NEVER PAY RETAIL FOR A COLLEGE EDUCATION
Gary North, Ph.D.
[I strongly recommend that you print out this
report. Click the print button. Go ahead.
Click it. This report will be easier to read in
a printed format. Also, while it's printing out
-- it's printing out now, isn't it? -- you should
create a new e-mail folder called "College."
Then drag this report into it. This report, if
followed, may put thousands of after-tax dollars
in your pocket. Don't lose it by mistake.]
Here is the dirty little secret of the academic
degree-awarding industry known as higher education:
A college degree is way overpriced. Students
(parents) pay way too much money. Students spend
way too much time in class -- time that is far
better spent in reading and writing. Then they
pay room and board on top of it.
Paying for a child's college education is the largest
single expense that parents face, other than buying a
house. But buying a house is done over decades. A college
education must be paid for in four years. Also, a house
may appreciate in value. It rarely falls in value. There
is no re-sale market for receipts for college expenses.
What I'm going to reveal in this report, very few
people know about. If I had not been inside academia, I
probably would not have found out, either.
I know how the American academic system works. I was
trained as a scholar. In 1972, I was awarded a doctoral
degree by one of America's better universities. I have
written 43 books. I have taught at the college level.
I'm outside the academic system, and I have been for
most of my post-doctoral career. I know enough about how
the system works not to be overly impressed with it. I
also know how to beat the system.
ATTENDING COLLEGE: A HIGH-RISK VENTURE
About 15 million Americans are attending college
today. About half pay their own way. The other half are
supported by their parents.
Fewer than half of all students who enroll in college
graduate with a bachelor's degree.
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/08/15/college.d
ropout.ap/
So, it's a very big gamble to invest time and money in
trying to earn a degree. The odds are against you. Your
goal ought to be to reduce these odds. You can do this by
taking advantage of loopholes.
Every system has loopholes. Loopholes are official
exceptions that are mandatory for any system to be
consistent with its official standards, but which would
threaten its economic survival if more than a small
minority of users took advantage of these loopholes.
Higher education is no exception.
Here is my view: there is no good reason for people
not to use them when they're available. They are made to
be used. You might as well be the person who uses them.
Paying retail is not necessary. If a person knows
where to look, he can earn a fully accredited bachelor's
degree that is not overpriced: not in money charged, not in
time invested (if he can meet certain life-experience
requirements), and not in distance travelled. He can earn
it at his desk for under $7,000. In under three years.
Because of the Web, a student never has to leave his
desk to earn a B.A., except to take monitored exams at the
local library.
The Web has changed just about everything. But it's
only one option. There are others. There are many ways to
skin the academic cat.
BEATING THE SYSTEM
You can spend $140,000 and give up four years of your
life to earn a degree at an Ivy League university, assuming
that your college board scores are high enough and your
high school grades were all A's.
Or you can spend as little as $3,500 over 2.7 years.
This means your child's degree will cost you a little over
$3 a day, plus books.
If you're willing to pay a few thousand more, your
child can finish the B.A. degree even faster and with less
work by showing that he or she has achieved life
experiences that meet the requirements of formal education.
People can receive college credit for these experiences.
But only a few colleges offer this option to people who
take finish their bachelor's degrees on-line.
Maybe your child can do what Brad V. did. As a new
high school graduate, he completed his bachelor's degree in
six months for $5,000. This was not some phony diploma
issued by an unaccredited diploma mill. It was a degree
from a state university. He never left home to attend
college.
Brad paid $5,000. He might have paid as little as
$3,100. But then college would have taken him two years.
As in most areas of life, there is a trade-off: you can pay
less, but it will take longer to get a degree.
There are a few accredited colleges that grant people
academic credit for their education-related work
experience, and even life experience, meaning unsalaried
work. I call these "merit badge courses." If a student
can show that he has the knowledge equivalent to a college
class, he doesn't have to take the class. He just has to
pay for it -- sometimes at a big discount. Some students
can knock a full year off of their course requirements this
way.
This option makes sense educationally. What we learn
on the job sticks with us. Our work teaches us in the
broadest sense. Why shouldn't adults receive formal
educational credit for knowledge they have mastered -- not
just learned in a classroom, but truly mastered -- on the
job?
Only a few accredited colleges grant academic credit
for work experience and life experience. Some that offer
this don't publicize it. They can't afford to.
Advertising is expensive. So, the story doesn't get out.
That's why so few Americans know of this opportunity.
A degree from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton will have a
lot more prestige than one from any of the colleges I
discuss. But will that degree get its holder a job that
pays 50 times more (after taxes) than a degree from a
college that costs 50 times less? Not likely.
College expenses for most students are high because
colleges are inherently inefficient. That's because the
original model was invented eight centuries ago, when there
were only a six or seven colleges in Europe, and the
printing press had not been invented. A library of a
thousand hand-copied manuscripts was worth a fortune.
Young men had to journey long distances to earn a college
degree, back when travel was expensive. Not many people
could afford to do this.
Colleges adopted the lecture method because students
back then could not afford to buy books. Lectures are
highly inefficient ways to teach. Consider how you learn
anything that's important. You don't do it sitting in a
lecture hall, except maybe for a brief introduction, and
even that could be put on videotape. You probably don't
read a textbook. You learn from a manual. Then you learn
on the job, preferably under the immediate guidance of
someone who does the job already.
