[ExI] What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This...

[Michael LaTorra]

Thanks for that post, Dave. I agree with quite a lot of what Charles Hugh
Smith wrote. One more thing to add, which applies mostly to large public
universities and some of the bigger private schools, is the heavy cost of
competitive team sports. College athletics are a profit center for a few
schools but a big financial drain for many others. I recall one student who
quipped that he attended a large football institution with a small
educational facility attached.


On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Michael LaTorra <mlatorra at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I read the article and went to the website of that college. It does look
> > like a very good school. But it falls short of being ideal, because it is
> > unaffordable. Most students can't afford spending over $40,000 per year.
>
> Yep. Charles Hugh Smith has a lot to say about traditional higher
> education. From http://www.oftwominds.com/Nearly-Free-University.html
>
> "Let’s start with what is self-evident about the basic structure of
> higher education:
>
> 1. As my colleague Mark Gallmeier noted in the Foreword, higher
> education is a legacy system based on the scarcity of recorded
> knowledge (printed and other media) and informed lectures. Both
> recorded knowledge and informed lectures are now essentially free and
> readily available. This is the material basis of the alternative
> system outlined in this book, the Nearly Free University (NFU), whose
> core is an open-enrollment, universally accessible, individually
> accredited curriculum designed for the emerging economy and the
> individual student.
>
> 2. The current higher education model is a factory composed of
> broadcast lectures and mass-distributed reading/coursework/tests. The
> student moves down the assembly line, attending the same lectures as
> other students, reading the same materials and taking the same tests.
> When the student receives a passing grade in a quasi-arbitrary number
> of courses, he or she is issued a diploma.
>
> This factory model of education is fundamentally unchanged from the
> era of World War II, when the government expanded higher education
> from its traditional elitist function to serve the nation’s war
> production. While factories churned out war materiel with low-skill
> labor, behind the scenes the war effort demanded a vast increase in
> engineering and scientific skills. This began the transformation into
> a knowledge-based economy. The difference between an industrial
> economy that requires massive numbers of low-skill factory workers and
> a knowledge-based (often referred to a post-industrial) economy is the
> knowledge of its workers.
>
> The factory model is obsolete in an era where a variety of nearly-free
> instructional materials and methodologies enable the student to select
> the most appropriate approach for his aptitudes and needs.
>
> 3. In terms of its financial structure, higher education is a
> cartel-like system that limits its product (accredited instruction)
> and restricts its output (credentials, diplomas). (A cartel is an
> organization of nominally competing enterprises that fixes prices and
> production to benefit its members. Cartels may be formal, such as the
> Organization of Oil Exporting Nations (OPEC) or informal like the
> higher education cartel. Informal cartels often rely on government
> regulations to restrict competitors’ entry into their market and on
> government spending or loans to fund their operations. To mask the
> uncompetitive nature of their cartel, they devote enormous resources
> to public relations.)
>
> The cartel’s basic mechanism of maintaining non-competitive pricing is
> to enforce an artificial scarcity of credentials. The cartel’s control
> of a product that is in high demand (college diploma) frees it from
> outside competition and free-market price discovery, enabling it to
> charge customers (students) an extraordinary premium for a product
> whose value is entirely scarcity-based.
>
> This is the very definition of a rent-seeking cartel, a cartel that
> extracts premiums solely on the basis of an artificial scarcity. By
> their very nature, rent-seeking cartels are exploitive and parasitic,
> drawing resources from those who can least afford to pay high premiums
> and misallocating capital that could have been invested in productive
> social investments. The term rents in this context means that the
> cartel collects a premium without providing any corresponding
> additional value. The rentier class includes landed aristocracy, who
> collect rents while adding no value to the production of their tenant
> farmers.
>
> 4. Since the higher education cartel is the sole provider of
> accreditation (college diplomas), it is unaccountable for its failure
> to prepare its customers (students) for productive employment in the
> emerging economy. If a diploma is portrayed as essential, students
> must pay the cartel even if the cartel’s product (education) is
> ineffective and obsolete.
>
> 5. The four-year college system is profoundly disconnected from the
> economy. That the cartel’s product has little practical application is
> not considered a factor in the value of the product (diploma), whose
> primary purpose is to act as a higher education passport that enables
> passage to a more expansive territory of employment.
>
> 6. The present system of higher education is unaffordable for all but
> the wealthy. The cartel’s solution to its high prices, $1 trillion in
> student loan debt (exceeding both credit card debt and vehicle loans),
> is a crushing burden on both individuals and society at large.
>
> 7. The higher education cartel is an intrinsically elitist force, as
> its survival as a rent-seeking cartel is based on limiting what is now
> essentially free: knowledge and instruction. In other words, the
> higher education cartel charges an extraordinary premium for a free
> product.
>
> 8. The only way the Higher Education cartel can continue to charge a
> premium for nearly-free products is to actively mystify its product
> (by attributing secular sanctity and civic value to its diplomas) and
> promote an artificial value for this product using public relations
> and political lobbying. In other words, the higher education cartel
> operates on the same principles as other informal cartels: it depends
> on the state to fund its operations, and it uses public relations to
> mask its cartel structure and systemic failure to fulfill its original
> purpose."
>
> -Dave
>
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