Posted on 08/05/2007 12:25:01 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Is a bachelor's degree in English (or history or philosophy or political science or any other subject in the liberal arts) worth over $30,000 a year? As the sticker price asked by more and more private colleges crosses that threshold, many families are asking that question.
The liberal arts education I received enriched my intellect (though not my pocketbook), but if I had a college-age child today, I couldn't justify paying over $100,000 for a bachelor's degree. It boggles my mind when I learn of a 22-year-old owing over $50,000 with only a B.A. to his name.
Apparently, I am not alone in my opinion. Enrollment is declining at many private colleges. Many families balk at paying such daunting fees. Increasingly, the significantly lower expenses of attending a taxpayer-subsidized state college or a rarity like Grove City College (2007-2008 annual cost under $18,000) present the only affordable options for middle-class families. It seems clear that the over-$30,000 per year colleges must find creative ways to reinvent themselves if they are to prosper or even survive.
This is easier said than done. Colleges tend to be some of the most change-resistant institutions in the country. Over the past quarter-century, the pace of change in American business has been breathtakingly rapid, producing massive changes in structure and practice. Many new companies and industries have emerged, while many companies that thrived in the 1980s have ceased operations or been merged into other companies. By contrast, if you were to sit in a liberal arts college classroom today for the first time in 25 years, you would notice a few superficial changes in the classroom (the presence of personal computers and a couple of other high-tech gadgets) and a modest updating of the curriculum (e.g., the addition of a computer science department), but otherwise, everything would seem comfortingly familiar to you. However, the winds of change are about to blow through American colleges.
Market forces, in the form of declining enrollments in the face of increasingly unaffordable tuition costs, will compel colleges to undergo major changes, just as other businesses have been forced to change.
Yes, I wrote "other businesses." Most college professors don't like to think of their schools as businesses. In fact, at many colleges today, it is the fashion for liberal arts professors to denounce business as a sordid, morally and intellectually inferior activity - even when their own college's business department has more majors than any of the liberal arts subject areas. These intellectuals need to curb their ideological or romantic opposition to business both for the good of their colleges and for the sake of preserving their jobs. Like it or not, a college is a business, and if a college doesn't give its customers (students) good value for their money (a degree that pays a decent return on a $120,000-plus investment), then the college's customer base will shrink. If the customer base shrinks too much, the college/business may close and those anti-business professors will have a chance to learn how much their own sheepskins are worth in the job market today.
Unfortunately, the needed attitude adjustment hasn't penetrated some faculties yet. For example, I know of a college in the over-30-grand category where proposals to establish majors in areas with excellent employment prospects, such as broadcast journalism, are routinely shot down by committees of professors in the traditional liberal arts curriculum. On what grounds? That the proposed majors are "too vocational." The rule of thumb seems to be that if an academic curriculum makes one readily employable, it is unacceptable. That is a shortsighted, suicidal position to take today when American families seem increasingly less willing to pay for a liberal arts degree and then watch junior have to sell insurance to earn a living.
The trend is not in favor of the private liberal arts colleges. A century ago, 80 percent of college students attended private colleges; today, 80 percent attend the less expensive, taxpayer-subsidized public universities. Several hundred private colleges have folded in the past few decades.
Economically, colleges can't continue to pay the salaries of tenured professors who have only a handful of students majoring in their discipline. Unless a college has a rich endowment, such economic inefficiencies are an unaffordable luxury, and these colleges may have to cease offering these unpopular majors altogether. Instead of employing two or three full-time professors in a department with six majors, colleges may need to downgrade such majors to a minor served by one full-time professor supplemented by an adjunct part-timer or by having students take courses at another college in the area or perhaps taking courses offered over the Internet or by private enterprises such as The Teaching Company.
One way to repackage the liberal arts curriculum would be to move away from majors such as history, sociology, political science, and philosophy to something like "Asian studies." There will be abundant employment opportunities in business, government, nongovernmental organizations, missionary work, etc., for students educated in an Asian language and a comprehensive understanding of the history, belief systems, social structure and traditions, etc., of Asian countries. It makes more sense today to offer courses in Chinese language than in French.
It will be fascinating to see how higher education evolves to cope with current economic realities. Change is in the air. The status quo will go.
I work for a software company that does basic research, and we hire real scientists all the time. There is no reason real research can't be done in the real world rather than the let's pretend world of academia. But no company on earth would put up with the social sciences peddling Foucaultean nonsense year after year.
If a university can subsist on what it really earns teaching, without subsidy, I will still want to get in their face for the nonsense stuff, but that the rest of us are forced to pay for it is beyond outrage.
You can go kick them all out tomorrow if you are worried. Instead half the hard scientists are reading the editorials against the Bush administration and paeons to socialist regulation that even half the pages of Science and Nature have become.
You've got an image problem. And for the best of reasons - you are overrun with socialist quacks and enemies of human civilization.
Essentially, the courses most universities require: course in the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and languages. The goal is to create a graduate who has SOME knowledge of almost every subject, rather than one trained in depth in only a speciality.
2) Are universities even offering such courses anymore, and if so, are they REQUIRED for graduation ?
In some cases, yes, they are being offered. However, as you point out, on many campuses they have been replaced by "fluff", PC courses that serve as nothing but welfare sinecures for left-wing propagandists.
3) If students prefer to take fluff courses that a lot of Universities are teaching ( see for instance the BS courses that recently dismissed Professor at Colorado, Ward Churchill offers ), are they considered well-educated generalists ?
They are by other left-wing illiterates who manage to penetrate the power structure. But as for any USEFUL knowledge, they have none.
4) Finally, aren't a lot of employers finally wising up to the fact that there just might be too many professors like Ward Churchill and Nicholas De Genova of Columbia ( who wished a million Mogadishus on our military ) in our universities and too many students actually taking their courses and getting A's ?
One can only hope ...
Doctor, lawyer, clergy, teacher, of these clergy was the main and earliest of those needing university education and clergy also furnished much of the legal expertise. Now we have engineer and scientist that need extensive and intensive training and credentials. College grad isn’t worth so much relatively anymore, but grad school still has something going especially when it provides a professional sheepskin for the office wall. For financial success there is little to compare with some trade unions, and for that the college route might be ruled out altogether. It’s a different game even compared with 1/4 century ago.
You seem to have had a bad college experience.
Many college graduates today can barely read and write.
College is hardly the place to learn THOSE skills!
People don’t go to college for education; they go because their parents tell them to go in order to get a good job afterwards.
True in many cases, but not in all. And I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive.
The entire system ought to be scrapped in favor of internships and apprenticeships for occupations from masons to marketing students.
Never going to happen.
As others here have noted, a good education is available online and at the library.
No, it isn't. KNOWLEDGE is available there, but not the education that backs the knowledge up.
What colleges provide these days is more like indoctrination.
I don't disagree with that, but the goal is to create a student smart enough to sift through the horse crap and find the pony.
i live in Northern VA. i was in the Seven Corners area of surburban VA on Saturday and saw a sign advertising $100,000 jobs to speakers of arabic. while there are native born speakers of arabic around, i would think american born but arabic-trained speakers would have a better chance at employment with some security type firms.
Many end up working in academia such as admissions offices or outreach coordination or event marketing.
A sheepskin also protects the employer for hiring a qualified person in any lawsuit.
University degrees (even law school degrees) are just about a ticket to employment, not about being a rounded individual.
You’re in Law and might suggest the most powerful position in Law, perhaps Corporate Attorney for an Internatonal Bank, or perhaps a basic passing the Bar and also holding a CPA. I got my Masters in Management, and if I also held some Plumbing and Welding certificates, of which there are a ton to have, and just starting out rather than looking at it from the view of my retirement estate, I would start a plumbing business with natural gas and fire safety branches.
oh i agree, and now that i am in the position of paying for my children’s college educations, i definitely have an eye towards marketable. my youngest has a learning disability and college may not be in the cards for her, so i will be looking carefully at what type of skills she might acquire that would be marketable and not academic.
You know what Longshoremen make per hour on average. Don’t need college for that, maybe just some expertise on the ten-key.
oh lordy, even when my 13 yo baby grows up, i don’t want her working as a longshoreman! good grief!
You have to have a link to the union. If you don’t, you need to cultivate one so you can get a recommendation. There is nothing more American. America—land of 300 million truckdrivers and one philosopher who died a decade ago.
My son will not attend my alma mater.
I graduated in 94 with < 20k total debt, this included tuition, books and some living expenses. Today this same school is charging nearly 10k a semester.
This is not an Ivy League school, but just a normal university. A BA from it in most careers will equate to a 30k-40k a year job. It is not worth spending 60k-80k to be able to get a 30k-40k a year job.
At my present employer, we had six or seven students fall below the minimum GPA required to begin their second year. One of the failing student’s father sits on our board of directors. Surprisingly, she was the only one of the failing students who will be allowed to take classes in the fall . . .
Many college graduates today can barely read and write.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I never went to college today but I would wager that one had to know more to get INTO college when I was eighteen than one needs to know to receive a degree now.
Just look at the infrastruture at most universities. The buildings are too often palatial and expensive to build and maintain. Name one large company that has a “campus” anywhere near as expensive to operate?
They aren’t nearly as bad as many U.S. Courthouses, but that’s another story.
I wouldn't be surprised if many end up as "Diversity Consultants" brought in for corporate sensitivity training seminars and the like. Many of these departments are subsidized by corporate foundations. Aside from ideological affinity, subsidizing the diversity industry provides street cred among leftists who will direct their ire at less enlightened corporations.
As for the article, it downplays the worth of studying the best that has been said or thought. It is as dismissive of American culture as the radicals who now control the university curriculum. Just like the radicals, the writer is enabling the erosion of those non-market habits and values on which society rests.
Conservatives can't complain about leftist bias in the university, and then whine about how useless the traditional liberal arts education is. The left is only in power because conservatives abandoned the "useless" field of ideas for the practical arts and discouraged any worthy young students who aspire to retake the field.
English degrees are worthless?
I had left college with two classes remaining on my English degree...and that (and the repeated dreams I kept having) was what led me to finish my degree via correspondence courses.
All through college I heard the “English? That’s a non-marketable degree!” line at parties and some such. But the education was not wasted, and is particularly helpful in proofing business presentations, and sending corrections back to the occasional unsolicited resume that comes over the fax machine.
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