Why would anyone choose to sit in a classroom for 50
minutes, three times a week per course, five courses per
semester, for 16 weeks per semester? No business teaches
its employees this way. Yet colleges teach mainly this
way. It doesn't make sense . . . from the student's point
of view. It makes a lot of sense from the teachers' point
of view -- teachers who may lecture only 6 times a week,
and rarely more than 12.
Today, there are local public libraries (which became
widespread less than a century ago), academic paperback
books (introduced about 50 years ago), videotapes
(introduced widely only in 1978), CD-ROM's (1991), and the
Internet (which really got rolling in 1995). But, despite
all this technology, traditions die hard in academia. It
costs college students (or their parents) a lot of money to
keep these traditions alive.
A student can read a book at home or at a local city
library. He can write a term paper at home or in the
library. He can take an exam at the city library, with a
librarian as a proctor to make sure he doesn't cheat. He
doesn't need to attend college. But most colleges require
students to attend classes on campus. Why? Not for the
students' sake.
PAYING FOR WHAT YOU DON'T NEED
The vast majority of colleges require students to
attend classes on campus. This requirement has nothing to
do with the way that most students learn new academic
material. It has everything to do with paying off
mortgages on the college's expensive buildings. It has
everything to do with shelving $100 million worth of books
in a $50 million library building, with a full-time staff,
so that faculty members can write term papers for each
other that almost nobody will ever actually read. This is
called "publish or perish."
Unless a student wants to major in physics, chemistry,
or engineering, any college should be able to teach him
whatever he needs to know through the Internet. This
education should not cost more than $2,000 per year for
four years. And that is with no government subsidy.
It need not cost more than $1,000 a year if you know
where to look.
So, why does it cost so much more? Because the
colleges want it this way.
The instructors employed by a 100% Internet-based
college would have to work a lot harder than they do now.
They would have to grade a lot more papers for a lot more
students. They would not be paid $50,000 a year mainly to
deliver nine hours of lectures a week, 32 weeks a year --
lectures that they wrote 20 years ago.
Only a handful of colleges have adopted 100% Internet-
based B.A. degree programs. There is a reason for this:
faculty resistance. Instructors who are employed by a 100%
Internet-based college would have to work a lot harder than
they do now if there were true academic competition.
The only thing that keeps Internet-based education
from replacing 90% of the colleges in America is this: the
people who run the colleges have got themselves what
economists call a cartel. They don't want to lose it.
The only thing that keeps Internet-based education
from replacing 90% of the colleges in America is this: the
people who run the colleges have got themselves what
economists call a cartel. They don't want to lose it.
THE ACADEMIC CARTEL
What is a cartel? You have heard of OPEC, the cartel
that controls the supply of oil. Its full name is the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The OPEC
representatives get together and agree to reduce their
production of oil. This keeps oil prices high: high
demand, low supply.
That's exactly what colleges do. They have set up an
academic cartel. They keep out new colleges -- colleges
that are willing to meet consumer demand by selling
educational services at a lower price. The higher
education system doesn't allow them to do this. There is a
legal barrier to entry for new colleges. It's called
"accreditation."
Existing colleges have joined regional accrediting
associations that Ph.D.-holding bureaucrats operate. The
representatives of these colleges set the standards for
accreditation. It's kind of like a club. I mean the kind
of club that you hit people over the head with.
Accrediting organizations are not run by the
government, but they depend on state governments to make
non-accredited colleges illegal. The legal use of the
words "college" and "university" is controlled by the
states.
State governments define what constitutes a college or
university inside their own borders. Most states define a
college in terms of one criterion: it is accredited by one
of the regional accrediting associations. This pretty much
freezes the number of colleges that are legally allowed to
issue accredited degrees.
Accreditation reduces the supply of degrees actually
awarded. This reduced supply of education is not based on
a lack of supply of students who are smart enough and who
are willing to work hard enough to qualify for a college
degree. It's a question of an artificially limited supply
of degree-granting institutions.
The colleges have those huge buildings, lawns to mow,
employees to pay, and all of those professors, assistant
professors, and teaching assistants with no Ph.D.'s (who do
most of the work grading papers and leading discussion
sections for freshmen and sophomore classes). This is a
huge investment. If there were true competition, 100%
Internet-based colleges would bankrupt hundreds of these
schools. Most of the others would have to learn how to
compete.
As a general rule, accrediting associations only
accredit schools that invest millions of dollars in
buildings. But in today's digital world, liberal arts
instruction doesn't require real estate. It only requires
dedicated teachers and dedicated students who are self-
motivated.
If the degree-granting system were really honest -- if
it were not run by a cartel -- then accredited college
degrees would be offered to any person who could pass the
same exams that the tuition-paying students also have to
pass. If the student could learn the material on his own,
but pass the standardized exams, then he would get the
degree.
Accrediting associations don't allow this. Why not?
Because it would bankrupt hundreds of colleges that are
protected from true competition by the accrediting
associations. It would wipe out the colleges' tuition
system, real estate system, and low teaching load system.
