A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
BY COMPARISON
The price of a Ford 4-door sedan has risen about 40% in the past seventy years in 2020 dollars, but of course it now has automatic transmission, power doors, power windows, and all manner of other improvements.
The answer regarding why the cost of a college education has increased astronomically over the last 20 years, without the product – a service – having improved to a comparable degree is a combination of the reasons which have been offered in the comments,
See “College is more expensive than it's ever been, and the 5 reasons why suggest it's only going to get worse,” Business Insider,
There are approximately 4,298 colleges/universities (public and private) in the U.S., but more and more colleges are closing under the strain of costs:
Apart from that, I'd recommend reading _Confessions of a Community College Dean_ by Matthew Reed. He describes the same cycle happening in community colleges, where climbing walls and athletics certainly aren't to blame. His is very much a view from inside the administrative beast, but it's a thoughtful and informative view.
One point Reed makes that I haven't heard here: "The gravitational pull of higher tuition is becoming progressively stronger. Ironically enough, some of that pull comes from scholarships and financial aid. To the extent that money is funneled through students, the only way for colleges to get that money is to charge students as much as possible."
I'll also bite on the "compare improvements in college to improvements in cars over the past 70 years" question. Here are two enormous improvements in college over the past 70 years:
* Colleges now provide much more extensive, comprehensive student support services of all kinds. These can be expensive; they can also be quite effective. E.g., the impact of CUNY's ASAP program, which raised semester-to-semester retention by 8–10 percentage points and increased graduation rates from 8.7 to 14.5%: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2393088
* Our understanding of effective pedagogical techniques has improved immensely over just he past 20 years. Active learning techniques in particular have proven remarkably effective; in science courses, using these techniques increases average exam scores by 6% while reducing course failure rates by about a third: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2014/05/08/1319030111.full.pdf (the authors of this study note that if an effect of this size were obtained in a clinical trial, the study could be "stopped for benefit" so that the control group could received the intervention). These highly effective educational techniques require a lot of institutional support, ranging from time off to redesign a course to room renovations to make it quick and easy to move back and forth from lecturing to small-group work.
Again, I do *not* want to claim that these account for or justify tuition increases. Still, these are real, significant, and important improvements in the college experience.
(A third change: unlike 70 years ago, college now provides the necessary entry ticket into most good-paying jobs—I guess you could call that an "improvement"? That may be more of an explanation for tuition increases, though I don't think it explains the explosion in college tuition over the past 10–20 years.)
Social functions of institutions are often hidden: as far as I can tell the function of a college education is largely to improve the students' class status, that is credentialism and to have a four year party before joining the work force- sure some people want an education, but people are willing to pay that much because they will earn that much or more or hope to and have fun
There were post war improvements on 1950 cars that in that time would have increased the value 10 more percent back then so A new car price adjusted is about 50 percent more than seventy years ago! And University tuition is locked into to product commodity with a higher priced tuition being better just as a higher priced car is better. Marx would say universities are a top contributer to the capitalist machinery in an extremely detrimental way to humanity. Knowledge should not be a capitalist commodity. Professors profess, they are not ambassadors of the creation of true agents of change, they are attache's of living a personal intellectual life for their personal happiness. Sorry to break the bad news.
Re David G's pt on pedagogical techniques: yes, I made the same pt earlier w/o the supporting link.
Just b.c Pr Wolff teaches basically the same way in 2020 as he did in, say, 1967 doesn't mean that this applies across the board. Probably a lot of teaching hasn't changed much, but some has, perhaps esp in the natural sciences as the link provided by David G. suggests.
To take another specific example, some courses in pol sci, esp intl relations, use exercises like simulations. Like every other technique, this can be done well or not so well, but where done well it gets the students to think more for themselves, learn to work effectively in teams, etc.
Again, that a lecture on Marx or Nietzsche or Adorno or Christopher Marlowe or whoever may be much the same in 2020 as in 1960 does not mean there have been no changes in teaching. It is very possible to criticize the tuition increases w/o claiming, as Pr Wolff has, that there have been no improvements whatsoever in the "product". Now perhaps those are balanced off by decreases in quality in other respects, but that wd require a more extended discussion on the part of whoever is undertaking to make the claim.
P.s. Re financial aid, the large budget/coronavirus/etc. bill that recently passed includes in its 5000+ pp. provisions increasing Pell grants and their availability, among other things.
"Social functions of institutions are often hidden: as far as I can tell the function of a college education is largely to improve the students' class status"
But it doesn't work out that way does it? Because now all expect to "improve their class status". What is the result: the shoe-man must now have a degree. And if the shoe-man wants to *manage* the damn store, by god, he must have a *master's* degree!
At anonymous: the shoe-man's father may have been a menial laborer- his son may want to be a teacher or manage a factory In a capitalist system all must seek money, some more than others Certain kinds of entrepreneurs and people who work in computers don't need advanced degrees- even police officers need advanced degrees It is the logic of credentialism but there is inflation as all or most seek it. I agree it is a futile quest Anyway it is a theory and education is just one kind of credential. Look up 'Randall Collins credentialism' He makes a sociological case for it. He is smarter than me and almost everybody
The shoe-man was my father. His father was a rabbi from Lithuania. I wanted to be a college-professor but lacked the requisite focus and discipline to get over that bar. I did read Professor Wolff's book "The Poverty of Liberalism" when I was a teenager and it distressed me considerably. I don't think I understood the gist of the attack on Mill. Mill seemed to me an extremely loquacious but extremely decent chap and why should Professor Wolff go so far as to make him the locus-situs for so many of our (then) present-day shortcomings? This argument was more than my 13-year-old mind could fathom or follow. But the cover design of that book was one of my favorites; so it has remained with me. As has Mill -- who from time to time actually makes a sharp point. And Professor Wolff, in spite of the confusion that his argument with Mill caused me when I was young, seems now to me to be a person of profound discernment and most crucially of humility and of decency!
—this is a HUGE deal, although as a colleague who works in prison ed pointed out to me, it makes it likely that there will be more low-quality exploitative institutions entering the field, like this one:
It seems to me that there is some kind of parallel between spiraling academic costs over and above costs related to genuine product improvement, and the very similar phenomenon in the rapid rise in health care costs in the US over a relatively similar time frame. Of course, the latter is exacerbated further by the insurance mechanism (someone else is always paying...) but there is probably some commonality in the rise of middle management and bureaucracy/legal fees eating into budgets. Slatestarcodex had an interesting topic on this matter if anyone cares to find it.
The answer regarding why the cost of a college education has increased astronomically over the last 20 years, without the product – a service – having improved to a comparable degree is a combination of the reasons which have been offered in the comments,
ReplyDeleteSee “College is more expensive than it's ever been, and the 5 reasons why suggest it's only going to get worse,” Business Insider,
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-college-so-expensive-2018-4
There are approximately 4,298 colleges/universities (public and private) in the U.S., but more and more colleges are closing under the strain of costs:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019-02-15/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing#:~:text=Though%20the%20U.S.%20Department%20of,ranks%20only%20around%201%2C400%20schools.
I thought I'd read about Baumol in this context on this very blog, and so I found:
ReplyDeletehttps://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-response-to-two-comments.html
Apart from that, I'd recommend reading _Confessions of a Community College Dean_ by Matthew Reed. He describes the same cycle happening in community colleges, where climbing walls and athletics certainly aren't to blame. His is very much a view from inside the administrative beast, but it's a thoughtful and informative view.
One point Reed makes that I haven't heard here: "The gravitational pull of higher tuition is becoming progressively stronger. Ironically enough, some of that pull comes from scholarships and financial aid. To the extent that money is funneled through students, the only way for colleges to get that money is to charge students as much as possible."
I'll also bite on the "compare improvements in college to improvements in cars over the past 70 years" question. Here are two enormous improvements in college over the past 70 years:
ReplyDelete* Colleges now provide much more extensive, comprehensive student support services of all kinds. These can be expensive; they can also be quite effective. E.g., the impact of CUNY's ASAP program, which raised semester-to-semester retention by 8–10 percentage points and increased graduation rates from 8.7 to 14.5%: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2393088
* Our understanding of effective pedagogical techniques has improved immensely over just he past 20 years. Active learning techniques in particular have proven remarkably effective; in science courses, using these techniques increases average exam scores by 6% while reducing course failure rates by about a third: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2014/05/08/1319030111.full.pdf (the authors of this study note that if an effect of this size were obtained in a clinical trial, the study could be "stopped for benefit" so that the control group could received the intervention). These highly effective educational techniques require a lot of institutional support, ranging from time off to redesign a course to room renovations to make it quick and easy to move back and forth from lecturing to small-group work.
Again, I do *not* want to claim that these account for or justify tuition increases. Still, these are real, significant, and important improvements in the college experience.
(A third change: unlike 70 years ago, college now provides the necessary entry ticket into most good-paying jobs—I guess you could call that an "improvement"? That may be more of an explanation for tuition increases, though I don't think it explains the explosion in college tuition over the past 10–20 years.)
