Wisdom and Learning

I’ve been thinking about education lately—mainly because we’ve been celebrating so many graduations. Daughter Social Sphere and her husband graduated from college the last weekend of April, and the following weekend son Political Sphere earned his juris doctorate. Yay!

So, clearly, we approve. We’re proud of their efforts and accomplishments, and we trust the learning will put them in a good place for enjoyable ways to support themselves and their families in the decades to come.

But, while the degrees are good mileposts in their lives, I’m more concerned with their virtues than their knowledge. Learning is good, when combined with faithful following of God’s laws. It can make you better able to serve, and to be a happier person.

So I was attuned to thinking about higher education as I came across a few things recently.

I read an interview with Dennis Prager, about why the Ten Commandments are still the best moral code. Since that’s an assertion I make in the Civilization portion of the Spherical Model, I was interested in what he said. One of his discoveries, during college years, was that if there is no God, there is no wisdom.  He said,

Without God, there are no moral truths. There are only moral opinions. There are good atheists, there are bad religious people. Everyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear knows that. If an atheist has similar opinions to the Ten Commandments, I breathe a sigh of relief. But that’s irrelevant to the question of whether there is moral truth if there is no moral God. When I debated at Oxford, I debated an atheist professor of philosophy on this very issue. The first thing he said was, “Dennis Prager is right, if there is no God, ethics are subjective.”

Prager added this comparison:

It is as if a man or a woman who has been trained their whole life in medicine sees some unbelievably obvious sign of skin cancer and just says, “This person has this lesion on his skin” and then describes every cancer symptom but not once mentions cancer. Nor does the oncologist note that the patient had been a lifeguard for 15 years, standing under the sun with their skin exposed to the sun all that time. And that’s not even as absurd as this professor not mentioning the absence of God and religion. It shows you how deep the rejection of God is in academia that you could see all the symptoms of absence of God and not mention God.

Prager and the interviewer go through the Ten Commandments in turn. When dealing with “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” he mentions education as a substitute for God:

Take education, for example. Education is magnificent. That’s the reason it’s a false God—because it is so wonderful and so valuable. But education as an end in and of itself produces well-educated barbarians. I’ll give you a very dramatic example. In 1941, there was a conference at Wannsee, outside of Berlin. The Wannsee Conference was where the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe. There were 14 high-ranking Nazis there, deciding on the genocide of the Jews. Of the 14, seven had Ph.D.’s. That should be sobering.

Similarly, overwhelmingly the only people in the West who supported Stalin were intellectuals. The record of intellectuals, secular intellectuals, is a moral disaster.

That brought to mind the scripture at the top of this post. Connect learning with counsel from God, and you’re a better servant to God. But learn while ignoring God’s counsel, and you’re proud but miserably stuck in the savagery zone.

During the past two weeks I’ve been looking over the oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding marriage. It puzzles me when very well educated people miss some basics, such as the importance of a mother and a father to a child, the importance of family as the basic unit of civilization, and the difference between a right to marry a person of the opposite sex according to law and millennia of practice and the “right to marry” anyone one chooses.

Enough of that for today, but I was reminded of a conversation I had a decade or so ago with Richard Wilkins, a constitutional law professor who valiantly fought to defend marriage. We were discussing some of the chain of SCOTUS decisions leading to where we are now, and I, with my mere bachelor’s degree, said, “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” not because I couldn’t understand, but because I could see clearly. He said (I’m paraphrasing, because of inexact memory), “It takes years of advanced education to come to a conclusion that wrong.”

Another story I came across this week was about a professor at the University of Warwick, England, who makes the claim that reading bedtime stories to your children puts unfairly disadvantages children who don’t have parents who read to them. There’s a simple solution: encourage parents to read to their children. But that’s not what this PhD elite suggests: the good parents should withhold reading from their children in their own home, to even things out—or, at the very least, those good parents ought to feel guilty about it. And he thinks any kind of alternative to public schooling “cannot be justified.” He even toyed with the idea that we ought to do away with families, except that he couldn’t, unfortunately, get around the natural benefits to children from caring parents.

I would logically conclude this man is an idiot—except for his obvious ability to read, study, gather information. He simply lacks the ability to draw reasonable conclusions from obvious information. He lacks wisdom. Because, “when they are learned they think they are wise…wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not.”

You know the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The hero of the story is the young boy who told the truth—thus freeing everyone else to admit they saw the truth too. We need more of those hero children.

As Gordon B. Hinckley said, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” [This quote is attributed to many people, possibly earliest to Alexander Hamilton. But I first heard it from President Hinckley.] Stand with God, and you stand on a firm foundation that will last through rain wind, and earthquakes. Stand firm no matter what the madding crowd may say.



Captain America instructs Spiderman
in Amazing Spider-Man #537

Higher Higher Education Costs

In the State of the Union address last month, one of the little candy toss-outs was free tuition at community colleges. We’ll tackle that in a minute. But in the follow-up interviews the president did with YouTube stars (go ahead and debate the appropriateness of that among yourselves), he was trying to explain how valuable politicians are. He said this:

Well, basically, politics is just -- how do we organize ourselves as a society? How do we make decisions about how we're going to live together? So, young people care about how college is paid for. Well, the truth of the matter is, the reason we even have colleges is that at some point there were politicians who said, ‘You know what? We should start colleges.’

Dating back to Abraham Lincoln, who started something called the land-grant colleges. He understood that government should invest in people being able to get an education and the tools to succeed. You guys are going to be the ones who are using these colleges and universities, and if they are not getting enough funding from government, and your tuition goes up, and you've got more debt, you're the ones affected. So you'd better have a voice and know what's going on about who's making decisions about that.

Politicians thought up colleges? As far back as Abraham Lincoln? What an invention!

Except that, I thought I remembered from an Iberian Culture class (back at the private university I attended) that the first university was created in Spain, in Salamanca. I didn’t remember a date, so I did a quick Wikipedia search. Salamanca dates to 1218, founded by the Catholic Church. It was among dozens of medieval universities in Europe (and not the first, although nearly so). Cambridge, in England, predates it by nine years.

Old Library, University of Salamanca
founded 1218, photo from Wikipedia

Other parts of the world lay claim to even earlier universities: Plato’s Academy, Athens, 387 BC; Najing University, China, 258 BC; Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt, 988 AD. Although the European ones might be the first degree-granting ones.

Meanwhile, I came across an article in my alumni magazine about some of those early universities and what they taught—the liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This is from “The Crossroads of Learning,” by John R. Rosenberg, dean of BYU College of Humanities, in BYU Magazine Winter 2015:

What we call the Renaissance, what we celebrate as the beginning of modernity, was actually a rerun, a 15^th- and 16^th-century sequel of a remarkable unfolding during the 12^th and 13^th centuries. In the luminescence of what we incorrectly call “the dark ages” sprouted one of mankind’s great creations, one that has endured 800 years and, gospel-like, has spread to every nation: the university.

Pretty much without exception, these universities were not government inventions, but church or otherwise private creations. And the concept of higher education greatly precedes the creation of the United States. We could even say that it was the higher education level of the founding fathers that made it possible for our Constitution to be created.

Abraham Lincoln, himself, studied law. The system was different then, but he still went through some sort of private higher education in order to enter his profession, well prior to becoming president and working out the Morrill Act in 1862 to create the land-grant system—which is what president Obama referred to. That was where states received (at the benevolence of the federal government) grants of federal land within their boundaries that were to be used for the building of colleges.

Colleges didn’t suddenly come onto the scene at that point. Colleges were all private before that. Colleges remained mainly private. A substantial portion—including all but one of the Ivy League schools—have always been private. States have used land grants to create colleges. More often state governments have acquired existing private colleges, turning them into state institutions.

Are there any federal government schools? You could give that designation to the military schools: West Point, Navy, Air Force. They have had special missions, and were funded by Congress. But all other government higher education is at the state and local level.

So that’s the history—somewhat different from Obama’s claim that higher education exists because of some politicians sitting around, going, “You know what? We should start colleges.”

The next thing to look at is whether higher education (with the possible exception of military academies) is within the proper role of government. What is that list again? Oh yeah, it’s in the Preamble of the Constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,

·         establish justice,

·         insure domestic tranquility,

·         provide for the common defense,

·         promote the general welfare [i.e., good for all citizens at once]

·         and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Does it say “give free higher education to all citizens"? No, it does not. Can you screw that idea into one of those provided? Nope. It’s good for the general welfare if we have an educated populace, but education is a product you can purchase, individually, according to your own desires and needs, and according to your preferences. Getting government involved in making that a blanket bestowal stretches the list beyond the point of elasticity.

And what do we know—conceptually, even before the data proves it—about government getting involved in something beyond its role? It will cost more. It will be poorer quality. It will essentially do exactly the opposite of the stated goal.

There’s a quote by P. J. O’Rourke, on free health care: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.” Ouch! We can restate that for college education: “If you think higher education is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”

Let me give you some perspective. I was raised in a family where I was told people like us (comfortable lower middle class) don’t go to college; that’s for rich people. But I was around a lot of smart kids who told me otherwise. There were things such as scholarships. For a while I had the mistaken idea that a scholarship was only for the top single person in a school, and I was among a lot of smart kids in a very large school. (The top 10% of the highly rated school would have been about 65 kids.) But they encouraged me anyway. And it turns out that most hard-working bright students can get some sort of scholarship. I was one of those. I also worked summer jobs, and sometimes two summer jobs plus a Christmas break job. One of my jobs was as a waitress in a luncheon restaurant in a department store—paid about $1.10 an hour plus tips, which were customarily about 10% then. Yet it was enough. I got through college without debt, and without family help beyond the occasional phone bill and a few things from the pantry.

It’s still possible to get a scholarship, but it helps if you’re somehow “underprivileged” in ways that supposedly I was not. It is much more likely that you can get student loans. Government stepped in and made that possible. Mr. Spherical Model (and therefore, me, by marriage) had student loans—at the low-cost government rate of 9% thanks to Pres. Carter making that rate seem low—of under $20 by the end of graduate school, which took a decade to pay off.

Skip ahead a few decades, and tuition rates have skyrocketed—consistently outpacing the rate of inflation, and, more obviously, the rate of household income. Why? Many reasons, interrelated, probably. But be certain that it has coincided with government’s attempt to make college more affordable for more students.

Making college affordable for more means greater demand. When demand is greater, prices go up. That is a basic economic reality. Although sometimes quality goes down to spread the service to greater numbers. Sometimes costs go up and service goes down (like with government health care).

I don’t know if this “free community college” plan will result in more community college students. But if it does, the cost of educating them will go up, and probably the quality of community college will go down. Count on it.

I also don’t know what an edict from the emperor-in-his-own-mind means. Community colleges, when not private, are paid for by local taxes—usually not even state taxes, but at the city and county level. So what the president has just done has offered to place (pending Congressional legislation, if lawful) an enormous burden on communities that are already stretched to meet the education needs of their communities at relatively low tuition rates compared to larger four-year universities. Somehow the already deficit federal budget will “grant” tax money filtered through federal treasuries to local community colleges to help them make up the difference between low tuition and zero tuition—coming from the same people and businesses already being taxed.

It hasn’t worked with any other government project beyond the proper role of government. It won’t work in higher education. Take a look at “free universal high school” where inner cities are lucky to have only a third fail to graduate. (Suburbs graduate at rates about 20% higher; rates across the rural-urban spectrum are related to family strength.) The same problems that lead a huge portion of the public to choose poverty over free high school education will lead to an additional portion failing out of free community college. And the cost for the rest of us will be far more than without government intervention.

But if the president is trying to “buy” voters from among lesser educated non-thinkers who haven’t learned this reality yet, he’s gone to the right source.

Higher Education, Part IV

This is the fourth (final) part of a series related to higher education costs. (See Part I, Part II, Part III, and also check out the president’s speech offering to help that led to this long and emphatic “no thank you.”)

The original government interference in higher education is the refusal to allow businesses to use their own hiring policies. While I think IQ tests are limited in many ways—they fail to measure life experience combined with drive—they are significantly useful in predicting job performance in many fields. This is from 2002:

Cognitive ability tests represent the best single predictor of job performance, but also represent the predictor most likely to have substantial adverse impact on employment opportunities for members of several racial and ethnic minority groups.[1]

What happened was, it became “unconstitutional” for businesses to use an extremely useful colorblind tool in hiring decisions, because the results might end up appearing to be racist. So businesses found another way—they let higher education institutions do the IQ testing, and subsequent weeding out, for them.

As a result, getting an education at a premier university that would provide the same cachet as a high IQ score became the path to career success. And students were willing to pay a premium for that credential.

Costs for the coveted scarce commodity rose. Fewer students could work their way through college. So government stepped in to “help” with guaranteed student loans (which may not be low interest, and cannot be dismissed even in cases of bankruptcy or disability). More students with apparent financial ability to go to college meant greater demand for limited college admittance, which meant ever higher education costs. Current costs for a degree in many mid-range skills far outpace wages. The result is essentially indentured servitude.