In every system, there are loopholes. Accreditation
has left intact at least seven of them. Hardly anyone
knows about all seven. One of them is off-campus learning.
OFF-CAMPUS LEARNING
Off-campus learning is a huge threat to the economics
of today's campus-based system of higher education. But a
few colleges do offer it in the name of democracy. The
accreditors dare not ban these programs altogether, for
that would be undemocratic, but they monitor them carefully
to make sure that the programs don't get too price-
competitive.
Only about 10% of 4-year colleges and universities
offer their students as many as half a dozen degree
programs by distance learning, even if they offer a hundred
majors to on-campus students. Most of these schools charge
the same tuition to distance-learning students that they
charge to on-campus students, even though off-campus
students don't use the colleges' real estate.
Nevertheless, some real bargains have slipped through the
cracks. But you have to know about them and then go
looking for them.
Colleges like to pretend that off-campus learning is
substandard, second-best education. But is off-campus
learning really substandard? The evidence says otherwise.
The most recent evidence suggests that off-campus learning
is superior to traditional classroom education, from high
school through college.
Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. Maybe you think
there is some tremendous educational benefit that students
receive by attending classes on a college campus, compared
to the education gained by students who learn at home. Let
me prove to you that you're wrong.
Well, actually, I won't prove this to you. Thomas L.
Russell will. He has been studying this question for a
long time. He has gone back and looked at the published
evidence of the comparative performance of students who
have taken their courses on-campus vs. those who have taken
their courses off-campus. These academic studies go back
to 1928.
Russell's amazing discovery is this: there is no
significant difference in student performance. This is
what study after study has shown, decade after decade.
Go to his remarkable Web site. Read for yourself the
findings of educational professionals.
http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference
Click on any year to see a summary of that year's
report. The years are on the left-hand side of the screen.
Here are just a few samples from the era before TV was
widely used as an alternative to actual attendance in a
classroom:
1928: "...no differences in test scores of
college classroom and correspondence study
students enrolled in the same subjects."
1936: "[Results of this study were very similar
to Crump 1928 and showed]...no differences in
test scores of college classroom and
correspondence study students enrolled in the
same subjects..."
1940: "In all but two comparisons, correspondence
study students performed as well as or better
than their classroom counterparts and in the two
cases which were the exception the differences
were not significant."
1943: "... showed no significant differences
between the groups in terms of motivation to use
supplementary reading material."
1949: "[Results of this study were very similar
to Hanna 1940 and Meierhenry 1946 and showed...]
in all but two comparisons, correspondence study
students performed as well as or better than
their classroom counterparts and in the two cases
which were the exception the differences were not
significant."
It gets even more amazing. Recent studies have
revealed that students who have been educated in a off-
campus learning setting produce higher performance rates
than conventional classroom-based education does.
http://teleeducation.nb.ca/significantdifference
WHY PAY RETAIL?
No college can afford to give information away. Yet
there is almost nothing that is taught in a college that a
student could not get in a local public library or on the
Web.
If you have ever seen the movie, "Good Will Hunting,"
you probably remember the scene in the restaurant where
Will, a high school graduate who is a genius, blows away a
hot-shot Harvard student. Will knows more than he does.
That's because Will has spent a lot of time in the public
library, and he remembers everything he has read. He tells
the Harvard student that he is spending a fortune to learn
what Will has learned at the public library.
Unlike Will Hunting, you may not know where to start
looking for the information you need about earning a
college degree at home at a price far lower than you ever
thought possible. Even if you do know what you're looking
for, you don't want to waste your time in a fruitless
search for information that you may not find. Your time is
too valuable.
I'll save you time. I have done your homework for
you. I have said that there are seven loopholes in college
education. Few people have heard of more than four of
them, and few of these people have ever actually taken
advantage of them. That's because they haven't put all of
the pieces of the puzzle together. I have.
I have spent all of my adult life in libraries,
including my own (about 13,000 volumes). I have spent
thousands of hours on the World Wide Web. I have
discovered where a student can earn an accredited four-year
college degree at a price that most middle-class Americans
can afford. Three minutes from now, you can have this
information.
I'm ready to give you all of this information,
including Web addresses where you and your child (or
grandchild) can line up everything in advance. I also have
a course-selection strategy to make it easier to get the
degree. I have written a report:
HOW YOUR TEENAGER CAN EARN A BACHELOR'S DEGREE
FROM AN ACCREDITED COLLEGE IN FOUR YEARS OR LESS
FOR AS LITTLE AS $5 PER DAY.
Even if the student is your grandchild, you can give
the report to the check-writing parent.
It won't do the check-writer any good to know how to
beat the college-pricing system if the student isn't
cooperative. While there are books out there on this or
that aspect of nontraditional college education, they are
all aimed at parents or self-funding adults who are on
their own financially. They are not designed to change a
student's mind.
What a parent also needs is a persuasive presentation
that will convince the college-bound child to take the less
expensive path. So, I have also written a 61-page report
for the prospective college student, in which I do my best
to make the case that nobody needs to spend $40,000 to
$140,000 to finance a college education. It has all of the
material in the parent's report, plus a lot more. It's
called,
EARN AN ACCREDITED BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN FOUR
YEARS OR LESS, AND HAVE ENOUGH MONEY LEFT OVER TO
BUY YOUR FIRST HOUSE
You can get all of these reports for free. I'm
offering them as bonuses. All you have to do is subscribe
to REMNANT REVIEW for three months.
