college glut
January 17th, 2007 by 
bkmarcus
"Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people."
– Charles Murray,
"What's Wrong With Vocational School?"
In the second of a 3-part series, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute challenges the absurd level of demand for "higher education" in the United States, especially absurd when you consider the nature of a liberal arts education and the diversity of intellectual skills and interests:
Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses — probably a majority of them — are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide.
As much as I agree with Murray's identification and analysis of the problem (a problem I'm confident most people don't even think is a problem), he does make one assertion I find puzzling:
Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.
What's he base that on? The university system is a cartel. When demand for a cartel's products are higher than seem to make sense, it's more than passing strange to blame the culture. It at least requires an argument. This assertion won't do.
He does get the prognosis and prescription correct, I think:
The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. … Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. … Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class….
Postscript
This is the first post on the new blog in the category I've decided to call schooling.
You can subscribe to it here:
Why am I not calling it "education"?
Well, for one thing, that word is practically owned by the cartel, and I'd rather be picked up by a Google search on "home schooling" than "higher education" ….
Another reason, though, is that schooling, as a word, describes an institution and a formal process -- it's a way to distinguish the contents from the container — a distinction that is not to the benefit of the statist "education" Establishment.
To quote Mark Twain,
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Finally, I'm as or more likely to write about the political economy of schooling in this category as I am to write about the particulars of teaching and learning.
PPS
Gary North's presentation of the economics of the schooling cartel is cached here:
And my collection of schooling/learning/teaching quotes is here:
January 17th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
You may enjoy these quotes. I don't have the full citations.
The fundamental purpose of education, in college as in the high-school and so on down to the kindergarten, is to set the young mind upon a track, and keep it running there in all decorum. The task of a pedagogue, in other words, is not to turn out anarchists, but to turn out correct and respectable citizens.
H.L. Mencken "Editorial" in The American Mercury, Apr 26, p.418
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not. His parents, unless they are infantile in mind, tend to be bored by his lessons and labors, and are unable to conceal the fact from his sharp eyes. His first teachers he views simply as disagreeable policemen; his later ones he usually sets down, quite accurately, as asses.
H.L. Mencken "Travail", p.308
And out of each [schoolhouse] is vomited the standard product of the New Pedagogy - an endless procession of adolescents who have been taught everything save that which is true, and outfitted with every trick save those that are socially useful.
H.L. Mencken
They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
H.L. Mencken
January 17th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
There's a treasure trove of quotes to be found here: http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I agree with Murray that our culture, over the last 100 years, has become unhealthfully (is that a word?) obsessed with "degrees". It's one of those areas where culture gets degraded by the state, which then contributes to further state intervention in a vicious feedback loop.
Kevin Carson makes the argument the best in his posts about the new "professionalism". But it rings true with all of my experience in the business world - you don't look at ability, you look for degrees. You could be the best analytical chemist in the world, but if you don't have three letters behind your name, you aren't going to get past the bottom rung in the lab, and you certainly won't be able (even if allowed) to open your own lab. It's a cultural phenomenon, not a market one. And I also agree with Murray that a truly free market, and even our distorted market, tends to chip away at such cultural issues. The problem is, this is what motivates most people to create state interference in the first place - they don't like how the market whittles away their cultural preferences. So we should all be wary of reaction to the changes Murray cites.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
It's not just in the US. Certain countries demand it to emigrate there.
I work in Australia, for a major global organisation with offices and facilities all over the world.
If you want to transfer to an overseas office, HR won't even consider you unless you have a university degree, even if it has relevance to your job, and even if the country does not require it.
University degrees are an easy shortcut to take, to even though other means of certification would be more accurate.
IT is a perfect example. University degrees in IT are useless for anything but a project leader role. Even "Network Administration" degrees spend more time on learning MS Project than on network related hardware and software.
Certification is far better for your job skills. Yet, even IT companies still want university trained graduates rather than someone who has certifications up the wazoo.