What is college (and professional school) for?

This post isn’t making an argument. Instead it presents some thoughts and questions regarding higher education, in the context of various recent internet items.

(1) Today’s New York Times features a piece about the arguably predatory tactics of the private agency the federal government employs to help collect student loan debt. Unlike almost any other debt, student loans aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy except under very narrow circumstances (circumstances that the agency featured in the article has fought successfully to have narrowed even further).

Supporters of the agency’s tactics say they are necessary to hold borrowers accountable. “For every dollar that the aggressive debt-collection firm fails to recoup, that’s a dollar that someone else is going to have to pay,” said G. Marcus Cole, a law professor at Stanford University.

Professor Cole added that if it were easy to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, lenders would simply not lend money to students without clear assets or prospects. “We need a standard like that to be able to allow students who can’t afford an education to be able to borrow,” he said.

This is an odd position to take, given that, after the Obama administration’s 2010 reforms, the overwhelming majority of educational lending in America is now done by the federal government, rather than private lenders. Taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize bad loans, but neither should the government be using student lending as a revenue generator. As a practical matter, egalitarian-sounding arguments about “access” end up being arguments for letting schools charge prices that don’t bear a reasonable relation to whatever return students and their families can expect to get from attending those schools, and then sticking somebody other than those schools, namely students, their families, and taxpayers, with the bill.

(2) On the other hand, higher education is to some extent a public, rather than a merely private, good. As such, arguments for a certain amount of public subsidy make sense. But that subsidy should be direct, rather than channeled through a massively inefficient system of public lending. Speaking of which, I was looking at tuition prices for universities in the 1970s, and was struck by the extent to which the cost of going to even the best public universities at that time was almost purely opportunity cost (which of course is itself always significant).

For example, here’s 1975 undergraduate resident tuition at the flagship university of a state whose government at the time was apparently under the control of communists:

Nominal: $390
2013 Dollars: $1,690

That state is (or rather was) Texas.

(3) Last week the Wall Street Journal published an interesting book review, decrying how in America today undergraduate students and professors (the piece was clearly written from the perspective of a tenure-track professor, rather than that of the precariat of contract instructors/adjuncts who do more and more of the actual classroom teaching at our universities) are locked in what the reviewer termed an invidious mutually assured non-destruction pact:

Education thus has degenerated into a game of “trap the rat,” whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don’t even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

To be fair, cadres of indefatigable souls labor tirelessly in thankless ignominy in the bowels of sundry ivory dungeons. Jokers in a deck stacked against them, they are ensnared in a classic reward system from hell.

All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments, or to enforce standards generally. Indeed, these acts are rarely rewarded but frequently punished, even litigated. Mass failure, always a temptation, is not an option. Under this regimen, it is a testament to the faculty that any standards remain at all.

As tuition has skyrocketed, education has shifted from being a public good to a private, consumer product. Students are induced into debt because they are repeatedly bludgeoned with news about the average-income increments that accrue to additional education. This is exacerbated by the ready availability of student loans, obligations that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

In parallel, successive generations of students have become increasingly consumerist in their attitudes, and all but the most well-heeled institutions readily give the consumers what they want in order to generate tuition revenue. Competition for students forces universities to invest in and promote their recreational value. Perhaps the largest scam is that these institutions have an incentive to retain paying students who have little chance of graduating. This is presented as a kindness under the guise of “student retention.” The student, or the taxpayer in the case of default, ends up holding the bag, whereas the institution gets off scot free. Withholding government funding from institutions with low graduation rates would only encourage the further abandonment of standards.

So students get what they want: a “five year party” eventuating in painlessly achieved “Wizard of Oz” diplomas. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons in which individuals overuse a shared resource—in this case the market value of the sheepskin. Students, implicitly following the screening theory that credentials are little more than signals of intelligence and personal qualities, follow a mini-max strategy: minimize the effort, maximize the probability of obtaining a degree. The decrement in the value of the sheepskin inflicted by each student is small, but the cumulative effect is that the resource will become valueless.

Of course faculty complaints about student apathy and fecklessness are as old as the university itself, but that cautionary historical fact doesn’t mean that structural criticisms of this sort are mistaken.

A friend who teaches undergraduates at a research university told me recently that he is finding it increasingly difficult to resist the enormous pressures pushing in the direction of simply not caring about teaching. Chief among these is that he’s well aware he will never be rewarded by either his administrative superiors (who only care about research, or rather publications) or his students (most of whom only care about receiving the maximum grade for the minimum effort) for the effort he puts into trying to make sure somebody learns something worth learning.

(4) Then we have this curious plea from a law professor, who asks whether we want to treat the education of lawyers like that of hairdressers and people who repair televisions:

Most schools of hair dressing, television repair and the like are free-standing, and not located in universities. The instructors are not called professors, and they do not receive either the pay or the prestige associated with being a professor. There are few, if any distributional requirements. Rather, instruction is devoted almost entirely to the skills necessary to find employment as a hair dresser, television repair person and the like.

One hundred years ago, law schools made a self-conscious decision to be a part of the universities. . . law professors began to teach such subjects as constitutional law because they wanted to be part of the university and not be considered employees of a trade school. Persons teaching law wanted to be professors. They wanted the pay and prestige associated with being professors. Most important, they came to believe that a university rather than a trade school education was necessary for a well-trained lawyer, even if that entailed significant time teaching subjects and skills that might not immediately help the student find employment and writing articles that were not of immediate use for judges. Both lawyers and those who trained lawyers, the founders of modern legal education believed, needed to be aware of developments in the humanities and social sciences, and that such knowledge could be gained only if law schools were vital parts of universities.

What’s curious about this is that the relevant parallel for law schools (post-graduate institutions training people to join a profession) would seem to be medical and dental and veterinary schools, which as far as I’m aware spend almost no time teaching their students about “developments in the humanities and the social sciences” (that is, on liberal education in classic sense). Also, humanities and social science professors may be amused by the notion of law professors wanting “the pay associated with” their particular vocations.