The College Racket

101 thoughts on “The College Racket”

1. Very good except that I don’t think there is any school where students spent Saturday afternoon reading in the library. Maybe MIT?
   Also, I don’t think 3 is strong enough. I don’t understand the point of an undergraduate business major.

   LikeLike

2. I think that’s good advice. I think there are a couple of good mythbusters in there — like don’t go straight for what appears to be the more professional degree (education/business) unless you see the clear path to the job and that some “fluffy” majors might have good solid learning behind them (languages might apply, there, too.)
   Here are my caveats (though not so succinctly put as yours).
   1) on your #1: I think the ivy advice has to be a bit broader than just the ivy’s — more generally, I think unless you have money to burn, you shouldn’t go somewhere you can’t comfortably afford to pay for. It’s important to remember that for some, Ivy’s are less expensive than state colleges. And, that can be true of some other schools, too — depending on the particular aid package you get. State colleges aren’t nearly as affordable as they used to be.
   2) on your #4: I think the concept that there are very few “tracks” left can’t be over-emphasized. I think a lot of people are looking for a path, where if they follow the path, they’ll get to a destination. I think very few of these exist. People often cite to STEM (Science, tech, engineering, math) degrees. But those aren’t paths anymore, either. They can be good degrees (though not if you hate them — the reward for getting a math degree is getting to do more math, usually). But they aren’t guaranteed paths to anywhere. Every rewarding job is going to require hustling. I do think the med school path remains a professional path with a destination right now, but it does require 10+ years of education, lots of student loans, and, most importantly, actually practicing medicine. Even that path might change as our health care landscape transforms

   LikeLike

3. “Very good except that I don’t think there is any school where students spent Saturday afternoon reading in the library. Maybe MIT?”
   hah. The students at MIT are human, too. But, they might spend Saturday afternoon in the lab, or building spaghetti bridges, or doing their math homework sets. And are a lot less likely to spend them in the football stands than, say, in Nebraska (though can the students still get into that stadium?).

   LikeLike

4. Students get very nice tickets at Nebraska. Undergrads, at least.

   LikeLike

5. Agree almost totally, with two qualifications:
   The circle of private colleges that are worth the money is a little broader than just the Ivies: the techs (Caltech and MIT), Stanford, Chicago, Duke, Georgetown (can lead to the presidency), etc. But the set of schools worth going into debt for doesn’t have more than fifty elements, for sure.
   There is a big division, often ignored, in the non-STEM/business majors. Traditional liberal arts majors, such as history, English, classics etc. command some respect. Admittedly, the market for people with those majors is pretty much entirely supplied by the top twenty (or maybe fifty) colleges. But “new,” fuzzy majors, like religious studies or environmental studies command much less respect, even if you graduate from Harvard. Goldman Sachs or McKinsey is much more likely to hire a classics major than a gender studies major.

   LikeLike

6. Yes, agree with all comments. Yes, the private school/good pool is slightly larger than the Ivy Leagues. Duke, Univ. of Chicago, Oberlin. I think that all of us could compile that list quickly. Trouble is that we are keeping that information to ourselves. Those stupid magazine lists of colleges are just so wrong, but most people don’t know what to believe.
   Univ. of Chicago is one of those nerd schools where they really do study on Saturday afternoons. Trouble is that you need mood stabilizing drugs to deal with all that.
   I could have added another items to the list, like only attending schools where the professors actually turn up to teach the classes or never taking employment advice from a professor who never worked outside the university.

