My key problems with Murray's essay are his arguments, not his conclusion. I don't see that Murray has a coherent story about how the BA persists despite its inefficiency. The signaling model does tell such a story, so Murray ought to at least take it seriously, and tell us how it relates to his thesis.
If he does embrace the signaling model, though, Murray's distributional analysis will probably turn out to be wrong. The main losers are taxpayers who subsidize the wasteful signaling competition, and consumers who pay more for the labor that colleges divert away from the productive part of the economy. Murray is right, of course, that talented workers without BAs suffer, too; but we should not forget that below-average people without BAs actually benefit from employers' imperfect information about their productivity.
I'm not sure this is right. This presumes a few things, like that people who get useless BAs end up doing whatever they would have absent the BA. But getting a BA has an opportunity cost. For one thing, it may use up funds that could have gone for useful vocational spending. For another, those who pursue college degrees they aren't really suited for give up several years of earnings, and more importantly, experience. Early experience seems to matter; the minimum wage literature indicates that failure to get a job as a teenager can have a permanent negative impact on later earnings.
The use of a BA as a signal is helpful to those who are below-average academically only if we presume that there is no other, useful training they could undertake, or that there is no more efficient means of sorting workers. If we instead imagine that three years of desultory course-flunking could instead be spent acquiring a marketable skill, or seeking out work that suits them, it seems more costly.
We should also consider that not everyone loves school. To people who are academically inclined, three years of school that doesn't result in a degree doesn't seem so bad--a pity about the degree, of course, but at least you got a lovely long vacation. For people who hate classwork, however, it's torture. Encouraging people to spend years doing something they detest in order to acquire a not-very-useful signalling device seems like a fairly great social loss.
I'd hate to think of us adopting something like the German system, where kids are relentlessly tracked into their future lives by the time they're fourteen. On the other hand, the Germans get one thing very right: they provide an excellent career path for those whose talents lie outside of college.
I've arrived at the (admittedly unsatisfying) conclusion that we should not erect any kind of barriers to college participation that we don't have now, but should work to make people understand that the choice is not "college or loser". Because believe me, that's how most high school kids think.
Of course, so many people wouldn't feel the need to attend college if we could somehow restore in this country a robust number of jobs that paid a middle-class wage (capable of raising a family on) that didn't require a college education. But that's an old hobby-horse of mine.
It's the "somehow" that's the kicker, isn't it? Let me know if you figure it out . . .
A long overdue conversation in this country.
BA's are often highly overrated, and a huge waste of educational resources. Twenty years of living in Boston proved that. Two years of having a child in a community college (vocational college, precision metal working; he can make parts for MRI's, machine guns, or space shuttles,) reinforced the notion.
College is very overrated.
The thing that people should be pushing kids to do is get some kind of skill that 1) they like doing and 2) cannot be acquired by 4 months of on the job training. Trying to get everyone into college just isn't going to work.
Really its as simple as that. Whether that means college, votech, or going out and handing some craftsmen his hammer for a few years, as long as you end up with a skill that sets you apart from the pack, you'll end up doing ok. Maybe not great, but ok. It's the 40 year old guys who only know how to stack boxes or flip burgers that are the real sad cases.
"We should also consider that not everyone loves school."
That's an important point. A lot of people really dislike school. There are a lot of naturally talented, hard-working people who just don't have the right skill set for school. We give these people the message that they are failures unless they get through college. Many of these young people would be better served learning to become a mechanic/carpenter/chef/secretary. At the very least, they might be better off working for a few years and then trying school again when they are more motivated/mature.
A whole other group of young people get BAs because nobody is making the sales pitch to them that they should learn something more practical. A lot of universities (or maybe just mine) do a lousy job of directing students towards careers. I think universities should expand career service offices and have one-on-one meetings with all their students early on (say, second semester freshman year) where they really try to make these students think about possible career choices.
I think there's validity in majoring in Latin (or some other "useless" major) just for the pure educational experience, but I think a lot of people choosing "useless" majors are doing it because they don't have any clue what they want to do with their lives, not because they're so passionate about the subject they've chosen.
so many people wouldn't feel the need to attend college if we could somehow restore in this country a robust number of jobs that paid a middle-class wage (capable of raising a family on) that didn't require a college education.
We have such jobs. Provided you're willing to live at a 50's standard of living (one car, smaller house with kids bunking together, broadcast TV and no cell phone, most meals prepared by mom at home from relatively unprepared ingredients, pack everyone into the station wagon for vacation, hopefully not with the dog on top) you can get by on one income in a skilled trade. Both my grandfathers had college degrees, and they lived much more modest lives, materially speaking, than most people today.
That is, it's our notion of the "standard" of living that has changed, not necessarily the jobs. We have higher standards than our grandparents did.
Students who don't want to or aren't ready to be in college also impose a cost by taking up their classmates' and their teachers' time.
And yet, the administrators continue to talk about recruiting and retaining students.
The thing that I think Murray is definitely right on is on certification exams as an alternative to bachelor's degrees. This would enable the signaling without the cost. It would break the accreditation / parchment-printing rent-seeking business:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30632
And, in fact, it would enable students to signal their skills & knowledge independent of exclusivity of their institution's 'brand'.
I went to a relatively competitive university, found I loathed being in school and completed by BA in 3 years.
I don't regret having gone to college but what I learned there, while interesting for bar room conversation is not at all germane to what I do professionally or skills I have acquired since having been paroled (my term of choice) from college 10 years ago.
It has been rather interesting, though, to see people's reactions when I tell them that, though I was paroled in three years I nonetheless hated school and couldn't wait to get out.
A pigeon hole is not something into which I can be fitted.
Rob has a good point about standards of living. Our view of them is also determined by what our peers are doing; it's tough to live within your means when you're keeping up with the Joneses.
Let me clarify my rather snarky comment above. I probably loathed school, in part, because I did the wrong major (double major in English and philosophy).