But, I am limiting this offer to those people who
subscribe only to the on-line electronic version. I am in
the process of phasing out the printed version. I can't
get the printed version to readers fast enough. On the
Web, delivery is almost instantaneous.
I figure that if people can print out the two manuals,
and thereby save $10,000 to $40,000, then they can print
out REMNANT REVIEW, too.
Is saving $10,000 to $40,000 after taxes per child
worth a trial subscription?
If this seems like a reasonable proposition, click
through and renew. Get your credit card ready.
You will receive three issues of REMNANT REVIEW. You
can cancel after those three issues. If you decide to
continue to subscribe, do nothing. Your credit card will
be billed every three months for $33.25.
http://www.publishers-management.com/rem
Or call, toll-free:
888-846-9028
NEVER PAY RETAIL FOR A COLLEGE EDUCATION -- PART 2
TWELVE MYTHS OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION,
AND WHY YOU SHOULDN'T PAY FOR THEM
Gary North, Ph.D.
Higher education is a huge industry. In 1999,
expenditures on colleges and universities in the United
States exceeded a quarter of a trillion dollars.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/digest/dt031.html
In 2000, 35.5% of all Americans between the ages of 18
and 24 were enrolled in college. ("Postsecondary Education
Opportunity" [July 2001], p. 2) If we count all age
groups, about 15 million students are enrolled full-time in
approximately 3,600 colleges and universities. About 1,400
are 4-year institutions.
From 1987 to 1997, prices in the United States rose by
41%. Meanwhile, prices for college tuition and fees rose
by 111%. (MONTHLY LABOR REVIEW, July 2001, p. 46.)
In 2001, the average cost of attending a state
university was over $11,000 a year. It was almost $25,000
for a private college.
http://money.cnn.com/2001/08/22/living/q_college
For one of America's premier Ivy League schools, it
was in the range of $35,000 a year.
We are talking big money and big influence. Colleges
are powerful. They seem as if they can lay down the law,
to dictate to consumers -- you, for instance. I am here to
tell you: looks are deceiving.
Every system has weak spots. Every system that is
designed to attain its own goals can be used to attain your
goals. You just have to understand the system, and then
make it work for you.
Any interconnected system this big has certain shared
operating assumptions. These assumptions supposedly govern
the every participating institution. Sometimes these
assumptions really do govern the institutions of higher
learning. Sometimes they don't.
I'm going to discuss a dozen myths of higher
education. These myths are sometimes announced officially.
Sometimes they are merely operating assumptions that nobody
dares to mention in public. But, I assure you, the system
of higher education in the United States does operate in
terms of these myths. As I hope to show later in this
report, this is why a very special opportunity exists for a
comparative handful of parents and students.
1. "A college education should be made available to any
academically qualified student."
The missing words are: "At what price?" College is
expensive. Only one-third of Americans, ages 18-24, attend
college, and over half of them quit before earning a
bachelor's degree.
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/08/15/college.d
ropout.ap/
The expense is just too great for millions of students.
But, in order to promote the myth of "college for
every qualified student," the industry has created some
opportunities for students who normally could not afford to
attend. Colleges have made special opportunities available
for "qualifying" students.
The trick is to take advantage of these opportunities.
Never pay retail.
2. "You get what you pay for."
Of all college myths, this is the least accurate. It
implies that the most expensive colleges and universities
are the best ones. This may be true at the graduate school
level. But there is no evidence that it's true for a B.A.
degree. If it is true in some loose sense, then the
disparity between what the best schools cost and what they
actually deliver, compared to what a local community
college costs and delivers, is nothing short of gigantic.
One piece of evidence is the 4-year colleges'
widespread use of mega-classes. Yes, even the best
universities. Into huge lecture halls, up to a thousand
students are jammed. One professor lectures to them with a
microphone. Some of the students can barely see his face.
Their term papers (if any) and their written exams are
graded by low-paid graduate students called teaching
assistants. In all likelihood, the main instructor is a
low-level faculty member without tenure -- and he may never
receive tenure. (Tenure itself is a racket: immunity from
getting fired.)
For a prestigious university with tuition of $24,000 a
year, a year-long class of 1,000 students generates from
tuition alone an incredible $4.8 million. Even with
student aid for some students, the profit is just
tremendous.
Senior professors will not teach mega-classes. They
are rarely good lecturers, and they know they could not
possibly hold the attention of a thousand students for 50
minutes. So, only untenured junior professors accept the
assignment. They have no choice.
No one in graduate school is trained how to teach,
especially not teach mega-classes. Teaching assistants can
be good or bad in front of students, but it's random.
Nobody fires them for anything but extreme incompetence.
In the natural sciences, especially physics and chemistry,
there is a high percentage of foreign graduate students in
the best universities. They are good researchers, so
senior professors use them as unpaid research assistants.
To justify their presence in the department, they are paid
to teach undergraduates in laboratory classes and
discussion sections. In too many cases, they can barely
speak English.
