NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

[Roughneck]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I think American education went all wrong when we dropped vocational tracks from High Schools and started the "every child deserves a college education" nonsense. How many MBA's do we really need? Not all people are cut out for academia and that's OK, but it's politically incorrect to say so.

The one thing I tried to impress upon my kids is to be something. To have marketable job skills when you finish your education. The days of getting a college degree for the sake of having a degree are gone. True it never hurts,but get a general business degree or a history degree and see where you are in the job market. They tired to get a two track education program going here and the academics shot it down. Look at what Germany does. They still have skilled trade people who make high quality stuff weather it's autos or optics. They have a dual track educational system. The other side of the problem is that academia has become a tenured, self serving special interest which is more interested in"higher" education than imparting job skills.

The local chemical plants and refineries put together a 2 year CC degree program in process technology. The average starting salary for an entry level operator is 65K. Most make close to 100K with OT after a few years. We should do more of this.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

If you or anyone else is in this predicament; massive student loans and an upside down house... Your best bet would be to skip the country and go work in another country..... You would have almost no future here with that kind of debt load.... I know several foreign students who are at least in the student debt portion, and they openly discuss going outside..... Get off the debt mill....

I was fortunate enough to have family assistance when I studied for my quite affordable(now since highly inflated in price) undergrad degree.

I was also fortunate enough to have a company employing me at the time to pay 100% tuition reimbursement for my study at an Ivy business school.

So I was lucky to carry zero student debt.

Coincidentally, I did leave the US a decade ago for New Zealand.

And New Zealand also has a student debt problem much like NZ's housing problem(which is to say quite serious, but likely a good bit less so than the US).

Personally, I hoping we see(In the US, NZ, and elsewhere) a shift towards more of a TechShop and/or a German inspired focused 2 tier system.

I try the best I can to contribute in the right direction by spending a staggering sum of money(for my business relatively speaking) each year on internal/external training for my staff...skills that are portable, clearly "tangible", and that can leave at any time requiring me to ensure they remain as happy and productive as possible.

One thing that stands out to me is what appears to be a disconnected and/or off-balanced education system.

From my perspective, I see far too many "thinkers" being produced and far too few "do-ers"....and I'd put myself squarely in the excessive group of thinkers......on the civvie side of things, while I used to work in semicon manufacturing(in management)...I've never actually made a thing myself.....I've helped "build" some well known companies.....and successfully "built" a couple of my own.......but it's always been using the backs of others.

I'll be forever grateful to the Army for having required me to start at the very bottom, and work my way up, by doing, mastering, and then teaching in order to progress up the food chain.

My biggest fear, even in NZ with it's less serious(but still scary) student debt problem, is the whole "cycle of life" disconnect that I fear is near inevitable:

If the student debt crisis is clearly unsustainable, as we seem to have good consensus here, then we risk losing our "seed corn" and/or we see a blight....seriously damaging or depleting our future economy harvest at a time when we are already suffering a blight.

But now that I think about it, even if the Academic Industrial Complex(NICE one Ghent12) receives a massive bailout to keep things going(and possibly help restart the economy with university-centric new business formation and job creation), I wonder if the disconnect will still be unavoidable....as the crushing student debt load across the population suffocates non-university centric business formation/job creation(who can afford to gamble on a new business when they are student debt slaves), and extinguishes future consumer spending on housing/cars/durable goods(who can afford to by a home or new car if they are suffocating in student debt?).

As a related aside....I wonder if student debt will act as a dangerous catalyst in a return to late 60's, early 70's protest movements......will we see student debt act as a crowbar to split and divide along generational lines a fight between the most wealthy generation in history(babyboomers) with their grandchilden(Y generation and those who soon follow) whose prospects are considerably dimmed suffering from F.I.R.E. economy debt slavery before even entering the workforce?

[Chomsky]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

wtf?

Guys, guys. It's called the Ignore button.

[oddlots]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I think American education went all wrong when we dropped vocational tracks from High Schools and started the "every child deserves a college education" nonsense. How many MBA's do we really need? Not all people are cut out for academia and that's OK, but it's politically incorrect to say so.

We need to encourage vocational trades and apprenticeship programs again.

Absolutely agree. The snobbery around this issue in my home country - Canada - drives me nuts. I remember a Provincial education minister saying to an audience "No one dreams of their son becoming a plumber." Oh really? A scandalously stupid statement IMO.

I want my son to have a trade and a liberal arts education. Trades are great.

One of the defining mistakes in the English speaking world was to let apprenticeship programs be run by the unions. They more properly belong to management, those most directly responsible for maintaining and increasing productivity. (For what it's worth, I think unions should also have representation on corporate boards as in Germany. That they don't Is another defining failure.)

[reggie]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

Guys, guys. It's called the Ignore button.

It's so very disturbing to see how successful the social engineering is at turning us against ourselves. Seems to impact all psychographics and demographics. The fact is, any physically recognizable subgroup in society can be successfully targeted, pro or con.

[oddlots]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

Honestly I think what Serge is saying is repugnant on its face. Let's say we could somehow factor out "average" historical and economic factors and determine "average" intelligence among racial groups. What good would this "truth" do us? The value of individuals or groups of individuals is not determined by their intelligence. You might agree and still sympathise with Serge's point. But the temptation to take this step to devaluing a whole group based on this purported "truth" is just too great to let stand. And the results of allowing such a devaluation to occur are so absolutely disastrous and deplorable - think smoking chimneys and slave ships - that I immediately question the motives and ethics of anyone who pursues this line of thinking.

At the very least, it's wrong in the same way that yelling "fire" in a crowded building is just simply wrong.

Personally I am very doubtful that any such truth can be distilled out of the "data." It's a bit like the point EJ makes about the efficient market hypothesis. The idea that such a theory could make sense of a market when one looks at the number of massive, epoch-making political-economic events that have transpired - re-engineered currency regimes, massive devaluations, gold-standards repudiated, clung to or slowly whittled away - the idea immediately appears ludicrous.

I am not saying Serge is a race supremacist, I'd just like to ask him what possible good could come of this line of thought. I'd also like to know whether he has known anyone who has been subjected to racism. I had a black Jamaican friend who was streamed into a vocational program in an inner city school setting in Toronto. And he would have ended up there if his mother hadn't intervened and insisted they had her son all wrong. Last time I saw Bobby he was doing his PHD at Columbia in applied physics. How would this situation have been avoided by your line of argument Serge?

[oddlots]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

Great thread.

Coincidentally Gordon T Long's latest article worries the same issues with some interesting charts regarding trends in R and D investment worldwide and some very thoughtful reflection on his experience as a VP of engineering at a major Massachusetts-based firm:

http://home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/2010/Article-Innovation-Creative_Destruction.htm


Here is what he concludes in 10 points:

A STARTING POINT FOR CHANGE – Gordon’s Top Ten

As I said in the beginning the US needs a bold new “Marshall” plan to fight the new destruction of creative destruction. Here is a starting point for public debate:

1 – If we can spend $165B bailing out AIG, then we can spend $100B (4 years of college @ 50K/year X 500,000 students) and guarantee everyone in America a college education to compete in the 21st century. Parents will start to spend immediately instead of presently being almost financially paralyzed with skyrocketing education costs.

2- Obama says we need to be leaders in Energy. OK. Where are the programs? Where are the 50,000 new university teaching and research positions ( 50,000 X 75K = $3.8B)? At $3.8B this is a rounding error compared to the banks TARP program.

3- 99% of all jobs in America are created by small business with less than 500 employees. Stop treating them like they are last on the ‘to help’ list after the banks, financial institutions and S&P 500 but first on the taxation list. S&P 500 paid almost net zero taxes, reduced US hiring, yet received the bulk of the governments bailouts. Small business is the golden goose that every administration seems determine to cook. What has the government done for small business other than burden them with Obamacare and the potential removal of the Bush tax cuts (most small business are directly affected proprietorships)? If you can’t immediately recite what the government has done to help small business as THE US employer (versus what they have done for the bank and financial lobby), then you understand the problem.

4- The number of Government employees, in addition to their salaries and benefits (federal, state & local) can best be described as out of control. According to a new study from the Heritage Foundation, U.S. government workers earn 30 to 40 percent more money than their private sector counterparts on average. So, in essence, the ‘servants’ make substantially more money than the taxpayers who employ them. Isn’t the system great? In fact, according to the study, if you add in retirement and health care benefits, the average federal employee now earns nearly twice as much as the average private sector employee.

5- Make Social Security and Medicare financially sound so Americas can believe and budget that it will be there for them. The public will spend and invest if they know they have a nest egg that really exists. The government is fooling no one. Kids learn that Social Security and Medicare is unfunded before their college freshman year today.

The stark reality of the shift from defined benefits to contributory benefits over the last decade is just now sinking in with the US consumer. They now have no retirement like their parents had. Retirement savings is something when added to college costs is leaving them frightened. Worried people don't spend money and when the economy is 70% consumer spending you have an economic crisis. Political denial and the government attempting to paper it over with policies of extend and pretend are misplaced and will make the inevitability even more difficult to effectively address.

6- When did the American people decide to fund military operations in over 130 countries around the world? With 40.8M people on food stamps, something is seriously out of balance here but there is no public debate thought to be required by either party.

7- The US has no full scale strategic growth programs being initiated by the present administration. We have only financial stimulus or austerity programs. There is a big difference that seems wasted on Washington.

8- Washington and the lobbyists that control it have taken control of our government. Obama campaigned to stop earmarks which ranged in the area of approximately 10,000 annually prior to his presidency. In his first year they increased to the 11,000 range. This is not the change he promised as more pork increasingly flows.

9- For those that actually read it, Obamacare is not a solution for healthcare. It is a stealth income tax we will all soon get hit with. The Dodd-Frank Act is not a fix to what caused the 2008 financial crisis but rather is the most dramatic shift in centralized US government planning and control since the 1930’s. Both these bills were over 2000 pages compared to landmark bills historically being 25 – 45 pages. Indications are that few of our elected representatives actually read either of these documents. They simply voted party lines. As Sarbanes-Oxley dictates, CEOs must sign their corporate 10-Q reports to the government and are liable for it. It is a felony not to. Every elected official should also sign that he or she has personally read the entire act prior to being allowed to vote on it or it likewise will be a felony.

10- The Supreme Court recently over-turned major elements of the Campaign Contribution Reform bill. Washington and the media have now gone completely mute on this subject as politicians scramble for mid-term campaign money for media expense coverage. Maybe our elected officials should vote with the same urgency on this matter as they are presently on giving billions of ‘candy’ away almost daily to every financial disruption, state budget problem, unemployment benefit problem or sign of increasing housing default and foreclosure rates during this run up to the fall elections.

[reggie]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I simply don't get this creative destruction argument, or the traction it appears to be getting. If GATT never happens (or Kissinger - Deng don't usurp Mao as part of Vietnam War outcome), then we're not having this conversation. Looks to me like someone is looking for a [moot] excuse to explain away our current paradigm. I may sound like a broken record, but I say it's more accurate referring to this frame of discussion as anyone of the following: 5GW, Psychological Warfare, Mind War, Information Operations, Propaganda, etc.

[Bruno T]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/op...r.html?_r=1&hp


Can we afford to let higher education collapse, even if we can't afford to pay for it's bailout?

Isn't higher education analogous to planting crops in the Spring to be harvested in the late Summer early Fall to get us through Winter?

Wouldn't a collapse of higher education equate to a crop failure and related hunger and deprivation?

The analogy isn't quite right. When you plant crops in the spring you get a needed product later, food. But when you create a government sponsored system to send way too many marginal high school students to obtain liberal arts, physical education, and vague "business" degrees such as marketing, which do not teach many tangible job skills, much less skills high in demand, you do not get an end result worth the cost.

What we've had for years is more like planting seeds in the spring to harvest plants for flower bouqets. Yeah, we need a few flowers, but you can't build a society or create wealth with flower arrangements.

One other problem is our substituting foreign skill and labor for domestic. It will eventually lead us to where we are now. A nation of relatively lazy dummies all ready to spend but unable to earn.

Economies need factory workers and lower skilled tradesmen too. We got away from this and acted like we could all be highly educated and things would work fine without accomplishing much real work. But at some point someone has to actually "do" work, and in fields where work is needed (not the silly stuff we have done for the last 20 years) , and not just plan, engineer, supervise, and administer it. Instead we're left with a class of well educated but virtually unskilled workers, combined with uneducated and unskilled workers. The skills are what we need more of, not just "education".

We need resources wasted in higher education diverted to giving those marginal students who really aren't cut out for college real world job skills that are in demand. Instead, when we come up short, we hire foreigners to do it for us, either via outsourcing, immigration, or educating their citizens in our universities. That's fine when you're rich, but we are not. I can hire someone to clean my house, but only if I am doing something worth more than that so I can afford it. Kuwaitis can afford to hire foreigners to do all their work for them. They are sitting on an ocean of oil. We can't.

This goes over here, in a forum of intellectuals, like a fart at a wedding, but Americans had better get used to the idea of doing actual "work" for a living. Those who don't will sit for 2 years collecting unemployment, then become homeless.

How did we think that the promised loss of standard of living would be felt? It comes in the form of a guy who used to manage the warehouse now running a forklift, or a surplus mortgage originator working at a tractor assembly plant. Get used to it or suffer the consequences. Those former "good jobs" are like a game of musical chairs. the best/luckiest will have them. The rest will need to do something useful to obtain employment.

[photoncounter]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

It is the fault of the Universities that they're not keeping up with business's "ever-faster pace of change."

Having spent the last 30 years in tech I can confirm that reeducating yourself every 10 years is necessary to keep centered in the mainstream of employment. There are still a few people keeping Novell Networks alive which I did in the 80's, and there's still people employed in the Client-Server tech of the 90's. But I am infinitely more employable today because I've reeducated myself around Cloud-computing. University has never had the classes I needed when I needed re-education. If they had, they would've gotten my money. Classes and experts are a helluva lot easier than dragging yourself through it on your own!

Yes, things are changing very fast in the computer science world and languages are becoming obsolete every few years, but the basic programming concepts don't change much. I was able to apply programming techniques (logic, algorithm) that I learned in micro-controllers, to C and as I understand they could very well be applied to C++, Matlab etc. I think this is true for almost everything -- concepts in circuit design, device physics etc. (just couple of other examples I am more familiar with) are the same as they were 30 years ago. If there is something that one needs to learn that is hard to learn by oneself, there is usually some kind of "crash-course" available, mostly offered by big companies.

The point I am trying to make is that the university education helped me learn the basic concepts, which helped me learn quickly whatever I need to learn on the real job. There may be (and there are) some specific jobs for which one needs to get specific education -- there's PhD for that.

I don't imagine restructuring education every few years would be very easy.

[bobola]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I put a high value on an education that teaches any skillset that can be more widely used through a lifetime, such as what is taught at vocation schools.

Knowing how to troubleshoot and fix a car that won’t start using a set of tools and a volt/ohm meter may possibly be more important than something like an MBA, over time. A good car mechanic will probably always be able to find work in a bad economy.

[reggie]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I'd be happy to discuss which of the statements I made you consider incorrect. The best available evidence supports precisely what I described in the post and I will be happy to detail it to you. And for the record, I have studied educational policy within the New York metro area quite intensively.

I am very much aware of some schools that have made great strides in educating black people, but as I said, they are simply far too expensive to operate. And that is really the key. We are beyond the age of wishful thinking. Uncomfortable realities that may have been ignoring due personal ideological biases simply can no longer be ignored. Such is life.

I've heard this same crap, and worse, from white Australians when they discuss the Aboriginal population - what a beautiful race of people, by the way.

And it's not much diff when you listen to a Kiwi talk about Māori's. Or, when I listen to Indians talk about native Fijians. I'm sure if one spent enough time living abroad they could develop countless examples of this kind of socially engineered bigotry.

Give me 20 years, control the NY state-house, and a media outlet and I'll totally reverse this trend and turn some other race in NY into drunken street bums. It's not that hard, really. The formulas for this are old and well developed.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I've heard this same crap, and worse, from white Australians when they discuss the Aboriginal population - what a beautiful race of people, by the way.

And it's not much diff when you listen to a Kiwi talk about Māori's. Or, when I listen to Indians talk about native Fijians. I'm sure if one spent enough time living abroad they could develop countless examples of this kind of socially engineered bigotry.

Give me 20 years, control the NY state-house, and a media outlet and I'll totally reverse this trend and turn some other race in NY into drunken street bums. It's not that hard, really. The formulas for this are old and well developed.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the wealthy west....across the US, Canada, Aus, NZ, western Europe......I believe your anecdotal comments about NZ white/maori is off the mark.

While it's not perfect here........there's plenty of evidence to support NZ facing it's race relations issues head on.

Can we get back on topic?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

The analogy isn't quite right. When you plant crops in the spring you get a needed product later, food. But when you create a government sponsored system to send way too many marginal high school students to obtain liberal arts, physical education, and vague "business" degrees such as marketing, which do not teach many tangible job skills, much less skills high in demand, you do not get an end result worth the cost.

What we've had for years is more like planting seeds in the spring to harvest plants for flower bouqets. Yeah, we need a few flowers, but you can't build a society or create wealth with flower arrangements.

One other problem is our substituting foreign skill and labor for domestic. It will eventually lead us to where we are now. A nation of relatively lazy dummies all ready to spend but unable to earn.

Economies need factory workers and lower skilled tradesmen too. We got away from this and acted like we could all be highly educated and things would work fine without accomplishing much real work. But at some point someone has to actually "do" work, and in fields where work is needed (not the silly stuff we have done for the last 20 years) , and not just plan, engineer, supervise, and administer it. Instead we're left with a class of well educated but virtually unskilled workers, combined with uneducated and unskilled workers. The skills are what we need more of, not just "education".

We need resources wasted in higher education diverted to giving those marginal students who really aren't cut out for college real world job skills that are in demand. Instead, when we come up short, we hire foreigners to do it for us, either via outsourcing, immigration, or educating their citizens in our universities. That's fine when you're rich, but we are not. I can hire someone to clean my house, but only if I am doing something worth more than that so I can afford it. Kuwaitis can afford to hire foreigners to do all their work for them. They are sitting on an ocean of oil. We can't.

This goes over here, in a forum of intellectuals, like a fart at a wedding, but Americans had better get used to the idea of doing actual "work" for a living. Those who don't will sit for 2 years collecting unemployment, then become homeless.

How did we think that the promised loss of standard of living would be felt? It comes in the form of a guy who used to manage the warehouse now running a forklift, or a surplus mortgage originator working at a tractor assembly plant. Get used to it or suffer the consequences. Those former "good jobs" are like a game of musical chairs. the best/luckiest will have them. The rest will need to do something useful to obtain employment.

I really like that edit to the analogy.

I also agree with the cascade downwards in the service economy.

It reminds me of the 70's/80's, everyone(that I knew) changed their own oil, brakes, plugs......it was a requirement in my father's household if I wanted to drive.....flash forward to the 90's/2000's and nobody knows how anymore.

I know we're going to lose the dog walking businesses and the cat and dog pet bakeries....but if our real GDP eventually drops back to late 1990's levels...how much of the service economy will also get lost....will we be changing our own oil(or should I say batteries?) after finally walking our own dogs?

I found another neat "open source" version of Techshop:

http://fabathome.org/?q=node/1

I wonder what role such things will play going forward.....will such things allow our children to begin to "make or do" things again?

[Basil]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

If you are going to criticize something, at least know how it works. Most universities charge students less than what it costs to attend. Endowments are not generated by "profits" from tuition, but by donations to the university. Harvard is very generous in the scholarships it provides, as is Princeton and several other top schools. Many students pay almost no tuition. Were these institutions and their endowments to be taxed, much of this financial aid would evaporate and go to the government instead.

I do, however, fully agree with the issue of college athletes.