THEY'RE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON. Via Minding the Campus, an article titled "Why College Is A Waste of Money" in a service called The Daily Beast (it has nothing to do with roller coasters or big-game hunting).

But there are plenty of four-year colleges willing to take the money of anyone who can pony up -- whether that money comes from parents, the government, or that student's paychecks until he’s old enough to buy a discounted movie ticket. These colleges have seats to fill and bills to pay, and sure, they'd all love to be Harvard, but they'll take what they can get. And student lenders? They have absolutely no incentive to encourage responsible borrowing because they will get paid back -- you can file for bankruptcy 400 times, and your student loans will still be there, with interest and penalties accruing daily.

The people financing these college investments -- parents and taxpayers -- have a right to demand that 46% of their money isn't sunk into the education of a student who drops out after a few semesters.

George Leef extends the argument.

Despite all the hype about the wonderful intellectual and economic benefits of a college education, the reality is breaking through---for many young people, college is a poor use of time and money. The reason why the percentage of Americans 25 to 34 who earn college degrees is starting to fall is that families are figuring out that a college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good life. The statistic that the higher education leaders find so alarming is made up of a lot of rational decisions that go something like this:

Mom and Dad: Son, your sister graduated from XYZ State two years ago and has beenearning $24,000 per year as an aerobics instructor. You're no better a student thanshe was. We know that several of your friends are going there, but don't you think youmight prefer to learn electrical work or something like that?

Son: Well, that makes sense. I don't really like school work that much, and from whatI hear, electricians make good, steady money.

It isn't the least bit surprising---much less dangerous to the nation---that we're seeing some decline in college graduation rates. For a lot of marginal, disengaged students, embarking on the quest for a BA simply doesn't make sense.

Both articles suggest that young people who would like to give higher education a try start at their community college. That's not a bad suggestion, although, as the dean at Anonymous Community notes, the mission, and the job description, are different.

I understand that a cc may not be what you had in mind when you went to grad school. I also don't care. We take our work seriously, and we want colleagues who take it seriously, too. Our students deserve no less. I've seen candidates who did everything short of holding their noses during interviews; every single one of them was immediately DOA. If you believe that a cc is somehow beneath you, don't apply.

The second, related to the first, is curiosity. This may seem counterintuitive, but the candidates who talked less about themselves and more about the college generally did quite well. If you're just giving Prepared Talk #14, you'll be less impressive than if you're actually engaging the group, and engaging is a two-way process.

Obviously, that involves doing some homework prior to the talk. What's the teaching load, both in terms of credits/courses/hours/preps, and in terms of level? I once heard a math candidate generously offer that she was willing to go as 'low' in the curriculum as Calc I once in a while, in a spirit of shared sacrifice. Most of the job involves teaching either remedial or college algebra. She didn't get the offer.

The same can apply to the English applicant who only wants to teach literature, as opposed to composition, or nearly anybody who refuses to teach gen eds. In the cc universe, those courses are most of what we do; if you aren't excited to do them, you probably shouldn't work here.

In my world, too much dissertation talk is a clue that you really have something else in mind. Talk about teaching is much better received, particularly if it references both the scholarship of teaching and learning and your own actual teaching experience with students similar to ours.

That explanation is spot on, although it points to two deeper problems that higher education has yet to tackle, namely the attempted coup of the college of education in higher education ("the scholarship of teaching and learning") that has already applied that thinking to the disadvantages of the common schools, and the Ph.D. as a research degree (perhaps people who would like to earn a comfortable, if not spectacular income teaching economics general eds have no reason to stay one step ahead of Selten and Tirole in the chain store paradox) where many of the higher education appointments are not at research departments.

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. At Phi Beta Cons, George Leef recommends an editorial questioning the oversold degree.

For all the talk about college being crucial to gainful employment in today’s society, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that bachelor’s degrees are no antidote to outsourcing, underemployment and lagging pay. Among 40 occupations on the BLS’ watch list for likely outsourcing are computer programmers, aerospace engineers and microbiologists.

Meantime, blue-collar trades people — from truck drivers to plumbers to electricians — are perpetually in demand. And none of these fields requires post-secondary degrees.

Even the education sector itself reflects this dichotomy. Indian River County School District, for example, hired an audio-visual coordinator fresh out of high school and paid him $15,000 more than a beginning teacher with a master’s degree.

None of this is to suggest that higher education isn’t important for the knowledge it imparts. A college degree can enrich life and, in some fields, ensure upward
mobility.

But Paul Barton, a senior associate at the Educational Testing Service, poses a provocative question in the title of his report: “How many college graduates does the U.S. labor force really need?”

Welcome to the conversation. Note, however, the tension between job preparation and intellectual growth inherent in that fourth paragraph.

Now, think about this.

