The Higher Education Bubble

A colleague from a public, western university told me that for an economics final exam he asked an exam question that required basic arithmetic. Unable to do the arithmetic, a student wrote in the allotted answer space: "Millennials don't do math."  Another colleague from an East Coast community college wrote this in a recent email:

Unfortunately, the whole enterprise has become a mockery. At my community college this semester, over 85% of our entering freshmen need math remediation -- that's 85 percent! Many do not know the multiuplication tables!

I recently met a philanthropist who told me that she thinks it's a waste of money for students who are unable to do college level work  to attend college. Even the mouthpiece of Progressivism, The New York Times, admits that the majority of high school seniors are not college ready:


In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.

The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.

The situtation is just as bleak with respect to performance in college.  According to The Chicago Tribune:

Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: 'I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.'


According to Sandra Stosky and Ze'ev Wurman in Minding the Campus:

Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

Except for the top 10 percent of students, college spending misallocates wealth.  There is no evidence that increased college attendance makes economies more productive.  America was a more innovative country when less than five percent of its population attended college.  For instance, Thomas Edison had three months of schooling. In 2012 66.2 percent of high school seniors enrolled in college.

Despite the absence of gains in academic achievement since 1970, K-12 education has, since 1970, tripled in inflation-adjusted cost.  I copied the following chart from Intellectual Takeout.org, which got it from the Cato Institute:

There also has been a higher education cost increase.  According to the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas N. Harris:

 Since the early 1990s, real expenditures on higher education have grown by more than 25 percent, now amounting to 2.9 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)—greater than the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in almost any of the other developed countries.  But while the proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has risen dramatically, the percentage of entering college students finishing a bachelor’s degree has at best increased only slightly or, at worst, has declined.

I disagree with Harris that the flunkout rate indicates a productivity gap.  Colleges that make their courses easier graduate more students, but the result is not higher productivity.  Rather, attendance of students who cannot graduate at the current watered down level diverts resources from more productive uses.

There is no evidence that college increases the ability to think coherently, to come up with creative solutions to human needs, to become a better citizen, or to become more productive economically.

On the other hand, there is evidence that colleges are politically biased and that they serve to indoctrinate students in left-wing, Progressive,  and big-government ideology.  Although college degrees in fields like engineering, business, and health raise salaries, there is no evidence that a more targeted or online education cannot equally prepare students for careers in those fields.  A large share of the Forbes 400, for instance, does not have a college degree, and that is especially true of the self-made portion that has engaged in areas other than finance.

Research that shows that college education contributes to human capital is tautological and does not control for alternative explanations.  It observes increases in pay from college, then it concludes that the pay is a return to human capital.  One alternative explanation is signaling: The college degree signals personal and intellectual abilities, but its content may be irrelevant to the job.  In that case an IQ test combined with four years in the military or the Peace Corps could be used in its place--and those might more accurate measures. Another explanation is that firms find college to be an easy way to screen job applicants: It is cheap to employers because the job applicants pay; parents are eager to see their children have prestigious or professional careers, and they are willing to foot the bill. 

On their part colleges and their faculties function as special interest groups, pushing for ever greater subsidies, expansion of programs, and licensure requirements in fields like medicine and law. Licensure requirements force the public to subsidize higher education.   Moreover, colleges have succeeded in gaining tax exempt status despite their routine violation of the Section 501 (c) (3) requirement that tax exempt organizations not engage in political indoctrination.  Universities, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and bogus sciences like environmental studies, routinely engage in political propagandizing, and they do so unabashedly.

There is an additional explanation for the higher education bubble:  Federal Reserve Bank counterfeit money that has been allocated to student loans. Without student loans the growth in the number of students attending college, hence wasting public resources and being indoctrinated in Progressive ideology, would be much smaller.  Conversely, firms would not be able to require irrelevant college degrees in fields like retail.  College can be viewed as a Fed-generated economic bubble, much like the tech bubble, the Internet bubble, and the sub-prime housing bubble.

The Anti-Liberal University

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had a wonderful colloquium at the Union League Club.  Anne Neal, the head of ACTA, organized the event, and chair was Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees.  The audience consisted of trustees like my great friend Candace de Russy, academics, and leaders in the academic reform movement like Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.  Several leading philanthropists were among the 35 to 40 participants.  The speakers included Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, Neil Hamilton of the University of St. Thomas Law School, and Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The distinguished group of trustees, donors, activists, and academics engaged in a riveting dialogue.  Professor Downs and I have subsequently exchanged some emails about the nature of the university.  I emailed him my views on the history of the university:  Universities never had a golden age, for they have always been anti-liberal, and the political correctness since the 1980s follows directly from universities' totalitarian roots in Germany.  This is what I wrote to Professor Downs:

I agree except for this question:  Was the university ever a liberal institution?  Americans are liberals, and liberalism in America was due to the American people themselves, neither to the Founding Fathers nor to the Constitution.  As they have been induced to adopt state activism, which by definition is not liberalism (Louis Hartz notwithstanding; he is brilliant until he gets to FDR), they have discarded liberalism, and so has the Supreme Court.   The university has contributed to and possibly induced the rejection. 

Were American universities ever liberal institutions?  They began in America as Christian colleges; they were transformed in the late 19^th century by Daniel Coit Gilman and Charles Eliot mimicking German universities.  The German universities were not liberal institutions, as Readings’s* history implies.  Their role was to support the German state.  State activist liberalism in America came from the German universities via the historical school of economics (Wisconsin’s Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons were pivotal in that regard).  The German historical school had fought with the Austrian school in the 19^th century,  and it was ultimately triumphant when one of its last followers, Werner Sombart, evicted Ludwig von Mises from the German Sociological Society under the Nazi racial laws (Sombart was old then, and he died a year or two later).  

In other words, I suspect that from the beginning Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, etc. were formed by anti-liberal actors; the liberal intonation coopted popular American belief in liberalism and was context or background to the inner impulse of the university, which was anti-liberal from the beginning. 

People who (a) believe in liberalism and (b) believe in learning want to believe that there was a golden age of university liberalism, but I am doubtful.  I don’t think the histories of universities will bear out that belief.  It is true that someone like William Graham Sumner advocated laissez faire at Yale, but the Mugwump, Gilded-Age period was still one when the university was a Christian institution. Yale had not evolved into a research-based university until the end of or after Sumner’s career.   There was, I recall, a conflict involving Ely when he taught at Cornell, which caused him to be fired; he moved to Michigan before Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin. That was still during the Mugwump period, and as Progressivism became ascendant the AAUP adopted the principles of academic freedom based on liberal rhetoric.  But the AAUP and universities themselves were Progressive institutions; in a sense, they were the source of Progressivism.  The rise of Progressivism during the 1890-1920 period (I would argue we are still in the age of Progressivism) followed directly from the influence of the German university on America.

*Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. 

Open Letter to Carl Paladino Re His School Board Bid

Dear Carl:

One issue you might consider is assurance of learning.   The median writing ability in American schools has deteriorated to the point where the median entering college student is functionally illiterate; college does not teach them basic skills, and they graduate illiterate. There are simple writing measurements that can be done to determine the quality of writing education at the school level, but these need to be graded by an objective, outside source such as ETS, not by the school system itself.  Cheating on objective tests is endemic in school systems across the country. The tests cannot be available to the schools.   

My mother was a New York City school teacher, and she described this to me in the 1970s in her school district in Spanish Harlem (District Four),  which was overseen by Anthony Alvarado, who was later made chancellor of New York City’s schools because of his supposed improvement in test scores. I vividly recall my mom describing the cheating in his administration in the 1970s.   The scoring of the tests must be done by outside agencies, and the tests cannot be administered by the school system, especially by the teachers or principals of the local schools.

 The conceptual issue in teaching writing is simple. It is like teaching a kid to ride a bicycle.  You teach them the rules, then they write, then you improve what they wrote, then they rewrite the same essay.  You teach them again, they try it again, you correct it again, and you have them rewrite it again.  The process is time consuming, so teachers avoid it.  They need to be forced or encouraged to spend the time on it.  The same is with basic math. The students must be given problems; they must be forced to redo problem they don’t get.  The teachers don’t like doing the grading, which is grueling.  They need incentives, and they need to be taught the importance of teaching basic writing and math.  One alternative way to teach writing might be programmed instruction.  

Diane Ravitch wrote Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform, which I recommend. In most schools progressive education is malarkey.  The students need to be taught the multiplication tables, multiplying fractions and the like by rote, not by the new math.  As well, they need to be taught writing by practice, like learning to ride a bicycle, not by “creativity.”   Other issues may be important too, but unless the students are taught the basics they will continue to graduate as illiterates.  I have 100 college students 80 or 90 of whom will graduate unable to write clearly. One student was promoted to district manager of a fast food chain, and she told me that she goes to the  College Learning Center to have them write memos she needs to write for her job.

I have spent 40 hours per week working on this for the past three years. I get results, but one class and one professor can’t undo 16 years of neglect of basic skills.  I stopped having them write term papers because they are unable to write English.  I have them write one-page papers that I grade and have them rewrite.  Then I grade them again.  This is time consuming, and most college professors do not have the grammar training or the willingness to do this.  It should be done at the elementary school level.  Currently, resources are massively squandered.  America graduates college seniors who cannot write at the level of third graders.  It is a scandal.

Sincerely

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Brooklyn College

845-657-8460

mlangbert@hvc.rr.com

From: Carl Paladino [mailto:carl@carlpaladino.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:33 PM
To: Carl@carlpaladino.com
Subject: Open Memo to the People of the City of Buffalo from Carl Paladino

Isaac Abrams Showing at Drawing Now at Caroussel de Louvre

Work of my friend Isaac Abrams, a psychedelic artist who lives in nearby Saugerties, New York, has been selected to appear in the  Drawing Now exhibition of contemporary drawing in the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris.  Drawing Now is Europe's leading contemporary art fair devoted to drawings.  Isaac has previously shown at various galleries in Paris and at a host of prestigious venues, including the Whitney Museum.  I own two of his delightful paintings.