Incidentally, schools are rated by the percentage of students they accept compared to how many apply—so they recruit so that they have more to turn away—which makes them more exclusive, literally, so they can then charge higher tuition. [I’ll refer you again to the Uncommon Knowledge discussion I mentioned in Part II.] Some of the ultimate schools, such as Harvard, take in so much money, they have literally billions of dollars in their permanent endowment fund. They could expand easily and offer the education to greater and greater numbers. Or they could provide full-ride scholarships to all their students for the next century—just off interest, without touching principal. But they don’t do that, because being exclusive, more than offering an excellent education for the next generation, is their business.

So now the president, who can do nothing about the third or half of high school students who fail to graduate, offers to step in to make sure everyone (sweepingly including the dropouts) gets a higher education. The premise is that a college education is the passport to a comfortable middle class lifestyle, and that should be available to everyone. It’s hard to argue with the “everybody should have the same opportunity” concept. But logic holds that there will always be a lower 50%; speaking it out of existence isn’t going to work. (I’m thinking of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average,” even though that’s not mathematically possible.)

If you know how to translate the president, you know he doesn’t really care about basic fairness—or else he’d be in favor of the free market. Power mongers grasp opportunities to be the deciders of who gets access to a certain level of lifestyle.

If the government is “helping” to make higher education opportunities, then of course it will have an interest in what is taught and how. So that means greater control over accreditation. Accreditation now is done by private entities, but does indeed have a certain point of view. For example, an accredited law school is required to teach not only that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land but that it was a correct Supreme Court decision—even though hardly anyone believes that, including the liberal members of the current SCOTUS. Accreditation is not a guarantee of education quality; it is a controller of documentation used for granting or denying access to opportunities.

Having more government influence on accreditation and other markers of success can only lead to weeding out dissenting opinions. And that is likely the intent.

Government could also affect choices by limiting use of student loans to those institutions it approves, thus limiting choice.

I am not in favor of encouraging diploma mills. I am in favor of my own children, at this point, getting their degrees from good universities—because right now that is still the gate to certain career advantages.

But, unlike our president, I trust the free market. If businesses were allowed to make hiring decisions their way, and students were free to get their education any way they chose (probably a combination of guided university education and much free online study), then costs would dramatically drop. Then hard work, effort combined with good character would be the gateway to success—rather than agreement with a tyrannical, interfering government.

---

[1] Murphy, K.M., “Can Conflicting Perspectives on the Role of g in Personnel Selection Be Resolved?” Human Performance, 15(1&2):173-186 (2002).

Higher Education, Part III

This is the third part of a four-part discussion on higher education (start with Part I and Part II), stemming from a presidential speech assuring us (or threatening us) that the government is there to help.

Before we get right to the point, we’re about to take a diversion into the insurance world. Bear with me; there’s a purpose.

There may be an even earlier starting point, but for our purposes, let’s look at the rise of employer-paid health insurance. We have to journey back to the 1930s—during the Depression. FDR wanted to experiment with some form of government-provided universal health care, while he was fiddling around with retirement insurance (Social Security). But there was huge opposition from the AMA as well as the existing insurance industry, so he abandoned that.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt did have an effect on insurance. During that decade, not only did the federal government set minimum wage laws, locking out lower skilled workers from the workforce, thus increasing and lengthening unemployment, but the feds also set upper wage limits. This meant that government interference prevented businesses from competing for the best employees.

So businesses did what they do in a natural free market: they found other forms of exchange. The government said they couldn’t pay a higher wage, so they paid additional benefits that didn’t come under the letter of the wage limit law. They paid for their employees’ health insurance.

Early on, insurance meant what it had always meant—a hedge against unexpected catastrophic costs. No one expected insurance to pay for regular doctor visits, medicines, and other health maintenance costs. Those were neither unexpected nor exorbitantly priced. But as time passed, the benefits needed in order to attract the best workers expanded, becoming more comprehensive, and separating the patient from the costs of the care. That separation means the market doesn’t respond as it naturally would to adjust prices. So prices spiral upward—a direction that still continues.

Meanwhile, the federal government continued incremental inching toward government medical care. Truman suggested universal government medicine in the 1950s, but again the AMA accurately denounced it as socialism.

In 1961, Reagan gave a famous speech against socialized medicine, which was being pushed at that time. It's about 10 minutes long--well worth listening to the whole thing:

 

 

One thing you can count on from power mongers is that they will be relentless. If they can’t get all they want at once, they will aim to get it incrementally over time. So it has been with socialized medicine:

·         Help the uninsured elderly with Medicare.

