08:14 – I see that student loan debt has now passed $1 trillion. That’s about $3,000 for every man, woman, and child, more than automobile loans and credit-card debt. Something has to give, and soon. The average college graduate now owes $25,000 on leaving college, where many find themselves unemployed, if not effectively unemployable. We don’t need any more people with degrees in history or English or sociology, so why do we continue to produce a massive flood of them at such crippling cost?
The Big Lie is that a college degree results in lifetime earnings that are more than enough to pay the cost of that college degree. That’s true on average, but the devil is in the details. For one thing, it ignores the time value of money, not to mention the time value of time. And it ignores the fact that the value of college degree is strongly influenced by the field in which one obtains that degree. Getting a degree in English, for example, is a losing proposition. One comes out of college having wasted four years and owing $25,000 on average, not to mention the costs that student and his family have paid themselves. The reality is that that English major starts out down four years of wasted time and, conservatively, $100,000. Better to have spent those four years working and kept the $100,000 in his pocket.
Finally, there’s the huge factor that no one ever takes into account. Ability and work ethic. Those who go to college are, on average, significantly brighter and harder working than those who do not. Comparing lifetime earnings of those who were bright enough and hard-working enough to get a college degree to those who were not ignores the fact that that cohort who get college degrees would certainly have had higher lifetime earnings than the non-college cohort, even if the first group had never attended college. Smarter, harder-working people tend to be more successful in life. Attributing all of that incremental success to the college degree is ridiculous.
I’d like to see the whole concept of undergraduate education and graduate/professional education revamped. Students should not, for example, do a four-year undergraduate pre-med degree followed by med school. Instead, they should apply to med school right out of high school and do a six-year course of study leading directly to their MD. Same thing with accounting, law, engineering, the sciences, and other rigorous disciplines. Students who were not ready to declare a major could do one or two years of suitable general preparatory work before deciding to choose between, say, accounting or law or business on the one hand, or between medicine or chemistry or biology or engineering on the other. But the goal should always be to have students complete four to six years of targeted education and come out the other end fully qualified in their fields.
Nor need the student necessarily complete the full course of education. For example, a student whose goal was to obtain a graduate/professional-level certification after completing the full six-year course might not be able to cut it. Fine. That student might leave after two or three years with lower qualifications, suitable to become, say, a lab technician or a bookkeeper or a paralegal.
Attributing all of that incremental success to the college degree is ridiculous.
You ignore the real reasons that colleges say that having a degree will increase earnings. It is called marketing. Colleges are big business. They employ some of the unemployable with history or philosophy degrees. Colleges go out of their way to try and make students fail a couple of courses to extend the students stay in the school another semester or year. If not by failing a course, then by fucking up their student records and refusing to fix their error.
Colleges are not in business for education. They are in business for sports and keeping the employees jobs. Education is just an unfortunate side effect.
Actually adding two year of “general study” might bring the average high school graduate up to a decent level, the level high school graduates had before the education “experts” took over.
One cannot hypothesize a solution prior to a sucessful cause and effect analysis. OK, I have done that and the time dependency of the cost of a college education is determined by the reciprocal of Moore’s Law.
It’s not just how bright you are and how hard you work. Those two things really matter. The thing that really matters is delayed gratification. Are you willing to work and sacrifice now for something in the future. Success used to correlate very strongly with going to college and buying a house. Since we wanted everyone to be successful we made it much easier to buy a house and go to college. Instead of making everyone rich, we only made it easier to get in over your head with mortgage and student loan debt.
So what are pre-med degrees actually for?
Here in Oz you the very bright kids who did medicine would leave high school at age 17, having completed two unit maths, physics, chemistry and an arts subject and enrol directly in a university medicine course. Six years later they’d emerge with a M.B., B.S. and work in a hospital for a year or two and then could start working as a general practitioner, or start down the specialist route (say 4+ years training to by an ObGyn, shrink, or whatever.)
Nowadays they don’t always take the brightest. They take a lot of nebulous stuff into consideration and reject some extremely bright but immature kids. that means the bar is lowered and we no longer get the best. And some universities make kids do a year, or even a full degree in something else, often unrelated to medicine. That makes them older when they finally emerge at the other end. Probably more mature but with more debt and perhaps the edge taken off their keenness to become a doctor.