I don't care how good a lecturer a person is. I don't
care how bright the full-time graduate students are who
grade term papers part-time. They are not delivering
education that is twenty times better than the education
available in a local community college for $50 or $100 per
semester, taught by a full-time professor, probably someone
with a Ph.D., without any teaching assistants.
The whole process was described brilliantly in a book
by Charles Sykes, PROFSCAM: PROFESSORS AND THE DEMISE OF
HIGHER EDUCATION (1989). Fortunately, it is still in
print. No one who is about to write checks for $40,000 to
$140,000 for a college education for himself or a child
should do this without first reading PROFSCAM. If you read
it, you will see why you should do everything possible to
cut college expenses to $10,000 or $20,000.
3. "It takes at least four years to receive a quality
education."
In most colleges these days, it takes five years for a
student to get his bachelor's degree. Required classes
fill up fast, so it sometimes takes a student several
attempts to attend them.
College professors have a sweet deal. The academic
year gets shorter and shorter. In my era, a generation
ago, school started in early September and ended in early
June. These days, school ends in mid-May. There used to
be two weeks of Christmas vacation. These days, it's three
weeks. Then there is spring break. Then there is summer
vacation.
One of the great advantages that students who go
through college by correspondence is that they can get
through in under three years. They live at home, work
part-time locally -- usually not in competition with
thousands of college students -- and take courses through
summer. They get into the work force a year early, which
is worth an extra $20,000, minimum. In some fields, it's
worth an extra $50,000.
There are other ways to skin the cat in terms of years
required. But hardly any parent knows about them. I
discovered them only because I was inside the system.
4. "College is inherently expensive because of
necessarily high overhead."
For all but a few undergraduates who major in particle
physics, this is bunk. There may be a huge library on
campus, but you never find it more than one-third of the
desks filled with students, and usually it's lower than
this. Students rarely use the library. Yet it costs tens
of millions just to build the facility, and up to $100
million to fill it with books. (Harvard University is the
giant: over 15 million volumes. I assume that it would
cost on average $100 a volume to replace, classify, and
shelve this vast inventory, which could not in fact be
replaced. That's $1.5 billion.) The only people who use
these books are faculty members. And most books sit unused
for decades.
Test me. Go to any major university library in your
state. Go on a weekday. Go any time of day. Go upstairs.
Then go into the basement. See how many chairs are empty.
There will be students downstairs in front of computers,
probably sending e-mails or writing term papers. But where
it really counts -- where the books are -- see how many
there are.
Undergraduates read 95% of their assignments in
paperback books or $60 textbooks. They rarely use the
library for research purposes. Most of what they need is
on the Web.
Then there are college faculty salaries.
Undergraduates rarely are taught by senior professors, who
are paid anywhere from $100,000 a year to $250,000 for the
big names. These people teach six hours a week. Their
classes have, at most, 20 graduate students.
The fees charges to undergraduates pay for the bulk of
all faculty salaries, unless the taxpayers are also funding
them.
Lower-level faculty members may teach nine 50-minute
sessions a week -- 12 at the most in small private
colleges. They get paid at least $50,000 a year.
The fact is, a college could have a faculty member
teach 200 students a semester -- five classes of 40 -- and
charge those students $400 for a one-year class. That
would generate $80,000. The college would take $20,000 for
administration, and pay him $60,000. Then he could teach
two summer sessions and generate another $40,000, for which
he would be paid $30,000. The college would keep $10,000.
He could earn $90,000 a year.
If he assigned a ten-page term paper, gave ten
objective exams (graded by a machine), and gave a mid-term
exam and a final exam, he would spend no more than 90
minutes per student per term, that's 20 hours a week for 15
weeks. Add to this double time for e-mails (highly
unlikely). He could prepare his lectures on videotape,
once. Students would view the videotapes.
So could the general public. Voters, politicians, and
parents could find out exactly what students are being
taught at tax-funded colleges. As John Wayne used to say,
"That'll be the day."
If the students signed up at any time, not just in the
same week, the course load would not compress the teacher's
exam-reading tasks into two brief periods. Students could
also go at their own pace.
What do most colleges charge for a one-year class? At
least $400 per credit, and each one-year class is six
credits. That's $2,400. The prestigious colleges charge
$800 per credit.
Using my approach, a liberal arts college could charge
$67 per credit, and do very well financially. So could the
instructors.
For any lower division college class -- freshmen and
sophomores -- $67 per credit would cover teaching costs and
basic administrative costs. If the entire school were 100%
Internet-based, there would be no costs to pay for the
physical plant: buildings, lawn care, libraries, etc.
For lower division students, $25 buys them a CD-ROM
with 5,000 books, plays, and poems: the classics of Western
civilization -- more of the classics than they could read
in a decade. (LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE.) An education at
Harvard College before 1900 used to be built around ten
percent of these classics. Today, few college graduates
ever hear about them, let alone read them. Yet this is
what a liberal education used to be.
The parents of freshmen and sophomores are paying
astronomical costs for mediocre services rendered. Their
tuition subsidizes juniors and seniors, who need more than
textbooks. And everyone finances the graduate students.
