "party pathway." In a study they conducted among 48 female students in one residence hall at Indiana University from 2004 to 2009, they found that young women who were similar in terms of "predictors" (grades and test scores) nonetheless emerged from college on very different career trajectories. Those from more modest circumstances were often done in by their partying-related stumbles and actually experienced downward mobility after graduating.
None of these alternatives to a traditional university degree is "the answer" to the higher education bubble. And we certainly shouldn't discard entirely the old-fashioned approach to college, whatever its shortcomings. A rigorous liberal arts education, with an emphasis on reading carefully and writing clearly, remains a tremendous asset, for employment as for citizenship. (The key word here, however, is "rigorous.")
But there is no point in trying to preserve the old regime. Today's emphasis on measuring college education in terms of future earnings and employability may strike some as philistine, but most students have little choice. When you could pay your way through college by waiting tables, the idea that you should "study what interests you" was more viable than it is today, when the cost of a four-year degree often runs to six figures. For an 18-year-old, investing such a sum in an education without a payoff makes no more sense than buying a Ferrari on credit.
The economist Herbert Stein once said that if something can't go on forever, it will stop. The pattern of the last few decades, in which higher education costs grew much faster than incomes, with the difference made up by borrowing, can't go on forever. As students and parents begin to apply the brakes, colleges need to find ways to make that stop a smooth one rather than a crash.
Mr. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. This essay is adapted from his new book, "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself," published by Encounter Books.
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