^^ There's been plenty of supply increase on the college side.  It's not like there isn't enough college to go around.  There are more than ever before and they're just dying for students.  Most of the cost increase is attributable to competitive pressures.  Instead of controlling tuition, colleges spend big to attract a larger share of students, even though most of them are non-profit and have no such mandate.  This is a choice but it's not the only choice.  Different choices could be made by the people currently in charge, or by different people.

 

^  Yes, but continuing ed doesn't pull you out of productive activity for months or years at a time, nor does it cost your annual salary, nor does it reduce your skill level to novice like switching fields does.  These are the costs of human obsolescence.

I'm starting to get the feeling that these mass murder shootings are the result of men overall feeling that they have no chance of finding gainful employment -- school or no school.

Expecting people to constantly re-educate themselves is the opposite of efficiency.  When someone is forced to switch careers, much of their accumulated education and experience becomes a waste.  That cost must be counted against whatever is gained in exchange for it.  Shunting that cost to individuals doesn't work, because the sum total of those individuals is your economy.  Every day that we force them to spend on retraining is lost productivity, and every dollar is one less (plus interest) for them to invest or trade with.  It's a destructive spiral. 

 

Most professions these days require almost constant retraining just to keep up. 

 

On-going, short-term professional development within a familiar field while still having steady employment is one thing.  Asking middle-aged folks to undergo significant long-term retraining while being unemployed is a whole different discussion.  The former is acceptable.  The latter is a hit that most cannot sustain.

Fine, if that's so unacceptable to you and 327 ... what exactly do you plan to force on the rest of us to prevent it?

Plan?  There's no plan.  Corporations aren't trying to plan the economy and neither are we.  Peak education is not the result of any sort of planning, it's a random collection of individual failures on a scale never before seen.  The fact that it transfers wealth from the many to the few is just a happy accident.  Happy because at least there wasn't any economic planning going on.  Thank goodness for that.

Just because there shouldn't be a plan doesn't mean you don't have one.  When you're ready to reveal it to the light of day, I'll be quite interested to see it.

Oh you won't see it... not until it's right behind you! 

 

Perhaps you should have majored in nefarious plan perception.  I hear Bowling Green has a stellar program.

I hear Bowling Green has a stellar program.

 

That should have led you to question your sources right there. :-P :-D 8-)

Plan?  There's no plan.  Corporations aren't trying to plan the economy and neither are we.  Peak education is not the result of any sort of planning, it's a random collection of individual failures on a scale never before seen.  The fact that it transfers wealth from the many to the few is just a happy accident.  Happy because at least there wasn't any economic planning going on.  Thank goodness for that.

 

Higher education has a staggering amount of salesmen working for it without receiving any direct compensation. Schoolteachers, relatives, family, friends, businesses, the media, the government, athletic organizations and on and on. It's only recently that people working for academic institutions really had to ramp up their use of sales techniques (because of the involvement of for-profit schools and rising questions about the employability of graduates) because it used to be that all the selling was done by others.

When I taught at one of those for-profit schools, the sales techniques and other tricks orchestrated by the admissions people were unconscionable.  For example, they got people who were mildly mentally ill enrolled, and after finishing one 2-year program they'd get them enrolled in another.  For example after 2 years of medical assisting then they'd put them in graphic design.  I saw them repeatedly misadvise students so that they took the wrong classes on purpose.  I'd see them promise students if they left in week 5 of one quarter for maternity leave that they could pick up at week 6 of the next semester, free of charge, then charge them full price for both.  Then the student took their anger out on the teachers instead of the admissions people.  I remember I had one student who didn't know what the space shuttle was.

 

Problem is, the state universities weren't much better with this stuff.

Fine, if that's so unacceptable to you and 327 ... what exactly do you plan to force on the rest of us to prevent it?

 

One way or another there may come a time when you are forced to stop being so apathetic about this issue.

Is the education BUSINESS really about education?  Is it really about making money on what they claim is education and controlling the distribution of knowledge?  But it is affected by changes in population and technology and whatever else forces evolution in society.

 

But we could have created a National Recommended Reading List for children decades ago.  Why didn't we.  We could have made double-entry accounting mandatory in the schools.  Double-entry accounting is 700 years old.  Are we really supposed to believe it is difficult to understand?

 

But now we have cheap tablet computer and public domain books, but what to read?

 

The Tyranny of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase

http://www.anxietyculture.com/tyranny.htm

http://www.archive.org/download/http://archive.org/details/tyrannyofwords00chas

 

A Short History of the World (1922) by H. G. Wells (not sci-fi but an SF writer's perspective)

http://www.bartleby.com/86/

 

Thinking as a Science (1916) by Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt - Thinking as a Science

http://librivox.org/thinking-as-a-science-by-henry-hazlitt/

 

Omnilingual (Feb 1957) by H. Beam Piper

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/03/scientific-language-h-beam-pipers-qomnilingualq

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/308/omnilingual

http://librivox.org/omnilingual-by-h-beam-piper/

 

The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh From the Lemonade Stand

http://www.exceltip.com/book-1570713960.html

http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/general/2006/10/18/foolish-book-review-quotthe-accounting-gamequot.aspx

 

Radically Simple Accounting by Madeline Bailey

http://qccomputing.com/radical-accounting-book.htm

 

There are good books out there but most books are crap and most people are not spreading good information.  That is the modern interpretation of Darwinism.

 

43 years after the Moon landing we are supposed to believe economists don't know about planned obsolescence?  Now we have it in computers more powerful than we actually need.  Gotta keep people buying computers.

Fine, if that's so unacceptable to you and 327 ... what exactly do you plan to force on the rest of us to prevent it?

 

One way or another there may come a time when you are forced to stop being so apathetic about this issue.

 

And if that time is years from now, I expect that even then, neither you nor 327 will have yet answered my question.  What public policy changes do you propose to force upon the rest of us based upon the curious problem of too much productive technology in the economy?

And how do you expect people to get paid when human labor is practically valueless from all the technology which you fetishize? Perhaps the 1% of people who own the technology can dole out monthly checks to the 99% of people who don't own the robots. When the value of human labor reaches zero, the value of humans reaches zero.

Or perhaps more than 1% of people will actually be able to avail themselves of such technology.

One must afford before one can avail, and the list of what will be accepted in trade for all this tech shrinks every day.  And then there's that specter of obsolescence again... what if you're forced to mortgage your life on tech and you end up with betamax in a world that goes VHS?  Not a big deal when we're choosing VCRs, but if all your life is to revolve around tech, that sort of issue gets more serious.

I remember that 20-year period when everybody had power can openers. Then people realized that they were junk and went back to manual ones.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352

 

The End of the University as We Know It

One must afford before one can avail, and the list of what will be accepted in trade for all this tech shrinks every day.  And then there's that specter of obsolescence again... what if you're forced to mortgage your life on tech and you end up with betamax in a world that goes VHS?  Not a big deal when we're choosing VCRs, but if all your life is to revolve around tech, that sort of issue gets more serious.

 

If the technology really is sufficiently productivity-enhancing (just speaking at the highest level of abstraction here, which seems to be where this discussion has persistently remained), it should pay for itself and more over the course of whatever its useful life is.  If its planned obsolescence is five years, then it should less than something with a planned obsolescence of twenty years, ceteris paribus.  There will of course be people who pay too much for a given technology, but that's true of any product, including many with no productivity-enhancing benefit whatsoever.  This is not something that can or should be "solved" by restricting the dissemination and commercialization of technology (or, really, doing anything else that could possibly flow from an anti-tech mindset).

 

I remember that 20-year period when everybody had power can openers. Then people realized that they were junk and went back to manual ones.

 

I still have a power can opener. :-(

 

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352

 

The End of the University as We Know It

 

This is one of the most promising developments in educational history, at least on paper.  That said, if such technology is to truly revolutionize education, it still has a ways to go.

I think people are only "anti-tech" to the extent that tech creates situations like Peak Education.  As with anything, if your action imposes costs on others, you are expected to cover those costs.  This is not a novel concept in law.  So if you get rich by wiping out someone's field of endeavor, by replacing them with software, if is likely that your gains are coming directly from their pockets.  They may have invested in that career at great cost.  You are profiting directly from the ruination of their long-term investment... surely you can see where this is going, in a legal sense.

I think people are only "anti-tech" to the extent that tech creates situations like Peak Education.  As with anything, if your action imposes costs on others, you are expected to cover those costs.  This is not a novel concept in law.  So if you get rich by wiping out someone's field of endeavor, by replacing them with software, if is likely that your gains are coming directly from their pockets.  They may have invested in that career at great cost.  You are profiting directly from the ruination of their long-term investment... surely you can see where this is going, in a legal sense.

 

No, I can't, because your premise is flawed.  If your action directly imposes some tangible harm on someone else, you can be expected to cover it.  That is not and has never been the case when one actor simply out-competes another in the market, so any move in that direction would indeed be a novel and extremely disturbing legal and policy concept.  VHS manufacturers did not have to cover Betamax' losses.  Google did not have to cover any losses from search engines that failed to keep up with it.  Nucor was not required to cover the losses of any of the steel producers who remained reliant on blast furnaces.  Nintendo did not have to cover for Atari.  So on and so forth.

 

Educations do not come with a lifetime guarantee.  Heck, some are practically useless from the outset.  What you propose--basically an innovation penalty, payable from innovators to the deadweight shed by innovation--is as anti-tech and anti-prosperity as I assumed it would be.

 

Tell me, would this be payable only by businesses, or by anyone who replaces a human being with technology that does the same job faster, better, and cheaper?  Should I owe my family's old stockbroker at Merrill Lynch a lifetime of severance payments since I decided to go with Fidelity?  I use H&R Block's online tool to file my tax returns; do I owe someone out there a payment for that, to compensate them for the job they might otherwise have had preparing my taxes?  Hell, is there a maid out there somewhere that I owe payments to because I got my own vacuum cleaner?  Or would that only apply if I'd once had a maid and then decided to clean my own apartment?

Each of the examples you list [edit: in the original paragraph] are other companies suffering harm, not individuals.  If Atari fails, those programmers can go to Nintendo or to another competitor.  This is the sort of innovation-based change we can all get behind.  The result is still people making video games and all that has changed is window dressing.  At no point is anyone's lifelong investment in themselves rendered useless.  If you equate that to the dissolution of a failed company... then that equivalency is really all we're talking about here. 

You'd already responded by the time I got my edits in, so I'll repost them here for the sake of keeping the discussion appropriately linear:

 

 

Educations do not come with a lifetime guarantee.  Heck, some are practically useless from the outset.  What you propose--basically an innovation penalty, payable from innovators to the deadweight shed by innovation--is as anti-tech and anti-prosperity as I assumed it would be.

 

Tell me, would this be payable only by businesses, or by anyone who replaces a human being with technology that does the same job faster, better, and cheaper?  Should I owe my family's old stockbroker at Merrill Lynch a lifetime of severance payments since I decided to go with Fidelity?  I use H&R Block's online tool to file my tax returns; do I owe someone out there a payment for that, to compensate them for the job they might otherwise have had preparing my taxes?  Hell, is there a maid out there somewhere that I owe payments to because I got my own vacuum cleaner?  Or would that only apply if I'd once had a maid and then decided to clean my own apartment?

Indeed, your edits make my last post look rather silly.

 

To penalize destruction is not to penalize innovation.  But if innovation creates destruction, it cannot be a pure good nor can it be treated as one.  Pills can cure a great many diseases that were once considered unstoppable-- and yet, we recognize that at some point, a drug's side effects can be more damaging than the disease it's trying to cure.

