Archive for the ‘Caught Our Eye’ Category.
A Meditation on Money – “the difference between an obligation and a debt: an obligation becomes a debt when you can put a number on it.”
Serendipity – “The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident.”
Shanghai – “We’re from Shanghai. We care only about money. You want to talk politics, go to Beijing.”
Complaints Choir of Singapore – YouTube
The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges are much less expensive–the average tuition is $7,605–and there are also many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education, and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé.
photo credit: JL Johnson | User47Higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better life. It is sometimes pointed out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts. It is unnecessary to point out that most of us are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it pretty emphatically.
. . .[Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia) in "Academically Adrift"] argue that many students today perceive college as fundamentally a social experience. Students spend less time studying than they used to, for example. In 1961, students reported studying for an average of twenty-five hours a week; the average is now twelve to thirteen hours. More than a third of the students in Arum and Roksa’s study reported that they spent less than five hours a week studying. In a University of California survey, students reported spending thirteen hours a week on schoolwork and forty-three hours socializing and pursuing various forms of entertainment.
. . .Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though. The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.
Neither Theory 1 nor Theory 2 really explains how the educational system works for these non-liberal-arts students. For them, college is basically a supplier of vocational preparation and a credentialling service. The theory that fits their situation—Theory 3—is that advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work.
Theory 3 explains the growth of the non-liberal education sector. As work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland Security. Close to fourteen times as many master’s degrees are given out every year as doctorates.
“Why we have college,” by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011
Tags: Academically Adrift, college, Higher Ed Bubble, Louis Menand
Andrew Klavan’s “One-State Solution”.
Hmmmm, just might work….
Tags: Andrew Klavan, One State Solution
We already know housing was a bubble and we are dealing with the ramifications of the pop back in 2007. Yet the higher education bubble keeps moving higher and higher.
In 1980 the typical California household would be able to finance 17 bachelor’s degrees at a UC with one year of household income. In 2000 that number had dropped to 5. Today it is only enough to purchase one bachelor’s degree at the UC system. Now keep in mind we are looking at the cheaper public option partially backed by the state of California. You have other institutions in SoCal like USC that charge over $50,000 per year. Without a doubt higher education is in a bubble more so in the private sector.
“In 1980 the median California household income would have purchased 17 UC bachelor’s degrees. Today it can barely purchase one UC degree.” by Dr. Housing Bubble, May 5, 2011
And what are the results for money spent on public schools in Detroit?
photo credit: JSFauxtaugraphyA study funded by 10 major foundations reported yesterday that 47 percent of Detroiters are functionally illiterate–unable to read a bus schedule, fill out a resume, or make sense of the directions on an aspirin bottle.
. . .
The report notes that half of the illiterate population has either a high school diploma or a GED. That’s beside the point. Virtually the entire illiterate population has completed elementary school, the level at which reading is theoretically taught. That’s seven years of schooling (k-6), at a cost of roughly $100,000, for… nothing.
“Nearly Half of Detroiters Illiterate. Cause Apparently a Mystery.” by Andrew J. Coulson, Cato@Liberty, May 5, 2011
Speaking of bubbles and inflation:
Robin Hanson has been arguing that perhaps along with redistributing income, we should redistribute grades. I have myself been known to argue that perhaps we should consider redistributing PhDs and Harvard professorships, to limited success with the sort of people who have those things.
“Should We Redistribute Grades Like We Do Income?” by Megan McArdle, The Atlantic, May 4, 2011
Tags: Andrew J. Coulson, Dr. Housing Bubble, grade inflation, Higher Ed Bubble, housing bubble, Megan McArdle, Student Debt, student loans
“Let’s take a step back,” [James] Altucher says. “What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.” For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. “So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.”
photo credit: Blosterblu – YTOver the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”
. . .
But if college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it? For [Peter] Thiel, the commodity college most closely resembles is the humble insurance policy. Americans have become terrified, he says, of what will happen to their children if they don’t send them to college. The recession, widening income inequality, growing job insecurity, the uncertain future of the welfare state, the increasing costs of health care–all have deepened the anxieties that made college such an attractive option for a rising middle class in the first place. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe, to be protected from the chaos. You’re paying for college because it’s an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class.” The larger question this raises, he says, is, “Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago? And does that tell us something has gone really badly wrong with our country?”
“The University Has No Clothes,” by Daniel B. Smith, New York Magazine, May 1, 2011
Tags: college, college education, Daniel B. Smith, James Altucher, Louis Lataif, Peter Thiel, Student Debt, student loans
As a 23-year-old math genius one year out of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook when the company was still in its infancy. This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher–one of Facebook’s first 100 employees–the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” [Hammerbacher] says. “That sucks.”
“This Tech Bubble Is Different,” by Ashlee Vance, April 14, 2011
Tags: bubble, Facebook, FastCompany, Groupon, investopedia, Jeffery To, Paolo Lucchesi, Shira Ovide, Student Debt, student loans, tech bubble
photo credit: keko.Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
“Bad Education,” by Malcolm Harris, n+1, April 25, 2011
Tags: college, Glenn Reynolds, Higher Ed Bubble, Howard E. Horton, Joseph Marr Cronin, Khan Academy, Malcolm Harris, Peter Thiel, Sarah Lacy, students loans, TechCrunch
In spite of all the hype regarding the Yuan as a reserve currency I have stated many times recently that discussion of the Yuan as a reserve currency is nothing but ridiculous hype.
My reasons are:
- The Yuan does not float, and there is no indication China is prepared to allow the Yuan to float any time soon
- China is a command economy
- In China, property rights and civil rights are questionable
- Chinese banks are insolvent because of malinvestments in infrastructure and an enormous property bubble
photo credit: LoneGunMan[I]f reserve currency status was such a gift, why doesn’t China take the steps that would make it possible. Why doesn’t Europe?
The fact is, for all their bitching, nearly every country on the planet does not want to relinquish their “export growth model”. Every week there is some trumped-up report by someone about how China is trading more in the Yuan with Russia and Southeast Asia countries. In the grand scheme of things such trade in Yuan nearly meaningless, not representative of a significant adjustment.
“Bogus Threats to US Reserve Currency Status: No Country Really Wants It!” by Mike Shedlock, MISH’S Global Economic Trend Analysis, April 27, 2011
china financial markets – Michael Pettis
WheresGeorge.com
Tags: dollar, Michael Pettis, Mike Shedlock, Mish, Reserve Currency, WheresGeorge.com, Yuan, Yuan as a Reserve Currency
photo credit: Lord JimWe’re working with the thinnest thread of sanity and intelligence here. We were always subject to the lowest common denominator, but historically those people on the bottom wrung of the sanity and intelligence scale were treated officially as outliers, lunatics and morons. People who weren’t quite sure they saw what they saw, or knew what they knew, would be reluctant to say anything, no less reach out to police to close down a mall. Not anymore.
Most of us have seen a package unencumbered by a hand sitting in a public place. Watch for a few more minutes and someone comes back, maybe a nice mother with some wayward children who required collecting. They clutch the package and walk away holding hands. No terrorism here.
We wait and watch. Rarely is anything so askew as to demand immediate action. We can distinguish an umbrella from a rifle. We don’t rush to assumption of the one in a million occurrence with nothing more than a flash of a fear to push us over the edge. But then, we aren’t the ones phoning in reports to police from Nordstrom’s.
“Empowering Hysteria,” by Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice, April 25, 2011
Tags: Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice
