What would higher-ed reform actually look like? How far down the chain do we need reform? I invite my readers to comment and perhaps we can put together some sort of outline for reforming higher education.
I know that most of the scambloggers and their readers are lawyers or law students, so first and foremost on our minds are things like dischargability of student loan debt, and transparency in the claims made by law schools. But the subprime student loan issue seems like the tip of a systemic iceberg.
We all recognize that a high school diploma is essentially worthless, a mere prerequisite to a college degree, which is almost equally worthless. Should higher ed reform start from the bottom?
If, as a nation, we recognized the perverse nature of our education system, shouldn’t we start with requiring high schools to teach to a higher standard? To teach practical skills, in addition to college prep? My rural high school had a trade school component, which I looked down upon as a college bound student. In retrospect, I wish I had taken some of those classes and had learned some kind of manual skill. If students acquired real skills in high school, perhaps this foolhardy suggestion that everyone needs a college degree would dissipate.
Universities also churns out a lot of worthless grads, particularly in the liberal arts and social sciences. How can public policy remedy this? Eliminate government backed loans for under performing students? Requiring schools to justify their programs to a government agency?
I think that we all recognize that the problem we encounter in the legal profession is a symptom of a system that is tainted, and that taint starts at the very bottom. I welcome your suggestions; let’s make this a conversation.
To tackle the higher education bubble, we first need to ask whether more government or less government is the answer.
The higher education bubble exists only because the government, by providing federally backed loan guarantees and by flooding the market with cheap money, prevented the best market regulator, free market forces, from functioning properly.
Under a free market system, banks would only make loans to students for academic programs that would actually enable the students to pay the loan back. Further, and perhaps more significantly, schools would no longer be able to hike up tuitions as they have done. Instead, schools would be forced to slash prices or go out of business.
I agree; sadly I think more government regulation is a more tenable solution than the prospect of cutting government involvement.
In sum, less government is the answer, not more.
Ultimately, higher-ed reform will have to address the fact that college education is presented as a route to a middle-class life, when that life is increasingly quite simply unavailable to all the people who want it. Universities basically serve to “cool out” the expectations of working and middle class people. The apparent neutrality of law school admissions, testing, bar exam, and credential discrimination serves the same “cooling out” purpose for those that fail as a shill does in a classic sting. Rather than blaming the system, the shill persuades the “mark” to blame himself, or fate (see: TLS, ATL, AutoAdmit, etc.) In the same way that three-card monte can’t be won by most players, the middle class life is a goal that cannot be attained by most students. In the absence of the university treadmill, society would have to bluntly admit that the mass middle class is over. And then what?
Change must start in High School: teach trades and college prep – include in the trades all the math and design theory of engineers; do the same for plumbing and all the building trades. How many times have you hired a workman only to discover they learned thier trade from the back of a crakerjacks box.
Years ago that is what made High School diplomas valuable. When the schools began to promote college tracking, the diploma became worthless.
Higher education reform would require exposing colleges and universities to market forces. Right now they are almost completely insulated from them. I have a few ideas.
As has already been mentioned, student loans could be made fully dischargeable in bankruptcy. Also, lenders might require schools to get some skin in the game by agreeing to be liable for a certain percentage of any defaulted loan (a clawback provision). This would end the massive conflict of interest that exists between students and universities. Of course, it would probably also result in the closure of a good portion of our nation’s colleges (and perhaps 75% of the law schools).
Another alternative financing model would be for schools to allow students to attend for free or at a minimal cost while charging them a certain percentage of their earned income for life. This is somewhat similar in spirit to Income Based Repayment. Schools with successful students would be able to enjoy higher profits and/or charge smaller percentages.
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to put themselves on the hook with some sort of a
Ultimately, colleges and universities need to be made to have some skin in the game.
Thanks! Done!
[I’m a lawyer who went through engineering school first.]
The first change in higher education has to begin in high school.
