The Education Bubble

Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic aren't complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as they're upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that don't actually exist.

The fault here isn't Wall Street's, it's a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow.

This was Clinton's platform and it's Obama's "Winning the Future" platform, pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves. The Dot Com boom in the nineties seemed to back up that policy with entirely new companies springing to life with valuations in the hundreds of millions and twenty somethings at the helm. But a good deal of those companies were nothing more than the foam on another bubble-- and more problematically the cream of the tech companies were created by college dropouts. Even more problematically, the tech companies liked to save money by importing Chinese and Pakistani employees on H1-B visas as cheap labor, while their lobbies insisted that this would protect "American" innovation.

But the real problem was that swapping manufacturing for college degree jobs solved nothing. American companies that manufacture anything become the tip of an outsourced iceberg. All the companies with the shiny logos depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials. They can't create anything that the People's Republic of China can't take away from them when the time is right.

American companies aren't outsourcing labor to China, China is outsourcing design and marketing to them and allowing them to serve as middlemen between Chinese manufacturers and American consumers, until a Chinese company decides to buy their product unit or its reverse engineered copies of their products are good enough that they invest the money in a marketing campaign to establish their own trusted brand.

And yet the tech industry is the closest to a college degree success story that we have. The failures are legion.

The problem with the "college degrees for everyone" approach is that creating more college graduates does not proportionally create more jobs, it creates more unemployed college graduates and devalues the worth of a college diploma. Too many college graduates mean that employers will look for higher degree levels. High school diplomas used to be a certificate of competence, then that was devalued through promotion in a system where teachers were expected to move students up to the next class no matter what. When college became the new high school, it was devalued in the same way. There are city and state colleges with students who are barely literate, not in the "kids these days use too many abbreviations" way, but in the "functionally illiterate" way.

If the goal is to move everyone to the highest level of education possible, the result will not be a more educated population, but an educational system with lower standards and a population that is less educated than ever because actual education becomes more inaccessible as the standards are lowered.

Make sure that everyone can "afford" to take out college loans and the marketplace will compete for students with traditional universities offering a large buffet of "educational choices", most of which are not educational or represent any kind of career path outside academia, and private colleges offering useful sounding degrees that no employer will look twice at.

For the liberal politicians it's a triple score. Money pours into academia which they can use as their own think tanks. The educational system gets four years or more to process students through more sophisticated indoctrination mechanisms. And then the students who can't find jobs join the ranks of the usefully disaffected because somebody must be to blame... and it can't possibly be the people pulling the strings of the people shouting at them through megaphones.

Clinton told working class voters that the manufacturing jobs were gone, but their kids would all have college degrees. Obama went one better by telling working class voters that they would be retrained to hold down "Green Jobs", even as they're falling faster than the Green companies and their sweetheart government pork. Those lies are what make the class warfare rhetoric out of DC so doubly despicable.

Politicians have never honestly talked to voters about what happened to the American economy, instead they fell back on the same mantra of opening up new markets through globalization and creating new jobs through education./

None of this is new. The country with the highest degree rate in the world is Russia. The USSR ran its citizens through its educational system at a rate that Elizabeth Warren could only gasp in awe at. But what was its education actually worth? About as much as American degrees are becoming worth. If you throw enough money and manpower at the educational system, you will have a really big educational system. What you will not have is anything of worth to go with it.

Only one country that has a higher degree rate than the United States has a higher per capita income and that country has its own oil industry. The usual handwringing that liberal pundits and politicians engage in over how the American educational system is failing compared to countries with higher degree ratios is wasted noise.These same statistics are trotted out to justify dumping more money into the black hole of an educational system under the pretext of job creation. But do the statistics even matter?

According to the OECD (another useless globalization organization wrapped around a WW2 fossil) the Israeli educational system is a hopeless failure. In its 2009 evaluation claimed that Israeli students were behind Turkey, Dubai and Russia in math and science. Yet peculiarly enough Israel keeps collecting Nobel prizes and turning out minor things like instant messaging, drones and Kinect. When reality contradicts statistics, it's wise to go with reality. That's a skill most politicians haven't learned, but it's a rather valuable one.

The universalization of education is not about remaining competitive in a global marketplace or any of that other nonsense piously repeated by politicians with their hands in more pockets than a thieving octopus-- it's about promoting the homogeneity of ideas across a population. Which is why the importance placed on universal education increases as a country becomes more culturally diverse or internally divided.

The original Department of Education was created two years after the Civil War. The Kalamazoo School Case, which set the precedent for forcing taxpayers to fund public education and created the entire system of property tax school robbery we live under today, took place during the same period. As was the National Education Association whose Committee of Ten played a key role in the standardization of the national curriculum.

A better name for universal education is federalized education, and there is very little difference between the two in the United States. The growing federal control of education is a mechanism for maintaining control of increasingly divided populations. It may be a failed mechanism, but like the rest of the government's boondoggles, it long ago created a class of people who depend on the system and have a vested interest in its expansion.

When this is understood, the failure of innovation in the system is also obvious. The educational system is not a means of empowering thinkers, but of standardizing a static consensus of ideas. It's a great way to learn liberal dogma, but an inefficient way of learning anything else. The expansion of the system is not about remaining competitive with China, just as funding more "Green Jobs" is not about "Winning the Future", it's about shaping the voters of tomorrow.

We're not falling behind due to a lack of college graduates, but because we're smothered by a system of stifling bureaucratic conformity that is far more concerned with its grip on power than with jobs or income. The resemblance to the USSR is not at all accidental.

The system would rather have 10,000 subsidized jobs that it creates than 10,000,000 jobs in the free market. It would rather have a middle class of 5 million college graduates, (40 percent of them government employees), than have a free market middle class of a 100 million, (only 30 percent of them college graduates and less than 0.5 percent of them government employees.) And it would rather have an angry mob camped out near Wall Street, than have a viable economy.

The educational bubble isn't creating a new Middle Class that will keep social security viable, it is creating dissatisfied people who feel that they are entitled to better and don't know who to blame. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country

Unlike the United States of today, the Soviet Union (and the current Russian Federation) actually encouraged/encourages its students to take hard sciences, math, and other subjects.

If tuition were affordable, No problem. But a 234% increase in tuition in 15 years and no hippies protest their leftist schools! Tuition and fees at many top schools, including room and board, is approaching $60,00 year!

The education model is outdated as well.

It’s set up as if information should be fed on an assembly line and it doesn’t take into account individual differences in terms of some individuals being able to learn faster and other individuals needing to learn at a slower rate.

I think the better solution is for their to be independent colleges for occupations, whose customers would be businesses and workers, and their responsibility would be to ensure workers are adequately trained.

The company I work for has started doing this in a small way... we’ve got some large software testing contracts which require a hefty number of entry and intermediate software testers. To fill these positions, the department head started offering evening tech classes for free and hiring the cream of the crop from those classes. Over the past year or two we’ve hired several dozen smart, young, and motivated people to fill these positions. It’s interesting to note that the majority of these hires are Russian immigrants.

I think it’s the ideal solution.

I think most workers today would be happy to work for 8 hours and then crack the books for a couple of hours at night to maintain training or improve.

I remember 30+ years ago that we were encouraged to take college course that would be of use down the road. Anticipate what would be needed by the time you got put of college.

We have just the one income and its less than $35,000 a year. Our son is in his 3rd year in the Honors College at Michigan State University, majoring in plant genomics and minoring in biotech. We save and scrimp and so far we haven’t had to take out any loans.

He plans to continue his studies and get his PhD. So, who knows maybe things will change, but so far so good.

I remember 30+ years ago that we were encouraged to take college course that would be of use down the road. Anticipate what would be needed by the time you got put of college.

Exactly!

The article makes some good points. However, the students and perhaps their parents need to apply some common sense to the process and think about reality.

What are the actual job prospects? Who is hiring, for what jobs, and what are the requirements for those jobs? Can I modify my interests to fit what's actually needed? If I spend tens of thousands of dollars on this degree, what are my prospects of realistically being able to pay this off?

Maybe the career track is OK, but some consideration needs to be taken regarding the school. A less expensive less prestigious school might be a better option.

Sometimes I think common sense gets less and less common as time goes on.

That’s true enough. Think about the chosen degree and if there really is a market for ‘medieval music’. lol

Kids can save a lot of money by getting some of their classes at community colleges prior to entering the bigger colleges. Some of those classes shouldn’t even be required though.

A lot of unnecessary cost gets added to the college bill, too, from students picking classes that are too hard for them. Our son says that for every 10 that show up planning an engineering major, about 8 change their path after the first semester!

He knows some kids that have changed their majors 4 or 5 times in 2 years.

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