I've ended up in finance (insert wry comment here) and have found it fulfilling. I am currently pursuing the Charetered Financial Analyst designation, which is somewhat akin to getting a Master's in finance, but is a course of self-study. Far more interesting, for me, at least, than going to a classroom and having an academic prattle theory in my ear.
Of course, going this route assumes that you have the discipline and skill set to allow for individual, self-directed study. I concede that most do not have that.
One of the things Germany doesn't do, interestingly, is track enough people OUT of higher education to prevent a massive oversupply of persons qualified for academic work. They don't have the kind of adjunctery that we do, but there are still no jobs for too many people with degrees.
Where I live, they are advertising for plumber and electrician apprentices, with wages at $15/hr. After 2 years (I believe), you're a journeyman. You get paid to learn a trade, and once completed, you earn a competitive wage. I've known electricians who earned in excess of $70/yr (I have an MS in Sociology and deservedly earn much less).
A good electrician or plumber is worth a high fee. Same with carpenters. Yes, they'll go through hard times with the rest of us as the housing boom crumbles, but we could not build another home, and people will still need these skilled workers.
This is very true, imho. What a BA buys is the freedom from the stigma of not having gone to college. Which is odd, anti-intellectualism being what it is in the U.S. But I think the problem here is that for learning a real trade via the college education model, the costs will be much higher than those associated with a traditional education. That's one of the reasons why high schools tend to be geared towards getting people into college - it's very expensive to set up an auto shop, a plumbing shop, a machine shop, etc. Mathematics? Don't get me wrong, it's the creme de la creme, but the actual investment in physical materials is books, someone who knows what's going on, and stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of paper. Not exactly the investment one would put into purchasing and maintaining a modern shop floor.
I think you may have inflated the costs of modern comfort a bit over what they were fifty years ago. Consumer electronics, for example, including cell phones and cable TV just isn't that expensive. Cars may be more expensive (or may not be) as a share of income, but by the same token, they last much longer and the repair bills are few and far between(for some of the younger set, getting 100,000 miles out of a car in 1958 would be something to brag about.)
The bulk of the costs that have gone up for most people are in just three areas - housing, insurance, and medical care. _Not_ on electronic gizmos and fondue pots.
You get paid to learn a trade, and once completed, you earn a competitive wage.
I agree, there are a lot of non-college jobs that pay a competitive wage. They involve learning a skill that's difficult to master, such as plumbing. I think it's more about people feeling ashamed they have to tell people "I'm a plumber" when the inevitable "What do you do" question comes up socially. Instead of, I'm working at A but I'm currently in community college. My cousin still feels ashamed that he's a plumber despite assurances from family that what matters most is making a good living and being a good provider.
The second thing is that most of these types of jobs max out at the 60K-70K range. When you work for corporations with a college degree there's always the chance you'll get into mid-upper management and earn in the 100K-120K range or get into the ground floor of a start-up and make millions. There's certainly a much higher ceiling on wages with a college degree, even though many blue-collar jobs pay a good wage.
What should also be part of the conversation is that we are so rigid with our timelines- graduate HS at 18, college at 22, etc. You could cut educational costs by just accelerating the education of the more capable. If one could graduate college at 18, what would that be worth to someone over the course of their life?
As for the signalling issue, I think technology is going to drastically change the way we handle education. The traditional educational model colleges work on is just on the verge of pricing itself out of existence. If student borrowing becomes significantly more difficult going forward, and I think a strong case can be made that it will, then alternatives to college degrees will rise in relative value.
@hanmeng: I can't speak for other colleges' financing models, but I teach in the CA community college system, and ours is based solely on growth: you grow, so does your budget; you stagnate or (God forbid) lose enrollment, you're screwed--especially since costs are essentially budgeted on spec/the year before the money comes in. We don't see a dime of our enrollment fees; those go directly to the state general fund, and then the state divides up the monies based on said growth. Thus we are wholly subjected to the kind of recruitment & retainment model you mentioned. We can get away with it to a certain degree since we have an element of voc ed and practicality in our school(s), but it leads to some frustration on the part of faculty that while we tend to be interested in quality, administration--through no fault of their own, really--is beholden to quantity. And so we get the party line about how absolutely essential college is for any future prospects.
"On the other hand, the Germans get one thing very right: they provide an excellent career path for those whose talents lie outside of college."
Also important, people who do not attend college in Germany are not automatically thought of as sub-human like they are in the U.S. (these days at least).
Sean makes a very good point. Colleges are a business. People make their livings teaching, adminitering, cleaning, etc. at these places. High enrollment brings the opportunity for economies of scale, where a 100+ students in Psych 101 class brings more profit than 20 students in an engineering class (and the instructor is more expensive for the latter).
I certainly do not want to make engineering degrees more expensive than Psych degrees (if anything, the reverse), so the lib ed, arts adn behavioral science students subsidize the engineering, math, etc. students.
But at some point, people need to ask "Is it worth it?".
The second thing is that most of these types of jobs max out at the 60K-70K range.
Nah, they really don't. The way to make more in the skilled trades is to start (or buy) your own company. Some of those guys make a lot more than a middle manager in corporate America.
"with a college degree there's always the chance you'll get into mid-upper management and earn in the 100K-120K range or get into the ground floor of a start-up and make millions"
Bill Gates and Michael Dell were both college drop-outs if I recall. Many (most?) businesses are started by people who never received a college degree. Granted, very few of those end up in Fortune. But even so, creating a profitable small to medium sized company from scratch is something to be very proud of.
Related question - why aren't companies recruiting high school students? They can identify the top students just as well as colleges can, why wait 4 years when they have to compete much harder for the cream of the crop?
If I was a CEO, I'd consider a program where top high school students (based on grades, SATs, and extensive interviews) would be recruited for a 2 (3?) year program where they'd be paid something like $25-30k a year. They could start out doing administrative work while being exposed to the business and gradually take on the duties of someone straight out of college. There would be mentoring and training programs. After the two years, the company would either let them go or promote them to full-time positions equivalent to college grads (maybe at lower pay for the first couple years).
GU - "Also important, people who do not attend college in Germany are not automatically thought of as sub-human like they are in the U.S. (these days at least)."
As evidenced by the mocking of Levi Johnston in yesterdays AP interview for saying he was leaving school to apprentice as an electrician. Those mocking him seem to fail to understand that an apprenticeship is just another form of education. Perhaps he understands that he is better suited for that track then the academic track. Certainly the value to society another good electrician brings stands a good chance to be greater than another over-educated, under-employed BA.
Or in previous example of "white trash" prejudice, we have the mockery Casey Aldridge, Jamie Lynn Spears' baby daddy, for getting a job as a pipelayer rather than a college eduction. A college education which would allow him the pleasure of commenting on gossip blogs as a diversion from the white collar drudgery of an office job (BA required).
Related question - why aren't companies recruiting high school students? They can identify the top students just as well as colleges can, why wait 4 years when they have to compete much harder for the cream of the crop?
Probably because the top students wouldn't skip college for an apprenticeship, and for other students, college is useful for sorting those who can discipline themselves enough to stick to it and succeed from those who can't.
I live in So Calif, where a degree has little meaning; unless you're a lawyer, no one ever mentions credentials. You can create/get a job in the high-paying entertainment or tech market on raw talent and entrepreneurial skills alone; there are few, if any, educational barriers to entry. And some amazingly successful businesses result from this. Which is why it bothers me that so many non-science, non-financial entry level jobs (PR, marketing, advertising) still require a college degree. Too many talented but self-taught people are kept out of these occupations--why not just give them a writing test?
Amy,
If you just gave everyone a test you wouldn't be able to sort the brilliant but lazy from the smart workaholics. If your a Goldman or a McKinsey you know that if you hire a Harvard/Stanford grad you are getting someone who is skilled at pleasing authority figures. You could have a 170IQ and bad case of oppositional defiant disorder, a test can't determine that. But a name brand dgree proves that you jumped perfectly through every hoop that has ever been placed infront of you.
Also, if you hire from Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc. you are hiring someone who spent 4 years hanging out with most acomplished and well connected members of their peer group. That has a great deal of value.
The linked Cato conversation and this one seems to assume that everyone who gets a four-year (a.k.a. "undergraduate") gets a B.A. Perhaps that's because most of the other scientists and engineers wisely realize that they have more important things to do with their time rather than reading blogs like this.
My brother-in-law never got a BA or BS, and my sister got a BA in journalism. They both work in the same insurance company, and her position is farther down the org chart than his (mostly because she eagerly embraced the mommy-track). My brother-in-law talks about having college graduates work under him, but doesn't seem to distinguish whether those are English majors or chemical engineers.
In short, it is my impression that technical degrees provide career-relevant skills, whereas humanities degrees only demonstrate that one has a "well-rounded education".
I would add that those in my family and our circle of friends value people more than degrees. I have a Ph.D., but I know that I'm not a better husband, father, son, friend, or neighbor compared to my brother-in-law.
It's kind of crazy to think most of my friends (who majored in English, history, philosophy, etc), didn't really begin to think about career paths until they were in their late 20's(4 years of college and a few years of doing odd jobs and volunteer work).
It was only then, in their late 20's, that it hit them, "I need a career!!!" And they went to Grad schools or pursued a career in business more vigorously.
That seems like a lot of wasted time.
The linked Cato conversation and this one seems to assume that everyone who gets a four-year (a.k.a. "undergraduate") gets a B.A. Perhaps that's because most of the other scientists and engineers wisely realize that they have more important things to do with their time rather than reading blogs like this.
Actually, this blog has a significant number of scientists and engineers in the audience.
Anyone who thinks you need a college education to earn a middle-class wage hasn't seen the bill I got for having new drywall and flooring installed two years back.
The second thing is that most of these types of jobs max out at the 60K-70K range.
I know a plumber, on maybe $200k/year, and a house painter on $300k/year (and he says this is a bad year).
Of course they have their own businesses, but so do most college grads with that sort of income.
Nothing needs to be CHANGED, we just need to tell the young kids what the real situation is.
(It could also be argued that all the SMART kids already know the facts, it's the ignorant lazy ones that waste their time doing useless degrees because their mum thought it would look nice on the wall.)
Actually, this blog has a significant number of scientists and engineers in the audience.
Then there are those of us who got BAs in science because our institution did not grant BSs at all.
As a current college student, I can say that most of college is meaningless, there are some very good teachers who really guide you forward, and taking their classes is more than worth it, in fact i'd say its a bargain price, but those are the minority, most of the time I learn more from what I investigate on my own time while reading topics in the news or having online debates than I do from a semester in the classroom. For the most part its just that degree that I can place on my resume, nothing more, that line where I can place my school's name and my field of study.
first, this is one of those unfortunate discussions because before one makes a judgment call on the value of a BA one should look at the existing literature on its value. unfortunately, said literature rarely looks at the major, instead it gloms together many majors, from those leading to immediate jobs to those leading usually to grad school to those leading to careers where one can evaluate a job-seekers performance by portfolio or questions. confounders render the general conclusion useless. people publish these studies to make cheap points in journals or to reinforce their pre-graduation institutional marketing rather than to aid the actual job-seeker who, after all, is not doling out any grant money and has already paid for school. commenters who have pointed out such distinctions are just emphasizing the confounders which by virtue of not being considered render these BA-effect studies and their conclusions therefrom worthless.
the German example is interesting but I think the American understanding of it is shallow. German firms in general do far more training in-house than American firms do, in part due to regulation of apprenticeships by the government, and by the general belief there that one should distrust external credits if one hasn't proven them internally, which fits in with the general bias of German industry to distrust new relationships until they are proven over time. the greater in-house training implies the German firm can rely less on educational achievement and on BA prestige and can look more at individuals than can American firms, i.e., they don't have to trust the strength of a BA signal as much, hence a BA can't have as much automatic value on its own separable from individual characteristics or accomplishments. So it's less "valuable" so people don't automatically invest in it as much.
Not one person mentions Griggs vs. Duke Power, which is the elephant in the living room.
"It could also be argued that all the SMART kids already know the facts, it's the ignorant lazy ones that waste their time doing useless degrees because their mum thought it would look nice on the wall."
I don't know about that. It's a strange phenomenon. I think the humanities attract really smart kids (I'm sure there's some stats on this somewhere). For some reason it seems like upper class American families disproportionately steer their kids, who are smart too, towards the humanities.
My guess is that there is perception that careers in the hard, scientific fields have great short term prospects, but less rewarding long term prospects. So they see the humanities as a more solid, long term base.
From my humble site last week:
My BA (in English, from a not-bad school in flyover country) was, essentially, the high school education I should have gotten and didn't. I'm grateful to the professors who taught me and the parents who paid but the material itself was really only baseline great-books-and-fundamental-concepts. If my experience is typical, maybe declining standards at the lower levels of education drive employers to raise the minimum bar for jobs requiring even moderate levels of skills like literacy?
I thought the Germans had high unemployment? Severe labor-market rigidity?
Well, you don't need a college degree to win the lottery prize of a unionized lifetime sinecure craft job, or suffer the alternative living on the dole while earning some extra bier money doing odd jobs for cash or retailing some weed.
Seriously (yes, seriously), I have heard that Germany trains a lot of people superbly for trades with few job openings. In Germany you don't have to go to college to live on student (or apprentice) stipends for many years.
I'm just surprised Steve Sailer hasn't shown up here to urge the resurrection of "overseer" as a trade.
Another feature of the German system is that people who don't end up on the academic track at 14 can still get on it later, when their tastes change. Someone who does so at 24, with some real work experience under his belt, no doubt brings a different perspective to his studies.
In general, I think everyone needs a solid education in the humanities AND a marketable trade. The question is which to learn in the years between 18 and 22, and I think a trade is a better idea for anyone whose parents won't support them till they are 35.
Humanities education, which need not be as expensive as the Ivy League makes it, strikes me as better for adults than adolescents in general. Life experience just helps people plug into literature and the arts better.
This rule is just for people who study the humanities as general life enrichment, of course. Those who are really trying to become professional musicians or writers should study the humanities on trade-related tracks, which is a different game entirely.
"Another feature of the German system is that people who don't end up on the academic track at 14 can still get on it later, when their tastes change."
That is not my understanding at all. From what I understand if you don't get on the track by 14 then you have an almost 0% chance of going to University.
Scent of Voilets,
Costs of class rooms and differing types of education is a worthy sub topic in a discussion like this; particularly when you consider how students with different learning styles flourish in different learning environments. When I was a child, schools had (at least in high schools,) shops, home-ec rooms, etc. Now, they typically don't. So my son didn't find these things until he went to the community college, where he flourished. And his classroom, a room filled with mills, lathes, grinders, and CNC machines, is the most expensive classroom in the University of Maine system.
He's now gone on to engineering school, where he'll get his BA, and plans to go on to graduate school.
He hated school all his life. Now, he cannot get enough. And he's recruited four of his friends that wouldn't go on to college to go on, he's working on a fifth. All to vocational and apprenticeship programs that respect their abilities and intelligence and don't make them feel stupid because they can't read "Wuthering Heights."
There are many different ways of measuring value. The most important value to me is my son finding his value. His friends finding their value. They learn with their hands. They are mechanical. They build things. They repair things. They are enormously useful people to have around. They deserve respect, and they deserve a society that respects their contributions.
Over the last 30 years, we have failed to do that in this country. Particularly through our education system. And that is a shame.
I know someone in Germany who did it in his 20s. There are schools for older students getting their academic high school diplomas before enrolling in universities, and I visited his. There were lots and lots of people at it. I wouldn't think these schools would be available outside the bigger towns, but they exist.
I think the theory is that students may learn a trade and then later seek to learn the academic subject that underlies their practical work. Which actually makes sense. Why chain people to desks during the most physically active part of their lives? Let 'em learn hands-on, then study more academic subjects when their bodies are calmer and brains are settled down to it.
I think jmo has it about right when it comes to I-bankers and consultants hiring from Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford. They want someone who won't bat an eye when the client says at 5:00 on Friday that he wants some report by Monday morning (I used to really enjoy pulling this one), who will pull three all-nighters over the weekend, will produce a nicely bound report that hits all of the points, and will show up at the worksite Monday morning looking like she had a relaxing weekend swimming and playing tennis. Oh yeah, she'll have a clue about which red to order with duck versus steak, and will have things to talk about at dinner other than just work.
Beyond that, I can't think of a business job that requires a traditional four-year B.A. or B.S. I recently retired from the finance subsidiary of an automotive company, and the majority of our jobs were for collection agents. There's a talent to this job (I doubt I'd be good at it), mostly involving knowing when and how to escalate the rhetoric, remembering not to threaten to break anyone's kneecaps, and knowing when to give up and call for the guy with the tow truck, but there's nothing that couldn't be taught to an intelligent high-school graduate. These jobs can lead to middle and upper management jobs paying well into six figures (most of the CEO's of the company, and all of the most effective ones, started out making collection calls), so it's not like they're the equivalent of burger flipping. Even the technical jobs like accounting, finance, and IT could be trained for in a couple of years of intensive courses not involving distribution requirements. Having said that, all of our entry-level professional jobs required BA's or BS's, or MBA's for finance, so there you have it.
I know a plumber, on maybe $200k/year, and a house painter on $300k/year (and he says this is a bad year).
Like you said, that's from taking a big risk and starting a business. Mid-Upper management gets there from college degrees just by slowly working their way up the ladder. I think for the follower and risk-adverse type people there's something attractive about working your way up in this manner. With a college degree you can generally work your way up higher than without.
When I was a child, schools had (at least in high schools,) shops, home-ec rooms, etc. Now, they typically don't.
I think this is a real problem and one of the consequences of No Child Left Behind. Shops give some students training for a decent paying blue collar job. It can helpsthem figure out that not all jobs are like school and they might enjoy a non-desk job. It's also useful life skill to know how to work with wood, on your car, or do simple electrical tasks.
When I went to high school in the late '70s we did have well equipped shop classes. Have they really all gone away? Education budgets have only gone up. Where does the money go?
As for the skilled trades, in Chicagoland you could only get an apprenticeship if you knew somebody. The unions had a monopoly on the labor market and took strong measures to keep it.
Maybe there is not an elephant in this room, but there are at least a fair size pair of rhinos.
People who get more years of education, particularly college education, gain several years of life expectation; of healthier life too.
People who go through college move into a marriage market where partners are likely to have higher potential incomes, greater capacity to enjoy and share enjoyment of different forms of consumption, and improved capacity to bring up their children to take advantage of the opportunities modern society offers.
It ain't all how much you earn, not by a long shot.
In New York State, voc ed has not disappeared with the advent of NCLB. That's because of the BOCES system, which is a like a regional school district encompassing a number of geographically close districts, and which provides voc ed and the more intensive special ed services to the member districts.
The disadvantage to the BOCES voc ed program is that going to BOCES for part of the day stigmatizes the voc ed student because BOCES also handles the more severe special ed students, and thus has the reputation of being where the non-hackers go.
But a few years ago (before NCLB), Mills, the State Commissioner of Education, decreed that ALL students (voc ed, spec ed, etc.) had to get a Regents diploma to graduate from high school, and the Regents diploma is and always has been a college-track high school diploma. Sure, some waivers are available, but they are hard to get and take up even more administration time.
I think a lot of people here are hitting on the same point that a college degree isn't adequate preparation for the real world and that a skilled technician is just as valuable, despite society saying otherwise.
One person above mentioned why CEO's don't hire high school students and train them in a similar manner to appreticeships. I believe the answer to that is 5 fold:
1. No guarantee the person wouldn't leave for another company, essentially wasting the company's money training a competitor's guy. (I know law firms do train, so that may contradict this point, but that's mostly because the supposed technical school for it (law school) is less than inaequate--law school literally teaches a student nothing about legal work in the real world. And, of course, since all law firms train, all law firms can poach from each other, rendering the costs nil.)
2. Fungible skills. While a plumber's apprentice can only become a plumber (and usually only in that state, if I am correct), a CEO for a paper company teaching someone business skills can leave the paper company and work for any business out there--car company, nuclear power company, etc., so long as they understand the product. So, again, the CEO wastes money training someone else's good worker.
3. Current state is default offloading costs. If we were designing a society from scratch, a la Socrates, the apprenticeship route would be a good idea. Unfortunately, we've woken up in a world where white collar skills are gotten in college, so a CEO has little incentive to start this program adnd ur the high costs; someone else does it for him, albeit very imperfectly.
4. High school kids are not at a stage where they're ready to settle down and be adults and take one career seriously. The NBA and NFL have tried to legislate against high school-age people becoming involved, observing that a 22 year old's skill progress and character are easier to observe and judge than an 18 year olds. Society's reinforcing the notion that immature behavior is a good thing certainly doesn't help, but that's a sociological question.
5. Coupled with #4, while becoming an electrician or plumber requires mastering a finite number of skills and amount of knowledge, more white collar jobs require intangibles that usually take longer to master. Great CEOs occur in their 40s (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs notwithstanding), while a really good-to-great plumber can be 25 and it raises few eyebrows.
Interestingly, businesses used to hedge points # 1 and 2 via indentured servitude, but that's now illegal. Darn.
That is not my understanding at all. From what I understand if you don't get on the track by 14 then you have an almost 0% chance of going to University.
That is most definitely not true; the Zweite Bildungsweg ("Second educational way", roughly) is certainly available and I knew some people on it years ago.
Mind you, German college degrees are more equivalent to an MA than a BA, and take correspondingly longer.
law school literally teaches a student nothing about legal work in the real world.
I'll grant that law school takes too long, the B.A. requirement for admission is silly, and it can frequently be overly academic in focus, but "nothing"? Not really. The core first-year courses come in handy pretty much every day for me. But you can't really teach experience and judgment, which are at the heart of most legal work.
Part of the problem for this discussion in general is that experience and judgment are key to success in most fields, and they can't be taught under any circumstances. So we try to screen for people who are promising in those areas, and people who managed to delay gratification as stupid horny teenagers well enough to be admitted to top schools, and then do it again as stupid horny teenagers away from their parents, seem pretty promising in the "judgment" category, at least.
Selection bias? Do you really think college would "cause" such results if the bottom 30% of the population (wrt IQ) went to college instead of the top 30% of the population?
I think Tim B has a good point about undergrad replacing high school as the place where many people get what used to be a basic education. My husband teaches at an accredited 4 year college (not one you've heard of, for good reason), and he is appalled at the quality of his students in just about every way imaginable, as are most of his fellow profs. The majority of undergrad programs seem to be playing catch-up, and that catch-up is desperately needed.
I also agree with MC that a classic liberal arts education would, in an ideal world, be better left to grown ups. Lord knows when I was in undergrad (English), the best students I worked with were people coming back to school after ... having a life. Experience made the subject matter meaningful. However, the whole BA experience did, as they say, teach me how to think: to approach new sets of knowledge, learn accepted structures for analyzing that knowledge and communicating with others, critique those structures, analogize to other areas, etc. Good, useful general problem-solving skills. Not anywhere near as useful as plumbing or HVAC, but, as others pointed out, more fungible.
I think the "signaling" explanation is right, though its value is probably overestimated. I've got 3 degrees, all Ivy/Oxbridge. The professional degree obviously has significant economic value, but I believe the two purely academic degrees also bring significant professional and economic benefit, because people make assumptions about my ability. Like anyone else from fancy schools, of course, I know perfect incompetents with comparable credentials, and even more with no real world abilities beyond cocktail chatter, but a bet that they are all reasonably bright, good at determining others' expectations, eager to satisfy them and skilled at doing so would generally pay off. People I know from Middling U don't get the same benefit of the doubt but they do get some, and I'm confident that continues right down to someone with a 2-year associates degree being given more credit than a HS grad, or someone with a GRE.
However, there is lots of discussion of the poor economic value of a BA, but not much of how damaging it is to academic study that it has become a tool for economic advancement. (The calls for colleges to improve job skills far outnumber calls for people without serious academic ambition to just get a fricking job already.) I agree that few people learn anything economically useful while getting a liberal arts degree that they couldn't learn just as well from a decent HS education and simply being socially functional. But the liberal arts do have another purpose, or did, which may be seriously undermined by colleges becoming job-credential factories: an introduction to the life of the mind. Is that worth $40K/year? Probably not if your goal is to land a non-academic job.
Upshot is I think that using educational credentials as a proxy for general ability is likely to be very persistent. The correlation doesn't have to be high for the signal to have value. But ultimately the losers are not just people blowing money on an "education" that doesn't have much inherent economic value, but also people for whom a typical BA education DOES have inherent (non-economic) value, who now have to pay inflated prices, compete for slots with people who aren't really interested, and sit in class with chuckleheads marking time before getting a job.
Anyhow, that's long and discombobulated - sorry.
Re: Interestingly, businesses used to hedge points # 1 and 2 via indentured servitude, but that's now illegal. Darn.
Businesses can and do require their employees to stick around for a given period (often two years) after paying for training or relocation, or they will ask for reimbursement of those expenses. I'm stuck in Baltimore until 2010 (assuming I am not transferred elsewhere) since I cannot afford to repay the c. 18K my employer spent moving me here.
Rob Lyman:
"I'll grant that law school takes too long, the B.A. requirement for admission is silly, and it can frequently be overly academic in focus, but "nothing"? Not really. The core first-year courses come in handy pretty much every day for me."
Rob, as someone in the legal field myself, I can assure you, had I walked straight into any of my legal jobs (I've had 2) after working as a paralegal (non-licensed, basically an office assistant) I would have had just as much knowledge of the law as when I graduated from law school. Law school is really a scam; we try to treat lawyers like doctors or engineers, but really being lawyer is a white collar version of being a plumber or electrician: best learned through apprenticeship.
(Warning: the rest is my curmudgeon's attack on law school. Grandpa Simpsonisms may arise:)
Law school curriculum, especially first year, is not geared towards practice. It is geared towards legal theory, or, rather, the legal theories the professors hold. And legal theory almost never holds sway in the real world. So much of it is merely professors talking to other professors while judges ignore it and merely decide cases based on practical experience and obvious precedent.
I mean, what can you say about a type of school where, to pass a licensing exam required by your profession (i.e. the bar), you need to take a class not offered by your school---that you have to go outside the school for (e.g. Bar Bri, etc.)? In other words, the school can't even get you past the basics exam for the profession for which it supposedly trained you. If that happened in an electrical or plumbing school, the place would be shut down, because no student would go.
Of course, it doesn't help that law school staffs are 95% people who have never worked in a real legal field in their lives or very little--meaning they jumped right their editorship at a law review and an appellate (not trial) clerkship right into their professorship--- or perhaps had a year in document review in the bowels of some law firm and never saw a client or court.
As a caveat, you don't need to have practical experience to be able to teach a skill. For example, the Charlie Weiss, formerly of the New England Patriots, never played college or pro football, and yet was a very good offensive coordinator--although I don't think he's a good (current) head coach. Ditto that many good officers in the military were never grunts.
However, law schools loathe people who have legal experience (one caveat--those who are not famous or judges), and deliberately avoid hiring them. They are allergic to testing a theory in the real world.
Por ejemplo, I had a trial advocacy class. It's not required, despite the fact that trials and hearings and dealing with judges are something that any lawyer may come to. The teacher was an AUSA (high up in his division) with a long winning streak, and was a good teacher to boot. But he stated to me, privately, that he knew he wouldn't get a full time position because he was "tainted" by experience. Apparently, his ability to call "b.s" on a theoretically teneable but practically impossible theory was a liability. Common sense is an hindrance.
Having worked with judges, I have talked to them about legal theory, and more than one has stated that legal professors don't have any input into their decisions. We can hear about the few legal cases where Reich was cited, but these are the exception, not the rule.
And, after a long paper on the topic (ironically, in law school), I found that, in the rare cases where it happens, when a theory from legal academia is put into use in the real world, the resulting mess created is awful and causes complete logical breakdowns.
There's a reason its a stereotypical ivory tower.
Thoughts from inside academia:
1) Megan is right about Germany: While we shouldn't emulate their tracking, there is a lesson to be learned from a system that gives paths for those who didn't go to college.
2) Freddie is also right: Barriers to college are not the answer. Highlighting other paths is the answer. That will mean that we in the university face more competition, a prospect that I welcome. Barriers to college would only mean that we don't need to compete as much, and we would suffer in the long run.
3) Regarding recruitment and retention: I have no desire to retain somebody who shouldn't be here, but I don't want to see somebody invest a lot of time here and flail around and then finally not graduate. I'd rather see the weeding out happen early, and see those who aren't weeded out graduate quickly rather than taking forever. It's a disservice to them to make 5.5 year graduation a commonplace thing.
4) While I have nothing bad to say about skilled trades, let's not completely knock the intellectual growth that comes from college either. I teach physics, a subject that is certainly not useless but not as useful as engineering either. It's somewhere in between, and the intellectual skill-set of physics majors makes them employable in a wide range of fields. For instance, physics majors have done great work on Wall Street, putting together mathematically sophisticated investment instruments that effectively manage risk and make financial crises a thing of....OK, never mind. :)
JonF:
"Businesses can and do require their employees to stick around for a given period (often two years) after paying for training or relocation, or they will ask for reimbursement of those expenses. I'm stuck in Baltimore until 2010 (assuming I am not transferred elsewhere) since I cannot afford to repay the c. 18K my employer spent moving me here."
True enough, except that it's not exactly indentured servitude, in that you can break the contract and pay them back, and you're able to work somewhere else. Indentured servants who tried to break out 1) could not legally work anywhere else; and 2) were often under the thumb of the law if they left, making them "slaves with a time limit."
You, at least, could theoretically leave for another job, and pay off your old employer the expenses. Thankfully, with the UCC and all that, we're not in some Napoleonic system where the only reparation for a broken contract was the fulfillment of the terms of the contract; now, we can just pay some money for efficient breaches.
had I walked straight into any of my legal jobs...after working as a paralegal...I would have had just as much knowledge of the law as when I graduated from law school.
I don't know what they taught you, but I find at least one of Civil Procedure, Property, Torts, and Contracts useful almost every single day. Bankruptcy, Corporations, Evidence, and Federal Courts (non-core courses) have also been useful.
This is not to say I had no filler classes, or that all 3 years were put to good use, or that there isn't a better way. But apprenticeships have their limitations, too; if I had apprenticed at my current (IP) firm, I would have huge holes in my knowledge which would harm both clients and the firm. And so would you, after your paralegal jobs. Issue spotting is an important part of counseling clients, and it's something that law school prepares you for quite well.
Thankfully, with the UCC and all that, we're not in some Napoleonic system where the only reparation for a broken contract was the fulfillment of the terms of the contract
That principle predates the UCC by hundreds of years, finding its origins in equity's requirement that the plaintiff have no adequate remedy at law.
"Like housing, spending on higher education has been fueled by cheap credit facilitated by a government sponsored enterprise (Sallie Mae, in the case of higher ed). As with housing (up until the burst of that bubble), all this cheap credit has led to higher prices (interestingly, politicians who call for increased spending on higher ed every election year never seem to consider that this increased spending may have helped drive up tuition costs)."
If it weren't for loans and grants only the rich would be able to go to college.
Rob, apparently you're both a prick and an idiot:
"I don't know what they taught you"
--It was a T14 school, so they were supposed to be good at this.
"but I find at least one of Civil Procedure, Property, Torts, and Contracts useful almost every single day. Bankruptcy, Corporations, Evidence, and Federal Courts (non-core courses) have also been useful."
----Hmm, let's go through these, shall we?:
1. Civ Pro? If I have a question on a rule, I crack the book. Nothing I "learned" in the class was anything I don't know the moment I open the book and read the statute. And if I have a problem
2. Property. Oh dear lord, now I know you're lying. Property is so state specfic for you to argue that this wholly backwards system has any value in the generalized law school context means I hope you have legal malpractice insurance.
3. Contracts. Nope. Open the Restatement, there it is. Nothing more.
4. Evidence. once again, merely reading the fed rules explain the same thing in class. those little nuances, like on hearsay? Guess what: you always check lexis or westlaw on them. If you use the law school course and don't shepardize, you're guilt of malpractice.
5. took Fed Courts. Useless in my 1st job the fed court system as a clerk. Useless today.
6. Bankrupcty and Corp: I now know what a corporation is, and that it can go bankrupt. Other than that, reading cases from California and Illinois when I'm in NY=useless.
As I stated, when the rules aren't clear, you have to use lexis or westlaw. I wouldn't rely on my professor's casebook or class, which grabbed law from all over---that's malpractice, you have to look up your own district or state's holdings on the law.
"This is not to say I had no filler classes, or that all 3 years were put to good use, or that there isn't a better way."
---thank goodness for small miracles.
"But apprenticeships have their limitations, too; if I had apprenticed at my current (IP) firm, I would have huge holes in my knowledge which would harm both clients and the firm."
------Such as those above courses, all of which are useless when you simply open the rules (Fed Rules of Evidence, etc.) and read the bare language? and then look up the case law? I think you're selling yourself short.
"And so would you, after your paralegal jobs."
---hahahahaha. Absolutely wrong, douche. please.
"Issue spotting is an important part of counseling clients, and it's something that law school prepares you for quite well."
----hahahahaha. Wrong again. Do you think a partner at a firm is going to give a new associate a case an go "spot the issues. Their all yours!" Wrong. He'll ask the associate to sit down with him and he'll go through the causes he sees, because he knows that law graduates know diddly and squat.
So you learn from a man or woman who knows how to spot issues and isn't some pie-in-the-sky kid. Issue spotting is for real lawyers with experience on knowing what actually flies in court, and not some kid who read a case where a slip and fall guy got hit by a faulty car speeding down the street by a drunk driver.
Then again, given your acumen thus far, I suppose you think those law school hypotheticals were real cases.
"That principle predates the UCC by hundreds of years, finding its origins in equity's requirement that the plaintiff have no adequate remedy at law."
---No shit, huh? Alright, douche, listen up: the UCC was an attempt to gather the common law ideas on efficient breach, etc. It was an attempt to nationalize really good ideas in commercial law. BUT not every jurisdiction followed every lovely rule. The UCC helped to change some of that.
However, dumbass, when someone says "UCC and all that," he's not pinning himself down and saying the UCC is the sole cause of efficient breach, or was the beginning of it. Hence "all that."
Now Rob, I figure you're probably some wanna-be-professor suck up. Good luck blowing smoke up a Dean's ass to get yourself a faculty position. Now go be a turd ferguson somewhere else.
It is interesting that there has been little discussion to this point about one of the key signaling problems, the career guidance systems in most high school settings. For most students and for their families, career guidance about careers outside of their knowledge base ( friends,families,and personal experience) is difficult to come by. They may know about careers, but they will know little about the patterns of the careers ( recruitment,promotions,etc). That's where guidance counselors are supposed to be helpful, but few get much help from their school systems. They are usually overburdened and get little chance to learn about the real world and the local economy. And the guidance systems in the middle school systems are even worse.
That's why there is so little knowledge in most guidance settings about blue collar jobs and what they require and what they pay and what they develop into. Most of the voc ed schools in New York City get students who are at the bottom of the reading ladder and are often choosing the schools because they didn't get their first choice of high school. And these are the schools that should be preparing students for some of the best blue collar jobs in New York City.
There are 130,000 construction jobs in New York City; about 65,000 are union jobs. The legal workforce, which cannot easily be exploited, averages $ 100,000 in the envelope per year,with benefits on top. And,after 5 years with an employer, unemployment is almost unknown,since a skilled worker is a prize. And,as many of your commenters have noted,journeyman status is just the beginning. Job superintendents, who come up through the ranks, now average $ 250,000 a year in New York City. And for those that want to, ownership is possible.
One of the major problems is that few families understand these opportunities and what kind of a lifestyle they support,unless the families are already connected to the business. Very few guidance counselors in middle school are ever suggesting that very good students look to the construction career. And that is a real mistake, because the quick learners in construction advance the fastest.
It is almost as if good careers are to be had but not spoken about. If you want to become a great civil engineer, there are few better programs than the coop engineering model pioneered by Northeastern University. Students in the coop program may spend one extra year, but they leave having developed a resume, a skill set of work habits from the real world, and an income stream. For most, after the second year of coop education with one employer, the employer starts picking up much of the educational costs for an employee that they wish to bring into the firm on a long term basis. In that regard the field component of the coop programs are really the equivalent of summer internships for lawyers and MBAs.
But if you asked most guidance counselors for such an experience, they would know little about them or see much value in them.
Now go be a turd ferguson somewhere else.
I have every intention of remaining a turd ferguson right here. I will also continue to believe that a properly integrated and organized framework is advantageous both to learning and to practice, and further that statute books do not always present material in the most intuitive or organized fashion.
"taking a big risk and starting a business"
How much of a risk is it, really, for a skilled tradesman to strike out on his own? He probably already has a customer base from past jobs, and it's not like it's trying to market some new and crazy scheme that no one has ever heard before. I'm not saying it's a no brainer, and he has to have some business skills that a wage earner doesn't have to worry about, but I'd say as far as business risks go, an experienced, licensed plumber starting his own shop is in a better position than, say, your average solo lawyer...
In this twisted society where knowledge and lack of psychological dysfunction are not as valuable as they used to be, the value of a college education is more a philosophical one. It makes you a better human being. Just as the insecure, uneducated "idiot" will say college is a waste of time, the educated, wise man can only shake his head in disgust as he listens to the uneducated make generalized statements having sat only on "one side of the fence".
If you don't know the answer to the question, "is college overprescribed", then you have obviously been living in a dark cave for the past 20 years.
Of course it is overprescribed.
Upon overnight reflection, it occurs to me that a good analogy for the value of formal education is post-adolescent language acquisition.
It is impossible to become fluent in a language by sitting in a class 5 hours a week. On the other hand, it's impossible for an adult to become fluent by mere immersion. So you combine the two: formal study to understand the structure of grammar, and (hopefully) immersion to make those lessons second nature. The formal instruction lets you make sense of the speech of natives in a way that merely listening and guessing at what they mean doesn't. It also offers you the opportunity to study rarely-used forms so that you aren't left guessing when you bump into them.
You can't be competent at any profession--engineer, doctor, lawyer, whatever--merely by going to school. Experience is essential. But mere experience is also inadequate, because unless you have a framework in which to insert your experience, you're left guessing a fair amount of the time. And of course, should you bump into a rare situation--an unusual disease, a rule against perpetuities problem--then having heard about it in school, even if you only remember enough to know you need to look it up, can save you from making a serious mistake.
Mike, You are an arrogant fuck to say that a college education makes you a better human being.
Knowledge may make someone a better human being.
College has very little to do with knowledge anymore.
According to the numbers I have seen (U.S. Census Bureau) only 25-27% of the adult population over age 25 has a BA/BS degree. The tone of the comments is that everyone is forced to go to college but the majority of people don't go to college. We might think the is because past generations did not go to college at the same rate as today. But even data for 25-35 year old's is a similar percentage with bachelors degrees.
A BA/BS is only used for one thing-To determine if you are trainable! As most people have pointed out here, the skills you gain with practical work experience is key to getting into the job or career field that you seek. I used the military to gain the skills I needed to go into the profession I'm currently working in. I have gone back to school, not because I need my degree to advance, but to check the box on my list of things to do. Even in my world, a Master's Degree will not get you promoted over someone who does not, it will only show that you have training. If a perosn can show that their real world training will benefit the company more than someone who does have a "Higher Education", they'll be selected. My 2 cents!
Kathryn: "But the liberal arts do have another purpose [...] an introduction to the life of the mind."
You don't even need the school for that, though. Buy books! Read them! Love them! Cherish them! Take the knowledge into your heart at a rate and manner determined by your heart! Between the public library and amazon.com, you can learn whatever you want, whenever you want, without all the stress and shame and fear of trying to get yourself to obey the teacher's commands, and feeling terrible when you can't force yourself to obey perfectly!
... you will forgive my outburst; I am still scarred--