·         Help the uninsured disabled with Medicaid.

·         Help the children of poor parents with State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

·         Regulate insurance companies providing benefits for employees.

·         Require insurance companies to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions (violating the free market risk taking of the insurance industry).

·         Require all Americans to purchase health insurance with full coverage as outlined by the federal government—including contraceptives even when against religious beliefs, and including denying healthy individuals the freedom to pay their own way rather than purchase full coverage….

In other words, power mongers start with an interference that leads to a problem, to which they can respond with another interference, which will lead to additional problems, to which more government interference will be the natural—and intended—response, until tyrants have control over the lives of the people.

So that is the pattern. Now let’s look again at the rising cost of higher education.

If we look very early on at education, we find government interference based on the need to educate poor immigrants (many from Ireland at that point), rather than let them become rabble on the streets. Government assumed, of course, that the vast majority of parents would continue to see to the education of their own children as they always had, while additionally being taxed to pay for the education of the identified poor—and government anticipated no resentment over the double cost for families.

By the last few decades of the 1800s, “free” public (government institution) education moved mainstream. By the mid-1950s, “free” public education became the norm for 1-12. Later, it became K-12. Now it is commonly preK-12.

Before government interference, nearly all US adult citizens could read (well enough to understand the Federalist Papers as editorials in their newspapers) and do basic math, as well as whatever other skill they needed to make a living. Today’s young people are skilled at user-friendly technology (but with decreasing programming skills), but know ever less history, literature, and basic math.

This is what you expect when you separate the parent and student from the responsibility of the learning.

Government schools fail to guarantee an education to those who graduate, but worse than that, high percentages fail to even graduate. Who is most likely to fail? Poor children—children of immigrants, children of single parents. So the initial purpose got the foot in the door. Then what had been working was decayed. And the final result is an exacerbated problem for the initial targeted group with the addition of an ever-growing population of undereducated needy.

For someone trying to “rule,” an undereducated needy populace is ideal. Thinking people can be so troublesome. So it is arguable that the failure was intentional (just like the failure of forced-employer-provided healthcare and exchanges are meant to fail so universal single-payer socialized medicine will be the logical next step).

In the next post we'll deal with the original government interference that led to rising higher education costs.

Higher Education, Part I

There’s yet another free course available online from Hillsdale College: Economics101: The Principles of Free Market Economics. This is in addition to a growing assortment of online courses I’ve been enjoying the last couple of years:

·         Introduction to the Constitution

·         Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution

·         Constitution 201: The Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism

·         History 101—Western Heritage: From the Book of Genesis to John Locke

·         History 102—American Heritage: From Colonial Settlement to the Reagan Revolution

Hillsdale College

You could additionally enjoy the weekly radio series, Hillsdale Dialogues: A Survey of Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas, which is an hour-long discussion between Hillsdale President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt. All are archived, in case you miss them live.

Hillsdale online also provides the Kirby Center Lecture Series Archive. And there’s a Hillsdale College YouTube channel.

All of the above are free.  The courses are essentially the same courses, including readings, lectures, and discussions, as for students on campus. You can attend as given, keeping up with the coursework. Or you can do whatever part you want, at your convenience. Even if you do nothing more than listen to the lectures, you’ll be getting a lot. But the reading is also very worthwhile. And if you do it as given, you can participate in the Q&A followup to the lecture.

The Econ 101 class started a last week, September 23^rd, with a new lecture once a week, and the Q&A a few days later. So if you sign up right away, you can keep current. In the first week’s Q&A, there was some discussion of Scottish author Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Its publication coincided with the Declaration of Independence, 1776. That means the ideas were out there by our nation’s founding, but the book couldn’t have been widely read yet. However, by the 1790s the book showed up in 28% of libraries in this country. It was one of the pieces of common literature our founders were familiar with by the time they wrote the Constitution.

You can of course make a donation any time, although none is ever required. For a $50 donation, in conjunction with the Econ101 course, you can receive a copy of The Capitalist Manifesto. (If $50 is too much, you can get that book at Amazon for much less, but without the good feeling of supporting the Hillsdale educating-the-world mission.)

If you’re one of those people who have just started to awake to the need to pay attention to politics and current events—because of the tragedies of our times—and you want to educate yourself, these Hillsdale courses are an excellent starting place.

If you’re homeschooling teens, and you want to give them challenging work—something you’re willing to study along with them—these courses are a great resource. And they have the benefit of preparing your student for the kind of thinking required of them at a good college.

