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Questions Raised By Education Dept's Road Show On College Value

Posted by timothy on from the it's-the-ineffables-stupid dept.

lpress writes "Department of Education officials, led by Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, were on our campus last week, soliciting input on The President's College Value and Affordability plan. The discussion focused primarily on the design of a system for rating colleges and to a lesser extent on innovation and improvement. While the feedback was constructive, many attendees pointed out difficulties and limitations of any college rating system. One solution is to open the process by having the Department of Education gather and post data and provide a platform and tools for all interested parties to analyze, visualize and discuss it. Similarly, open innovation should be encouraged, for example, by providing a hosted version of the open source education platform MOOC.ORG."

16 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. a college rating system that already works by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    it's call the BCS. yeah, right.

  2. Education con game by nbauman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These people got their education at schools like Harvard, where they spent full-time in an environment designed to educate them, challenge their ideas, let them relax and think, and experiment -- and make the social contacts that helped their careers more than the course content they were ostensibly learning.

    Now they're trying to tell us that it's just as good (and cheaper) to get a college class online. If we can only be wise consumers in the free market, we'll find a deal online that we can afford. Nobody walks.

    This is a con job. It's like saying Internet porn is just as good as sex. It's like saying that you can find affordable health insurance online.

    40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.

    City College has a wall of pictures with the Nobel laureates who graduated CCNY, most of whom said in their Nobel biographies that they couldn't have afforded to go to college if they had to pay for it.

    The University of California turned out graduates who gave us the revolutions in digital electronics and medicine. Then Ronald Reagan decided to cut the budget by attacking the liberals he didn't like anyway. If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.

    The job of government is to pay for education.

    We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.

    Let's do what works. Bring back free university education. Pay for it out of taxes.

    1. Re:Education con game by epyT-R · · Score: 2

      Sorry.. With income and sales tax, something close to $0.40 on the dollar goes to the state already, more for specific items due to punitive taxation. While I don't dislike your idea, I already pay too much in taxes to float the systemic deficit spending loan as it is. Enough is enough. I want my money and my rights/freedoms back please.

    2. Re:Education con game by sjames · · Score: 2

      Oddly enough, they will!

    3. Re:Education con game by sir-gold · · Score: 2

      That great, until you lose both legs and an arm invading some tiny country that you have never even heard of before.

    4. Re:Education con game by stenvar · · Score: 2

      40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.

      Forty years ago, only about 10% of Americans graduated with a college degree; today it's more than three times that. And your idea that European nations just give everybody a free college education is a fairy tale.

      If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.

      College has generally become more affordable, and far more people go to college now than 40 years ago. Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.

      The job of government is to pay for education.

      No, that's not its job, but for practical purposes, it's doing it already.

    5. Re:Education con game by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

      College has generally become more affordable, and far more people go to college now than 40 years ago. Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.

      Most instate Universities with room and board are around $18,000/yr. So, a 4 year degree is in the neighborhood of $72,000. I don't know what mid-size cars you drive, but that's pretty steep. College has become anything but more affordable. If it had been, there would have been less need for student loans, not more.

      It has nothing to do with the major one picks (although some majors do not gain one an advantage in employment). 40 years ago, a college degree in business allowed one to jump into middle management. Today, it is pretty much standard for administrative assistants to have one. Yes, today's administrative assistatns do more than yesterday's secretaries and stenographers, but $72,000 worth of education more?

      No, the system is broke, because somebod confused correlation and causation 40 years ago when the push for everybody to have an education really took off. Yes, people with degrees made more money than those without back then, but without all of today's financial aid, many of those people attending college already had a socio-economic advantage. Yes, there is no doubt that in certain fields it really did make a difference, but in most, we all knew the doctor's kid was going to get a better job with or without college than the farmer's kid was.

      But, with all the best intentions, after misidentifying the real problem, we through billions of dollars at it so that today, many, many people have a college education, but the doctor's kid still gets the better job than the farmer's kid, because often it's not about what you know, but who you know that makes the difference.

    6. Re:Education con game by Atomic+Fro · · Score: 2

      Spot on. The only thing a ratings system would accomplish would be handing out salaries to a handful of cronies tasked with compiling a worthless metric. Unless you are born into privilege (money, athletic, or scholarly ability) and you are going to college, its going to be the local state university. Hopefully one that caters do your chosen discipline without extreme financial burden.