I actually agree that some kids were emerging from med school at 23 without important personal skills in dealing with patients. But those skills shouldn’t be made a pre-requisite for enrolling, they should be taught as part of the course and examined.
The university I teach for has a pretty impressive bureaucracy. This resulted from the fact that the University was created by merging three smaller universities. Rather than coming up with a consolidated management structure, they basically kept the old structures and added a whole new layer on top. As a result, we have a staff:teacher ratio of slightly less than 1. About 55% of the employees are teaching staff, about 45% are non-teaching personnel.
A while ago, I was looking for similar information about a couple of US universities. It’s hard to find! I don’t know if information like this is intentionally hidden, or they just figure no one is interested. One data point: the University of California is apparently pleased to announce that its ratio remains at the low, low level of 3:1, just as is has been for the past 10 years. It also has only about 300 administrators in the “Senior Management Group”.
Now, obviously schools differ. UC, for example, has a lot of staff running around their teaching hospital. Still, I wonder what the ratios are for typical universities. Does anyone know?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/judge-spares-amazon-from-colorado-sales-tax-reporting-scheme.ars
RBT Posted on 4 April 2012
Students should not, for example, do a four-year undergraduate pre-med degree followed by med school. Instead, they should apply to med school right out of high school and do a six-year course of study leading directly to their MD.
I agree 100%. And that is exactly how it worked for my daughter in-law in Germany. When she started medical school,–after a year’s lapse after high school (13 grades), while she waited for an opening slot in medical school,–all the students began working in hospitals immediately upon matriculation. Sort of like Physician Assistant trainees. As they progressed they took on more and more responsibility. She started school in 2001, and we all moved to the house in Stausberg during 2004. Very shortly after that, she began the equivalent of a residency (working regular hours, not the days at a time, sleeping in the hospital nonsense US residency requires–although she did have to do occasional overnights on weekends when hubby was available to take care of the kids; Germany makes lots of accommodation for working women to care for children, and men and childless women pay for that). She took 1 year off work for one of her pregnancies, but continued with school, so she finished just a little after most of the others who started with her. She also continued working in hospitals once a doctor, as that arrangement allowed her better control over time available for taking care of the 5 kids.
Like in the US, there are middlemen agencies that doctors and nurses work for–whose purpose, as nearly as I can see, is solely to inflate the price of services by inserting a needless layer of people and bureaucracy into the system.
Chuck wrote:
“…she began the equivalent of a residency (working regular hours, not the days at a time, sleeping in the hospital nonsense US residency requiresshe began the equivalent of a residency (working regular hours, not the days at a time, sleeping in the hospital nonsense US residency requires”
Yeah, I thought only we did that to our trainee doctors. I used to know a woman who routinely worked 18 hour shifts as a resident. Crazy, plus it can hardly be good for the patients under their care.
Actually, there’s a lot to be said for the old US intern/resident system, where literally 48-hour and 72-hour shifts were commonplace. The idea was to put the fledgling doctors under extreme pressure while they were backstopped by experienced doctors. Actually, the interns were backstopped two-deep, with residents watching the interns to prevent errors and attendings watching the residents. The fledgling doctors learned to make critical decisions while under pressure, and a lot of older physicians still believe that was an important part of their training.
Close 90% of the colleges and universities and also stipulate rigorous exams in high school for students who intend to go further, weeding out even more. This crazy business of everyone going on to college has become a total joke.
OFD, BA English Literature, 1989
At least when OFD went to school, they still made English Literature majors learn some English Literature. Now I think they spend more time studying politically correct bovine excrement than English Literature. Don’t even get me started on the whole ______ Studies field.
RBT wrote:
“Actually, there’s a lot to be said for the old US intern/resident system, where literally 48-hour and 72-hour shifts were commonplace. The idea was to put the fledgling doctors under extreme pressure while they were backstopped by experienced doctors…”
Okay, who do you want operating on/making critical decisions about you or yours? Someone who’s 50 hours into a 72 hour shift, or someone who’s reasonably fresh and alert?
Yeah, me too.
