Why is a college education such a huge part of our free enterprise system?

[kentuck]

Why is it so different from a public-financed high school education?

There was a time when professors and college presidents did not make so much money. I can recall taking a " supply-side" economics class in the '80's and the instructor believed that education was no different from any other commodity. Let the market decide. Even the parking spaces were decided by whatever the market would bear. The cost of everything went up.

But, wouldn't it be to the benefit of our nation to give all our children the best education possible? Do we really get that with the best education for those that can afford it? Shouldn't some things not be tied to the "free market" but instead, be decided upon the common good?

[Buzz Clik]

1. What's your question -- about college grads or college faculty and admins?

Or something else?

[kentuck]

4. "Why is a college education such a huge part of our free enterprise system?"

???

[Buzz Clik]

7. You wandered from that question in your text and asked other, non-related questions.

Answer to your question: A college education is valued by employers.

[AngryAmish]

2. And never mind higher education is essentially a giant rape factory.

Rape rates higher than the Congo.

[daleanime]

3. "A time when....professors...did not make so much money."

Google the phrase adjunct professor salaries.

[kentuck]

6. Then...?

Who is getting all the money?

[daleanime]

10. Massive subject, well worth the research.....

there are areas in education that do act as sinkholes for cash and they should be deal with, but to earn a PhD takes about 12 years of work. Don't you believe in rewarding effort?

[Igel]

14. Lots of people.

Many faculty make $80k or more. Some well over $100k, even in humanities. Look to professional schools and the number goes up.

Administrators can make more, but most don't.

Athletics is to a large extent self-funded.

Money goes to maintenance, to libraries, to technology, to new construction and new equipment. Libraries and subscriptions are expensive.

A lot goes to financial aid. Many schools skim money off the tuition income stream to help fund students from poorer families. Then there are the TAships and RAships, and all the support programs that exist to help students these days--career centers, financial aid counseling, tutorial sessions.

It's one thing to say "the average student loan debt is $80k" or whatever it is, it's all well and good to say "average tuition is $30k/year" or whatever, but few cite the average price paid. If you have a free ride--I know more than one senior in my level science classes that will have one--you got no loans. You don't count towards "average student loan debt." Others get partial grants or scholarships for athletics, academics, or who knows what else. That brings down the total, and would make "average price paid" be significantly under the average tuition. That gets nobody into a high dudgeon, so it doesn't get reported. We pay more attention to the weather in Rochester, NY, than people do in Los Angeles: "As for the last 43 days, sunny and a high of 83" incites tedium compared to snow, hail, sleet, etc.

We tend to hear the average student loan debt, including those at prestigious schools and professional/graduate schools, not "average undergraduate student loan debt for 4-year-degree graduates from state universities." And cherry-picked average tuitions for sets of select schools.

Take Univ. of Houston, included in nothing but not a horrible school. In 2014/15, including living expenses and books, a reasonable cost of attendance was under $25k/year. Graduate in 4 years, total's $100k in loans, assuming on-campus housing, no financial assistance, that parents contribute nothing, you have no savings, and all you do during time off is make spending money that doesn't go towards living expenses or school.

When you're graduate student president at a tier I school for a year, you're given a lot of inside documents for review as part of the committees you're on. That included proposals to the state legislature, proposed budget breakdowns, quarter budget expenses. It's been years since I was in that role, but things haven't changed that much.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

17. Companies that service the colleges.

People that own housing marketed to students. Businesses that operate on or near campus.
Since I was a senior at a private mid priced college 35 years ago, tuition has gone from about $2200/semester to about $18,000/semester. I'm told that price includes money that funds scholarships and need based grants. All of that (IMO) is going to build the enrollment and expand the school. This improves the community somewhat since it creates jobs and generates business.

IMNSHO what it does most is generate student loan debt. It's an anchor around the neck of everyone who owes and their families.

When I graduated, a semester could be paid for in about 20 weeks working for minimum wage. It takes about 78 weeks now.

Is our economy 4 times better?
Is anyone (not a 1%er) 4 times more secure?

[Iris]

33. Administrators. I recently read that there are more administrators on campuses now than tenured prof

[stone space]

5. Some prioritize military spending over education spending.

That's why we have so many threads asking us how we would ever be able to afford "free education", but no corresponding threads with questions regarding how we can ever pay for our "free military".

[daleanime]

11. +1

[alarimer]

8. College professors don't make much, relatively speaking.

College presidents, on the other hand, do. Often these days they are political people (former politicians) with no experience in academia who are brought in solely to raise money. Why public universities need to raise money is another story. They have largely been starved of funding by state governments, figuring they can raise tuition to make up the difference. That is why tuition (and especially fees) have gone through the roof.