      Gut Homeland Security (by extension TSA), cut military spending, stop spending money on the militarization of local police. Stop taxing labor so working families can afford to send their kids to college.

      Invest in education, don't subsidize tuition. Distribute more money to universities through grants. Invest more into agencies like NASA that can outsource some of their work to universities. Create an environment where universities can be flush with cash so that tuition becomes known as a barbaric tool used in the past by the elite.

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    7. Re:Education con game by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 2

      Why on earth did people choose to moderate this off topic and troll???!?

      Would it have been better if I'd direct quoted the bits about only rich people being able to afford higher education?

      If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay. .... We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms.

      My point is that the third choice is to serve the country -- not necessarily on the front lines. You can join the army as support personnel and still get the college tuition package. I'd personally never take that option, but it's there.

    8. Re:Education con game by nbauman · · Score: 2

      Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.

      You obviously don't know anything about art history.

      I took art history courses.

      I learned about the Bauhaus, industrial design, architecture. I learned about the history of the motion picture and the birth of video. I learned how people figured out how to apply a new technology.

      I learned about Leonardo da Vinci and the study of anatomy. For many centuries the study of art anatomy was the same as the study of medical anatomy. I learned about art and technology.

      I learned about why they had the art that they did in Renaissance Italy, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in 1960s New York.

      It helped me understand the history of science.

      Art history is simply a branch of history. Do you think the study of history is a waste of time? Do you think it's more important to study generals and battles than it is to study architects and industrial designers?

      BTW, when undergraduates major in art history, they also take the same basic courses that everybody else takes, such as math, science, English, foreign languages, music, other history, etc. The idea is that you go to college and get a well-rounded education, that teaches you how to deal with anything. You don't know at age 19 what the world is going to be like for the next 40 years, so you have to be prepared for the unknown.

      If you go to the Nobel prize web site http://www.nobelprize.org/ and read the biographies, you'll see that many of the most accomplished scientists studied the liberal arts as undergraduates. Harold Varmus, who is now head of the National Cancer Institute, after discovering the role of retroviruses in cancer, was an English major. Eric Kandel, who discovered the physiological basis of memory in neurons, studied German literature at Harvard.

      The four-year undergraduate degree, where you let kids follow their curiosity, is the goose that lays the golden egg. It's the most valuable thing we've discovered -- throughout history, around the world. That's the way we turn out great minds, including scientists, including "producers". It's a system that works and you shouldn't mess with it if you don't understand it. If you start tossing out all the subjects that bored you, you'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You'll turn out technicians who don't know what to do when the world changes.

  3. Re:Government is the problem. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    are not technical institutes where you train for a job

    Yes, they are. Maybe once ago, in a land far, far, away, where only the old money went, that was true, but not any longer. At this point the people with the wealth are not spending it to create new work for people to live off of. College is only increasingly enrolled in because with a shiny piece of shitpaper in hand, you might be slightly more able to support a family. College degrees are not needed for thier merit, but as a way of attempting to leverage yourself into an ever growing labour pool. Trust me, this economic system is going to collapse sooner or later, if the wealthy don't start paying people doing unskilled labour enough to live comfortably on. Either all the poor will starve, and the labour pool will shrink, or the old money will be sodomized with salad forks and sub machine guns, forcibly redistributing their ill gotten wealth to the poorer.

  4. don't worry by stenvar · · Score: 2

    Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.

    1. Re:don't worry by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

      Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.

      Well, if he would just undo the damage created by no child left behind, it would be a great start.

  5. what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?

  6. Hell I'd love it if they had something so by NotSoHeavyD3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    you could differentiate which ones are primarily research institutes and those that are actually focused on education. (I say that because the institute that I got my BA from pretty much has research as their primary goal. Finding the next generation of researchers is their secondary goal, politics and PR is their tertiary goal, but quaternary goal, oh yeah that's totally undergrad education.)

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    Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
  7. Re: Innovation and improvement by JWW · · Score: 2

    Perhaps they could finish fixing health care before they go into overdrive fixing colleges.