Interns don’t operate. They assist, if they’re lucky enough to get the opportunity. And generally they assist only early in their shifts, when they are well-rested. And assisting usually doesn’t involve anything where there’s even a small chance that they’d harm the patient.
Everyone seems to assume that the medical establishment is stupid. They’re not.
As to who I’d want making critical decisions, I’d take an experienced nurse over a well-rested intern any time. Interns are the medical equivalent of fresh second lieutenants in the armed forces. A smart 2nd LT understands that he has the authority but has no experience or judgement. That’s what his sergeant is for. In the same way, a smart intern–and most of them are very smart–realizes that’s what the nurses are for. Sure, the nurse can’t order the intern around, any more than the sergeant can order the 2nd LT around. But it takes a very stupid intern or 2nd LT to ignore orders phrased as suggestions from his sergeant or nurse.
It is correct that only experienced doctors do surgery. In fact, in most US states, you have to have a full residency in your particular field, before touching a knife or a robot. What’s more, a doctor who is expert in cutting and removing cancers, may not know much of anything about anesthesia, even though his patients are under, while he operates. The thing that scares me are the hospitals that allow anesthesiologists to leave the OR and put somebody else under in another OR, then circulate between the two (or sometimes three). It is not often that something goes wrong, but when it does, you want an anesthesiologist there at the moment it does, because the operating doctor may not know what to do.
I don’t agree that working people to exhaustion teaches them anything, except that they might be able to overdo their private life before going on duty to operate, and get away with it. Most of my work involves doctors who have been charged with making mistakes. I can tell you that all of them (including recently trained nurses) are very bright people. But the hospital systems are whacked with stupidity (run by the same kind of people who cream off lucrative stock options), and those residency programs are part of their nonsense. The doctors I dealt with in Germany were just as competent as ours, and they never went through that senseless residency boot camp.
In fact, in most US states, you have to have a full residency in your particular field, before touching a knife or a robot.
Not true according my friend who is a doctor. As soon as you get your medical degree, licensed by the state, you can do any medical procedure you desire, brain surgery, heart surgery, vasectomy, there are no legal limits.
However, the possibility of getting any hospital to allow you access to the facility is zero. The chances of getting any insurance company to cover you is zero. The system restricts the doctors, not the legal system.
>Dave B.
“At least when OFD went to school, they still made English Literature majors learn some English Literature. Now I think they spend more time studying politically correct bovine excrement than English Literature. Don’t even get me started on the whole ______ Studies field.”
I hit the tail end of the good stuff, and managed to catch some pretty elderly gents who were either about to retire or had already done so and were professors emeriti. As I was wrapping up my BA and then going on to grad school for the MA and PhD, the field was already rotten with neo-Marxist porcine excrement, leavened heavily with all the Permamently Aggrieved ideologies of the Glorious Sixties, thanks to a Long March through academe by a lot of the ball-less radicals, the ones who talked the talk but never walked the walk at the barricades and in the jails and prisons back then. Since then, they have the utter gall to compare themselves to civil rights marchers and activists of that era, too. Scum.
Near the end of my all-but-dissertation studies, I got to witness the discomfort and humiliation of some of these creeps as the kids coming along were even more radical and hateful and militant than they had ever been. A couple even cried openly in class at what they had wrought, pretty much the destruction of the serious study of the humanities and its replacement by blatant political indoctrination of the Marxist-Leninist derivatives like deconstruction, queer theory, French feminism, new historicism, and the like, with most of the emphasis being on theory and not any love or appreciation for literature, per se.
But like Dave B. sez, don’t get me started. It took long enough, but eventually I saw the game wasn’t worth the candle to light it, and not only that, there were, and are, no jobs for the likes of me, a straight, married, Christian (even worse: Roman Catholic) white male war veteran and ex-cop. Best I could have possibly done would have been a continuing series of ‘gypsy professor’ gigs at various podunk community and junior colleges around the continent, while making ends meet stocking supermarket shelves and pumping gas.