 

As the cost of educating yourself for a career continues to skyrocket, the destruction side of that scale grows.  Is the value side (productivity from tech) growing enough to keep up?  If so, what's the problem?  There wouldn't be any.  The problem is that the value side isn't growing nearly so fast.  One could say that the destruction side (i.e. ed costs) is growing at a pace that would be unsustainable in any situation, a pace that tech's benefits cannot possibly match.  It would seem that the most logical approach would be to reduce the costs that make this an issue in the first place.  Addressing that problem does not require an up-or-down vote on technology.

I still have a problem with your entire conceptual framework, particularly the central concept that any person providing services for another could have a claim on that person's purse even after their services have ceased (unless, of course, that was specifically contracted for in advance, in which case the service provider would be expected to give up something else in advance, e.g., lower pay up-front in exchange for a higher severance).

 

I agree, of course, that the cost of education has been growing at unconscionable and unsustainable rates.  And with respect to state colleges and universities, I am quite willing to entertain intervention to lower those out-of-pocket costs; the taxpayers' support for such institutions need not be unconditional, and they have no shareholders to whom they owe fiduciary duties to maximize financial returns.  Also, as the article KyleCincy posted noted, the technologies that could wreak a little creative destruction on the currently-dominant residential higher education model are already growing out of their infancy into their toddler years, though they have a ways to go before maturity yet.  It definitely should be possible to provide education at significantly lower cost than the current model allows, which will be critical if we want to address the student loan bubble.  (This is one reason I think that "Peak Education" may turn out to be a misnomer.  As that article notes, in the paradigm to come, it may be that Tiffin, Heidelberg, Muskingum, Marietta, and so on cannot survive ... but Harvard could have an enrollment of millions, each paying a fraction of what students at Harvard or those other private schools must.)

Fine, if that's so unacceptable to you and 327 ... what exactly do you plan to force on the rest of us to prevent it?

 

One way or another there may come a time when you are forced to stop being so apathetic about this issue.

 

And if that time is years from now, I expect that even then, neither you nor 327 will have yet answered my question.  What public policy changes do you propose to force upon the rest of us based upon the curious problem of too much productive technology in the economy?

 

I don't know, I really don't.  There are too many unskilled people in this country for the direction we seem to be headed.  I don't think we're talking about changes like cars replacing horses or computers replacing typewriters.  The changes that are on the horizon are much more significant and happening exponentially.  I don't have a solution, but I do see a bifurcation of the labor force (which has already begun to happen, IMO) that will make this country very unstable and ripe for chaos.

>ripe for chaos.

 

Yeah, you can't have this many people getting screwed by an increasingly unpredictable and cruel myth of a system.  College went very quickly from being an investment to being a gamble. 

Fine, if that's so unacceptable to you and 327 ... what exactly do you plan to force on the rest of us to prevent it?

 

One way or another there may come a time when you are forced to stop being so apathetic about this issue.

 

And if that time is years from now, I expect that even then, neither you nor 327 will have yet answered my question.  What public policy changes do you propose to force upon the rest of us based upon the curious problem of too much productive technology in the economy?

 

I don't know, I really don't.  There are too many unskilled people in this country for the direction we seem to be headed.  I don't think we're talking about changes like cars replacing horses or computers replacing typewriters.  The changes that are on the horizon are much more significant and happening exponentially.  I don't have a solution, but I do see a bifurcation of the labor force (which has already begun to happen, IMO) that will make this country very unstable and ripe for chaos.

 

There may be too many unskilled people in this country, but I think part of the lesson of this thread is that some of those unskilled people actually have college degrees.  Those degrees just didn't actually impart real skills, or at least not skills worth the price paid for the degree.

I rest my case:

 

 

And for each of these clowns you do see, there's 10 you can't see. 