Social functions of institutions are often hidden: as far as I can tell the function of a college education is largely to improve the students' class status, that is credentialism and to have a four year party before joining the work force- sure some people want an education, but people are willing to pay that much because they will earn that much or more or hope to and have fun
ReplyDeleteThere were post war improvements on 1950 cars that in that time would have increased the value 10 more percent back then so A new car price adjusted is about 50 percent more than seventy years ago! And University tuition is locked into to product commodity with a higher priced tuition being better just as a higher priced car is better. Marx would say universities are a top contributer to the capitalist machinery in an extremely detrimental way to humanity. Knowledge should not be a capitalist commodity. Professors profess, they are not ambassadors of the creation of true agents of change, they are attache's of living a personal intellectual life for their personal happiness. Sorry to break the bad news.
ReplyDeleteRe David G's pt on pedagogical techniques: yes, I made the same pt earlier w/o the supporting link.
ReplyDeleteJust b.c Pr Wolff teaches basically the same way in 2020 as he did in, say, 1967 doesn't mean that this applies across the board. Probably a lot of teaching hasn't changed much, but some has, perhaps esp in the natural sciences as the link provided by David G. suggests.
To take another specific example, some courses in pol sci, esp intl relations, use exercises like simulations. Like every other technique, this can be done well or not so well, but where done well it gets the students to think more for themselves, learn to work effectively in teams, etc.
Again, that a lecture on Marx or Nietzsche or Adorno or Christopher Marlowe or whoever may be much the same in 2020 as in 1960 does not mean there have been no changes in teaching. It is very possible to criticize the tuition increases w/o claiming, as Pr Wolff has, that there have been no improvements whatsoever in the "product". Now perhaps those are balanced off by decreases in quality in other respects, but that wd require a more extended discussion on the part of whoever is undertaking to make the claim.
P.s. Re financial aid, the large budget/coronavirus/etc. bill that recently passed includes in its 5000+ pp. provisions increasing Pell grants and their availability, among other things.
ReplyDeleteHowie said:
"Social functions of institutions are often hidden: as far as I can tell the function of a college education is largely to improve the students' class status"
But it doesn't work out that way does it? Because now all expect to "improve their class status". What is the result: the shoe-man must now have a degree. And if the shoe-man wants to *manage* the damn store, by god, he must have a *master's* degree!
At anonymous: the shoe-man's father may have been a menial laborer- his son may want to be a teacher or manage a factory
ReplyDeleteIn a capitalist system all must seek money, some more than others
Certain kinds of entrepreneurs and people who work in computers don't need advanced degrees- even police officers need advanced degrees
It is the logic of credentialism but there is inflation as all or most seek it.
I agree it is a futile quest
Anyway it is a theory and education is just one kind of credential.
Look up 'Randall Collins credentialism'
He makes a sociological case for it.
He is smarter than me and almost everybody
The shoe-man was my father. His father was a rabbi from Lithuania. I wanted to be a college-professor but lacked the requisite focus and discipline to get over that bar. I did read Professor Wolff's book "The Poverty of Liberalism" when I was a teenager and it distressed me considerably. I don't think I understood the gist of the attack on Mill. Mill seemed to me an extremely loquacious but extremely decent chap and why should Professor Wolff go so far as to make him the locus-situs for so many of our (then) present-day shortcomings? This argument was more than my 13-year-old mind could fathom or follow. But the cover design of that book was one of my favorites; so it has remained with me. As has Mill -- who from time to time actually makes a sharp point. And Professor Wolff, in spite of the confusion that his argument with Mill caused me when I was young, seems now to me to be a person of profound discernment and most crucially of humility and of decency!
ReplyDeleteLFC: I remember you making that point, sorry for not going back and finding it so I could acknowledge you!
ReplyDeleteThe big bill LFC mentions apparently will make pell grants available to incarcerated persons:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/20/congress-pell-grant-prisoners-449364
—this is a HUGE deal, although as a colleague who works in prison ed pointed out to me, it makes it likely that there will be more low-quality exploitative institutions entering the field, like this one:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/12/17/this-tiny-christian-college-has-made-millions-on-prisoners-under-trump
David G: No apology necessary at all.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that there is some kind of parallel between spiraling academic costs over and above costs related to genuine product improvement, and the very similar phenomenon in the rapid rise in health care costs in the US over a relatively similar time frame. Of course, the latter is exacerbated further by the insurance mechanism (someone else is always paying...) but there is probably some commonality in the rise of middle management and bureaucracy/legal fees eating into budgets. Slatestarcodex had an interesting topic on this matter if anyone cares to find it.
ReplyDelete