The Times, They Are A Changing!

So warbled Bob Dylan, well before he sold out to the man. The times are really changing for education.

Some forty odd years ago, the cost was bearable. My working class mom and dad, plus a summer job, was enough to pay the bills when I got my degree. I didn't even work during the school year!

These days, the cost is unbearable. Things have changed. A lot! A recent MSNBC article reports that the cost of a college degree has gone up more than even health care. More than virtually any other component of our economy!

Finding the reason why is difficult. Virtually everybody agrees that 'labor costs', that is, the high-end PhD's who teach the classes, have gone up a lot. And 'plant and equipment' costs more too, especially for an education that attempts to keep up with the research labs found in industry. And finally, the attitude that states, the actual sponsors of higher education, has changed too. They're contributing less and less to the cost and forcing parents and students to pay more.

But I suspect that most of this can be bundled into a simpler explanation: supply and demand. "In 2000, fewer than one-third of Americans said college was essential to be successful. Now the figure is well over half. Enrollment is surging. Enrollment grew 9 percent during the 1990s; during the 2000s it rose 33 percent, to roughly 21 million." (Justin Pope, Associated Press) The simple fact seems to be that costs are going up mainly because they can.

With exploding costs and a declining economy, it's no wonder that student debt is exploding too. MSNBC recently ran an article titled, "Is student loan, education bubble next?" A new report estimates that average student debt for borrowers from the college class of 2010 has passed $25,000. There's every reason to believe that mass default in student loans might be the next financial crisis.

The current mode of higher education is, at the very most, only a century old. It didn't exist until around 1900. And the attitude that everyone can and should get a college education has only been around for about a generation or two. Is it "education for life" or "vocational school". Is there really value for taxpayers to train someone in the fine distictions to be made between the plays of Marlowe and those of Shakespeare? And after a student is trained, what will that student do except train someone else? There's really no agreement about what a college education actually is or what it's worth, yet families and students are free-falling into a life of debt to pay for one anyway.

The tradition that higher education evolved from was not at all what it is today. It was reserved for the upper classes and nobody expected to be able to make a living as a result. Vocational education was mainly taught "on the job" and often involved a craft guild or apprenticeship. This reflected the close relationship that "industry" - like making shoes for example - and "labor" - the shoemakers guild had.

It seems to me that we're rapidly returning to those days, and if a crash comes in student loans, it will just make it happen faster. Bill Gates was a college dropout. So was Steve Jobs. As a manager who hired a lot of people in my time, I never paid a lot of attention to a college degree. I paid attention to what someone had actually done before to show that they could do the work.

If anyone ever asked me about my own college degree, I had a well rehearsed answer: "It proves that I was able to work in a structured environment to complete a multi-year effort in pursuit of a defined goal. It does not prove that I actually learned anything that I can apply to an actual job."