It is fascinating to see people accusing others of things that they themselves are doing, especially when their own sins are worse.
Academics love to say that businesses are not paying enough to people who work for them. But where in business are there people who are paid absolutely nothing for strenuous work that involves risks to their health?
In academia, that situation is common. It is called college football. How often have you watched a big-time college-football game without seeing someone limping off the field or being carried off the field?
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College athletes are not to be paid because this is an “amateur” sport. But football coaches are not only paid, they are often paid higher salaries than the presidents of their own universities. Some make millions of dollars a year.
Academics also like to accuse businesses of consumer fraud. There is indeed fraud in business, as in every other aspect of human life — including academia.
When my academic career began, half a century ago, I read up on the academic market and discovered that there was a chronic over-supply of people trained to be historians. There were not nearly enough academic posts available for people who had spent years acquiring Ph.D.s in history, and the few openings that there were for new Ph.D.s paid the kind of salaries you could get for doing work requiring a lot less education.
My own pay as a beginning instructor in economics was not high, but it was certainly higher than that for beginning historians.
Now, 50 years later, there is a long feature article in the February 17 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education on the chronic over-supply of historians. Worse yet, leading university history departments are resisting demands that they keep track of what happens to their students after they get their Ph.D.s — and inform prospective Ph.D.s of what the market is like.
If any business operated this way, selling customers something that was very costly in time and money, and which the sellers knew in advance was almost certain to disappoint their expectations, academics would be bursting with indignation — and demanding full disclosure to the customers, if not criminal prosecutions.
But The Chronicle of Higher Education reports “faculty resistance” to collecting and publishing information on what happens to a university’s history Ph.D.s after they leave the ivy-covered walls with high hopes and low prospects.
At a number of big-name universities — Northwestern, Brown, and the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus at Chapel Hill — at least one-fourth of their 2010 history Ph.D.s either are unemployed or their fate is unknown.
At Brown University, for example, 38 percent of their 2010 Ph.D.s are in that category, compared with only 25 percent who have tenure-track appointments.
For people not familiar with academia, a tenure-track appointment does not mean that the appointee has tenure, but only that the job is one where a tenure decision will have to be made at some point under the “up or out system.” At leading universities, far more are put out than move up.
There are also faculty appointments that are strictly for the time being — lecturers, adjunct professors, or visiting professors. Half the 2010 Ph.D.s from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania have these kinds of appointments, which essentially lead nowhere. They are sometimes called “gypsy faculty.”
Finally, there are Ph.D.s who are on post-doctoral fellowships, often at the expense of the taxpayers. They are paid to continue on campus, essentially as students, after getting their doctorates. More than one-fourth of the 2010 Ph.D.s from Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard are in this category.
At least these universities release such statistics. A history professor at Rutgers University who has studied such things says: “If you look at some of the numbers published on department Web sites, they range from dishonest to incompetent.”
But apparently many academics are too busy pursuing moral crusades in society at large to look into such things on their own ivy-covered campuses.
How true. I have no confidence that this will be posted since none of my recent comments have passed the moderators scrutiny. You have lifted my spirit that someone gets the morass of Academia over the past 30 years.
Dr. Sowell implies that the pupose of a university is job training and placement. It used to be that the purpose of an education was intellectual development. He implies that the duty of a university is to warn prospective students that they might not obtain a positive return on investment if they pursue a PhD. One would think that anyone intelligent enough to pursue a PhD would have some awareness of employment prospects in academia and elsewhere.
Yes, academics can be self-righteous, sel;f-interested, and lacking in candor--just like some other businessmen. However, they have no duty to limit their market by announcing in advance that the product they deliver might be of questionable market value, any more than Stephen Sielberg has a duty to announce in advance that "War Horse" is not necessarily that good a movie..
Yes, universities use football programs to attract money from donors. But football players are not "uncompensated". They receive exactly the sorts of compensation that economists like to talk about as alternatives to wages:: "psychic" or "hedonic" compensation and various types of preferential treatment--sometimes free products, sometimes scholarships, sometimes interim "jobs", sometimes career opportunities, not to mention the chance to compete for professional football careers----all of which they compete from an early age to have access to. So let us not weep for the football players.
The real question is: do the universities deliberately publish false and misleading data? Do they allow students to believe, as some law schools do, that the median salary for graduates is $160,000 per year?
If you're in college for personal enrichment and do not care about credentials (degrees, credit hours) then surely you could acquire the knowledge at far lower cost?
Economic productivity is just output divided by $_in. And the continuing decline of teaching productivity in higher ed. should be a scandal.
No doubt a time will come when technology is used to provide higher ed. (at the undergrad level at least) to the masses (or at least that portion of the masses who are capable of and motivated to acquire it) at far lower cost.