It's a pyramid system, where entry-level students pay
far more than what their first two years of education are
worth. Beat the payments pyramid, and college gets
cheaper, fast.
5. "A college could not attract academically qualified
professors under such teaching conditions."
The Ph.D. glut appeared overnight in 1969. I was
still in graduate school in 1969. I remember. From that
date on, most newly graduated Ph.D.s have not been able to
find a teaching job, not even part time. Since 1969,
American universities have produced 30,000 new Ph.D.'s a
year. That is over a million Ph.D.s in the United States.
There are 15 million students attending college. There are
plenty of people who want to teach college students.
Why won't colleges hire people on these terms?
Because this would force down the price of tuition, require
much tougher teaching schedules, and create competition for
the existing faculty members. It isn't going to happen
until the public wakes up to the real world of higher
education. There is no indication that this is happening.
But a few people have figured it out, and they have
found ways to take advantage of the system.
7. "Interaction with other students is crucial for
success in college."
There is no evidence to support this assumption. In
Harvard Law School, yes. There is team studying, in order
to cover everything. But this is not the case in an
undergraduate program.
In a typical college, a few students know each other.
Maybe in a fraternity or sorority, you know other people
well. But this has nothing to do with academic success.
It has more to do with social fun and games.
In a dorm room, roommates exist together, but once
they can get out of the dorm, they do. They don't see each
other often after this.
In class, there is very little interaction, especially
in the first two years.
In the library, you are supposed to be quiet.
Where is all the much-praised interaction? Not in
anything related to academics.
6. "Students need face-to-face contact with their
professors in order to benefit from college."
Yeah, right: in a class of 200 to 1,000 students. I
mean, they can barely see his face from the top row.
Students may visit a professor in his office once in a
semester for ten minutes. Maybe the student needs to ask a
question about which classes to take. What's wrong with e-
mail? Maybe the student wants clarification on some point.
What's wrong with e-mail? What has face-to-face anything
got to do with most undergraduate education. (Again, I'm
not talking about particle physics or organic chemistry.)
Colleges are pretending that it's still 1950. Well,
it isn't. The world has changed, but college teaching
methods haven't -- not in eight hundred years. Professors
still lecture to a room full of students. Students still
sleep in class. Textbooks are still assigned -- books
screened by committees before getting published. They were
boring in 1450; they are boring today.
Nobody ever goes back to read an old college textbook.
Well, hardly ever. I can think of only one in my entire
career, and nobody ever assigned it to me in class. I knew
the two authors. One of them was briefly my graduate
advisor. It has been out of print since 1982.
Textbooks and lectures: what an inefficient way to
learn anything new! Does any profit-seeking business teach
employees this way? Do people's careers advance by reading
a textbook and attending three 50-minute lectures a week
for 14 weeks? Not after they get out of college.
If a lower division student wants face-to-face
communications with a professor, he had better attend a
community college or an expensive four-year private college
with 1,500 students or fewer. Otherwise, forget about it.
7. "If a student doesn't have access to 15 lectures per
week, he will not receive a decent education."
Most people can read at least twice as fast as someone
can speak. We can also use a yellow highlighter to mark
important passages in a book. We can make notes in the
margin. We can re-read. We can stop reading in order to
think carefully about what we have just read. We can re-
read a chapter before an exam. We learn from books and
personal experience most of what our memories retain.
The average person lectures at a speed of about 100
words per minute. Very few professors will talk faster.
Very few students can type this fast. Fewer still can
write this fast. So, lots of information is missed in
note-taking.
Then there is the human memory. Within 24 hours after
we hear a lecture, we will have forgotten almost everything
we heard the day before.
In a student guide on note-taking, Utah State
University reports that within 24 hours, 95% of what we
heard but failed to write down is forgotten. That's why a
student had better take very good notes. Even when he
does, the study says, two-thirds of what he writes down is
forgotten by the next day. (The guide doesn't even bother
to mention what the student will remember a week or a month
later if he didn't take good notes.)
http://www.usu.edu/arc/idea_sheets/note_taking.htm
Conclusion: he had better be a great note-taker! But
most people's note-taking skills are not very good. OK,
maybe he's a genius note-taker: a fast writer, a careful
listener, and he can even read his own handwriting. Most
people aren't like this.
Lecture notes "get old" really fast. We forget why we
wrote down something. We forget its context. I speak from
experience as a Ph.D.-holding note-taker and also as a
reader of college students' final exams. They heard my
lectures, but they sure didn't remember much about them.
Books and personal, real-world experience are the two
keys to education after we're ten years old. Classrooms
are important educationally mostly for keeping children
quiet and in their seats.
For a person who wants to get a college education,
books are the key, not lectures. If a student can ask a
question about what he has read, simply by sending a
teacher an e-mail, why does he need to be in a classroom?
He doesn't. That's another dirty little secret of
higher education.
That's why off-campus learning is every bit as good as
on-campus learning in most fields. The key to your success
in college is personal dedication to learning, not where
people do your learning. Time, some books, and professors'
e-mail addresses are all a person needs to get a good
education.
8. "The secrets of a student's successful career is the
people he meets in college."
If a student attends an Ivy League college, maybe this
is true to a limited degree. But if the student saves his
money as an undergraduate by attending a low-cost college
and excelling academically, he can make far better business
contacts at the Harvard Business School or the Harvard Law
School.
Here is what parents are rarely told. Write this one
down where you won't mislay it.
When it comes to where you attend
school, the most important thing
career-wise is the school from which
you received your final degree.
If you attend Podunk State University, get straight-
A's, score well in your graduate records exam, and get into
a big-name graduate school program and then graduate from
it, the key to your future is not where you earned your
undergraduate degree. It's where you earned your final
degree.
The correct goal is to get through the best graduate
program that a person can get into, and then survive. If
someone can save money by attending a college with no
academic prestige, and then perform well enough to get
into, and through, a top-flight graduate school, that
person will be known by the final school.
If you go to Harvard as an undergraduate, but you run
out of money and fail to graduate, what are you? A college
drop-out.
If you graduate from Harvard College, but attend grad
school at your local state college, you're going to be a
local state college person when it comes time to hire you.
The employer thinks, "What was a Harvard person doing at
this podunk school? What's wrong here?" You will spend
the rest of your career explaining the step down -- or
concealing it.
If a student has to attend a prestigious 4-year
college to get into med school, then he will have to find
ways to beat the system in the lower division years. But
if the goal is just a bachelor's degree, concentrate on
saving time and money.
9. "Institutional short-cuts defeat the purpose of higher
education."
Short cuts defeat the purpose of the administrators
and professors, but they aid the student who knows where
they are located and how to take them.
Short cuts teach you to do well, despite cutting
corners. That's why Harvard Law School piles on more work
than any student can do by himself. This forces students
to improvise. (See the movie, "The Paper Chase.")
An employer wants to hire people who don't waste time,
who solve problems at the lowest possible cost. He would
rather hire a B-student who went to school full-time,
worked full-time, and graduated early, than a straight-A
student who took five years to graduate, and whose parents
paid for it. He wants hard workers who are looking for
ways to cut costs.
Colleges are run by bureaucrats for the benefit of the
careers of bureaucrats. They employ teachers who have the
sweetest job in the world if you don't like long hours,
hard physical labor, and people looking over your shoulder
to rate your performance. Once you're tenured, life gets
really good. These people don't live in the world of
business. They are subsidized.
If you can save time and money, and still pass all of
the exams, who cares how you did it? In the movie, "Patch
Adams," everything comes easy to him in medical school.
People are jealous of him, resent him. It would have been
a lot easier for him if he had not been around his fellow
students -- if he had been taking classes at a distance.
Because things were easy for him, he got in trouble.
What college bureaucrats think is a bad thing --
cutting academic corners -- is a good thing. The sooner a
student learns to cut corners, the better. (I don't mean
moral corners, of course.)
10. "Very few students master their course work in a
setting outside the traditional campus environment."
The fact is, non-traditional students do just as well,
and perhaps better, than traditional students who attend
lectures, take notes, and go to football games on fall
weekends. The statistics on this go back to 1928, and the
message is consistent: traditional classroom education is
no better than non-traditional learning methods, and
probably not as good.
The typical student is put in a classroom environment
no later than kindergarten. Parents associate "education"
with "classroom." Yet in graduate school, the classroom
disappears. The graduate seminar of a small group of
students replaces it. Yes, this is a very expensive form
of education. It is paid for by the excess tuition
collected from undergraduates or from the state
legislature. But it is considered the best form of
education for would-be scholars.
The more advanced the educational experience, the less
time spent in classrooms. In fact, classrooms are
associated with beginners. It is a mark of a person's
arrival into the world of serious learning that he no
longer is required to attend classes, except as a teacher.
A classroom is the equivalent of training wheels on a
bicycle.
The sooner that a student escapes the classroom
environment, the sooner he or she learns what advanced
education is all about.
Students who really do have to attend a lecture in
order to learn are so poorly trained academically that they
ought not to be in college.
In the two most prestigious English-speaking
universities in the world, Cambridge and Oxford, students
are not expected to attend lectures. Some do, but this is
only in those rare instances when the instructor is an
entertaining lecturer. This has been true at both
universities for about seven hundred years.
11. "It is the moral responsibility of some students (or
their parents) to finance part of the education of
other students."
Here, we get to a politically incorrect topic. In
many private colleges -- no, ALL private colleges -- there
is a form of discrimination that few students or parents
recognize as discrimination. The college charges different
prices to different students.
Economists call this practice "price discrimination."
This is exactly what it is. One student must pay full
tuition. Usually, this is because his parents have more
money. Another student gets what the college calls a
scholarship. This is word magic. It's public relations.
The so-called scholarship is nothing but a transfer of
wealth from one family to another.
I first experienced this phenomenon in 1959. I was
granted a scholarship to a very expensive 4-year college in
southern California, the one that had the best academic
reputation for undergraduate liberal arts in the state
among 4-year schools. It still does. I was given a
scholarship of $500 a year. In today's purchasing power,
that was worth about $3,000. Then I won a California state
scholarship for $600. As soon as the state informed the
college that I had won, the college revoked my scholarship.
There was no scholarship. There was a bribe to
persuade me to attend. That original $500 payment was
really a subsidy from the parents of richer students -- and
there were some very rich families sending children to that
college. I didn't figure this out until I took a graduate
course in economics. Call me a slow learner.