I decided to be an engineering when I was in seventh grade, and even changed high schools just so I would have the chance of taking more than one semester of physics and an AP calculus course in preparation for college. My original high school, still considered one of the best public schools in that state, didn’t have the ability to offer me classes that would make me marketable. In the face of NCLB and state mandates, the educational targets in high school are too low for the students with vision and too high for those who lack a vision. High school is not geared at all towards what you want to be when you get out – instead it’s simply what about some of the things you’ll have to do when you get out (balance a check book, read a newspaper written at the 6th grade reading level, being able to remember passwords without writing them down). The lack of practical, work related skills (for almost any entry-level position currently existent) being taught in high school in conjunction with the educational arms race attitude held by employers makes high school, as currently conceived, useless in preparing students for employment or for college, for the most part.
Higher education reform is necessary, but changing the attitude of employers is going to be a major hurdle (also, probably beyond the scope of this post)
High school:
emphasis on practical work skills. in essence, encourage kids to pick majors in high school.
early emphasis on career options – skills assessments and aptitude tests need to be offered before junior year.
college preparation plans beginning with freshman for the schools that don’t do that currently.
increased movement toward year-round school
College:
salary caps for professors and administrators
lower tuition caps
focus on experiential learning
reduce or eliminate independent study – if students can’t do the research and learning on their own without paying thousands of dollars of tuition, does it really have value?
early emphasis on career opportunities for students beginning no later than sophomore year (the norm in my engineering program, though apparently not for liberal arts majors)
Grad school:
Year round courses
Emphasis on experiential learning rather than theoretical
Changes to the way loan interest is calculated (in terms of compounding and growing during school)
Reduction of program length where viable (particularly in law and certain PhD programs)
Not enough, but the bare minimum of changes I see as needed.
I tend to think that better government is what is needed. The question is clearly not how much of it there is but what it does.
What the education bubble is, is a disaster of unconstrained drive for profit built upon, yes, the federal guarantees. But, to say that simply withdrawing the federal guarantee is the solution is akin to saying that the remedy for a broken foot is to amputate the leg, when, really, (to continue the metaphor), it’s something you need to walk.
It is true that the federal guarantee is responsible for a distortion of the incentives in the sector (making just about all of them run against what should have been the main interest: doing something good for students and, by extension, society), you can’t look at the federal guarantee in isolation and simply conclude that it is government interference in the free market and it is, therefore, wholly to blame for where we find ourselves today (i.e., that would be in a kind of debtor’s prison). As someone pointed out above, the bankruptcy regime is also regulatory interference in the private market, and the Bush 2005 legislative mash-up led to effectively reducing the risk for lenders to zero. The basic problem (as someone else points out above) is that the lenders were not forced to have any skin in the game. The taxpayers and the students, of course, always did, and that hasn’t changed under the new direct lending scheme. Before, basically what you had was a private market profit-incentive with no risk to check greed. The federal guarantee allowed students access to loans, but, more than that, it allowed private banks to pursue profits through sheer volume, and not by smart, responsible lending. You had a straight pipeline from taxpayers wallets to private, for-profit post-secondary institutions who had no accountability for anything they said to anyone, and that was mediated by a group of lenders who had no disincentive from throwing students into default to earn (straight from the federal government) the fees and increased interest charges delinquency and default would bring. What is more is that because the industry used a misleading 2-year cohort default to determine the percentage of their portfolio that was guaranteed by the government, after two years, they had a handy way to profit from deceiving government. As long as that two-year snapshot stayed low, the government was on the hook for whatever Sallie Mae inflicted on students after that date. You can’t blame that kind of behavior on the federal guarantee, and in the event that you do, you should also realize that Sallie Mae, Citibank and the rest of them were securitizing these loans based on the fraudulently-obtained risk “rating” from the Department of Education and profiting from selling those “student loan-backed” securities.
Therefore, from the perspective of tax payers, yes, under the new healthcare bill (Yes, you read that right.), there is more government because the new regime is a direct lending regime; and the private banks are, indeed, cut out. But at least the entity putting taxpayer dollars on the line is somewhat accountable to the taxpayers, rather than to shareholders, and at least it has an incentive to collect that money back from the students – meaning that it has an incentive not to ruin students’ lives in the name of profits. Before direct lending, Sallie Mae and the other private banks simply did not care where the money came from. If I paid them back, then that’s great. If I didn’t, they got paid anyway, and they likely made more on my account. In addition, however, simply getting the government out of student lending is not a practicable solution. Under a completely unrestrained free market system, no student would get a loan to pursue higher education, and that is not exactly a desirable outcome for society. Simply, students are horrible credit risks, and, if you think that fully privatizing student lending – meaning no direct lending by government and no government guarantee – is a desirable outcome, then ask yourself this: Would you want your student loans under 29% interest like your credit card loans? Granted, if they were dischargeable in bankruptcy, then maybe you, I and everyone else here would prefer that; but, the ability to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy doesn’t discipline credit card companies into more consumer-friendly practices, does it. Clearly, then, there is going to have to be some kind of consumer protection-inspired regulation is necessary, at the least.
In short, bankrupcy legislation has to be reformed for private loans. I think the Income-Based Repayment plan is a good plan for loans that the government gives under the new direct lending scheme. I do think that those of us who got our “federal” loans from Sallie Mae before the healthcare bill, however, should have the right to discharge them in bankruptcy. Congress also should pass a law removing the guarantee on these loans – yes, after the fact. Further, there should be a way to hold schools accountable for the bullshit they publish.
The other thing is that when these private lenders are securitizing loans, just like the banks with mortgages, they should be required to hold a certain percentage of the underlying instruments. Otherwise, you’re just creating loan contracts which you intend to sell on, and you don’t really care whether they’re good loans or not.
They should make grad school loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. As it is, since the people making the loans have their hooks in you for life, they make all kinds of bad and horrible loans that they’re entirely aware the borrower will not be able to repay.
The result is a glut of shitlawyers on the market, degrading the value of a law license, and causing the profession to fall into even deeper disrepute than it already is. If you’re asked whether you’re a lawyer or whether you do scat porn for a living, you’d probably be more popular admitting to the scat porn.
If grad school loans were dischargeable, these swindlers wouldn’t write more loans to go to toilet schools and there would be a lot less shitlawyers out there.
It is a fundamental conflict of interest for the same person or entity to 1. Teach a subject, and 2. Test and certify that a person has knowledge of a subject.
There should be an entity, such as the federal or state Departments of Education, that create standardized tests for a subject (eg calculus, torts, American history, quantum mechanics). They don’t have to be multiple choice. They can have any format that accurately measures the student’s knowledge. They would also have a lengthy public book that is the foundation for all of the test questions so there are no surprises. Anyone who pays the testing fee should be allowed to take the test and get credit.
The student can then do whatever they want to prepare for the test. They don’t need to attend college at all. Some can just study the public test materials. Others may hire a tutor for $200. BARBRI type courses would evolve that efficiently teach the material.
When a student has sufficient credit, he should be allowed to sit for a professional licensing exam. Why should it be necessary to sit through 7 years of irrelevant bullshit in order to be a lawyer?
Under this system, it shouldn’t cost thousands of dollars a year to receive an education and the quality of the education would be much better. People presently spend half of their lives, and a fortune, sitting in boring classrooms not learning.
But will any of these proposed reforms produce more jobs? And, if not, then what value do they have?
If it provided balance to the job market, ie fewer unnecessary college and graduate degrees and more skilled workers, you might find better employment figures. You might also have better job satisfaction. I think a lot of students feel such cultural pressure to go to college and beyond, that they end up overeducated and unemployable. Those are separate issues from whether there are quantitatively more jobs, but remedying them would be of social value.
No one is mentioning the word AMBITION. If you have the degree and passed the bar, go hang out a shingle just like the guys at the big firms once did. You eat what you kill but the reward is there for those with the guts to take it and besides, you would be the one in charge.
I agree that learning the plumbing trade right out of high school would be a good thing, but only if you had AMBITION and some amount of business savvy.
Nothing is easy – sorry if you were told that a law degree made life simple and you were naive enough to believe it.