[Iris]

34. ^this - succinct explanation ^

[malthaussen]

9. Oh, don't worry...

... a few more years, and primary and secondary education will be such huger parts of our free enterprise system that the money made off colleges will seem trivial.

The amount of money to be made in education by the corporations who provide it is awe-inspiring. But as with most things, relatively little of that trickles down to the producers, which in this case are the ones who actually teach. Administrators and coaches are the ones who get the major windfalls. Even tenured professors make relatively small salaries compared to their qualifications and experience, and tenured professors are becoming rarer and rarer as colleges get more into the "gig economy."

But then, you really aren't asking why, you're asking if it should be so, if it is the best thing for the nation. I daresay, the answer to that depends on how much you believe, or affect to believe, that privatization is always superior to government oversight. These days, most in power are all for making more profits, especially as so much of that profit finds its way into their pockets.

-- Mal

[daleanime]

12. +1

[SmittynMo]

13. Benefit our nation to give all our children the best education possible?

Bernie - Absolutely
HRC - Sure but we wont charge you as much as we do today.

Gee, I know where my vote is going. Bernie all the way!!!



Note: And I have no intent of going back to school at age 62. Why does this matter to me then?

I am extremely concerned about the future of the middle class, and my children and grandchildren.

[Igel]

15. Ambiguous question.

I'll assume you mean "why is it part of the free enterprise system and not public?"

Well, part is public. It stopped being so well funded when (1) taxpayers stopped wanted tax increases and (2) social programs grew.

Increasingly K-12 education has moved from being about education and about being a social program. Spending in K-12 has soared in the last 40 years in real terms--doubling or tripling. Much of that has gone for SpEd, ESL, and other programs less about mass education and more about making sure the disadvantaged are dealt with fairly, largely the result of Congress' implementing SCOTUS requirements. We like to focus on athletics, but my school spends more on SpEd than on athletics, and even athletics are often reduced to a social program--"involved students are high-achieving students" (research is fuzzy on cause and effect, but nobody likes "high-achieving students are involved students", and if you're in athletics your coach hounds the students' butt sto turn in work and stay qualified for the program, and the principal hounds the teachers to provide extra everything, if only to keep the principal from paying unannounced visits).

Still, the emphasis in the '40s and '50s and '60s was high school. In the '70s it was community college. And then it went back to high school. And if we'd turned attention to post-secondary, mostly a white-person's institution, there'd have been political hell to pay on the left (and not so much interest in the project on the right). So we have improved graduation rates, a bimodal SAT distribution masked by a single reported average, and nearly flatlined NAEP scores.

Even the interest we have in post-secondary is split. On the one hand, we have lagging graduation and achievement rates for low-SES minorities (and whites). On the other hand, we have a clear pay gap for minorities that have "made it" and aren't low SES, as well as escalating costs for those who go to college.

In the interim, the colleges that had existed grew and grew, new ones were founded and expanded, and by the time anybody in government started to think about "real" public post-2ndary ed there was a well funded sector of the private or de facto privatized economy already there. Government handles such things best when there's scant competition, because then it's just another player in a part of the economy that doesn't provide "common" services or services nobody wants to provide.

(I'd also argue that while consumers may like the low-rent tuition, it creates problems for some programs. Government serves government first and foremost, and plans ahead while research agendas don't. It's hard enough getting the NIH to be flexible without making some government agency responsible for setting the # of English and chem eng majors at North Podunk University for f/y 2017/18. Would we really have the number of art history majors if taxpayers funded them all? Or would the government be expected to find them all jobs, if the #s didn't decrease?)

[Wounded Bear]

16. Because, much like medicine, we don't have an education system...

we have an education industry. We've turned most institutions of higher ed from teaching facilities into profit centers.

[So Far From Heaven]

18. What 'free enterprise system'?

You have the US confused with somewhere else.

Labor markets drive education requirements. What is most interesting is the lowering of salary versus level of education as a whole. You can buy college grads for a dime a dozen, just like they did high school grads years ago.

I have never taken any courses in physics all the way through grad school, nor taught any courses, that consider the field and its required education a 'commodity'. Only after graduation do employers do that.

If you consider education a commodity, then that is exactly what you get.

Admin at the University where I teach costs almost as much as the TOTAL faculty cost. Sports are NEVER break even except at exceptional sports colleges such as Alabama.