^^ There's been plenty of supply increase on the college side.  It's not like there isn't enough college to go around.  There are more than ever before and they're just dying for students.  Most of the cost increase is attributable to competitive pressures.  Instead of controlling tuition, colleges spend big to attract a larger share of students, even though most of them are non-profit and have no such mandate.  This is a choice but it's not the only choice.  Different choices could be made by the people currently in charge, or by different people.

 

 

I'm late into this discussion but it seems silly.  Are you really arguing that higher education for all is bad thing, or not worthwhile?

 

Not everyone needs to go to Harvard or Stanford or even Case Western.  Cleveland State has some great programs and is VERY affordable, especially when you consider living at home rather than campus.  Ditto for Toledo, Akron, Bowling Greeen.  Even if a person/student doesn't find work in their field, they are better off with education.  It improves communication skills, problem solving, and makes them more adaptable.  A more educated society is a safer society, a more productive society, a more civil society.

 

I think the real problem is that we have too many young people ignoring all this and saying "hell I can't afford college", then grumbling about not being able to find a decent job or make enough to have any sort of adult life.  The decision to get more education beyond high school shouldn't even be a decision.  By Junior High, young people should have some sort of plan in place for what fields interest them and start focusing in that direction, be it business, medicine, arts & sciences, etc.  Delaying that decision till high school graduation is WAY too late.  As a result, government scrambles to try & find "good paying jobs" for these people will little to no skills or education, rather than support them for life on welfare programs.

 

 

>you consider living at home rather than campus

 

This is the real dilemma with higher ed.  I would love to see a breakdown of how much student loan debt is living expenses debt, not tuition.  But in my opinion you have to get out of the house, although I do remember those pathetic souls who seemed to go home EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND.

My point is, there are plenty of ways to graduate with a 4 year degree without going in debt up to your eyeballs.  I have a good friend who graduated from CSU with a degree in Civil engineering, took him 5 yrs, he worked part time the entire time while living at his parents' but I don't think he even took out a single loan.  He's making about $75k a year now.

 

The other option which is rarely discussed is doing a community college for the first 2 years, then transferring to main campus for the last two.  Big time savings there.

i guess it depends on what you consider to be expensive.  tuition at CSU is 4,600 per semester. so, your friend would pay $50,000 in that five year span on tuition alone. Its nice if you can swing that without taking out loans, but it is difficult.

^^I don't know about everyone else, but my student loans really only cover tuition.  and commuting ain't cheap, either.

I rest my case:

And for each of these clowns you do see, there's 10 you can't see. 

 

Teens and young 20s are typically a little strange.  Imagine a video of Bill Clinton during this era, or George W. Bush, or Bill Gates.

i guess it depends on what you consider to be expensive.  tuition at CSU is 4,600 per semester. so, your friend would pay $50,000 in that five year span on tuition alone. Its nice if you can swing that without taking out loans, but it is difficult.

^^I don't know about everyone else, but my student loans really only cover tuition.  and commuting ain't cheap, either.

 

All you need is a part time job where you can earn $9k a year.  $10/hr x 20 hrs a week will suffice.

i guess it depends on what you consider to be expensive.  tuition at CSU is 4,600 per semester. so, your friend would pay $50,000 in that five year span on tuition alone. Its nice if you can swing that without taking out loans, but it is difficult.

^^I don't know about everyone else, but my student loans really only cover tuition.  and commuting ain't cheap, either.

 

All you need is a part time job where you can earn $9k a year.  $10/hr x 20 hrs a week will suffice.

 

Assuming you're living for free somehow.  Not everyone might even have the option to stay home--or one's home environment might be unconducive to studying.  It's certainly true that many college students could afford to be a little thriftier, but people still need food, clothing, and shelter, even if that doesn't meaning dining out every night, wearing the latest designer fashions, and renting a luxury apartment.

C-Dawg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9Kz4mIUQUM

^Video is private

Hmm...somehow they made it so that you can't view a youtube video without viewing it on this site:

http://deadspin.com/frat-bro-gives-pregame-speech-for-the-ages-before-flag-1379134787?fb_action_ids=10151924510502174&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151924510502174%22%3A419878231447612%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151924510502174%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

 

 

I think whoever posted it on YouTube made it private, because he was getting a lot of negative reaction from the deadspin link. I can't imagine why. People who comment on deadspin are usually so tolerant of guys like this. 

Watch out Al Pacino!! 

 

I don't know if the speech is the best part of that video.  Check out the adrenaline running through the dude two to the left.  He is AMP'ED for a flag football game.

Deadspin posted a second video with the music from Any Given Sunday underneath the speech. This isn't flag football, bro, this is our LEGACY!!! (I love how he walks off the field and isn't even playing after that)

The scene in an OU dorm room, dated 1969:

Harvard desperately trying to look normal:

This isn't exactly on topic with peak education but it seems to be the best fit. The premise is that even though US schools are at or below average when taken as a whole against world, when looked at on the state by state level for math and science testing we have really good state systems and really really bad state systems and not much in between. What I found interesting is the exclusion list on the website. 

 

 

Here is the article:

 

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/10/american-education-isnt-mediocre-its-deeply-unequal/7354/

 

And here is the website with the study:

 

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/naep_timss/

Good find.  Thanks for sharing.

 

I see Ohio falls basically in between Israel and Quebec (the study broke out the Canadian provinces, too).  Could be worse.

 

Also, while the Asian Tiger countries' test scores are definitely impressive, I have to admit I have a slightly more ... erm, balanced? ... view of their educational systems now than I did a few years ago.  I still think that Japan, South Korea, China, and Singapore get a lot right, but those countries do have their own problems.  In addition, many of them have the dubious luxury of being able to give substantially more attention to each child (in school and out) because they have so few children.  Not exactly a perfect situation.

Also, in many Asian countries there's a lot of things that Americans all know that get left out of the curriculum. Things like animal knowledge, how the human body works and how to play musical instruments. Only if the students specialize in those things will they learn them. Very little in the way of school sports as well.

Not that any of the information here is really news, despite new studies that document the decline in education, but it's always still somewhat shocking. I would bet that today's typical college graduate is actually less literate and ill-prepared for the workforce than a typical high school graduate from a generation ago. I think at least some of this can be attributed to the fact that today's 20 & 30-somethings grew up so pampered by their narcissistic baby boomer parents that their demands carried over to the realm of higher education in the form of rampant grade inflation at even elite institutions (how dare you give my little Johnny a "D"! He's always been an "A" student :|), as standards fell and common sense was pushed aside in the quest for "self-esteem." No wonder our culture is going down the tubes!

 

College’s Identity Crisis

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: October 12, 2013 366

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/bruni-colleges-identity-crisis.html?_r=0

 

And already, the higher learning that too many young Americans partake of leaves a lot to be desired. Time magazine rightly began its recent cover story on the college experience in the United States by reporting the results of a chilling survey last year of recent graduates. It showed that 62 percent of them didn’t know, for example, that Congressional terms are two years in the House of Representatives and six years in the Senate.

Not that any of the information here is really news, despite new studies that document the decline in education, but it's always still somewhat shocking. I would bet that today's typical college graduate is actually less literate and ill-prepared for the workforce than a typical high school graduate from a generation ago. I think at least some of this can be attributed to the fact that today's 20 & 30-somethings grew up so pampered by their narcissistic baby boomer parents that their demands carried over to the realm of higher education in the form of rampant grade inflation at even elite institutions (how dare you give my little Johnny a "D"! He's always been an "A" student :| ), as standards fell and common sense was pushed aside in the quest for "self-esteem." No wonder our culture is going down the tubes!

 

 

 

And get off my lawn too!

 

But seriously what do you need to know today? Your phone tells you everything. I do think that the concept of knowledge is changing, knowledge used to be how much can you retain and how do you relate what you already know to a new subject. Now it's a series of Alice in wonderland little doors and nooks, that if you know just enough to find the door what lies on the other side is availible to you.

Rote memorization left the education world many moons ago.