As things stand now, businesses complain about the lackluster skills of high-school graduates. Such concerns prompt Liam Julian of the education research center at New York’s Fordham Foundation to opine: “If high-school diplomas actually meant something, conventional wisdom would be less likely to demand college diplomas.”

Where is the trustee or university president who will put the onus back on the high schools, which has the potential to improve faculty morale. As would more self-selection.

For high school students, an unsentimental analysis of supply-and-demand is called for. Bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees are entirely appropriate pursuits for the academically inclined and they help keep future options open, but sheepskins aren’t for everyone. And there’s no shame in that.

But there is shame in suggesting that slackers and corner-cutters are somehow able to carry water for a patternmaker.

In the real world, lawyers appear to be everywhere, while a good, skilled craftsman is increasingly hard to find — at any price.

That's always been the case.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE DEFLATING?

It has long been my position that the powers that be in higher education have broken the social contract with the populace they're supposed to serve, and a year ago I noted even people who might be sympathetic with higher education's ethos walking away.  "What good does it do to stay one micro-aggression ahead of the most easily triggered matriculant, if none of the graduates can rebut an argument or re-stock a coffee house?"

More recently, National Review's George Leef recommends an essay by a recent community college graduate.  "Graduate students as instructors are extremely rare at community colleges and faculty get paid to teach, not to conduct research." There aren't graduate programs in the research university mold to provide the cheap labor, although without further information, we don't know how many Wake Tech (or Milwaukee Area Tech, or Kishwaukee College, or Henry Ford Community) faculty lines are filled by Ph.D. students or recent graduates of the local universities on contingent appointments.  Furthermore, what you get out of community college might depend on what you put in.  "They are hardly educational havens populated entirely by dedicated students and excellent faculty."

But a matriculant might be getting something, and here the institutions riding the top of those U.S. News league tables might be adding no value at all.  Again, it's about getting out what you put in, not in the sense of simply reading and highlighting the book and noodling at a computer screen, but in making connections and asking questions, and sometimes getting into arguments.

Some authorities still insist that colleges, even if they teach no specific knowledge, at least improve “critical thinking.” But this contention is not borne out by a test designed to measure such thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since the 1980s the improvement in students’ CLA scores during their four years of college has dropped by about 50 percent, and such improvement now averages just 7 percent over the first three semesters.

Even that small gain is very unevenly distributed: the top 10 percent of students average a creditable improvement of 43 percent, but about 45 percent of students show no significant improvement at all. Another test of academic proficiency given by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) found that between 2006 and 2011 the number of students who were “proficient” in “critical thinking” rose during four years of college only from 3 percent to 8 percent; those “proficient” in “written communication” rose only from 5 percent to 9 percent, and those “proficient” in mathematics rose only from 5 percent to 10 percent. (Presumably, the 8–10 percent of proficient graduates are more or less the same as that top 10 percent who showed strong improvement in critical thinking according to the CLA.)

Worse, for many students, their experience is a lot like what happens in failing common schools: the longer they have them, the less competent they get.

Leaving aside a “marginal” category, the number who were clearly “not proficient” decreased during their college years only from 86 percent to 72 percent in “critical thinking,” only from 77 percent to 63 percent in “written communication,” and only from 84 percent to 73 percent in mathematics. Such measures are hard to dismiss, because if anything the ETS has an incentive to tell colleges what they want to hear.

Perhaps the rising numbers of disgruntled faculty, and writers of "quit lit" in the house organs for business as usual in higher education are onto something.

At the heart of the problem?  The usual suspects: an enrollment model of access-assessment-remediation-retention and a product prototype of beer-'n-circuses.  It appears, though, that Charlie "Fail U" Sykes's characterization of investing in higher education as the equivalent of buying a BMW to drive it over the cliff, then to buy three more, has legs.

Even if the average price for a public college education could be cut by a third, $50,000 is still far too much to pay for students not to learn anything. If all students want is to enjoy themselves on a break from studying and working, and the rest of us for some reason consider this desirable, they should be able to enjoy themselves for much less money, perhaps for a year at a pleasant place where they can live in comfortable dormitories and party, sunbathe, or ski with no classes to feel guilty about skipping.

If the quality of a college education cannot be improved, we should concentrate on encouraging at least half of those who now go to college not to go, adjusting requirements for jobs and professional schools accordingly, and make provisions for an orderly shutdown or shrinking of most of our colleges and universities. But, of course, the quality of a college education can be improved. The problem is that hardly anyone is trying to improve it. Few people are even paying attention to the defects of higher education as it is now, and some still deny that anything is wrong.

I'm not sure about the "rest of us" considering the "gap year," another upscale indulgence, as something to be subsidized. Shrinking enrollments are concentrating minds at places you might have heard of: perhaps market tests will produce the efficiency gains.