But it's probably not going to come quickly, as few in today's higher ed. apparat have had any real motivation to address the continuing crisis in teaching productivity.
I roll my eyes every time people make comments that imply that college isn't about getting a job or career. While jobs are not the only benefit that come from higher education, no one would invest as much money and time as they do if they were doing it just for self fulfillment. Yes, many PhD programs are paid for but most of those are in the hard sciences (which are also in higher demand.) History PhDs usually involve large investments of money that people would not make unless they were convinced that their future income would make up for it.
Is it good to have a educated and well rounded populace? Sure. But that is not what happens at most universities anyways (but that is a different issue.) The point is that investments that range from usually $10,000-$50,000 per year (depending on school and program) are not just for general self improvement: they are for future income advantages.
If you think that the type of people who seek a PhD in History are smart people who know what they are doing when they seek a degree with low demand, then you aren't very familiar with higher education in the USA. People are discouraged (especially in the humanities, arts and social sciences) from thinking about money. They are told to let the future deal with itself and just follow their passion when it comes to picking a major or a graduate degree.
You'd be surprised at how many students graduate with a bachelors (much less a masters of doctorate) degree and feel that they didn't realize how big their student loans were. They feel that it is unfair because they were too young to make these decisions and were "taken advantage of" by the banks and even the federal government through FAFSA. Do you honestly think History PhD graduates don't care if they are highered as historians because at least they will have found their grad schools days so personally rewarding? $70,000 in loans is a high cost for a degree that is just for personal satisfaction and not for career advancement.
The fact is that universities in this country are hypocrites for decrying anything but full disclosure in the for-profit world when they are reluctant to be forthcoming when it comes to life after college. Dr. Sowell is right to point out that hypocrisy.
That was answered in the course of the post--intellectual development. Universities exist for the liberal arts, humanities, and pure sciences. The institutions that exist for job training are vocational or trade schools. There's nothing wrong with either.
The idea that college is there to produce job opportunities is a bad one. Yes, that's a side-effect in careers that require a lot of esoteric and/or specialized knowledge, like law or medicine or the priesthood, but that's not the reason to go to college. You do it to study, more in depth than you can in secondary school, the things that define humanity and its accomplishments. (That many liberal arts colleges fail to do this is a given, sadly.)
The problem isn't that college isn't doing what college was never meant to do, it's that people are selling it as though it will, and culture is treating any other path as somehow "less" than a university education. There's nothing wrong with vocational or trade school if your mind is not of a bent to study the more esoteric fields of knowledge out there. Most people probably aren't of such a particular personality type. The problem is that, in making sure the opportunity to do this was open to everyone who was interested, regardless of their birth circumstances, somehow, it got mixed up with the idea that every single person should want and be suited for it. But there's big money to be made by increasing the numbers of students, so universities are betraying their core purpose by promising (falsely) to be vocational schools. And vocational schools are promising (falsely) to be universities.
I could get a far better return by buying a set of Great Books. I would probably have enough left over to buy a latte everyday while I read them in Starbucks.
Not only does the university sell college degrees as "worth it" based on higher lifetime earnings, but many jobs require a degree - even for work that ought not require it (bank tellers and receptionists for example).
But to add insult to injury, it is debatable that four or five years on campus really gives one exposure to the challenges of the intellect. Great books, survey history courses, military history study, straightforward writing, civics, etc have been purged in favor of esoteric specialty courses, sub group studies degrees and a culture of grievance and victimhood.
Are Cal Tech,Carnegie Tech, M.I.T., Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech,and the like, "vocational or trade schools" ? [In the interest of full disclosure, one of my degrees is from one of the aforementioned institutions, the other two being from "universities".] I suppose that you are correct, strictly speaking, but I would not call what you get from them "job training". With any luck, you might get the attitudes and basic tools, not to mention a first-hand exposure to some masters at work and play in your chosen field of endeavor, all of which, with any luck, will help you to pursue a fulfilling, lifelong career in science or engineering. Do you believe then, too, that Colleges of Engineering and Applied Science have no legitimate place in a true university?. Even Oxford and Cambridge give degrees in engineering and related applied sciences, although Oxford came comparatively late to that state of affairs.
Anybody remember that Mel Brooks movie in which he's at the unemployment office in ancient Rome and he tells the woman at the window he's a stand up philosopher?
American working class don't go to college in high numbers even when grants and scholarships are offered. Immigrants pursue Ph.D. in volumes and are more likely to pass through the education mills with great disappointments.
Most successful people never finished or entered college. Education is hands on in the real world, in the real environment; much is learned outside of those ivy-covered walls of higher education. I suspect most teaching at universities would experience hardship in finding and keeping real jobs in real working places.