The college was trying to get me to attend, and they
used money from another parent to attract me. When I got
money from outside the college, they revoked the payment
and kept the state's money. They knew I would attend. I
did. But I quit after one semester. I found a college
just as good, bit without the reputation, for half the
money. I wanted the education. I didn't care about the
reputation.
All over America, a bidding war is taking place.
Colleges recruit the students they want, and they use other
people's money to make the bids. Very few colleges have
permanent endowments, and those that do have endowments
don't generate enough money from them to hand out all of
the so-called scholarships they award. Wealthy parents pay
the tab.
This wealth-transfer system includes athletic
scholarships, scholarships for minority students, and
scholarships for "majority students" whose parents don't
have enough money to pay for their children's educations.
This indicates the existence of a string commitment of
colleges to let students in who do not pay the full cost
that other students pay.
Tax-funded colleges have assented to this practice by
private colleges. They have even imitated them. They also
want to recruit top athletes and brilliant students. So,
they have adopted certain enrollment practices in the name
of "granting scholarships" that are in fact subsidies that
reduce the colleges' net income per student. Other
students' tuition payments must make up the difference.
Don't be one of these others.
Those parents and students who understand the academic
system -- including rich parents -- can put this knowledge
to work. They can save a small fortune in fees. But they
have to know how to work the system. Not many people know
how.
12. "It is unfair for a handful of families to use the
collegiate system's loopholes to gain a significant
advantage for themselves."
Loopholes are policy. Every system has loopholes.
They are there for people to take advantage of. The
designers of the system built them into the system. For
them to complain that some people use them, while others
never figure out how the system really works, and why, is
hypocritical. If the people who run the academic cartel
don't like the loopholes, they can close them.
If every family had a copy of this report, some of the
loopholes would be closed. But the loopholes are not
obvious, and most families will never hear of this report,
let alone buy it, let alone read it, let alone do what it
recommends.
That's true of every loophole. The iron law of
loopholes is this: When lots of people start using them,
they get closed.
A BAD ATTITUDE?
You now have an overview of the American modern
college system. This is not a conventional view. I am
trying to make a case for an unconventional strategy of
earning a bachelor's degree from an accredited college for
half the traditional price.
By now, you are beginning to get the picture.
Millions of students and millions of parents don't get it,
which is why they continue to pay small fortunes when they
don't have to. They pay dearly for their ignorance.
I know of seven main strategies to beat the system.
Each strategy plays a particular role. Some parents know
of one or two of them. Very few understand all seven.
Even if they do understand, very few know how to put the
pieces together. And even if they do put the pieces
together, their children object, and eventually get the
money.
If most parents knew the strategy I recommend, and
could bring themselves to implement it, then the colleges
would have to change the rules. I'm talking about
loopholes. Loopholes can be closed. But they won't be
closed. Why not? Because all of this is hidden in plain
sight. Only a handful of "buyers of certified education
services" ever do what I recommend.
But you may be able to. If you do, you will keep
extra tens of thousands of dollars.
I realize that by now, some of the people who started
reading this report have thrown it away in disgust. They
don't like my attitude. All I can say is this: they will
pay a lot of money that they don't have to pay in order to
express their disgust with my attitude.
ONE MORE TIME. . . .
I have written a report:
HOW YOUR TEENAGER CAN EARN A BACHELOR'S DEGREE
FROM AN ACCREDITED COLLEGE IN THREE YEARS OR LESS
FOR AS LITTLE AS $4,000
Even if the student is your grandchild, you can give
the report to the check-writing parent.
It won't do the check-writer any good to know how to
beat the college-pricing system if the student isn't
cooperative. While there are books out there on this or
that aspect of nontraditional college education, they are
all aimed at parents or self-funding adults who are on
their own financially. They are not designed to change a
student's mind.
What a parent also needs is a persuasive presentation
that will convince the college-bound child to take the less
expensive path. So, I have also written a 47-page report
for the prospective college student, in which I do my best
to make the case that nobody needs to spend $40,000 to
$140,000 to finance a college education. It has all of the
material in the parent's report, plus a lot more. It's
called,
EARN AN ACCREDITED BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN THREE
YEARS OR LESS, AND HAVE ENOUGH MONEY LEFT OVER TO
BUY YOUR FIRST HOUSE
You can get all of these reports for free. I'm
offering them as bonuses. All you have to do is renew
early to REMNANT REVIEW for another two years.
But, I am limiting this offer to those people who re-
subscribe only to the on-line electronic version. I am in
the process of phasing out the printed version. I can't
get the printed version to readers fast enough. On the
Web, delivery is almost instantaneous.
I figure that if people can print out the two manuals,
and thereby save $10,000 to $40,000, then they can print
out REMNANT REVIEW, too.
Is saving $10,000 to $40,000 after taxes per child
worth a subscription renewal?
If this seems like a reasonable proposition, click
through and renew. Get your credit card ready.
You can also subscribe through quarterly billing
system: $33.25 per quarter, billed automatically to your
credit card until you cancel.
http://www.publishers-management.com/rem
Or call, toll-free:
888-846-9028
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