Aid to higher education

Ryan Craig advocates,

  • Requiring colleges and universities to restructure degree programs to ensure students achieve industry-recognized (stackable) credentials.
  • Mandating colleges and universities to provide experiential learning (work experience) as part of degree programs.
  • Limiting short-term Pell funding to programs offered in conjunction with a qualified employer or industry group, to make sure that beneficiaries acquire the skills that lead to good, middle income jobs.
  • Providing a new basis for government aid to education: not for delivering educational programs, but for achieving graduate placement into a “good job.”

I think that the very top tier of schools would and should resist this, but they should not be getting aid in any case.

My cynical view is that you cannot structure aid to higher education in such a way that the schools won’t just use it to continue to operate as they do currently.

14 thoughts on “Aid to higher education

  1. Personnel is policy, and the only way to save an institution is to fill it with people who naturally want to do the kinds of things that line up with the stated ideal ends and purposes of the institution, and who would not tolerate the corrupting influence of those who would want to subordinate those ends to other motives or goals.

    So the selection mechanism and incentives for entry and exit have to be set up accordingly, or the corrupt result is inevitable and the whole effort is pointless.

    In this case, the only way to make universities about learning and the search for truth is to place an enormous material and social penalty on degrees, such that only people who truly love those things will voluntarily suffer and pay the costs. So long as the degree is seen as a positive or bonus, the ingredients of corruption are baked in the cake.

    • Setting the ideal mechanisms and incentives sounds right. Relying on choosing personnel with the right natural motivations sounds wrong.

      • Really? I’ve never been in or observed what I would judge to be a “well-functioning institution” that wasn’t full of people who were driven by sources of motivation the system’s formal and official incentives were altogether insufficient and inadequate to produce on its own, and in which the positive products of that institution weren’t the result of the good fortune of a cultural system which, at least for a while, was able to reproduce and self-perpetuate that spirit of high standards and excellence specific to the profession and mission, and effectively building a dam to exclude other, outside pressures always trying to creep in and flood the place, inevitably destroying it in the process.

        That also includes families, which of course rely on psychological sources of affection and motivation wholly distinct and altogether more powerful than any cost-benefit analysis of material benefits. (One can argue that these instincts and impulses originated in contexts with such sacrifice-and-burden-justifying benefits, and are genetic holdovers maladaptive to modern circumstances, but thank God for it!)

        There’s no substitute for love. Whether it’s love of children, love of literature, love of math, or whatever. There’s no substitute for a cultural cultivation process and corporate social dynamic that creates and continues to inspire people to want to focus on and do the things one hopes the institution will accomplish, and to not succumb to pressures to bend the power, prestige, processes, resources, esteem, and authority of the institution towards accomplishing alternative objectives for ulterior motives (e.g. ideological politics, social justice, etc.) The people have to really feel a perfectionist workaholic’s inner need to produce at high quality and quantity, in a way that is frankly trans-rational (perhaps meta-rational in the game-theory strategic equilibrium sense) in terms of costs and benefits, else the temptation to corruption will win out.

        And often, the only way to do that is to insist those people face costs and penalties and accept a “loser monk” lifestyle that will discourage the entry of fakers, clock-punchers, zealots of orthogonal causes, and so forth. The flipside of “The Worst Rise To The Top” coin is that “The Best Will Still Stick It Out At The Bottom”.

        • Simple examples of well functioning institutions: grocery stores, restaurants, and retail work surprisingly well. Uber/Lyft work pretty well. I’m quite happy with my children’s public elementary school.

          I believe those institutions work well largely because of the right incentives and mechanisms, not because of completely unique individuals.

          Even family: sure a great family is built on love but also incentives. A good parent sees their biological and cultural legacy in their children and has a physical interest in their well being. Children have biologically incentivized love for their parents, especially their biological ones.

  2. The comments amount to alignment of educational efforts to job specific purposes.

    We are now working in an age of extreme specialization, and that the idea of using vast resources to scatter shot pre-educate people in advance of any particular job commitment (and the associated narrow and deep skill/knowledge targets) is kind of crazy.

    • We are also in an age transformed by Web/Mobile/Cloud. The skills gap comes from this area and the tools/specializations change so quickly that the hope of specialized pre-educate is impossible, however, there are an underlying set of core skills that are missing and the general toolset that polymaths use to master new specialties on the fly.

      For a rough first approximation, the two underlying generalizations are Computer Science (programming) and Data Science (analytics).

  3. I have a question

    Theoretically the best schools should be for profit schools who take the cost on themselves so they only get a return if their graduates succeed.
    and yet there are no top tier schools like that

    how come?

    • Incumbent elite colleges have several major advantages over new for-profit institutions:

      1) Tax-exempt status.
      2) Large endowments from a long tradition of philanthropic gifts by alumni.
      3) Prestige, based partly on longevity.

      All three depend partly on the college’s ‘public purpose,’ not-for-profit status.

      Some entrants rose to the top a century ago via massive philanthropy by magnates: U. of Chicago (Rockefeller, 1890)), Carnegie-Mellon U. (1900), and Emory U. (1915).

  4. An alternative policy:

    Allow students to use public “tuition” as a voucher, valid also at firms (large and small) and at other organizations, for apprenticeships, internships, and training at firms. Firms, professionals, tradespersons, etc. might respond productively to the tuition-revenue incentive, and norms might develop about helping to form then next generation’s human capital. College has low six-year completion rates (about 50% system-wide) and skews heavily towards ‘signaling.’ Why not experiment with alternatives?

  5. Kling is right on every point. Kling said higher ed shouldn’t get government aid, which implies privatization, which is actually a rather radical change. I sense Kling isn’t opposed to that but hasn’t given it much serious consideration either.

  6. The real problem is that for many years, for many decades, colleges have been discriminating against Reps, and those who believe in “individual rights”.

    The discrimination has become demonization.

    No college with less than 30% Reps or publicly Rep supporting professors should be tax-exempt. Nor should their students get Federal loans.

    But this ain’t gonna happen, and many, maybe most, Reps would be opposed to this.

    As long as Reps don’t get hired, the colleges will continue being indoctrination centers. So going around them is a second best problem reduction strategy.

    More on-line certification, on-line essay testing.

  7. It is interesting (well, not really) that commenters on articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education scorn any hint of degrees being practical.

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