My last post was on April 25th and while my intent was to do a weekly blog , it has become a 60-day blog. I apologize, but I have been busy. In writing for this blog while at the same time teaching and writing academically, I needed to pause for new research. The interesting thing is that while I have posted nothing in 60 days, people keep on visiting the blog and re-reading the old stuff.
Over the past 60 days or so I have been reviewing data from OECD and other groups who have shared their findings with me. I’ve been collecting the thoughts of students and parents about higher education, interviewing employers about what they expect and what they think they are getting from higher education. I have been visiting campuses that are planning to make significant changes in their operations in expectation of raising their productivity and I have also been speaking to groups at conferences.
Speaking to groups is also an “input” function for me, providing I listen carefully to those who comment and question. Over the next few weeks I hope to have some responses to some of the commentary that has been going around.
There’s a hypothesis out there made by a credible source, (Peter Theil) that we are in an education “bubble”, in many ways, just like the “dot-com” bubble and the “mortgage bubble, whereby people are persuaded through greed or ignorance to pay more for an item purchased as an “investment” than that item’s true worth. Thus, when the bubble explodes and values decrease, they loose a lot of money.
If indeed, a person invested years of his or her life and tens of thousands of dollars pursuing a degree only in the expectation that they would get it all back and more, then, for the time being, those who have completed their education this year, may get less that they had anticipated they would receive in return. But there’s little evidence that this condition will persist beyond the current crisis.
The value of a baccalaureate is set by the employer, following their understanding of the value of the education and the market for graduates in which they must compete. Right now employers are not hiring enough people at any price. The projection is (by Pew Research) is that when they resume hiring the salaries they will be offering will be 20% less than they were offering before the crisis.
I can’t buy that. The realities of the U.S. demographics and global competition will guarantee a stable demand over supply for graduates at both the undergraduate and graduate level which will maintain the price (wages) the employer will pay. The cost side is another matter. There’s no doubt that the cost of education to the student is inflated, but (recently at least) that has less to do with the increase in operating costs at institutions of higher education than at the decline in state support of higher education which acted as a subsidy.
Higher education needs to increase its productivity, if not to avoid a bubble, certainly to remain competitive worldwide. I’ve been reviewing all the productivity schemes that are out there and very few of them make any sense.
The dream of “packaging courses” (this time the digital packager is Carnegie Mellon University) to be offered by less expensive faculty at other campuses has been resuscitated but it does not work to increase value (quality) and eventually it will die as did the previous attempt by the Annenberg Foundation.
Most universities are currently processing a “bubble” of their own as the
population demographics are seeing the retirements of a greater number of professors than in the previous decade. This will lower teaching costs as the new faculty is likely to cost less and may be persuaded to teach more, but teaching is only one of the duties of faculty and without as much knowledge creation and community service, universities are less valuable to the culture.
Thus by another measure of productivity, universities with large turnovers this decade, will produce less value for our economy. These productivity schemes are also likely to do nothing about the two major issues facing higher education that is, what percentage of the students who enter college ultimately graduate and how long does it take for them to complete a baccalaureate.
Oohm 
Jose Ramon, let’s keep the focus on your last two questions: what percentage of the students who enter college ultimately graduate? and how long does it take for them to complete a baccalaureate?
We are wasting valuable money on what is called in community colleges -student success rate- (percentage of students obtaining “D” or better by the end of the course), this is after what they call census data, (three weeks after the first class session).
Statistics are not encouraging.
I have to agree with you. I believe the value of a degree is still the same, even though higher education costs are rising. On the other hand employers have changed the way they view higher education, lowering the value of the degree within the workforce. Employers now seem to be interested in experience levels, but given the innovation higher education exemplifies, they will be able meet these challenges. One solution may be to introduce more practicums and internships into the curriculum.
I have missed your blog, welcome back. Do you think that the productivity of the for-profit university sector contributes to the “bubble”? Is there a bubble expanding or do I gather you think Theil is applying private sector economics to education?
If colleges routinely admit unqualified candidates and graduate them, the proper comparison is with a house “flipper” who expects to re-sell the house and pay-off the over-100% loan, or the interest-ony loan, in the expectation of ever-increasing housing prices. But in the same way that a house is more than an investment, education need not “pay-off” financially, as those who work on a Ph.D and become university professors prove every day.
“This will lower teaching costs as the new faculty is likely to cost less and may be persuaded to teach more, but teaching is only one of the duties of faculty and without as much knowledge creation and community service, universities are less valuable to the culture.”
This is a complex sentence and I’m not certain that I interpret it correctly. In many ways I think that getting new faculty into universities will be stimulating. I liken it to my own industry (utilities) where that new faculty is amping up productivity and introducing some healthy risk taking. I agree that newer faculty may be required to teach more and have already seen evidence of that locally – and without support, I might add. But do you believe that teaching more is contrary to knowledge creation? Is that because if one is teaching then one is not doing research? Is there not a way to combine the two so that the students become the engine for knowledge creation? As for the community service element, I see that as a problem for the universities today. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve worked to get the schools more involved. Oddly (or not), it is less of an issue at the community colleges. I believe that the notion of community involvement really must begin at the top.
Very good questions you ask. Research tells us that a faculty member who works summers (for example) and therefore teaches more per year does not produce any less research (all things being equal) but a new faculty member takes about 3-5 years before they are ready to compete for the research support and many universities spend thousands of dollars supporting their attempts to get some traction. Carnegie says that professors with 10 years of experience are twice as productive as those with 5 years of experience. It is just very hard to do and unless there are clear and valuable incentives along the way, or faculty get paid by universities do do research, they won’t attempt much. The way universities are governed, new people with new ideas are seldom given a chance to see them come true and it is the system that keeps them in check. Sometimes this is very bad and as a consultant I am hired sometimes to break through the logjam, but organizational structures, accreditation standards and over ten centuries of tradition, are hard to budge.
The new faculty is never as productive as the old faculty, about 70% of the funded research is done by people with 10 years or more in the academy and student-led research can be a tool for teaching some things to undergraduates but has never, in my 30 years, produced anything that can me called new knowledge. Graduate students working with a faculty who has a research agenda are a bit more productive but not much. Usually you have to go to a post-doc before you can find publications that are quoted by others. Sorry, but Llanes is right, only the rapidly aging tenured faculty produce enough research to keep the enterprise going.
That’s very interesting and I don’t dispute it at all. But it does bubble up like a convention needing some type of breakthrough. Are you familiar with donorschoose.org? It’s an online charity connecting people like me with school classroom projects around the US. What if there was a research version? Young academics could post their projects and anyone interested could help fund. Obviously certain things would be more appealing to the masses but it could also work as a marketplace for the finished product. Thinking out loud…
That is a great idea. I don’t know if it would yield any results but it may be worth trying it out.