I don’t mean for this to be simply an ad for Hillsdale. I have been thinking specifically about higher education, and higher education costs, since the president’s speech on the subject in late August.

There is more I have to say on the president’s plans, which have slipped into obscurity during discussions of Syria, Obamacare funding, and debt ceilings.

In these posts I’ll cover the increasing free/low cost resources online for higher education. Then we’ll look at these questions:

·         What is the connection between higher learning and higher debt?

·         Is government best suited for taking on the rising cost of college education?

Higher Education Part II

Some years ago I was staying with my mother for a visit and happened across an AARP newsletter that actually interested me. The article was called “How to Learn Just about Anything Online for Free.” I’m all for learning, and even more so for free or very low cost.

It was a pretty good list. Some of it included major universities that have put lectures online—MIT (MIT OpenCourseware), Harvard (Harvard@home), and Berkeley (webcastBerkeley) among them. It listed a couple of sources for downloading textbooks and other books for as low as a dollar: AbeBooks.com and Alibris.com. This was before practically everything became available for e-readers through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I think these sources are supposed to be even less expensive.

OpenCulture.com was another recommended site being updated with new content. And for the even more tech savvy senior, ITunes U with over 100,000 educational video and audio files. Add to that AcademicEarth.org and of course YouTube EDU, which offers lectures from some of the top universities. Then there’s VideoLectures.Net and TedTalks (one of my favorites). There’s also WebMD and BBC video language learning courses. The list isn’t quite endless (although it might be nearly endless, now several years hence), but let’s just say there are a great many low-cost ways to get yourself educated from your computer. It’s not unheard of to imagine homeschooling through college on a shoestring budget.

For a little more cost, there’s GreatCourses.com, at about $100 per college level course.

Getting the information you want to learn—for little or no cost—is not the problem with higher education. So maybe it’s about getting a degree.

Options for that are growing online as well. BYU-Idaho, for example, has a growing program called Pathways, to help people get their college degrees through distance learning combined with local class groups. This can be ideal for homemakers who dropped out to support a spouse, or people who made it partway through college, took a job, and eventually had a career stall. The program is real college, accredited, with more support than traditional distant learning classes. (Mrs. Political Sphere and her sister are both in their first month of this program, and feeling great about getting back into progress toward a degree.)

Meanwhile, a typical college education is currently costing in the range of a starter home—often without the promise of salary commensurate with paying back student loans. 

Andy Kessler and Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge

While I was thinking about higher education and gathering this list, I happened to spend an evening listening to the latest Uncommon Knowledge discussion, this one from September 20^th, with PayPal founder/venture capitalist Peter Thiel and author Andy Kessler talking with host Peter Robinson about the progress of technology, including the disappointment that it hasn’t gone further. Twenty-one minutes in, they switch gears and started discussing higher education.

I got down part of the conversation (from notes, so not necessarily direct or full quotes):

Peter Thiel: The top universities serve as a sort of tournament credential….  These colleges never want to expand the number of people they let in.

Peter Robinson: So they are in the business of exclusivity?

Peter Thiel: In that sense education is not a positive sum game about learning and education, but a zero sum game.

Andy Kessler: Universities are a sorting mechanism…. If corporations were allowed to give aptitude tests, universities would wither.

Peter Thiel: Yeah, 15-minutes aptitude tests would not cost you a quarter million dollars a semester…

Andy Kessler: And four years of your life….

Peter Robinson: So, top universities are in the best shape, not because they do a better job of educating, but because they’re in a better position to do the sorting.

Peter Theil: They [graduates] want to have the credentials of a top university, because it is an IQ test in disguise, yes.”

Andy Kessler [about online education affecting K-12 education]: We have the same problem we have with energy and pharmaceuticals. It’s a regulatory issue.

Peter Theil: Large sectors of our economy are government run—quasi-government run. And so, if you define technology as doing more with less—more computing power with less cost—education is the opposite. We’re doing less with more. We’re spending more and more money. The quality of the public school teachers has steadily gone down. So you’re getting less for more. So it’s actually moved in the opposite of a technological—it’s an anti-technological direction.

 

To summarize, what we have is a burst of availability of information and education sources for lower costs—just like you’d expect from a free market technology economy. But simultaneously we have ever more expensive and limited sources for the credentials necessary for upper-middle-class-and-higher success.

And it is at this point that the president steps in to “solve the problem of the cost of higher education.” Recall what Reagan once said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

Part III to come.