Should Harvaed Be Free?

Continuing with the theme...

<s> not my problem. You are also clearly a(n) *ist of some sort. We know your kind (replace * with anything that will create knee-jerk self dense, shaming in you)</s>


(<s></s> implies sarcasm within the enclosed tags.)

 

Harvard proposes changes to the college admission process

Harvard report proposes changes to college admissions - Business Insider

 

Don't make college free, increase need-based aid

Guest Commentary: Don’t Make College Free — Increase Need-Based Aid

 

Louisiana makes college free. See what happened.

When Louisiana Offered Free College Education, Guess What Happened

 

Ontario budget today - free education for income under 50k.

 

And that is the way things out to be.

 

The focus on universities--free, less expensive, whatever--is misguided. It is a supply side argument regarding national human resource development. The idea is that if more people get higher education and training, they'll be able to have better careers. But it ignores the very important demand side--what does the marketplace need in the future? No one--NO ONE!--in the U.S. is managing this crucial element. (In simpler times with more Tayloristic careers, employers and unions did this pretty well. But those days are long gone--and so are those jobs.)

So more and more students--and mid-career workers, too--trundle off to get their degrees (or more degrees) with little rhyme or reason--accumulating debt and driving up the costs for everyone (because of liberal availability of student loans, mainly.)

We have to do two crucial things. First, we have to measure what this nation requires for its future. Then we have to build frameworks and pathways to prepare people for those requirements. This would include assessing applicants to these pathways to ensure fitness, readiness, and willingness. THAT'S what we need to pay for, not "free" college for everyone. Doing that just jams up the supply side. (Think Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory.) It doesn't address the demand side of the equation and leaves us with a lot of over-educated (in the wrong areas) and under-employable graduates with a ton of debt. Ugh.

 

No economist here but I do not thing it is just as simply as sliding along the supply and demand curve. A highly education populace with expand the possibility frontiers. Therefore, there should be more supplies and demand same time - not just a trade off. Free/ affordable education expand the economics pie so there a bigger piece for more people instead of a small piece for fewer people. After WW2 many progressive countries offered free education to returning service people. This is partly creditedfor the growth in the economy and improvement in life after Ww2

 

I didn't sat "curves." I said "sides." I wasn't making a macroeconomic case, but a national HRD one instead. Oh, and WWII ended 70 years ago. Times have changed. Anglo countries are in decline, European countries have recovered, and Asian countries have emerged. (See the East Asian Tigers, who specifically paid attention to the demand side.)

I didn't suggest a trade-off, or that one was necessary. I just said that an entire side of the discussion is being ignored.

A supply side argument could still be made for much of Africa, though. But that's outside the scope of the discussion, as is your example.

Now, about Antarctica....

 

It isn't. Some countries have and do this kind of demand side analysis and policy execution quite well. It is the central success of the Asian Tigers' rise in the 1980s, and is key to China's future. But the US and UK remain mired in now-archaic human capital theory and practice,. We focus on raising skills, but we don't do anything to (a) increase demand for them and (b) matching our supply to that demand. This keeps our countries mired in what Finegold and Soskice called a low-skills equilibrium. The way out and towards a high-skills equilibrium (see Singapore for example) is to develop public policy around the demand for high skills. Otherwise, I contend, you have higher and higher skilled workers competing for the same low-skilled jobs, creating the condition once described as "Diplomaism" by David Hapgood decades ago. In fact, because of globalism, those workers are, in fact, competing for lower and lower skills jobs because the jobs they used to do have gone overseas. This also exacerbates the income we suffer in our society. More education and training alone won't fix this. We need demand for those new skills. Some companies--like Apple, Google, and Tesla--are doing this. We as a society need to do this on a grand scale. If not, we might see those manufacturing jobs return, paying even less than the do now in China and India!

 

I'm going to disagree with the first part of that statement somewhat. I think we act like we are focusing on raising skills. I think we're really good at talking about focusing on raising skills.

In practice, we seem to be really good at identifying highly technical skills and then finding ways to water down education that ostensibly caters to that field. We're also really good at making Masters degrees an entry level credential. Look at how many Masters degrees there are in Health Informatics or Data Science that require no prerequisite coursework or work experience. So, 10 courses from beginning to end, many with no capstone or thesis requirements. Color me skeptical that these programs are actually raising skills in any appreciable manner.

We identify labor needs; often highly technical. And people rush to the programs to make the big bucks then get sad when they realize that they have to do math. Then the universities, many of them at least, make a path of lesser resistance. I had one programmer tell me how his Masters in IT Management (which his manager pushed him to receive from a traditional B&M university that shall go unnamed) involved 9 credits in what amounted to basic and intermediate MS Excel work. He told me that he seriously considered dropping out when he realized the program had the rigor of a Dummy's book but decided to stick around because the degree was on our dime.

I don't believe this to be an exceptional case. People regularly arrive with degrees and no skills or with horribly outdated skills that they learned very recently.

Everyone wants to be a techie. Not everyone wants to be a coder. Not everyone can be a coder. Everyone wants to be a data scientist. But a relatively small number of those people want to study programming, statistics and math. The demand is great for the people who have the skills. The problem is that schools are awarding degrees with the right words but without the substance. So employers are absolutely willing to pass up someone with an MS in Data Science in favor of a high school dropout with a good kaggle ranking.