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

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/04/29/the-tragedy-of-cooper-union/

what kind of a douchenozzle talks like this:

I resonate very much to future-oriented thinking about higher education. I assure you that I will be guiding the institution to embrace these technologies and we’re not going to be trapped in the past. I think if we get over this hump there will be so much opportunity… I think we can lead… We don’t have a global brand. We’ve got to build that global brand.

Cooper Union has historically not been very well known, even among New Yorkers: they often think it’s some kind of labor union, rather than an undergraduate college.

not really

yeah what? I knew what Cooper Union was before I moved here, and I'm not even in a related field.

everyone knew Cooper Union, because it was free

also the school with campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis that only teaches Great Books in tiny classes, because that seemed insane

Salmon is a graduate of the University of Glasgow

I once accidentally drove across cooper union, like I thought I was driving down an extension of 7th street or something, but it was actually cooper square

I don't think ilxors are a very representative sample set for these things, and 'new yorkers'... I think people who spend a lot of time in downtown manhattan probably are going to eventually get some sense of 'there is a school, it is called cooper union' but that doesn't mean they could tell you it has a good architecture program or it's free, more just that there's a building or two near st marks.

well anyway I think his point is right that it doesn't matter if it's a global name as long as kids in the fields that are relevant know it. Just like pretty much every would-be music major knows Eastman even though its overal national name recognition is probably not huge

I also have to wonder how long this has been in the works -- I mean the $175 million mortgage to met life, the new building, I feel like the people running the school can't have been planning to continue to run the school as a little quasi-socialist operation. "Oops, too many bills to pay, guess we'll have to start charging tuition" rings pretty hollow

"global brand" is code for money engine, right? Capital doesn't want to see all those resources go to waste.

eh it wasn't a conspiracy to turn this into a money machine, it was a conspiracy to 'be the best school at any cost'

yeah I mean it's about the same fiscal strategy NYU is trying to pull with the same disastrous results

can't wait for the cooper union dubai campus

lol I just made that same joke to someone

haha great minds

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/05/09/the-tragedy-of-us-higher-education/

Friend just posted to FB that Elizabeth Warren is supposedly pushing for student loans to be at 0.75% -- I have mixed feelings about this, as I think it will probably just push tuition up as it enables students to borrow more

could be combined w/ strings attached to how those loans can be used

am skeptical that this was intended as more than a gesture tbh

yeah I like Warren but she definitely has the grandstanding gene

I also think she probably understands the banking system well enough to understand what the fed discount rate is and why it's not exactly comparable to other kinds of borrowing.

Friend just posted to FB that Elizabeth Warren is supposedly pushing for student loans to be at 0.75% -- I have mixed feelings about this, as I think it will probably just push tuition up as it enables students to borrow more

Do states ever force their universities to significantly lower tuition?

In other related news, Peter Thiel's Class of “20 Under 20” 2013, where you get paid to avoid college:

Over two years, each fellow receives $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, thought leaders, futurists, and innovators.

http://www.thielfellowship.org/2013/05/announcing-the-2013-class-of-20-under-20-thiel-fellows/

Do states ever force their universities to significantly lower tuition?

why would they want to do that? cutting money to higher ed is an implicit tax that gets basically zero blowback from voters.

Why is that necessarily "cutting money to higher ed"? The state can make up the difference.

For example, the University of Georgia's got a $6b budget. Care to guess how much of that comes from tuition?

It's just odd to me that tuition keeps rising and the solution is...cheaper loans?

if the state is gonna make up the difference it's taking money from something else or raising taxes

which is harder than just putting some 18 y/os in debt

So making student loans cheaper has no costs associated with it?

warren's proposal certainly does, which is why it's not gonna happen

It's almost certainly less expensive for the government to subsidize loans than to lower tuition (or better yet, to increase grant/scholarship money and ideally base it on need.)

And yeah it's a nice gesture for Warren to want to lower debt service. But is lowering the borrowing rate by half going to keep students from being swallowed by the cost of tuition? Doesn't seem like it.

or you can replace teachers w/ online courses

and not spend any money

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/how-colleges-are-selling-out-the-poor-to-court-the-rich/275725/

And here's the key bit: Many colleges, he argues, appear to be playing an "elaborate shell game," relying on federal grants to cover the costs of needy students while using their own resources to furnish aid to richer undergrads.

"With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue," Burd writes, "the nation's public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students."

Laptop U - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all

There was a study out a few days ago suggesting that only six or seven percent of MOOC courses are finished by students on average.

Sepetately, this was moderately interesting on the US side:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/feature-social-arts-trample-liberal-arts/2003658.article

“One of the consequences of the invisibility of social class in the US is that women in the wannabe category didn’t understand how much more in the way of resources some of the other young women they were trying to keep up with had,” Armstrong continues. “It took us the whole of the study to realise that the consequences of partying very hard would vary so dramatically.” Seemingly small differences in social background were often greatly magnified through this process.

But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

the article is off on a few things (cost of teaching not the real driving force behind cost of college, but rather bureaucratic bloat, decreasing state funding, cooper union-esque overreach) but overall a pretty good take

The thing that struck me most is that this article reminds me of a lot of hand wringing articles circa the Napster days, where the only sure thing was that the system was likely going through fundamental change.

yep. and nobody was paying $40,000 for a cd.

bargain priced shit

plato was on the money about the motive for inquiry after all:

a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley

The cartoon is chucklesome.

In that New Yorker cartoon way.

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-mooc-moment-and-the-end-of-reform/

loved that

The key to this piece of rhetorical alchemy is that you can’t over-think it, in the way I just have. Brooks is taking something that lacks prestige and cultural capital—a mode of education that is not valuable, only expensive, not innovative or exciting—and placing the name “Harvard” around it makes it into something that suddenly is both valuable and worthwhile, as a function of Harvard’s symbolic role in American higher education, to define the new cutting edge.

harvard is doing this too

which is the only reason moocs are suddenly relevant, but a real reason why they are