David Trinh

People are real dumb:

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007…

The study, a joint project of Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, also found that most Americans believe that colleges could admit a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices, and that colleges could spend less and maintain a high quality of education.

This is bizarre.  If colleges really cared more about their bottom lines than educational outcomes, presumably they would leap at an opportunity to admit more students—especially if the marginal cost of each extra student was so low that they could do so without lowering quality or raising prices.  There are a lot of people out there that need to take an intro econ course.

That said it’s worth noting that American universities consistently top the charts as the world’s best educational institutions.  It’s possible some of these lists might be a little busted but you can’t deny that American colleges and universities do most of the world’s leading research and are the most desired places of study for most of the world’s population.  Gotta think we’re doing something right.

Although I can attest this was not a problem at my school in rural MN, there is apparently a glut of honors programs in many American high schools.  Overall, I agree with the thrust of this article; it’s important to keep honors programs selective so that they actually mean something besides another tassel at graduation.  I would only add that there is an even further harm from the proliferation of honors programs at top-tier high schools that the piece fails to mention, namely, that because many lower-tier schools, like the one I attended, have only NHS, applicants from these lesser schools are at a serious disadvantage during the college admissions process. It’s awfully difficult to compete against students who can spruce up their resumes by choosing from a smorgasbord of honors programs.

Now I’ll concede that I was never in an honors society at my high school–there’s a long tale here to be told, but the short of it is that my name was vetoed by a faculty member who took issue with some of my political opinions–and still managed to make it through the college admission gauntlet relatively unscathed; however, I do remember my lack of departmental awards (non-existent at my high school) and my complete lack of honor society membership cards did cause my interviewer to raise his eyebrows while he was paging through my papers.  This is, of course, just one more advantage that students who go to comparatively better high schools have over others but it seems like one that could be eliminated relatively easily by imposing more stringent requirements on membership or by actually making an effort to introduce these programs in lower-tier schools.

I wrote a letter to the Echo Press (my hometown newspaper in Alexandria, MN) about my former high school’s new slogan, pictured below.  This letter was printed in yesterday’s paper; if you’re interested, you can read it here.

Interestingly enough, most of the comments about my piece on the Echo Press’s website are supportive which I found more than a little surprising because when you rag on popular local institutions (the high school football team and so forth) you usually expect a little defensive pushback.  The fact that this isn’t happening here makes me think that the problems at JHS are so systemic and so obvious that it really is impossible to make a strong case for current school policies.

Sterling Memorial Library-- temple of knowledge or gaudy luxury?

I’ve made it know before that I’m not a big fan of Kevin Carey, the oftentimes false policy director of Education Sector; that said, Carey does have a decent piece in the most recent Washington Monthly where he makes the case for expanding online education.  In particular, Carey zeros in on one online university called “StraighterLine” that offers unlimited introductory online college classes for the low, low price of $99 a month:

This, Smith [the founder of StraighterLine] explained, was where StraighterLine came in. The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call- center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses à la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run. Burck Smith simply decided to get there first.

Luckily for those of us here at dear ol’ Yale, Carey argues that this new business model isn’t going to do much damage to the nation’s elite schools.  However, Carey thinks that America’s middle and lower-tier schools could be in for a world of hurt:

Ivy League and other elite institutions will be relatively unaffected, because they’re selling a product that’s always scarce and never cheap: prestige. Small liberal arts colleges will also endure, because the traditional model—teachers and students learning together in a four-year idyll—is still the best, and some people will always be willing and able to pay for it.

But that terrifically expensive model is not what most of today’s college students are getting. Instead, they tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn’t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return.

I take a little umbrage at Carey’s assertion that the Ivy League merely sells ‘prestige’—honestly, this charge simply smacks of bitter ressentiment—but I think the rest of his analysis is pretty spot on.  Speaking from first-hand experience (I went to the University of Minnesota before I came to Yale) I can attest that giant lectures at state universities often lack a little in quality.   Case in point, I learned micro econ from a TA at the U who could barely speak English; when I got to Yale I learned econ from this guy.  Because I’m nearly certain that the quality of intro micro economics at StraighterLine surpasses the same course at the U of M—anything could really—I can see how certain colleges may be threatened by the emergence of new low-cost online schools.

All this said, I really think there is some value in traditional college students (e.g. those between the ages of 18 and 25) attending real brick and mortar institutions.    I know it’s a bit cliché to say that one learns more in college in the dining halls than in the classroom, but, hey, things are clichés because they’re true.  Accordingly, while I may be able to get behind the idea of StraighterLine expanding its reach into older students who are returning to the educational marketplace late in their careers, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that a great number of younger Americans would be better off taking classes from online universities.