I happen to agree with probably most folks on this board that the hard sciences, maths, engineering, medical, etc. fields are the ones that should take utmost priority, but I also believe that we do all that without the Western humanities and we become utterly impoverished thereby. Thankfully the cadres from the Glorious Sixties are retiring and dying out, like their imbecilic left-wing counterparts in the media and churches. Someday I may get lucky enough to be able to at least tutor young people in English literature, history, philosophy, Latin, etc., preferably on a one-to-one or seminar basis, and they won’t hold my lack of a politically correct dissertation soaked in Maoist theory against me.
There’s a place for liberal studies, but I mean the classic liberal education, not the dreck that the Liberals have turned it into – as OFD catalogues. Fortunately, much of the liberal arts can be learned on your own.
OFD, maybe you could wangle your way into teaching a few small senior-level classes at a private or parochial high school. I imagine you’d have to work for about nothing, at least at first, in order to “steal” a seminar class away from the regular English/history/Latin teachers. Perhaps you could bill it as a limited-enrollment seminar to inculcate the love of a liberal education in select students. That one-liner probably needs a few more buzz-words, but if you were ABD, you can probably pile them plenty high and deep, heh.
Maybe you should share your knowledge online. Like Khan did with Khan Academy.
Of course, that’d be a lot easier if you were rich and had a load of free time. Perhaps that should take priority.
I have, brilliant ABD imbecile that I am, thought of SteveF’s idea already, and will be looking into it much more rigorously once my IT “career” tanks once and for all. And yes, I can pile that kind of stuff high, wide and deep.
eriticist’s suggestion puzzles me, however; getting rich and having a load of free time would indeed be fun, but I fear neither my IT gig nor tutoring kids not so already pole-axed by the publik skools will generate either of those desirable states of being for me.
OK, OK, no need to get tetchy. I’ve found that many times something that I think is obvious isn’t necessarily obvious to someone else and I’ve taken a lot of “why didn’t you tell me that years ago?” Better to err on the side of too much communication, here.
But if you feel a knot of unresolved rage in your stomach, you can always alleviate it by finding a government employee, telling him he makes you sick, and puking on him.
TN must be different than IN with regard to surgery. Older doctors are grandfathered in, in IN, but here you have to be board certified to put a knife to someone in a specialty area, and you can only get board certified in your field if you complete a residency in that field. That makes it very difficult for doctors who have not made up their mind what they want to do by the time they are ready for residency. If you start down one path and change your mind, you have to begin the residency again. Now it is possible to get certified in some area if you are an M.D. from out of state, and thereby avoid the residency, but a new doctor in IN cannot just start cutting away when the state issues their license.
I should also correct an earlier implication: hospital management is not responsible for there being the residency boot camp; that comes from the state licensing board, which is made up completely of doctors. Doctors license doctors, and lawyers license lawyers. Nice incestuous situation, which needs to end.
Hey, no, SteveF, I warnt being tetchy at all; I appreciated the suggestion and it helps to confirm me in my continuing idiocy that I could still possibly teach somewhere. Thanks, ack-shoo-ally.
I only rarely now have those knots of rage at various matters in life and over the decades, and they are, thankfully, dwindling as I enter my approaching dotage and prepare to wander all Lear-like on some blasted heath somewhere, howling about sound and fury signifying nothing, etc., etc.
Yeah, I confess I was flippant. My point was that, if you’re not bothered about earning money from it, you could share your knowledge with thousands of people online. The example I gave was Khan Academy, where they give a lot of free lessons on maths and sciences.
Or, to give a more familiar example, our host’s videos on YouTube. IIRC he doesn’t have ads enabled — they’re all to accompany books, kits, etc.
I agree, but I don’t think we need worry about the humanities. I know a lot of scientists, and I don’t know one who doesn’t read widely in non-science fields, and usually with an emphasis in a particular subject area. For example, one chemist I knew back in grad school was also learned in Renaissance art, to the extent that she could have lectured at the university/grad school level. She got interested in the subject based on her expertise in pigment and dyes, and her interest developed and expanded from there. Similarly, I’ve known physicists, biologists, physicians, and engineers who had expert-level knowledge of various fields of literature, music, history, and so on. In short, the kind of people who become scientists and engineers are often autodidacts with wide-ranging interests.
Conversely, I don’t think I know a single humanities person who reads serious science or engineering literature for recreation.