   LikeLike

7. “But “new,” fuzzy majors, like religious studies or environmental studies command much less respect, even if you graduate from Harvard. ”
   Yup. I think that’s true. And I think there’s a reason for it: outsiders don’t understand what those new fuzzy majors mean you’ve learned and done. Classics has a history. I’m unfamiliar enough with it that I don’t know exactly what I’d expect a classicist to know, but I presume that there is some framework, and that many know what they should know.
   Gender studies, Environmental studies (which sometimes pretends to be a STEM field, and in fact might be in some places), . . . . an outsider simply can’t evaluate. An environmental scientist might have done atmospheric modelling of greenhouse gasses or they might have studied the political impact of the Erin Brockovich movie in California. Both might reflect important skill sets, but the point is that you can’t know what skills set they might have. Or they might have done nothing you’re interested in.
   This is an issue, in my opinion for a variety of newer majors. There was significant resistance (for some good reasons) when new majors started arriving in STEM fields (computer science, biomedical engineering). Some of these have moved fairly into the mainstream as they’ve matured, and one can rightfully argue that as the science of software became relatively important, conflating it with chip design might have been requiring to broad, and thus too shallow, a major. People still argue about BME. Genomic sciences & neuroscience are two newer majors that are still in the gray zone of whether they are understandable by outsider. What does a neuroscientist know? They could be a psychologist or they could be a molecular biologist. The two backgrounds would imply a very different set of skills.

   LikeLike

8. Great advice! I also agree about U of Chicago being a place where people are in the library studying on Saturday afternoon. In fact they even study on Friday night.

   LikeLike

9. Oh Laura, why do you post these things right before I have to go out? We’re probably in agreement in terms of student loans, and I certainly think there is a higher ed bubble, but I really disagree when it comes to majors and what kids should do at college and about “crappy mediocre” private colleges (as I teach at one of those).
   But I have to go. I will be thinking about this while I’m doing rows and crunches and whatever hellish things my trainer has planned for me.

   LikeLike

10. I went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and (back in the day- late 80’s ) we studied on Sunday afternoons and even Saturday nights (til about 10 then we went out drinking. It was a good balance!)
    Great points Laura. I hope one positive of the current financial crisis is that students now heading to college may pick more sensibly(ie not based on hot tubs and how nice the dorms are). It is hard to know what major might best get you a job though- I think maybe Steve Jobs’ view of pursuing the path that your heart wants to follow might work here. If you LOVE history, go for it (but dont’ major in history or for that matter ,computer science or engineering, if you hate every minute of it bc no major guarantees anything!)

    LikeLike

11. Also I would love it if you would become the Suze Orman of college admissions. The whole topic is so confusing- do you spend a lot, go to the school that offers you the best deal, go where your heart tells you to go even if it puts you in debt. You hear so much talk and not much of it makes sense. I need someone to talk sense!

    LikeLike

12. Once again, Laura, I agree with each of your points individually, but disagree with the focus on individual action as the solution to a societal problem. For example:
    9) And do not, under any circumstances, take all the loan money that they give. They will give you whatever you want. Do not take it.
    Good advice. But it won’t fix the problem. What will fix the problem is: (A) Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy 5 years after graduation; (B) make schools eat some of the loss if their students default; (C) set standards for student loans so they don’t all look like their from the mortgage-bubble days; etc.
    Paying for “a good college” is like paying for a house in “a good neighborhood.” You will pay more for the higher social status. If you give everyone in America a $20,000 raise, they won’t suddenly all move into a nicer neighborhood with better school systems — it’ll just make all of the houses in the good neighborhoods $20,000 more expensive (with granite countertops). And if you give everyone access to a $20,000 loan, we don’t all get to go to better colleges, we all of the colleges get $20,000 more expensive (with a nicer student rec center). And that’s what happened, except if you lose your job, you can’t sell the student rec center to pay your rent.

    LikeLike

13. you can’t sell the student rec center to pay your rent.
    If you have the right tools, you can maybe grab some of the fixtures and sell those.

    LikeLike

14. This post was just about how individuals should make smart choices, but I absolutely think that there needs to be collective changes as well.
    I don’t think that colleges are like housing, because I think that most college consumers don’t know what they are buying. In some cases, I think that people are neglecting good colleges with cheap price tags in favor of bad colleges with high price tags.

    LikeLike

15. 1. How do you all feel about going to a mediocre private college that is going to give you a lot of money to attend? And you major in science?
    2. If you want or need to avoid the “big school” situation (let’s say, because of your personality), most state colleges are out.

    LikeLike

16. I’m with you on #6 in spades. Given the state of schools and the state of the economy, there’s concrete financial value in avoiding college, or at least postponing it. School is just too expensive to be a four year playground. Get an internship in the field of your choice, try it on for size. