generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fashion/recent-college-graduates-wait-for-their-real-careers-to-begin.html

(this is branching off discussion in the quiddities thread)

think everybody is devoting their energies to the retweeted thread

After college, he worked at an Apple Store in New York as a salesclerk and trainer, while furthering his music career in an experimental rock band.

beyond parody

euler keeps bringing up his state's 7k tuition as a value. in 1970 uc berkeley tuition was...$320.

the cost of education is going up because of:
a. administrative costs
b. unnecessary amenities (/'competition' for students)
c. student loan bubble / nobody is 'priced out' of college = no cost competition
d. belief that the state has less of a role in financing education, esp if a degree is a sound personal investment for someone

and without knowing his school name, I can bet that the tuition there is more than double what it was in 1990.

awkward pause

on the other thread remy said ``There's a bigger issue than the cost, though - the lack (or, often, perceived lack) of academic/writing/social/disability/ELL support and outreach for first-gen college attendees."

one of the reasons college costs have gone up so much is that we're hiring so much new staff, as opposed to (permanent) faculty (our salaries have hardly budged in years & are shite---my kids no longer qualify for reduced-price lunches this year but that's only b/c I got promoted). So I'm resistant to any suggestion that suggests we need more staff. Also I'm a first-gen American, first-gen college student, in fact one of maybe three in my extended family of say 40 people to have a college degree (& one of the others is my brother)---so my perspective is gonna be different re. first-gen college students needing support from universities in academic matters

in general in education as in all else, poverty's the issue, esp. in early childhood years; by college we can add value to people's already-in-place skills but we can't create those skills from scratch; only a parent or a community can do that.

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=67116

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide.

iatee I am sure our tuition here has way more than doubled since 1990, & that's shitty but as was said before, states have withdrawn support so we're doing the best we can.

right, but that 7k has to be put in perspective - it's not a permanent 'good deal', it's only cheap relative to other prices, and it's inevitably going up

A somewhat similar dynamic happened to the tail end of the baby boom generation, who attended college in mass numbers, although they paid less to do so.

Firstly, the leading edge of the boomers occupied all the available employment slots for college grads, leaving extremely slim pickings for the wave of boomers that followed them. Then the Reagan/Volcker recession shut down employment altogether for about 3 years. There were easily a hundred qualified applicants for any professional level job, however obscure the qualifications were.

Notably, when the yuppies emerged out fo the dust cloud of this free-for-all in the mid-80s, they tended to be the most competitive eye-gougers and back-biters of all. The less objectionable late boomers gave up and settled into carpentry or bartending types of jobs.

yeah, the UC schools (& other public schools in which I may have more of an interest soon if things go well) have less inexpensive tuition---semi-privatizing the universities is an ongoing thing.

still kind of amazed at the value of public universities in the USA though; bragging but my classes kick ass & they're only paying like $700 for a whole term of it! a good dinner out with a date is gonna cost you what, a 1/7 of that? true that a student has to handle it right; when I go teach in a hour or so I'm gonna see some dead eyes that remind me that some of these kids aren't getting anything out of this, & that it's their fault (b/c after only a week I can assure you I'm not fucking up yet).

euler is your school increasing enrollment at all?

in general in education as in all else, poverty's the issue, esp. in early childhood years; by college we can add value to people's already-in-place skills but we can't create those skills from scratch; only a parent or a community can do that.

But there's a way to 'correct' for some of those skills by offering fair support services. This is equitable, and right. Not everybody comes to college w/ the same background, but college could – potentially - close the gap between the struggling kids and the are-gonna-do-well-no-matter-what types. But I'm not even sure that 4-year college is the right answer, anyway, so maybe this is a moot point?

attendance is at a high this year but the prez/board of regents is keeping it at more or less stable levels, so we're only about 500 students up this year iirc

my #s seem a bit down wait-list-wise but my classes are all full so things seem ok

I'm not sure that four-year college is right for those students either, but I think a lot of the problem is that while the "go to college & ~find~ yourself" is great for upper-middle-class kids, I don't think it suits others so well.

fwiw I feel the same way about the sexual revolution

jeez I didn't find myself until about four years after college

also before you people tell me to get to work

a) I've got the stomach flu pretty wicked right now
b) taught 3 hrs yesterday & gonna do it again for an hour today
c) was an awesome Pete Sampras at the US Open moment yesterday, hoping to play like a champion again today

I thought you were tenured? it should be ilx+tennis 24/7 now

wait maybe some sleeping...and eating

remy otm - there is a huge disparity in the quality of education that a student can potentially get before college.

this article instantly reminded me of a nearly identical piece in Time Magazine from the early 90s about Generation X - over-educated, aimless, without economic prospects, debt-ridden, unlikely to scale the economic heights of their forebears, etc. I wonder if that is online somewhere...

haha yeah tenure but like Sampras I wanna keep rising high

yeah the thing is 'aimless college grads' has always been 'a thing', but right now we're in an economic downturn that's not comparable to anything else post-great depression xp

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that for students who require special accommodations, have either documented or undocumented LDs, speak mediocre English, need to take a slower, non-traditional (or interrupted) path through schools, or require additional mentorship or counseling, the the community college and state school system has often been welcoming, empowering and viable. Whether it's true or not, these students aren't perceiving the same help/options in these schools b/c of a one size fits all approach that now include a lot of more traditional students who need less in the way of support. For the school's bottom line, this is a good thing: accommodations cost money, and customarily the students who require them have a lower earning potential (as a group) than the students who don't, so why not focus on the most likely-to-be-successful students?

ah here it is

xp

"Reason: America needs them. Today's young adults are so scarce that their numbers could result in severe labor shortages in the coming decade."

yeah this part doesn't come up in many articles today

boomers kids are their own demographic bump, gen x was the lack of one

What worries parents, teachers and employers is that the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up. At a time when they should be graduating, entering the work force and starting families of their own, the twentysomething crowd is balking at those rites of passage. A prime reason is their recognition that the American Dream is much tougher to achieve after years of housing-price inflation and stagnant wages. Householders under the age of 25 were the only group during the 1980s to suffer a drop in income, a decline of 10%. One result: fully 75% of young males 18 to 24 years old are still living at home, the largest proportion since the Great Depression.

In a TIME/CNN poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, 65% of those surveyed agreed it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. While the majority of today's young adults think they have a strong chance of finding a well-paying and interesting job, 69% believe they will have more difficulty buying a house, and 52% say they will have less leisure time than their predecessors. Asked to describe their generation, 53% said the group is worried about the future.

69% believe they will have more difficulty buying a house, and 52% say they will have less leisure time than their predecessors.

that much turned out to be true!

Because they are fewer in number, today's young adults have the power to wreak havoc in the workplace. Companies are discovering that to win the best talent, they must cater to a young work force that is considered overly sensitive at best and lazy at worst. During the next several years, employers will have to double their recruiting efforts. According to American Demographics, the pool of entry-level workers 16 to 24 will shrink about 500,000 a year through 1995, to 21 million. These youngsters are starting to use their bargaining power to get more of what they feel is coming to them. They want flexibility, access to decision making and a return to the sacredness of work-free weekends. "I want a work environment concerned about my personal growth," says Jennifer Peters, 22, one of the youngest candidates ever to be admitted to the State Bar of California. "I don't want to go to work and feel I'll be burned out two or three years down the road."

seems a little different to me!

Euler what is your field?

yeah sure there are differences - I haven't read the article in 20 years fwiw

gen x: lazy
millennials: overeducated, prob a little lazy, mostly just fucked

that article feels more like "aimless 20 somethings not sure of what they want to do", today's version of "aimless 20 somethings WANT to do something but finding all doors shut"

yeah as far as I can tell In This Economy™ what used to be entry-level jobs all advertise as requiring 3 years experience. I somehow have gotten a few interviews anyway but every time one peters out I just get less interested in applying for more programming jobs and more interested in killing time until grad school.

I'm a phil-ah-soh-pher

which btw shouldn't be conflated with "the liberal arts" b/c our students aren't usually the dreamy-wanna-write-a-story types, rather they're the mass debater types & go on to do analytic work & typically get pretty well paid (unless they go to grad school obv)

you mean @ your school or philosophy majors in general

Not really involved in the discussion but here's a link that might be of interest - http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/08/31/historical-trends-in-college-tuition/

The linked post about the retained value of a college degree is also worth a look.

both xp unless we're talking continental philosophers w/ all that crit theory bullshit & that's just dreamy-wanna-write-a-story stuff that isn't gonna get you anywhere

obv I am a pawn of the status quo

I dunno I think their prospects aren't much different from english majors or whatever, they just have a higher tendency to go to law school

if I owned 'generic business' I would totally hire a bunch of philosophy majors tho, seems like an undervalued asset (as long as I didn't have to talk to them)

what if 'generic business' was a 'medicinal marijuana shop'

fwiw philosophy majors rank in the top three nationally on the LSAT, GMAT and GRE pretty much yearly; our only competition is physics & math iirc

xp lol

Got turned down for a job I had two interviews for today. FUCK THIS SHIT.

xps to Euler: see I don't like the idea of denigrating "the liberal arts" as a thing, I legitimately believe that the liberal arts (including liberal study of the sciences) are the foundation of a democratic society; this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education. College as a job-training-and-credentialing exercise is just going to become a worse and worse value proposition (though it honestly isn't now, as college grads are still outperforming non-college-grads in the job market, modulo debt I guess), especially because the academy moves so slowly that by the time it has figured out how to prepare students for the economy of 2011 it'll be 2038.

a hoy hoy: YEAH NO KIDDIN

this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education it's becoming less of this all the time

yeah I would like to see more discussion of the value of a liberal arts education itt. think a lot of ppl (though not all) who post to ILX prob have a degree in the liberal arts and went to liberal arts colleges?

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

my hs had it, I didn't take it

^^^we did and I managed to studiously avoid all of them

we also had an auto-repair type class, I think

the stuff I learned in my hs journalism class - particularly how to write, use a computer, and lay things out - came in much handier professionally than anything I learned in college, really. but liberal arts degrees/colleges are not really about learning a specific subject matter imho, they're about training your mind to think critically and work in different contexts.

I would definitely be making more money in the same industry I'm in now if I'd gotten an engineering degree, but I always hated math.

school is awful - full of false promises and useless work
memorization and paper achievements
any kind of real sense of desires to learn or create are put to the side

yeah 'critical thinking' is the rote response to people who question the value of a liberal arts education

I'm still trying to think through the true value of the ability to 'think critically' in the job market

dayo it was called the vocational wing in my hs

also folks, this is my line of work and i have a lot of relevant things to say, but i would really rather not discuss it publicly for a variety of reasons

xp - critical thinking is REALLY IMPORTANT esp if you don't have very good critical thinking skills

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

Was v sad when I had to give up woodshop b/c there was no room for it in the college-prep curriculum. It was down to shop or band, and marching band won.

Just think, I could have grown up to be a stoner!

I tend to take Dewey's line about the value of a liberal-arts-education in creating & nourishing a populace able to handle democracy

+ DFW's take in his Kenyon graduation address

oh I totally agree that critical thinking is implicitly and in and of itself a valuable skill, LL - but that's not how all employers see it

ps - i had shop class in middle school

it's an important skill to have as a human being, not as an employee

I think that the american liberal arts education actually contributes substantial economic value to this country - overall we had a much more adaptable job market in the late 20th century than most of the world. more engineers would be good too, but an economy can't be 50% engineers (and really would anyone want to live in a dystopia like that?) most contemporary jobs don't require specific training and in better economic times can be learned on-the-job.

said it in the other thread but the bigger problems are:
a. jobs! (I know underemployed engineers from good schools!)
b. cost

i do not work at a liberal arts school btw

liberal arts school can't really be blamed for 0 net job growth this month

last month, rather

schools

gonna put that one on the Ivies, as usual

wanna get some class resentment going on this thread also

ime the critical thinking tends to be "i wish i hadn't done a useless humanities degree"

The public university at which I work has increased tuition and enrollment geometrically in the last two years to compensate for evaporating state funding, with no commensurate strengthening of infrastructure.

The quality of students haven't changed much except I'm seeing more examples of mediocrities: girls getting psych degrees as a time killer before marriage because their parents press on them the importance of a college education, guys getting business degrees because, well, they want to start their own franchises, and journalism majors who don't realize how useless that degree is and always was.

true everywhere

an economy can't be 50% engineers (and really would anyone want to live in a dystopia like that?)

Would it be like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

working nights did not come in handy today. someone called me about an hour into my sleep (10? 11am?) and I gave off the just the most generic dozed pitch, can't even remember what company they were calling from.

lol @ 50% engineer economy; welcome to China :(

gonna put that one on the Ivies, as usual

wanna get some class resentment going on this thread also

― Euler, Friday, September 2, 2011 1:22 PM

ultimately we're being fucked by people in dc and wall street, lots of them went to ivies, all of them are rich, it's not completely hors-sujet

all we needs are farmers and abstract artists

problem with america is not enough grant woods

"school is awful - full of false promises and useless work
memorization and paper achievements
any kind of real sense of desires to learn or create are put to the side"

i really view this as a positive when applied to the evil ambitions of... a lot of people frankly. what other civilizing institutions do we have other than compulsory education? I agree with Thiel in the sense that a lot of motivated people would be personally, selfishly better off not pursuing advanced degrees and doing startups straight from high school, but I disagree that it's a net positive for society.

it seems weird that so mnay people spend so much money on rent/mortgage - seems like just money going to rich banker types instead of food, healthfcare etc

food and health care $ is also mostly going to evil rich people

Nunez - that was just my individual experience - I did however enjoy doodling in the margins of notebooks and dyadreamin

we all dreamed of dyao in school

really Mr Spock, cant we have a spciaety where people dont have to pay fuckin mortgages!

otm xp

btw just so you guys know -- the hammer is coming down on higher ed w/r/t assessment and accountability for their claims. the HLC has issued a whole new system of criteria for accreditation that is designed to force institutions to account for how their time and money is being spent.

fyi

that's mostly w/r/t for-profit schools, which isn't what this thread is really about (tho it is a pretty important subject)

no it's not
it's all schools that want to be accredited

"no it's not
it's all schools that want to be accredited"

are we to accept this wholly as a truth!

the new accreditation process will apply to all schools that wish to be accredited by the HLC (mine is not for profit)

I'll belive it when I see it - mind the menace of such schools!

fwiw philosophy majors rank in the top three nationally on the LSAT, GMAT and GRE pretty much yearly; our only competition is physics & math iirc

lool

i'm interested in your 'just go to a state school argument' because how much does that then start closing doors to possible future careers? or at least certain career paths? i mean the % of ppl who are ever going to sit on the supreme court or be an svp of an investment bank or write for the simpsons or w/e is negligible already but the idea that anyone who cant afford/doesnt want to risk huge debt to pay for a private school shldn't even dream of it is p dispiriting

i mean 'private colleges are really expensive so don't go to them' is reasonable advice except: public schools are getting more expensive, only have so many spaces and is at odds w/ the idea that at least certain private schools are the 'only way' to make it certain professions. also at my large public university the % of tenured professors who did not attend an elite private college is hanging right around 15% w/ most of the coming from oxbridge/my own school. so, yknow...

you don't really have a choice about believing it -- the new accreditation process was released at the 2011 HLC conference, so i can confirm that it's real

the lengths to which some schools will go to conceal their poor job placement numbers/career services? that i can't really say. but reporting it is a part of institutional assessment, and everyone has to do it.

i still dont understand this 'private schools are too expensive' thing -- it was much MORE affordable for me to go to a private liberal arts school than a public one

"you don't really have a choice about believing it -- the new accreditation process was released at the 2011 HLC conference, so i can confirm that it's real"

these things are always a red herring

there's also a gap growing w/r/t private schools in that the best schools can all pretty much give full-rides to the poor/middle class kids they admit. I think going to a no-name local private school is prob the worst deal you can get right now tho. xp

well that's if you go to a good private liberal arts school with a generous financial need policy xp to deej

a lot of third, fourth tier 'private liberal arts' colleges out there that will provide you w/ the same experience but for which you will probably have to finance your entire experience with loan money if you can't pay it upfront

yeah deej is point in case that this can really depend on someone's situation, which makes it even harder to talk about. but *overall* private schools are considerably more expensive.

haha basically what iatee said

"Creating the Climate for Continuous Learning is a distinct Strategy Forum intended specifically for institutions already experienced with AQIP. This Strategy Forum requires an institution to have submitted a Systems Portfolio to AQIP, undergone a Systems Appraisal, and received and analyzed its Systems Appraisal Feedback Report. Registration is open."

listen to this - lifted RIGHT OFF THEIR SITE

did you c/p that randomly or what

haha

:(

Yeah I had a friend in HS who went to Duke of all places because with financial aid it was cheaper than UVA. The financial aid budget is the biggest fiscal concern at my college; our operating budget was like 85% tuition and fees every year (compared to places that have much larger endowments and draw on them for operating budget every year). Basically the full-pay students fund financial aid every year for the ones getting an average like 50% discount on the sticker price.

"Principles of Good Practice in Adult Degree Completion Programs
In order to facilitate the evaluation of adult degree completion programs in member institutions, the Board of Trustees has adopted a set of kick-ass principles developed by a special task force, as a framework for program implementation. These principles also are used by team members in evaluating patterns of evidence during accreditation reviews."

haha

it's like a black hole of jargon over there

is this from univ. of utility data?

No College Student Left Behind is just around the corner, once you pass the nationally applied gen ed integrated learning objectives that seem imminent :-/

(i sincerely hope i'm wrong about that btw)

"These best practices have been developed by the regional accrediting commissions in response to the emergence of technologically mediated instruction offered at a distance as an important component of higher education. CAn I get a what what!? Expressing in detail what currently constitutes best practice in distance education, specifically electronically offered degree and certificate programs, shit is whack, they seek to address concerns that regional accreditation standards are not relevant to the new distributed learning environments, especially when those environments are experienced by offcampus students."

No College Student Left Behind is just around the corner, once you pass the nationally applied gen ed integrated learning objectives that seem imminent :-/

I think a better situation would be a national credentialing system - if you graduate w/ an BA (or if you don't) you should have to take and pass a competitive national test for your field. some sort of post-college (or college alternative) skills and intelligence measure. having an alternate way to prove yourself would eventually take some pressure of people going to college just for the sake of going to college.

tho fwiw self-taught lawyers still can't practice if the pass the bar etc.

ah yes, but who will design that test
that is the terrifying question (for me, at least)

its nicer to have to pass a test than pass a workload

you would say that

hope self-taught doctors are barred too

take some pressure off* xp

"The Commission invites participation in of one seven Regional Forums on Commission Initiatives. Think you can bring it? These forums provide the opportunity to hear about proposed changes in the Criteria for Accreditation and the development and implementation of the new Open Pathway model for continued accreditation, and to provide comments, ask questions, and raise issues.Also booty blast session and 1$ drafts"

if a self-taught doctor can pass the same test as one who had to spend 200k to learn that stuff, not sure what the problem would be. obv doctors require hospital and lab experience and the institutions for this alternative don't exist. but they could.

there's also a gap growing w/r/t private schools in that the best schools can all pretty much give full-rides to the poor/middle class kids they admit. I think going to a no-name local private school is prob the worst deal you can get right now tho. xp

― iatee, Friday, September 2, 2011 11:49 AM (17 minutes ago)

yeah, this wasn't quite the case 20 years ago, but the disparity was pretty large, in that my first choice college, while it may have given me a pre-eminent proto-hipster education, was a 2nd/3rd tier liberal arts college that waitlisted me for financial aid, and my second choice college gave me 1/2 a free ride, and that's how i ended up at an ivy.

I think a better situation would be a national credentialing system - if you graduate w/ an BA (or if you don't) you should have to take and pass a competitive national test for your field. some sort of post-college (or college alternative) skills and intelligence measure. this isn't even well-implemented for high schools yet, i think colleges doing something like this is years/decades off. not to mention that a lot of fields can't be measured using a 'competitive national test' b/c education doesn't work like that.

having an alternate way to prove yourself would eventually take some pressure of people going to college just for the sake of going to college. - yes, absolutely.

sarahel was your first choice sarahelawrence

(sorry I actually don't want to know the answer to that)

xp - it was Reed College in Portlandia

fwiw I didn't know quite what I wanted to do and was mystified by all the college application stuff so while my peers had parents who were helping them around on it or looking at schools I felt oddly guilty -- I didn't know what I wanted to do, and that would help me pick a school, so why am I going to spend money and time applying to all these schools?

It didn't take me too long to figure out I was wrong once I was in college, but then I was all mopey and just tried to explain this to my parents so it'd count in for my sister, but then she ended up going to the state university, too, since she had reasons to stay close at the time and they gave her a full ride scholarship

kinda lol at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for such a huge tutiotn and there are no grades just at the end of the semester "pass or fail" based on them looking at your stuff - why pay for that

It's a decent article, though who the fuck thought that the example "girl gets swept into a fairly popular American rock band" was somehow
even remotely appropriate? Maybe a reunited LCD Soundsystem will save me from my temp job?

I'm certainly jaded after college and I find the most terrible thing about it is my current career path. I was able to get a student
employment job working medical admin and have since been bouncing from temp admin job to temp admin job for the past three years.
I can't complain about being gainfully employed, but the fact that I'm 26 with an MA and was only able to afford to turn my hot water on a month ago
is certainly depressing. Lately I've taken to working on my writing as a full time job. Though I'm reaching mixed success with that, it at least makes me feel like I'm not wasting the years I put into school.

One though I keep having is that despite my ambivalence about having children (I don't believe I should reproduce personally, and adoption is a lot more of an ordeal than signing up for free baby delivery), I will be saving for their hypothetical college educations until I am quite positive that they are never going to manifest themselves in my life. Or my sister's life.

(xp to Latham) I dunno, it kind of makes sense to me? Why should you be graded on your output as a Masters' candidate artist? You either do the work or you don't, and the feedback is valuable but the grade is irrelevent.

well then I will pass or fail you and your work for 30$ - don't worry - I'm awesome

i'm interested in your 'just go to a state school argument' because how much does that then start closing doors to possible future careers? or at least certain career paths? i mean the % of ppl who are ever going to sit on the supreme court or be an svp of an investment bank or write for the simpsons or w/e is negligible already but the idea that anyone who cant afford/doesnt want to risk huge debt to pay for a private school shldn't even dream of it is p dispiriting

There's another thread about this somewhere - I remember posting a study from five or six years ago that looked at the socioeconomic class of students who attend the top-tier colleges (public and private) - 75% were drawn from the top-quarter of the socioeconomic scale, 3% from the bottom quarter.

Given the representation of those institutions in the arts, upper echelons of the business world, politics, etc., it's essentially a self-perpetuating oligarchy.

It's one reason I didn't finish my fine arts degree from a run of the mill public 'national research university' (UT-Arlington, god knows how national it actually is) - what the fuck does that piece of paper do for me? Am I really competitive getting into a good MFA program vs someone with lesser work from SVA/an Ivy/etc.?

in the art world that presumably these students are preparing for, it really is often just an issue of pass/fail

is there an art world anymore?

what is art?

last year, i participated in a group discussion of art school MFA students and recent grads about a "just arts economy." it was very frustrating and i felt like an asshole.

must have been painful

what i meant to ask was whether the conversation flowed smooth and easy, or was hard and uncomfortable?

the upshot was that 90% of them were upset that they had paid $30k-$40k a year in tuition and were not making a living as artists.

I mean I think the "art world" was this rich patron thing that eventually just become irrelevant - Andy Wrhol was the last vestige IMO

my friend Sean, who has an MFA and makes a living as a financial planner tried to raise the issue of supply and demand, but they shot it down as hegemonical bs or something like that.

There are more obscenely rich people today than when Warhol was alive.

Oh no, there still some very wealthy people supporting artists. I think we call them "trustafarians" now.

"the upshot was that 90% of them were upset that they had paid $30k-$40k a year in tuition and were not making a living as artists."

Shocker.

I call them "people who should be gving ME money instead to make my shitty songs"

http://www.meca.edu/news/support-meca
actually we have one here - Roxxame Quimby

I'm kind of sad that democratizing art via the Internet has kind of taken the form of 20x200 (and similar), which is okay for photography but renders everything else they put out more decoration than art (because it's all just scans and inkjet prints, more like a poster you buy at the mall than 'art' with any kind of engagement with the artist).

yeah like this is why we can't be telling people that college is a purely economic decision (even though the BLS indicates that it still has that effect). If you want to spend four years training as an artist, that is awesome and you might have a great time, but nobody should be telling you that you are going to graduate into a well-paying sculpture job.

I was in "the art world" allot at least in academics as a youngster and now I am fille dwith a sense of fear and loathing when ever I pass Maine COllege of Art

Is anyone telling sculpture students that? Cuz that would be truly irresponsible.

do you know what they do? ... they ask your for an ARTISTS STATEMENT

COL!!! (crying out loud)

yeah s'what I'm saying, I don't know if anyone is telling them that, but cf. sarahel's anecdote; plenty of people still have an expectation that going to college and learning a lot about something could launch them into a career doing that thing. whereas to actually make that work out you need a lot of luck and tenacity.

genius art IMO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUpWMN9Rm5Q

I don't know anyone who went to or considered going to a high-dollar art school (grad or undergrad) who thought of it as a wise investment monetarily. They either considered the debt and didn't care, had family money enough to not give a shit, or were too starry-eyed to consider the implications - but none of them thought it was a guarantee of income afterward.

One of my first photo professors has been a "senior lecturer" for a decade, which cured me of any desire to get my MFA and try to find a teaching job.

hey at least he has a job

ALIHAJ - "at least I havea job" is everyone's current self-soothe

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/perm.php?c=38&q=22

maybe the difference between this generation and Gen X is that Gen X art students had a more realistic perspective on working as waiters and strippers to support themselves financially.

ok let me get to Lamp's post above:

i'm interested in your 'just go to a state school argument' because how much does that then start closing doors to possible future careers? or at least certain career paths? i mean the % of ppl who are ever going to sit on the supreme court or be an svp of an investment bank or write for the simpsons or w/e is negligible already but the idea that anyone who cant afford/doesnt want to risk huge debt to pay for a private school shldn't even dream of it is p dispiriting

Who's to say whether a public school undergrad can't end up on the Supreme Court? Scalia went to Georgetown, which is quite a bit worse than the top public universities in America. but anxiety about closing doors on certain ~dreamy~ careers is legit---you're weighing risks when you make these choices, & you might think massive debt is worth the risk in order to get a chance, no matter how remote, of such a career. Or you might not! My argument is that aside from those dreamy choices, a public degree can be/generally is (unless drugs/laziness/etc) just as valuable as a private degree. To the extent that it's not, it's because "top" hs prospects choose private schools w/ big debt b/c they think those degrees signal ~success~. & then they get articles like the one atop this thread written about them.

i mean 'private colleges are really expensive so don't go to them' is reasonable advice except: public schools are getting more expensive, only have so many spaces and is at odds w/ the idea that at least certain private schools are the 'only way' to make it certain professions. also at my large public university the % of tenured professors who did not attend an elite private college is hanging right around 15% w/ most of the coming from oxbridge/my own school. so, yknow...

yeah I mean this discussion is hard b/c things depend on the locale. like the UC system has to reject pretty good people...or send them to Davis! whereas in other states, of the flyover type, we have lots of spots, & our grads go on to do lots of terrific things, albeit generally not on the coasts (which I know is a basic good to many of you). But another reply: I don't know which "certain professions" you have in mind; same as the ones above? most of my (fellow private school) undergrad friends have tech jobs of one sort or another, or are lawyers. Those are pretty normal upper-ish-middle-class things to do. I tend to worry more about "average" (upper-ish-)middle class people's aspirations; dreamers oughta know they run big risks no matter what school they choose.

lastly: in my world of tenured professors no one knows or cares where any one went to undergrad, & I've sat on several hiring committees in recent years.

nothing wrong with being a stripper, that IS art

like the UC system has to reject pretty good people...or send them to Davis!

The UC system and the CA State system have doubled or tripled tuition and fees in the past decade! If I were going to grad school now, there's no way that i'd be able to pay even part-time tuition with wages from a part-time job (which is what i did, except for my thesis semester)

I really never hear good things about California's governance, economy, zoning laws, or flammability at this point.

I don't know anyone who went to or considered going to a high-dollar art school (grad or undergrad) who thought of it as a wise investment monetarily. They either considered the debt and didn't care, had family money enough to not give a shit, or were too starry-eyed to consider the implications - but none of them thought it was a guarantee of income afterward.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Friday, September 2, 2011 12:47 PM (4 minutes ago

I went to a high-dollar art school (albeit writing for screen/ tv) and thought - based on the statistics quoted by the program that it would be a wise investment. I considered the debt, did care, was reassured by the financial advisers at the school, and went for it. Never recouped, not even close.

http://hanlepedia.wikia.com/wiki/Art

lol

The thing is, my writing career probably would have been successful if I'd had 3-5 years after graduation to focus on it intently, w/o distraction and as a full-time profession. Some of the people in my graduating class did: and they were successful or are becoming very wealthy/respected/acknowledged now. But I was poor going in, poorer coming out, and unable to devote myself sufficiently to the pursuit for which I'd gone to school . So while the employment statistics (quoted as like 50% success rate, IIRC) I was told upon entry be accurate, and an okay gamble, the odds of me succeeding were always a lot, lot lower.

"I went to a high-dollar art school (albeit writing for screen/ tv)"

brothers in foolishness arms.

Mike Schmidt had no use for art school
http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt316/soydevon/101-mike-schmidt-action-front.jpg

xp - yeah, my next door neighbor freshman year did that (the intent focus w/out distraction), i did not. She is now a celebrated playwright. I work in accounting.

The thing is, my writing career probably would have been successful if I'd had 3-5 years after graduation to focus on it intently, w/o distraction and as a full-time profession.

couldn't you have found a really cheap place to live though--like in a weird part of the country, lived there, worked on your craft for a few years? just wondering/thinking out loud.

like you know

http://www.rentals.com/Kansas/Wichita/

is that a recent trend, or one making a resurgence -- "community discussions" about establishing artist/writer colonies in cheap areas of the US? 10 years ago everyone was talking about Detroit. Now I think it's South Dakota.

I think they just call it the ghetto - oh wrong thread

couldn't you have found a really cheap place to live though--like in a weird part of the country, lived there, worked on your craft for a few years? just wondering/thinking out loud.

I did learn a lot when I was there – I got to make films, visit sets, talk to people who'd worked inside the industry, spend time with like-minded writers, chat it up in targeted groups and be mentored by "industry insders" while receiving incredibly profound and honest feedback. I paid a lot for 'access' and was provided it unstintingly. Maybe if I were more of a, err, go-getter, I could have arranged that access on my own and written and honed my craft for 4 years. But, honestly, I don't have anything negative to say about the quality of my education - it was good, and I don't regret it. I do regret not understanding the necessity of stockpiling $$$ or finding a crap job to let me work full-time on the writing after I left. I dislike that there wasn't a little caveat underneath the "50% of graduates work in the field of TV/film in ten years" that said "and they are often working in it when they enter/have family connections/come from wealthy backgrounds that allow them a single-minded pursuit of their craft" but really that is not too realistic to expect.

live in Mom's cellar

There was a short documentary (sponsored by a skate brand?) recently about Detroit as artist's colony, so I think that's still often talked about.

the whoel city of detroit? thats too much art

LG could you plz stop dropping dubious lols into this thread with every other post?

my heart just jumped into my throat

LG could you plz stop dropping dubious lols into this every thread with every other post?

there is nothing dubious about anything I do

xp - yeah, my next door neighbor freshman year did that (the intent focus w/out distraction), i did not. She is now a celebrated playwright. I work in accounting.

― sarahel, Friday, September 2, 2011 4:11 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

heh there's a cousin in my family who inherited a nice chunk of change, spent several years devoting himself to writing, and is now an optometrist

holy crap, sarahel, was your next door neighbor freshman year sarah ruehl????

ruhl

ruhl roh

lol @ 50% engineer economy; welcome to China :(

― dayo, Friday, 2 September 2011 13:24 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Leaving non-vocation college education aside, which is definitely valuable and enriching. There is an oversupply of MBAs and JDs and an undersupply of Engineers in the US. If you pick an oversubscribed field you have to accept the risk that you won't get to practice what you train for.

As a side note I was very interested to hear recently that Ernst and Young (big four Accountancy firm) was hiring straight from A-Level in the UK and guaranteeing that salaries would match or exceed those of incoming graduates after 3 years. An apprenticeship by other means.

writing's so good that he has to optometrize you so you fully appreciate it

accounting is the ultimate "hey the world will always need ___________" job

I live in a building that is slowly becoming an artists colony ie everyone young is now on unemployment

I thought that was undertaker-ing. xp

you don't have to go to school to become an undertaker

oh wait you do

http://www.ehow.com/how_8117_become-mortician.html

You thought morticians didn't have to be trained/licensed?!

you do! unless you can APPRENTICE.

i actually turned down a chance to become an apprentice undertaker a few years back.

my 12th grade guidance counselor's degree was in mortuary sciences, which explains his cold handshake.

btw mortuary biz doing as shitty as everything else these days according to my uncle.

xp but how would you explain his death erection?

You thought morticians didn't have to be trained/licensed?!

― Halal Spaceboy (WmC), Friday, September 2, 2011 4:38 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

seems pretty easy - shovel the corpse into a furnace, collect $200

btw mortuary biz doing as shitty as everything else these days according to my uncle.

we can fix this by raising the Social Security age.

not gonna lie though -- going by dude's house, mortuary game is tight during times of plenty when people can afford those amenties like a coffin and a plot.

maybe he keeps all his money in the vault... the cold vault.

pry the money from his cold dead hands

lastly: in my world of tenured professors no one knows or cares where any one went to undergrad, & I've sat on several hiring committees in recent years.

well being a lot closer to admissions than to tenure i feel like 'people' care at least a little. but really, and even if 'tenured professor' is approaching the type of rarified position currently occupied by like head of WME, it was more an attempt to test a basic assumption i have against some easily accessible real world data. and as another anecdote my dad was a senior executive on wall street and weve talked abt this a little: at some point it doesnt matter if you went to princeton or u nebraska, what matters is the work youve done for the firm. if they were considering promoting someone to vp they wouldnt consider undergrad at all. but a hell of lot more candidates for vp went to princeton than u nebraska
i guess my point is: i dont think going to u michigan or uva or any other well regarded state school makes it impossible to work on wall street or at a top law firm or management consulting firm or think tank or entertainment conglomerate or talent agency or government agency but i think it makes it harder? and maybe its a good trade to simply pay less tuition and have to shine a little brighter and work a little harder than a harvard alumni would? but i think the problem is the perception that things are made easier and that makes it harder to make the best choice as a 17 yo? like:

My argument is that aside from those dreamy choices, a public degree can be/generally is (unless drugs/laziness/etc) just as valuable as a private degree. To the extent that it's not, it's because "top" hs prospects choose private schools w/ big debt b/c they think those degrees signal ~success~. & then they get articles like the one atop this thread written about them.

but to what extent are smart, ambitious hs students to blame for the sort of signaling thats going on here? this is a p hardnosed calculation for someone to be making at this point in their lives, yknow?

there is also the perception that "you only do this once, so make it count" wrt going to college, somehow makes the debt 'worth it'

i think i do miss not being able to hang around old-money types by not going to a private school. that's a magical opportunity lost to me, like having a unicorn for a roommate, so maybe harry potter is to blame for this aura around private school?

horseshoe: yes, that's who it was.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/president-obama-there-is-no-engineer-shortage/2011/09/01/gIQADpmpuJ_story.html

this is a big problem

And, sadly, our top engineering graduates don’t always become engineers. They move into finance or management consulting — both of which pay far higher salaries than engineering. I have seen the dilemma that my engineering students at at Duke University have faced. Do they take a job in civil engineering that pays $70,000, or join big Wall Street financial firm and make $120,000? With the hefty student loans that hang over their heads, most have made the financially sensible decision. In some years, half of our graduates have ended up taking jobs outside of engineering. Instead of developing new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources and ways to sustain the environment, my most brilliant students are designing new ways to help our investment banks engineer the financial system.

"Run the World (Goldman Sachs)"

my college was basically a feeder school for goldman sachs

I think every college is a feeder school for goldman sachs

it isn't gonna win me any friends, i know, but i've gotta admit that i actually have major thorny ethical issues w/ a lot of MBAs going to work for these big bank/finance firms, even in lowly "respectable" capacities.

it's not just MBAs that go to work for big bank/finance firms! lots of undergrads go straight from college. it kinda sucks but big banks/finance firms are probably one of the last 'meritocratic' hirers left in America. fuckers

yeah, true. communications/political science majors were the first ones drafted from my undergrad.

horseshoe: yes, that's who it was.

― sarahel, Friday, September 2, 2011 6:27 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh what is she like i am mildly obsessed with her

as somebody who knew that getting the degrees i did wasn't going to make me a millionaire or anything, i still think that i learned quite a bit and gained a fair amount of insight/entre into certain worlds— most are arts-related, but that's what i dig, so whatever.

what i resent is that no one will hire me. at this point, i'm working on a business plan with a lawyer who wants to start this unique research agglomeration site for other lawyers, as i have worked as a paralegal in the past, and can zoom around WestLaw and LexisNexis etc. also, duh, i know the internet better than most lawyers above the age of 35.

(BTW— having training and experience as a paralegal and legal researcher means nothing if you did it on the other side of the country, as i have found out the hard way :( )

i guess my point is: i dont think going to u michigan or uva or any other well regarded state school makes it impossible to work on wall street or at a top law firm or management consulting firm or think tank or entertainment conglomerate or talent agency or government agency but i think it makes it harder? and maybe its a good trade to simply pay less tuition and have to shine a little brighter and work a little harder than a harvard alumni would? but i think the problem is the perception that things are made easier and that makes it harder to make the best choice as a 17 yo?

I feel like mich/uva are exceptions - they're generally considered 'better' than all but a handful of private schools and their student body composition is pretty similar to those private schools. but I think focusing too much on them is misleading too, cause these days all the schools 'better' than them offer substantial aid. most 18 y/o's aren't blessed w/ that kinda decision to begin with - they have to make much more subtle calculations. harvard vs. umich is easy - howbout, idk, rutgers vs. bard? for someone 100% intent on going into certain fields, grad school, med school, the private school is generally a safer decision, even if it means massive debt. for someone who just wants to work an office job, the marginal gain might not be worth it. but most people don't know what they want to do w/ the rest of their lives at 18, and these calculations can get pretty complex.

why we allow 18 y/os make complex financial analysis w/ 100s of thousands of dollars, idk.

er, why we allow them to do complex financial analysis*

^^ otm

If a kid right out of high school up and decided to buy a house (expensive car, condo, whatever is comparable) people would be puzzled, but commit to likely borrow that much cash for school and it's like "oh, that's cool."

well, an expensive car is a horrible investment

you can't sell your degree back

a BA from somewhere is almost always 'worth it' but there are no shortage of graduate degrees - many from 'top colleges' - that are worse investments than an expensive car

i dunno i think you can come up w/ a better example. a car is pretty much the worst expensive investment you can make

as soon as you drive off the lot etc etc

well yes, also morally

but I mean if you live in sprawlsville and need to get to your job, a cheap car is an investment that allows you to get to your job, the actual value of the car is going to go down but that's not the reason you bought it

and if you buy an expensive car, it's also not because you think it's going to increase in value. you buy it for social reasons, personal reasons, display name reasons, also to get places. but if you lose your job you can sell it. it's worth something as an object.

whereas college degrees - many of which cost as much as expensive cars - *are* generally considered financial investments. I buy degree X because it will increase my earnings potential in the long-run. (also cause it's fun to go to college, I want to meet girls, whatever, but if the investment factor wasn't there it'd be hard to justify the price. whereas expensive cars are veblen goods - people want them because of what they represent, not because a 100k car is gonna get you to work better than a 20k car)

well i just mean the resale value on cars is much worse than like any other product.

my technics have if anything gone up since i bought them, in contrast

I was going to say mortgage but the original nytimes thread reminded me real estate is way more expensive than $100-200k in a lot of places

whereas college degrees - many of which cost as much as expensive cars - *are* generally considered financial investments. I buy degree X because it will increase my earnings potential in the long-run. (also cause it's fun to go to college, I want to meet girls, whatever, but if the investment factor wasn't there it'd be hard to justify the price. whereas expensive cars are veblen goods - people want them because of what they represent, not because a 100k car is gonna get you to work better than a 20k car)

― iatee, Friday, September 2, 2011 8:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think id argue ppl go to college for similar reasons as buying a car -- what a degree represents, the status it confers, etc

(in addition to the investment)

I think that's true, but removing that factor from the 'financial investment' factor is difficult because they're related - do you want to go to college to fit in w/ the educated / upper middle class, or because it's historically the way people end up educated and upper middle class?

I mean, how much does a dartmouth degree impress people if you're 40 and you make minimum wage?

posts that hit a little too close to home

:( sorry I was trying to pick someplace nobody here went

haha i didn't go there also this thread is otm

I went to a tier 9 public school and I have a good job and all this shit about my generation being broke and unemployed/underemployed makes me feel guilty in one part, and in three parts just incredibly incredibly fortunate

I say good job in the sense that I make a living and I love what I do, I'm not pulling engineer or Goldman sax money by any means

fyi i am a college dropout livin the dream of a stable, reasonably paid (i live fine in brooklyn) job in retail.

also imo college was the biggest waste of time/money ever.

and i learned way more abt myself & how to interface with the world thru day-to-day living in nyc than i did in the classroom.

(i learned very little in terms of 'knowledge' at school outside of a few classes--one on science & ethics and another on middle eastern music.)

people should get a degree just for surviving in nyc imo

also otm in that i do feel incredibly fortunate that i have a job i don't hate in a field that interests me, when tons of the folks i went to school with remain unemployed or employed in positions they loathe. xpppppp

(i learned very little in terms of 'knowledge' at school outside of a few classes--one on science & ethics and another on middle eastern music.)

I learned a lot in college, in terms of knowledge. but i learn most by talking/discussing, and i was blindly fortunate to choose a school that made chatter the dominant form of instruction. But ... I learned a lot more from the social experience than the academic, and a lot of it was kind of ugly growing up and making mistakes. And I got very bad grades, mostly. But I don't regret it. I wouldn't have survived in a city, not at 18, not at 19...

I guess I'm saying 'different strokes' with a lot more words.

I posted this in the other thread but I think it's good so everyone shoudl read it cause it dispels the myth of 'you get a BA to learn valuable knowledge and skills': http://www.quickanded.com/2011/05/is-higher-education-a-bubble-fraud-conspiracy-ponzi-scheme-part-ii.html

it's all signals man. well, not all, and not for everyone. but mostly.

Yeah, another flavor to all of this is that since, what, world war II, stating the obvious truth that "college isn't for everybody" has had a sort of reactionary and anti-democratic flavor; untold effort has been expended by K-12 educators to get kids from underrepresented backgrounds into college. None of those folks are going to talk to you about why college might turn out to be a waste of time and money.

well sure. i think a lot of my college experience was impacted by my fairly negative attitude & overall disappointment with the way things actually were--mandatory critical writing classes at a 10th grade level, professors more interested in teaching you ~how to approach things~ than the specifics of those things, etc. idk, weird time in my life.xp 2 remy re: diff strokes

Finance interns make an average of about $13,000 for their ~10 week summer program. And they still complain about having to sometimes file.

I think what we're getting at here is that college can be good for signaling and can also even be good for the idealistic hippie academic reasons that some of us still like to believe in, but a lot of 18 year olds don't know what they want out of the process and aren't provided with information that might help them make the most of their time and their or their parents' money.

I'm an example--I've dropped (or been thrown) out of higher ed four times starting when I was 19.

harvard vs. umich is easy - howbout, idk, rutgers vs. bard? for someone 100% intent on going into certain fields, grad school, med school, the private school is generally a safer decision, even if it means massive debt. for someone who just wants to work an office job, the marginal gain might not be worth it. but most people don't know what they want to do w/ the rest of their lives at 18, and these calculations can get pretty complex.

― iatee, Friday, September 2, 2011 8:57 PM Bookmark

I'm pretty sure this is just not true, i.e. you would probably stand just as good a chance for law school/MBA/med school/PhD programs and most fields coming out of Rutgers as Bard. I could see Bard maybe giving you an edge in some field like media or the arts, where cultural capital is highly valued, but those fields pay jack anyway.

bard was a bad example, I was just trying to think of a regional 'decent' liberal arts school

anything on bottom half of this list would be better: http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf

anyway talking to one of my friends who (after months of desperation) just yesterday got a pretty good gov't job. was the peace corps job fair and not her elite university that got her a job, in the end.

btw something worth considering is that people with BAs or higher have an unemployment rate of 4.3

not that i dont agree that theres something "wrong" with the system, but unemployment rises precipitously the less education you have. which makes college seem like a not-horrible investment. depending on how much youre paying for it!

for reference: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

also cards on the table i am a liberal weenie type who would like everyone to go to college for the sake of going to college, what is the point of living in the richest and most technologically complex society on the planet if were not at least making the effort to give everyone the tools to talk about good books

I borrowed $160000 so I could learn how to talk about what I talk about when I talk about running

actually that wasn't a very good book sorry

but at least "you" have a job!

I borrowed 160000 so I could work in a cafe and listen to other people talk about how to talk about what I talk about when I talk about running

DAYO!!!!! my dear boy

if I were the president
I would wave a magic student loan forgiveness wand

then everybody could join an indie rock band

they don't have to,they could be rappers, or noise bands, or musical theater dudes, I mean the world is your oyster without student loans

you could become a dockworker!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/can-the-middle-class-be-saved/8600/?single_page=true

still making my way through this article, not exclusively about college grads but does contain this

The return on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income stratification. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. Nearly 2 million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that’s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings.

Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral (degrees), in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.”

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Without doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, on a relative basis, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high. But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts, incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing badly,” says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”

from the same article, re: degree creep

All of that said, the overall pattern of change in the U.S. labor market suggests that in the next decade or more, a larger proportion of Americans may need to take work in occupations that have historically required little skill and paid low wages. Analysis by David Autor indicates that from 1999 to 2007, low-skill jobs grew substantially as a share of all jobs in the United States. And while the lion’s share of jobs lost during the recession were middle-skill jobs, job growth since then has been tilted steeply toward the bottom of the economy; according to a survey by the National Employment Law Project, three-quarters of American job growth in 2010 came within industries paying, on average, less than $15 an hour. One of the largest challenges that Americans will face in the coming years will be doing what we can to make the jobs that have traditionally been near the bottom of the economy better, more secure, and more fulfilling—in other words, more like middle-class jobs.

also cards on the table i am a liberal weenie type who would like everyone to go to college for the sake of going to college, what is the point of living in the richest and most technologically complex society on the planet if were not at least making the effort to give everyone the tools to talk about good books

I think this is true, but there's no reason it has to be done using today's college education structure. I mean we're operating w/ a basic model that's been around for centuries (okay it's a lot different today, but we've inherited the overall structure), not because it's the best of all possible ways to teach 18 year olds how to talk about books / create signals for the job market, but more because...well, it's there. in 2011 it still gets the job done. a BA is still a good investment, overall, I agree. but if you look at the trends w/r/t cost, value, risk - I don't think our current system is on a sustainable path. the best comparison is w/ our health care system.

another old blog post by the same author:

http://www.quickanded.com/2010/08/uc-world.html

basically the problem w/ online education today is that it lacks rigor, post-degree signaling, and it's mostly run by evil for-profit companies. but can you, in theory, get the equivalent of a *college education* online? absolutely. (this is harder w/ science and lab courses, but I suppose some institution could create a private lab an online student could go to.)

but basically, if college is just about 'learning how to talk about good books', there's no reason why we can't create a cheap, scalable way for people to learn the same stuff.

yes i agree with all of that!

"but can you, in theory, get the equivalent of a *college education* online? absolutely"

stomach flu worse today so p much all I can manage is "lol"

evidence-less techno Utopianism

I mean it's coming but the point is that it's gonna be shitty, cheap but shitty, & we'll make big money off it & maybe it'll be good enough for a lot of shitty white-ish collar work but that's not the Dewey dream & im gonna put my stake in that dream over further cheap atomized memorization in order to serve the ruling class

yeah I'm sure you can get one kind of college education through online services, but will it be equivalent to the traditional idea of a college education? by what metrics will you measure this?

what's the evidence that our current system is actually working when it comes to giving someone 4 years of education? it appears to be performing worse than ever:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much

45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.

you don't think an online model can compete with...this?

well I guess that depends on what your goal is - to outperform middle of the pack 4 year colleges, or to approximate the kind of education offered at a top tier school

Theoretically this is possible, because the technology is there but

a) the interaction between students/student-and-teacher will always be mediated, and
b) the price will be roughly equivalent to traditional school b/c the model for 'quality education' will always be plain ol' college, not some other (better, more equitable and Dewean ideal) system of learning and dissemination of material
c) an online degree of any merit whatsoever requires roughly the same amount of attention and ability from professors, TAs, and adminstrative staff.

So there is an argument to be made about accessibility and customizability of a degree done online, and its but if it's done correctly it is neither cost-saving (at least for labor and materials) nor time-saving.

also not sure how an online model would ever replicate the social aspect of college, which is not really easy to quantify!

I'm involved in the tests they're talking about; we're implementing the collegiate learning whatever this year. It tests skills that ought to have taught in elementary school (crit thinking etc). Let's work on stuff there! and in pre-k

also I read ilx & see how seriously a decently smart community took college, imagine what others are like. A lot of people aren't ready for college at 18

like should we just dumb things down? What's the point?

or to approximate the kind of education offered at a top tier school

Why would you need to do this for people who otherwise might not go to college at all? A much less rigorous level of direction toward thinking/reasoning/critical skills would be just fine, probably. This is not a slur. People who get their livelihood by learning a trade are not also at the same time going to be the nation's foremost scholars. If they're using an online method, it doesn't have to approximate the offerings of an ivy or something.

fwiw i've taken a few classes on line and they were - save one - uniformly terrible. mostly, subject-area professors are pretty unsavvy, conservative, and old-fashioned in their computer usage, and schools don't want to invest in the video technology that would make online tutoring/mentorship/discussion actually useful. the one valuable online class i took involved weekly skype check-ins with the professor, t.a.,; streaming video lectures with online chatting & question submitting, a lively discussion board, and a lot of free resources (.pdfs) provided inline in the course framework.

well I guess that depends on what your goal is - to outperform middle of the pack 4 year colleges, or to approximate the kind of education offered at a top tier school

online university doesn't need to complete with harvard. most of the country goes to middle of the pack 4 year colleges - outperforming and underpricing that model would be enough.

xp iatee otm.

To remy: I'm not saying the tech or the methodology is there right now, you're the expert on this stuff! But even for a hypothetical future.

Fwiw I went to an expensive-ish liberal arts school, hated it, hated my classes, took a bunch of crap that I don't remember because I didn't have any framework to put it in because I grew up in a box where we didn't even watch the nightly news because it showed sensationalistic, violent, depressing stories. I needed another LIFETIME to grow up before I went to college. Would have been better served by working some low-level job and just living.

as noted in the article, the keyword is rigor. if an online unversity program is *very hard* it'll be a the path towards gaining respect, esp when getting a generic BA from local U is easier than ever.

be on the path

for sure, laurel.

I also think it's interesting that word 'rigorous' is currently so very loaded in elementary education. In my experience 'rigorous' is a cipher for 'quantifiable STEM and LA knowledges and discrete skills and abilities' as opposed to the more holistic, vocational, child-sensitive, broad-based, social science and socially/artistically inclusive curriculum that would actually be more valuable to pretty much everybody. Obv. I'm not parsing your use of 'rigor' that way, but even if I do I think the point stands that 'rigor' is much less important than whole-child education.

STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. Education is full of the most absurd acronyms.

ok laurel - but if you argue for a less rigorous, online approach, what separates that from phoenix university?

basically I think it's amazing that America has such an amazing university system given how incurious our population is, & it's sad that we're gonna wash that away to save a few bucks & lose the last, great hope of mankind

well blame the people who run those universities!

also our state gov'ts

and I'm still talking under the influence of that atlantic article, but is there any evidence that the market for middle class jobs - i.e. jobs that pay $40-60k (or even 80!) and would thus be a reasonable goal for someone who enters a middle of the pack 4 year college or online equivalent - is growing? what use is training someone for a middle class job or for trade if those jobs aren't there in the first place?

also us news and world report

Re "rigorous": Hm yes, I was just looking for a more neutral word to describe a less advanced, slower-paced (maybe?), program that would assume people coming in didn't have any background in the material yet, for instance. Dunno. Thinking about people who are not natural "students", and whose focus in time & energy is on another part of their lives at the same time they're using this hypothetical study program.

Dayo: oh god, I have no idea. I was just questioning the demand for a program "as good as" top schools, for the purposes that have been given here.

and I'm still talking under the influence of that atlantic article, but is there any evidence that the market for middle class jobs - i.e. jobs that pay $40-60k (or even 80!) and would thus be a reasonable goal for someone who enters a middle of the pack 4 year college or online equivalent - is growing? what use is training someone for a middle class job or for trade if those jobs aren't there in the first place?

the overall performance of the american economy is not something that our universities can control, but I agree, all signs point downward and think this is one of the factors that's going to take down the system.

given how incurious our population is

This feels like a...strange thing to say. Or at least a pre-judged thing? I mean, how did our population GET so "incurious"? Americans aren't stupider than other (what other?) populations, I'm p sure.

it's kind of a chicken and the egg question - why push 18 year olds into debt for college when so far all signs point to the economy not being able to support them when they graduate

This feels like a...strange thing to say. Or at least a pre-judged thing? I mean, how did our population GET so "incurious"? Americans aren't stupider than other (what other?) populations, I'm p sure.

― brb recalibrating my check engine light (Laurel), Saturday, September 3, 2011 11:13 AM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark

I am always wary about talking about things like these, but for one thing, education isn't as highly valued by our culture (or certain segments of our population) as it is by other cultures

also cards on the table i am a liberal weenie type who would like everyone to go to college for the sake of going to college, what is the point of living in the richest and most technologically complex society on the planet if were not at least making the effort to give everyone the tools to talk about good books

i feel like this is kinda projection or s.thing, like if were talking techno-utopias then a system that got 'most ppl' into and out of school earlier wld be the ideal, with college being open to the ppl who 'really want it'

I am always wary about talking about things like these, but for one thing, education isn't as highly valued by our culture (or certain segments of our population) as it is by other cultures

― dayo, Saturday, September 3, 2011 8:14 AM (3 minutes ago)

Teachers especially. There's still some sort of respect (at least in the form of paycheck, often) for professors, and a ramping-up of respect as age-level of students progresses, but damned if I don't believe that teaching kindergarten (well) in failing district is a far sight harder than teaching 10th grade history in a wealthy independent. But we esteem the high school history teacher as an intellect, and passively denigrate the kindergarten teacher as basically a kid technician

I am always kind of shocked to see how little respect teachers get in this culture until you reach the professor level - "those who can't do, teach" etc.

hmm i guess i dont have particularly well-formed opinions on this subject im just kind of suspicious of a lot of the discourse that springs up when we talk about reform or whatever; im wary of the idea that "college just isnt for everyone" in the current state of things, i.e. huge wealth gap, increasingly stratified society and so forth. just seems like another way to reify those distinctions

that was xp to lamp

and the underlying assumption is that anybody could teach, given the opportunity and necessity. It's the only job in the world that everybody thinks they know how to do! Nearly everybody has had 13 years exposure to hundreds of different teachers, many of them terribly poor in quality - and because so much of the job is invisible/off-stage, especially for good teachers, it even looks like an easy job. (xp to dy)

for someone who ends up w/ serious debt from a for-profit university, "college" has only served to increase the wealth gap

and you can also argue that various institutions are key players in the huge wealth gap + increasingly stratified society

xp

well yeah

yeah remy my only experience w/ how other cultures perceive teachers is in china, but there if you tell someone you're a teacher it's an automatic +1 - respect for teachers is baked into the culture, there are loads of teacher training colleges (even if the methods they learn are questionable), a lot of students want to become teachers. I'm sure there are other cultures out there w/ similar views

like if there was more inherent respect for teaching as a profession, it would siphon off some of the brain drain that's going into finance, it would make it easier for teachers to get better compensation, more benefits, make it a much more attractive profession as a whole

i struggle with this q, will universal (or graeatly expanded) university opportunities lead to better wealth distribution? or will it simply debase the signaling power of a degree and leave a lot of ppl with debt and few technical skills (4 those who dont pursue professional degrees)? i don't know, i guess i'm a fence sitter, i don't know what to tell a student other than "go, it's the best option" but i also want 2 live in a world where not going to college is not a death sentence for your career prospects.

and a lot of it has to do, v. simply, w/ shitty pay. highly qualified young people (male, especially) don't want to enter into a low-regarded profession in which finding employment is difficult, where the salary is capped at 70,000 after 20 years of work.

i guess i should stress that the ideal "lets all go to college and discuss great books" world is unachievable so long as college costs so darn much

like, in comparison to other careers which require (or at least privilege) post-secondary ed, teaching is lower on the totem pole, but in a lot of communities, it might be one of the better paying jobs there. i worry more about plumbing and electricians and sewage and waste management and etc being considered "beneath" middle class kids (thus flooding the available college spots with those who can afford it).

yeah max i think its hard, i mean i dont want a return to pre-50s college system either but increased access hasnt seemed to do all that much for income equality either. obv its a completely subjective argument but my ~feeling~ is that if we had some kind of system wherein ppl could leave school @ 15/16 for apprenticeships/job-training/a career the # of ppl who wld want to pursue post-secondary education wld drastically decrease, and that many people who currently spend 4 years and X dollars on a communications/business degree wld be a lot happier?

i mean its sort of a pointless opinion to have @ the moment since no1 really needs an apprenticeship to learn how to work at wal-mart but in an america that had actual jobs i guess its worth thinking abt ways to 'de-credentialize' some careers?

^^^
i guess my line of thinking right now is basically pining for "true" meritocracy (obv a term fraught w complication). in that, if you are an excellent student, u get the k-12 education you deserve to help prepare u for the rigors of university ed regardless of your background. if u fuck around in lib arts type classes bc it doesnt interest u, there are other things u can do and support yrself/family as an adult. from my own exp, i see middle (the upperish side of that) class kids go to college whether or not it interests them bc they feel they "have to", frequently getting the degree that still serves as a signal of employability. and i see poorer kids who were the top students in their respective high schools getting to college without the skills to be successful (not just academic, but for lack of a better descriptor "professional" skills, parents didnt come from privlege, dont know how interview for professional positions or the jargon of higher ed or whatever), dropping out more frequently (w debt).

if we had some kind of system wherein ppl could leave school @ 15/16 for apprenticeships/job-training/a career the # of ppl who wld want to pursue post-secondary education wld drastically decrease, and that many people who currently spend 4 years and X dollars on a communications/business degree wld be a lot happier?

right but what worries me is that those numbers would decrease largely out of the pool of lower-income, underrepresented students. if i thought that people from all different backgrounds would forgo a liberal arts education in favor of apprenticeships i would be more in favor of it, but the way things "work" right now i think you end up stacking the deck.

if i am king i probably nationalize higher education and make it free for everyone who wants to go

my other idea is to make all kids between the ages of 13 and 20 go work on farms year-round without tv, the internet, or video games

^^^feelin this

they get to use facebook though right

I think a lot of this goes back to 'in an america that had actual jobs' - I mean when times were good this country could get away w/ a lot of things that were pretty inefficient (health care system, 4 years of college to 'find yourself', *cough* urban sprawl etc.) that I don't think will be possible in the longer term

xp to lamp

like if there was more inherent respect for teaching as a profession, it would siphon off some of the brain drain that's going into finance, it would make it easier for teachers to get better compensation, more benefits, make it a much more attractive profession as a whole

more respect and compensation would be nice for teachers, but do you know what would also be awesome? hiring people who would be fantastic teachers but who don't want to go through the horrible, utter bullshit that is the process of getting certified.

if you live in Texas, you can get quickie certified (not necessarily a good policy tho)

then i'd have to live in texas.

:-)

this is s.thing i think abt all the time but:

- i think 'college' in the spend four years studying s.thing that interests you sense, whether its books or european history or chemical engineering, has tremendous innate value both personally and for society and so im sympathetic to the 'everyone should go' argument

- but i think even assuming it was free and ignoring opportunity cost not everyone is going to be able to realize that value. and maybe even most people, this is hard to quantify tho. however as it stands college also has tremendous value in the 'i need this to get a job' sense and so young ppl dont really have the option to make a choice based on their own utility, so they spend a bunch of time and money on a shitty business degree or feel forced to take courses they not prepared for/cant get much out of

- so it makes sense imo that there should be more viable career paths that dont require a four year degree or even mb any degree, like realistically what skills do you need to work in corporate hr that you couldnt get from working a low level admin job for three/four years instead? outside of a few technical/engineering jobs most white collar jobs could just as easily be structured in the same way blue collar fields are now imo

The system for creating and certifying public school teachers is partly sensible and partly grotesque. The primary assumption seems to be that the people entering the system in the hope of becoming teachers are a dog's breakfast of skills and aptitudes, who must be reduced to a smooth paste and extruded in the shape of teachers.

like realistically what skills do you need to work in corporate hr that you couldnt get from working a low level admin job for three/four years instead? outside of a few technical/engineering jobs most white collar jobs could just as easily be structured in the same way blue collar fields are now imo

totally

Revive apprenticeships, but without as much indentured servitude involved.

ok but those white collar jobs aren't gonna be around long I think---we'll automate or outsource them soon, next ten years top

maybe the most dispiriting thing about teaching where I do is how unambitious my students tend to be---those kids are gonna be fucked because they just wanna drift & then slide into some boring but ok paying office job, & the economy's just not gonna support that anymore

well i mean im p resigned to using my doctorate to sell five thousand dollar shoes to the wives of third world oligarchs or w/e jobs are still around in ten years, max and are both kinda arguing 'ideal worlds' here

wait so how can I get a job as a third world oligarch

do I just move to Kyrgyzstan and start bribing public officials or what

step one guns

step two tanks

i think you just need to find a public co. in an industry w/ a high barrier-to-entry and a large captive market and then through a combination of blackmail, bribes, and empty promises purchase the company once it becomes privatized and then voila you own a co. that controls 80% of latin america's telephony and ur the richest person in the world

slim shady

I think about this stuff all the time not only b/c of my job but because I have kids, & because of my egalitarian leanings I'm somewhat ambiguous about it but I think my kids are gonna do super well in this brave new jobless world b/c they've lived in other countries, speak multiple languages fluently, are super smart especially at math, & have a sense of how "wide" the world is: so that if what's needed is to open a business in say Malaysia they're just gonna do it---this is that whole "new global elite" thing that I posted about sometimes, & it's pretty much gonna rule to be those people, so I dunno

whereas for many of my students, they're hoping to find office-y work in Dallas & they have no real special skills to offer because they majored in psych or soc or heaven forbid business & they're not particularly worldly or quick on their feet & the world's just gonna eat them alive...but they're happy for now. I dunno, I worry about this "generation limbo", not for my family but because I work with these people & for better or for worse I ~care~

so that if what's needed is to open a business in say Malaysia they're just gonna do it

Uhh nothing from kindergarden on up teaches the on-the-fly skills you'd need to make yr way in the world in another country, without significant (family) assets behind you. My experience w education is exactly the opposite -- they rly don't want to have to deal with kids who have traits that wd suit them for quick thinking/acting or high levels of adventure/excitement/flexibility.

I mean if you want yr children to be world adventurers, take them out of school, move to Mozambique, and make them be friends with street kids who'll teach them how to pick pockets and lie convincingly.

nah but my kids have already made their way in another country, is all I mean

ok but those white collar jobs aren't gonna be around long I think---we'll automate or outsource them soon, next ten years top

who's the techno-utopian now?! (I pretty much agree.)

I think it's important to look at our college education system in the bigger economic context - the future of white collar labor and economic inequality has more to do w/ bigger political and economic processes than w/ what any given college can do.

maybe the most dispiriting thing about teaching where I do is how unambitious my students tend to be---those kids are gonna be fucked because they just wanna drift & then slide into some boring but ok paying office job, & the economy's just not gonna support that anymore

but it's hard to blame 18 y/o kids for not being able to predict these things - 'college' worked for americans for 50 years, and it still 'works' for almost every traditionally successful person you'll meet.

but I don't get how you can be so hard on these kids and still ultimately defend the bigger system - I mean atm your job is teaching these kids, which in turn depends on them wanting to purchase the college degree signal. how many 18 y/os in nebraska (I am just gonna pretend you live there) want to pay 7k (the bargain price, these days...) a year to learn about philosophy?

yeah it seems sort of unfair to call the students you teach "unambitious," Euler; it seems more like they're inheriting a really uncertain future that likely adults in their lives have not fully understood/been explicit with them about. i can understand head-in-the-sand-i'll-just-ratchet-down-my-expectations responses to that even if they're not the best response.

xp what iatee said

I'm an unambitious college student, but at least I'm an electrical engineering major and not a philosophy major.

I have lots of extremely smart multilingual friends who are good at math and the only ones who are abroad these days are teaching english, not starting the malaysian facebook

re. how many kids want to pay that much to learn say philo; a fair number! we get them jobs because they learn how to write well & how to reason well; other degrees besides math & maybe bio I'm inclined to agree about.

I don't think it's "our university system" that's failing these kids, I think it's our culture, our parenting, our cultivation, our attention, that's failing these kids

there is more student loan debt in america than credit card debt

that's a failed system

I know how to fix it
more credit cards for everyone

BOOM

& another thing: going to college at least used to be a decision for the risk-averce: high costs, high opportunity costs, with pretty much a guarantee of steady if not spectacular repayment of that risk. so we tend not to get the "entrepreneurial" types nor do we train people to be entrepreneurial. we train the future servants of the corporate state. so horseshoe's right: it's a lot to expect college students to have figured out that this has changed, that the costs aren't gonna buy off life's risks. but we need to do that, somehow.

crut, i predict a future for you in designing and making thousand dollar analog synthesizers for the hipster offspring of Lamp's shoe-buyers

there is a part of me that def identifies w/ euler's POV, insofar as i think cultivating risk-taking as a skillset would potentially bear fruit in brave nu world of lame economy

and the underlying assumption is that anybody could teach, given the opportunity and necessity. It's the only job in the world that everybody thinks they know how to do!

increasingly folks think the same thing about lawyers. why do you think legalzoom and handling cases as a pro se litigant are so popular?!?

like, and that can be as simple as encouraging/mandating multilinguilism and labor mobility around the world, i don't know

xp

cultivating risk-taking as a skillset would potentially bear fruit in brave nu world of lame economy

In order for people to be motivated to take risks, apart from having thrill-seeking brain chemistry or something, they need to start from a place where the outcome of a failure to act is WORSE than the outcome of the failure of the endeavor. P much risk-taking starts with things being really shitty. So I guess we're on the right path?

some start-up $$$ isn't bad, either.

universal health care makes starting a business a lot less risky

In order for people to be motivated to take risks, apart from having thrill-seeking brain chemistry or something, they need to start from a place where the outcome of a failure to act is WORSE than the outcome of the failure of the endeavor. P much risk-taking starts with things being really shitty. So I guess we're on the right path?

― brb recalibrating my check engine light (Laurel), Saturday, September 3, 2011 1:35 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think so!

Primary text for study: Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen.

what types of businesses are we talking about, here? Etsy storefronts and things like Elfster?

Buying children and selling the parts.

I think about this stuff all the time not only b/c of my job but because I have kids, & because of my egalitarian leanings I'm somewhat ambiguous about it but I think my kids are gonna do super well in this brave new jobless world b/c they've lived in other countries, speak multiple languages fluently, are super smart especially at math, & have a sense of how "wide" the world is: so that if what's needed is to open a business in say Malaysia they're just gonna do it---this is that whole "new global elite" thing that I posted about sometimes, & it's pretty much gonna rule to be those people, so I dunno

lol i wonder if my parents sd the same thing and ive spent the last couple of years living below the poverty line

i do think that the academy cant really do much abt the relationship of labor to capital in a ~globalized economy~, nor really can how you raise yr kids (other than to be wise and realistic abt the world i guess), im genuinely ambivalent abt the ability of real wages to increase in the next ten years period idk

universal health care would be a huge boon toward encouraging the kind of risk-taking I'm envisioning

Buying children and selling the parts.

Oh yeah that's the other thing that happens to street kids whose parents don't have the resources to secure their children's futures.

re: what kind of businesses/ventures: honest answer, i don't know...maybe more nanotech engineers taking root in developing countries, expats starting tex-mex restaurants in mumbai, more nonprofits starting schools for girls oprah style, dollar and a dream type shit

my secret dream is to start a good burrito place in paris

nobody steal it

nobody fucks with my masala dosa with refritos and guacamole

a non-ilxor just posted this on my wall

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/the_college_forprofits_should031640.php?page=all&print=true

the guy that article's about seems like an amazing dude

unrelated to the subject at hand but still, wkiw

if he had any free time

maybe this is heedless point scoring against the eisbars and morbs of the political threads but i dont see how you can read about how the obama admin finally held for-profit colleges accountable in that article & say that even if you were in a battleground state you wouldnt vote for him in the coming election -- / continue in other thread

iatee, thankin u for that link. Just posted it to my brother, who has two degrees in film production and is looking at getting a teaching cert instead.

The chief regulatory threat to the for-profits coalesced in the form of something called the “gainful employment rule.” The federal Higher Education Act states that, in order to be eligible for federal aid money, career-oriented schools must “prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” And so the Education Department set out to define “gainful employment” as a ratio of student loan debt to income. If students weren’t earning enough in the workforce to service their debts after leaving a school, the idea went, then the school should not be eligible for aid. The very premise of the rule shook the foundations of the for-profits’ business model. Their stocks dropped to four-year lows.

ya, felt a lot better about obama's ed policy after reading that, altho i still think arne duncan sux

Those who do graduate from Western Governors credit their mentors with being the single biggest factor in their success. Playing a role with no real analog in the wider world of higher education, WGU’s mentors operate from home offices and kitchen tables scattered across the country. (But unlike the armies of adjuncts and graduate students who do most of the teaching at both for-profit and traditional schools, mentors work full-time with benefits.)

not a big fan of arne duncan either

that's an awesome school! seems like more of a 'supplement' to the traditional 4 year college rather than a replacement, so far

a supplement when we're looking at 'the american college system', but on an individual level it would be a replacement for some people, and ultimately, some schools. harvard will exist in some form 20 years from now - the best 'signal' money can buy, a gdp-sized endowment, rich people are doin alright etc. etc.

but can public and private schools outside of the 'admissions tournament' 10% survive if a significant % of 18 y/os decide that WGU (etc.) is a better investment? esp w/ a political culture that seems intent on reducing both public subsidies to universities and research.

right - but as the article mentioned, the worst performing of WGU enrollments were precisely the 18 y/o fresh high school grad demographic. of course there could be many explanations for that - if it could draw on a larger pool of students than it does now, picking up some of those whom are now going to mediocre 4 year colleges, that might change things.

otoh the question with online learning is where does the motivation come from - it's easy to see where it does for the person profiled in the article and others in his age range, it's a little harder to conjure up for younger people. but hey, like we've been suggesting in this thread - maybe 2-3 years of independence after high school will be enough to motivate twenty somethings to go back to school and get a degree?

also the assessment/competency based system will lend itself better to certain subjects and not others - not sure how some of the subjects traditionally taught in the liberal arts would be, for example.

not trying to shit on the school! just thinking some things through. but some cynics would say that all they've done so far is create a cheaper, online (and more efficient) version of night school.

(also, don't mean to denigrate night school or adult education in any way! just trying to place it in context of this discussion.)

one big problem with college is that up until people turn like 21-22 they are all huge morons no matter what theyre doing

p much true

hence my big "work on a farm" plan

also solves: obesity, bullying, having to see teenagers out on the street

aww but teenagers can be so amusingly earnest about their weird little lives sometimes!

you can be one of the supervising farmers

it'd have to be a web app farm

you could call it max's adventure orchestra (mao for short)

Uhh nothing from kindergarden on up teaches the on-the-fly skills you'd need to make yr way in the world in another country, without significant (family) assets behind you. My experience w education is exactly the opposite -- they rly don't want to have to deal with kids who have traits that wd suit them for quick thinking/acting or high levels of adventure/excitement/flexibility.

― brb recalibrating my check engine light (Laurel), Saturday, 3 September 2011 19:16 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I mean if you want yr children to be world adventurers, take them out of school, move to Mozambique, and make them be friends with street kids who'll teach them how to pick pockets and lie convincingly.

― brb recalibrating my check engine light (Laurel), Saturday, 3 September 2011 19:17 (4 hours ago)

haw

very good

i suppose it proves tom friedman isn't a sociopath because he has never had a great idea like that

otoh the question with online learning is where does the motivation come from - it's easy to see where it does for the person profiled in the article and others in his age range, it's a little harder to conjure up for younger people. but hey, like we've been suggesting in this thread - maybe 2-3 years of independence after high school will be enough to motivate twenty somethings to go back to school and get a degree?

I mean the core motivation comes from the same place as their motivation to go to a normal 4 year school - better job prospects. kids also like the frills that come w/ traditional college - campus, sports, social life, whatever. but the frills are not why people are going into 6 figure debt.

and if colleges start competing on price, frills are the first thing to go

I'm not sure every freshman enters college with "better job prospects" as his number one motivator

I'm not sure every freshman enters college with "better job prospects" as his number one motivator

― dayo, Saturday, September 3, 2011 6:41 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark

i think its more 'my parents said this is what you should do'

'bone some hotties'

"COLLLEEEEEGGEEEEEE" *kegstand*

I'm not sure every freshman enters college with "better job prospects" as his number one motivator

maybe not but if 'better job prospects' didn't exist, the whole concept falls apart pretty fast. whereas people do go to schools without football teams. and without cute girls. people go to commuter schools w/ no social life.

sure, but lots of people take out loans to go to those third and fourth tier 'idyllic' 'pastoral' colleges just to enjoy the 'college experience' that's as much a media and cultural phenomenon as it is an economic one

sometimes i think itd be nice to time travel back to like the early 60s and go to college cuz like the classes were smaller and probably more fun and expectations were lower and everyone dressed so nicely and you could take six months off ofter you finished to kick it in france on the cheap and no1 wld give a fuck cuz you wouldnt even have a resume, youd just work in the office of whomever yr dad played golf w/

then i realize that no1 wld be friends w/ me and i couldnt text and sleeping w/ cute dudes wld be a cumbersome trial and i realize how much better it is now 2day

that's a good point, but I think the media/cultural phenomenon is gonna shift a bit when we have a national student debt crisis

everyone would be friends with you, you would be from 50 years in the future and would be the smartest human being alive

bring an iphone

i would be burned as a witch

hopefully a national student debt crisis would lead to legislation that would allow student loans to be forgiven

also legislation leading to free iphones for everybody

40 iphones and a mule

when i do i want to be buried w/ 1000 ipads like an ancient chinese emperor

just showing up in heaven giving out ipads 2 every1... hey jesus want to play angry birds?? well NOW YOU CAN

but maybe heaven is like an ivy league campus in the 50s... no jews or gay ppl

no women either

hopefully a national student debt crisis would lead to legislation that would allow student loans to be forgiven

I don't think this would happen without significant reforms that clamped down on the current situation easy money paying for colleges that get more expensive ever year / 4 years of kegstands in a 4th tier rural paradise might not be as easy for a lower-middle class person

but then again we paid for the financial crisis w/o regulating away the biggest moral hazards, so who knows

situation of

if we do forgive student loans I'm gonna be pretty pissed I didn't go to grad school

this board is now just a bunch of rich college kids

― chaki

maybe this is heedless point scoring against the eisbars and morbs of the political threads but i dont see how you can read about how the obama admin finally held for-profit colleges accountable in that article & say that even if you were in a battleground state you wouldnt vote for him in the coming election -- / continue in other thread

so, b/c a politician arguably does one good thing then i should just drop to my knees and worship him even if he's done a zillion not-so-good things?!? by that measure, the only politician in my lifetime who hasn't passed that test would be Dubya.

what a pathetic, weak argument for Obama that is ... even for you.

seriously, dude, yer nothing but a cheap Chinese-made knockoff of Ethan ... without the wit, intelligence or class.

had no idea deej was chinese

no but he was made there

tremdendous work from the computational linguistics dept of the chinese secret services

nakhchivan I want to read one of your books pls post link to relevant amazon links kthxbye

damn

I don't wanna get aggro and shit about it but I too don't get "I don't see how you can read about this good thing an elected official did and say you wouldn't vote for him" - there is literally not one elected official in the history of the country who doesn't deserve your vote if that's how you make the calculations.

none such xxp

nakh fess the fuck up

bide your time. nakhchivan will have a book someday, but not quite yet. unquestionably he has that aroma about him, but he's not quite ripened enough.

I don't wanna get aggro and shit about it but I too don't get "I don't see how you can read about this good thing an elected official did and say you wouldn't vote for him" - there is literally not one elected official in the history of the country who doesn't deserve your vote if that's how you make the calculations.

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, September 4, 2011 11:23 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think there's a pretty distinctive pattern of obama having done more good things than his predecessor that, being the crassly cynical person i am, adds up to a better life for lots of ppl than if i choose not to vote bcuz im so angry at the crass cynical nature of politicians

but we've had this debate before

dont know what eisbar's problem is but while i like morbs & aerosmith as posters i find his posts in the political threads to be the most annoying & kneejerk, w/out any real humanity behind them. youre the dreadlocked dude on my college campus convinced that gore & bush are the same person

like, eisbar is consistently the worst on those threads, a bunch of generic rage & frankly youre the one w/ the ethan obsession

Black men

http://www.economist.com/node/21528226

generation lmbo

A recent study from Georgetown University’s Centre on Education and the Workforce argues that “obtaining a post-secondary credential is almost always worth it.”

ehhh complicated

other than that I think that's a pretty good take on the big picture in 9 paragraphs

quality xp

yeah I wish I had used that title for this thread g1

It seems like our global society really doesn't know what to do with the efficiencies created by automation. Or rather, efficiency is captured by the ownership class as profit rather than used to give humans a lot more free time I guess.

if the ownership class would bother to pay their damn taxes then it would all be okay

How long before we have an activist youth movement that starts demanding massively increased taxation on capital? I would almost tolerate activism if it was about that. Instead of like wikileaks or the plight of the Palestinians or whatever.

yeah that's what it really comes down to

the idea that massive amounts of people maybe just should be paid not to work - and that that might not be a bad thing for the economy - is still an incredibly hard sell

xp

so how long has the 'hollowing out' of the middle class been a recognized threat? I don't regularly follow krugman

yeah that idea won't ever fly in the USA---I know the econ & I'm morally for reduced inequality but paying people to not work hurts me in the gut & it'd take a lot more than econ to convince me; & for most Americans this is exactly the problem with the welfare state: people getting what they don't deserve, haven't earned (well, that + racism of course)

it's been happening steadily since the 70s and esp 80s, but 'recognized threat' depended on who you asked. it's always been an issue, but most people were fine with the 'rising tide lifts all boats' narrative, as it appeared that, despite rising income inequality, the poor and middle class were still making progress. in retrospect a lot of the nominal income gains even back in the good periods were illusory.

euler I think your take is probably pretty representative, but attitudes change. when our permanently unemployed class turn into a more visible, perhaps dangerous social problem, people might begrudgingly moderate their views.

or they'll just throw them all in jail

oh wait they're already doing that

wasn't even implying 'the permanently unemployed are gonna go on crime sprees' - one of the interesting things about the great recession is that crime hasn't shifted much overall. I more meant 'more people having friends and family who have been unemployed for 3 years, not out of choice, more people interacting w/ office workers thrown into poverty, etc.'

people getting what they don't deserve, haven't earned

yeah ppl can only have money they didnt deserve or earn if the 'market decides' to give it 2 them, not communists govts

yeah I mean *I'm* persuadable on this but I kinda goes against our national image of ourselves as a place where hard work + gumption makes you the person you are. I guess the consumer revolution already upended that, though. So I dunno.

would rather see a renewed WPA though

xp but that's money they deserve, axiomatically (I mean, to those who have that pt of view)

sort of? i mean the idea that the market for say, corporate executive salaries is truly efficient is p lol but w/e

sarcasm was more just bcuz youre right, even the most parasitic of rentier capitalists will go 2 the way arguing that they produce some kind of social value (lol making markets more efficient) just because the idea of true 'leisure' class also seems deeply unamerican

realistically i think a simplified, more progressive and better enforced tax regime is the 'fairest' way of readjusting things otoh wheres max, i think he has a workable idea for sending ppl to go work on farms or s.thing

renewed WPA could still be great in the short-term, but in the long-term you'd rather people were working just for the sake of working? you'd rather a man digs a ditch than a machine?

one of the related issues is that rich people are working longer hours than ever.

if we want people to work just because being a 'worker' is good for your moral character or whatever, we can have a system of shared part-time labor. we simply may not need 95% of working americans to provide 40h week of labor, and having 10 people work 20h is probably better for society than 5 unemployed people and 5 people at 40h. it's never that simple, though, and I think it would be harder to organize from above than just increasing welfare, which is actually fairly straightforward. (unemployment insurance without an end date.)

but I kinda goes against our national image of ourselves as a place where hard work + gumption makes you the person you are.

hah this hasn't been true for a long time, but yeah it's built into our national self-image

keynes thought by 2030 we'd be working 15h weeks and mostly just trying to figure out what we'd do with our free time

(he did not envision ilx polls)

I'm not sure what I think re paying people to not work but I think I'm committed to the "dignity of labor" both as in "don't make work so shitty that it offends against human dignity" (that's an injunction to the ruling class) & as in "work is a basic human good, it gives meaning & purpose & direction to human life" but re the latter I have a pretty broad understanding of work e.g. building ridic Minecraft worlds might count, so I dunno.

virtual WPA hmm

I think 'paying people not to work' is not the right phrasing - 'paying people subsistence wages when the demand for more labor simply doesn't exist'. this isn't some crazy futurist idea either, already happens in countries w/ considerably less wealth than america.

yeah I think the right phrase might be "guaranteed minimum income", there might be some econ/poli sci term of art that gets used I dunno.

'In Praise of Idleness', Bertrand Russell takes on the supposed nobility of work

though as someone said upthread unlimited unemployment insurance is a lot easier to implement than some sort of universal free money program

15hr working week, another 15hrs spent studying to keep colleges open

Money quote:

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

ok so I'm obvs just posting the good-sounding rhetorical bits here but still

yeah I know the Russell essay, but I don't trust him on this: he only knew idleness when depressed, & he was an aristocrat.

he was an aristocrat and therefore…his opinion is invalid or…?

well there's also something to say about idleness in the white collar 40h week

see: ilx.com

xp do you mean since he personally never put in 12-hour days at the sadness cannery in Manchester or something he couldn't know how rewarding that really was?

iatee ilx.com isn't loading for me ???

haha ilxor.com

I like how we have this overarching narrative about the american love of labor but at the same time we also believe that a significant % of americans are looking for an excuse to live the rest of their lives under the poverty line as welfare dependents

yup. then again i believe that the 'overarching narrative' is most often associated with one particular ethnicity of americans, while the 'significant %' are associated with other ethnicities. damn cynicism..

pearsockic

that there's really only two posters on ilx, velko and a sockmaster supreme

― harshbuzz to my chilt-on (zvookster), Wednesday, March 24, 2010 2:12 PM

zvookster would know about that : )

pearsonic isn't a sock

you guys all laughed at my farm camp idea and now youve all come back around

marx thought that once we overcame capitalism wed all go hunting a lot

dude was really into hunting, go figure

i'm not laughing at the idea - i actually think that a civilian corp (a year of military or non-military service, optionally) as prerequisite for no-strings-attached two years of college funding is a semi-brilliant idea.

nah silby re. Russell all I was saying was that as an aristocrat he knew a different kind of idleness from the laborer: it wasn't simply a way to rest his feet & turn his mind off, as laborers do, but rather a way to let his mind free.

even poor people have the internet now

facebook: the great equalizer

farmville: the great unequalizer

haha touche

allow me to raise the discourse: shit sux.

I'm liking this Bertrand Russell essay, though

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-the-jobless-the-mad-as-hell-millennial-generation/244552/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-unemployment-what-its-like-to-be-jobless-in-your-20s/244448/

just user emails nothing super enlightening

but I like the boomers/gen x/gen y narrative, we haven't talked much about that

I can linkspam my own thread right

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/05/rick-perrys-plan-10000-for-a-ba/perrys-college-plan-its-just-a-start

mostly just college profs defending the status quo

$10,000 for a bachelor's degree? Let's start by firing all the administration!

otm

haha I mean but you should see the admin levels in your av research uni, & most of it is aimed at nothing more than making more money---it's like the platonic ideal of Weber

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/Part_12.html

http://universityprobe.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Untitled-1024x700.jpg
http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-growth-at-uc/

this crazy old physics prof has written a lot of good stuff over the years w/r/t the UC system financing and costs:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/

esp: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/UndergradCost.html

admin cash is pretty sweet too

As an administrator at my research university, the disparity between administrators who reward themselves with golden parachutes into the millions and the rest of us reeling under salary freezes and the governor's forcing us to contribute three percent of our salaries towards retirement is -- well.

dangling modifier but you get it

that said, would your job even exist 30 years ago?

sure -- I'm the adviser to the student newspaper, website, and radio station.

I'm thinking of your assistant dean of undergraduate science research & the like.

were there really full-time people working for the student newspaper and radio station in 1980? (I genuinely have no idea, but surely there are some people who went to college in 1980 here?)

If there are good jobs, won't people train to fill them? The vocational part of a college education should be easy, but there is a lot about working that cannot be taught. I think a college education is more about quality of life, quality of existence, of which working is eventually a significant part, for most people.

I tend to take Dewey's line about the value of a liberal-arts-education in creating & nourishing a populace able to handle democracy

― Euler, Friday, 2 September 2011 19:17 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

where is the best place to begin reading about this?

liberal arts school

hiyo!

Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed", from 1897, isn't a bad place to start. I have it in my copy of The Essential Dewey vol. 1 (subtitled Pragmatism, Education, Democracy), published by Indiana University Press in 1998.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/education/13loans.html

Many borrowers, even those who are unemployed or earning little, can avoid default by participating in an income-based repayment program that began in 2009 but is not as widely used as might be expected. Under the program, borrowers who pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years — 10 years if they are in public service — can have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven; in 2014, that will go down to paying 10 percent of discretionary income for 20 years.

“In the age of income-based repayment, there is no reason for a student to default, since even a payment of zero dollars is acceptable payment, if you have zero discretionary income,” Ms. Cochrane said. “But as of April of this year, only about 350,000 borrowers have entered income-based payment, a small subset of the eligible population. Students need to understand the options, colleges need to share the information, and the department needs to make it as easy as possible for students to enroll.”

one of my friends is going to grad school - 100k for a non-profit type degree at a 'good school' - only because the gov't started this program. he considered it considerably less risky. I dunno if that's a good system in the long-term? also it's only available for public loans, so "there is no reason for a student to default" is misleading.

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide.

― hardcore oatmeal (Jordan), Friday, September 2, 2011 4:57 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

+1

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/news/The-Art-Institutes--3531.shtml

Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice sued Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation, which is 41 percent owned by investment bank Goldman Sachs. The government has charged the company with fraudulently collecting $11 billion dollars in state and federal student financial aid between July of 2003 to June of 2011. EDMC allegedly collected $2.2 billion of that money in 2010 alone. That amounted to almost 90 percent of the company's 2010 revenues.

for-profit colleges are scum

Boger wanted a career in "live event and concert photography," and contacted the school after seeing its ads on TV, she says. "Ideally I wanted to work for Rolling Stone or Spin. They made it sound like if I went [to AI], they would help me find a job. They said 90 percent of their graduates are employed within one year in their field. They said, 'We have contacts at all the major music magazines.'

"I think [the recruiter] was telling me what I wanted to hear, because when I got out, they didn't have anything," Boger says. An AI career counselor gave her just two contacts at small publications in Austin. Boger was unable to reach one because that contact had moved to another job, "and the other said to me, 'You don't have the qualifications you need,'" Boger recounts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/education/21admissions.html?_r=1

In the survey, 10 percent of the admissions directors at four-year colleges — and almost 20 percent at private liberal-arts schools — said that the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.

But they are not the only ones with an edge: the admissions officers said they admitted minority students, athletes, veterans, children of alumni, international students and, for the sake of gender balance, men, with lesser credentials, too.