'Conservative' education pushes have privatized as much of the state university systems as they have public schools, and reduced budgets by at least 25 percent over the past 10 years or so, so the cost to the student has blown up.

Welcome to America.

[kentuck]

19. Interesting opinion about education and brainwashing...

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/13u4wp/wow_people_are_brainwashed_by_college_heres_a/

[Adrahil]

21. Just the usual anti-college rant.

If he doesn't want to go to college, don't. But then don't he shouldn't complain when the best he can do is night stocker at Wal-Mart.

[kentuck]

25. Obviously brainwashed...

already.

[Adrahil]

31. Yup. Edumacation. Who needs it, amiright?

The kind of nonsense in that piece is the kind of bullshit I hear from my sister and her kids. And then they ask me to cover their car payment this month, which I do because honestly, I don't want them losing their shirts, and they mean well.

College is certainly not for everyone, and not everything useful can be learned in college. But that kind of rant is part of the anti-intellectualism sweeping this country.

[Adrahil]

20. College Professors make lots of money?

Maybe some do, but as the husband of an Associate Professor, I can tell you that the salary, compared to her education level (PhD) is not terrible, but it's not that great, either. Let's put it this way. I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering. I make more than twicwe what she does with her PhD. It's ain't the rank and file professors costing lots of money.

[jwirr]

22. I did not used to be. When I was in school it was rare to see

graduates attend college because technology was not a big part of getting a good paying job. That was in the 50s. For the most part you needed a high school education but that was not absolutely necessary.

As technology made employment more complicated more education was needed. And that change has continued up until now. With the lose of jobs to other countries we have lost some of the jobs that did not require a college education and what is left is low income. Thus college has become a necessity if we want a good job today.

On the other hand why is industry requiring this trend? The have been using machines to replace all the workers they can but they still need upper echelon workers and college is needed for that.

I was reading a book about medieval tenant farming techniques. The idea was to use human labor not machines and technology. I am actually old enough to remember my grandfather as a tenant farmer her in the USA. We deliberately moved from that model which employed a lot more people to "bigger, better and more" due to scientific changes. Factories needed that excess farm labor for their use and farming could then be done by machines and less people power.

Given climate change I am not sure it was a good change.

[Recursion]

23. It's mostly social signalling

I hate that. I've done my best when I've hired to not limit the search to people with college degrees, but it gets hard to sneak that past HR.

[moondust]

24. Neoliberal shift of the 80s?

Yes, some colleges seemed to follow the corporate model of CEOs making hundreds of times more than the average employee and thus began paying administrators much more than in the previous, more egalitarian system. If the boss of GE is making millions then shouldn't the boss of Mississippi State be making a whole lot more than the average employee, too? You know, just implementing the new Wall Street paradigm.

Leapfrogging

[CK_John]

26. Before the end of WWII only 8% of the population had college

ability. It was post WWII and the GI bill that opened up the possibility for college.

Also millions of GI got a lesson in leadership and the way to get things done.

[Albertoo]

27. You probably should split the question in two

First, how studies are organized. The names might differ, but the cursus itself is becoming homogeneous worldwide: HS diploma/baccalaureate -> College/Bachelor -> Masters/PhD

The second question is that of the funding. And there's no magic bullet. either/or:
• either people pay (part or all), and they tend to be more selective/invest themselves more
But they get in debt.
• or people don't pay. No debt. But people choose their orientation with less care for the market, and the enrollment numbers swell, making it harder to provide quality education

Or anything in between those two options

[kentuck]

28. Why does there have to be a "market"?

Seriously.

[Adrahil]

32. Because education is not an unlimited resource.

Even is college was free for everyone and anyone could study anything, there would still be a type a market. You might argue it would be a market of merit, and that might be true, but there WOULD some method to account for supply and demand.

But let's hear it... what's your perfect plan?

[kentuck]

35. Give everyone equal opportunity to the same education and let the cream rise to the top...

Education should be like the air we breathe.

[daleo]

29. It is a way to sustain and transmit class priviledge

Expensive education ensures that upper middle class and rich people's offspring get the best paying and most influential jobs. It also allows a certain proportion of the most motivated and most academically offspring of the working class a small chance for upward mobility. That acts as a safety valve, by co-opting possible dissenters, and giving the system a fig leaf of apparent fairness.

[NightWatcher]

30. If you need it, our friends in the private sector will make money off of it.

See also:
Prescription drug prices
Health Insurance costs
And anything else that people NEED

The private sector is evil and will squeeze every bit they can from anything that anyone needs. As soon as regulation falls away, the vultures in the private sector will swoop in to exploit.