You may have heard what some successful persons have said about education:
Cornelius Vanderbilt, transportation tycoon: "If I had an education, I would not have had time to learn anything else."
George Bernard Shaw, a playwright: "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."
Re: "Most successful people never entered or finished college." These kinds of statements from pseudo-conservatives anger me to no end. Yes, there are specific examples of very successful dropouts. The rough grain statistics (mean income or net worth vs. degree level) suggests your evidence could be anecdotal. It may be that HIGHLY successful people are more likely to have not finished or started college. I have not seen the data here, but I am not the one making dubious assertions, so maybe you should do the work. I suggest you set an arbitrary, but fair, definition of what make a highly successful person For example, $10 million annual income on average for the last 3 years, or 100 million net worth. While you will not need to find every person fitting that definition, you will need a fairly large random sample. Then I suggest you classify your data by level of education (say 4 or 5 categories).
But please look at the data before you speak again on this matter. Darn It, we are conservatives here. We think before we speak, we let facts determine our opinions, and while we question the methodology and motives of some studies, we for d---- sure don't ignore the data.
Your stance on statistics is very academic. So, yes, statistics are used to prove anything you like and you just need to sample the right people and phrase the right questions. Moreover, statistics do not negate the fact that college is not needed for success, period.
John D. Rockefeller Sr, first earned billionaire in the United States of America - Never attended.
Henry Ford, assembly line manufacture - Never attended.
Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers - Dropped out.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft - Dropped out.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple computers - Dropped out.
Walt Disney, founder of the Disney Company - Never attended.
Frank Lloyd Wright, distinguish architect - Never attended.
I never said a degree was a necessary condition for success. You seem to suggest that dropping out is a pre-requisite for success.
BTW, you exhibited the very behavior you criticize (selective sampling) by selecting 7 or 8 very successful dropouts (If 50% of the entire Forbes 400 list were dropouts, then I would concede immediately). Moreover, the 3 youngest member of your list (Jobs, Gates, and Dell) were excellent students that were probably too far advanced at age 20 for a university education to be useful. Gates and Dell are very interesting cases. Dell was ready for college at about age 8. Gates was advanced programmer by the age of 16 and doing graduate level work on sorting algorithms by his sophomore year. His friend Paul Allen also dropped out. The "dumb" guy at Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) graduated with honors in Mathematics at Harvard.
If you break those numbers down by degree, you will find that a handfull of degrees (mostly in engineering degrees) are responsible for most of the "success" of those with college degrees. Most of the rest earn little more than the person who never went to college. Especially when you take into account the lost 4 years of experience.
The most telling indicator of the decline of higher education is the Occupy movement. College kids over pay for an education that nets them zero job prospects and they protest, not the college that foisted the fraud upon them, but the bankers and investors who could be instrumental to their future employment.
In the 1980s, I paid 1,400 dollars a semester for a full course load, excluding on campus room and board. It took me a month and a half after getting my degree to land a job paying $10/hour. That was a reasonable trade off, since within the first year of employment I was able to recoup my investment--I didn't need to take out a student loan.
Thanks to "help" from government programs, the cost of a degree has skyrocketed to the point where a single credit hour for an out of state student costs almost as much as what I once paid for a full semester.
Subsidies increase costs, leading to shortages, by inflating demand. When you ask the government for help, you are essentially asking for higher prices. If colleges were honest brokers, there graduates would posses a basic understanding of economics and the smart ones would attend the cheapest college possible, instead of the most expensive.
Quite so, M. Sowell: informative as usual. But, I must point out that, at least in the sciences and engineering, post-doctoral fellowships and similar arrangements have become an essential part of the process of preparation for a career in these professions, and thus are an essential part of the educational process in today's world. Poorly paid, post-doctoral positions are also an inescapable aspect of the economics of the dog-eat-dog world of competition for research funding, a fact which is consistent with Mr. Sowell's points in this essay.
If anything, you've understated the problem. Too often those who excel at school are encouraged to stay there studying esoteric topics until they are unfit for any of the real careers available in the marketplace. For a firsthand look at the gory process: External Link (100 Reasons Not to go to Graduate School)
As a retired professor, I can say with confidence that Dr. Sowell is once again right on target. I myself got into academia (1) because I was drawn to the scholarly life, (2) because I liked the idea of working for a big organization that would pay me fairly well without demanding that I worry about the bottom line myself, (3) because I was a leftist snob. The entire system is even more corrupt today.
Oh, and in response to an earlier writer....perhaps most of Academia is filled by career academics....but there are still a few of us on campus that have retired from successful business or military careers and are now attempting to impart some useful knowledge to those destined to follow in our footsteps :)
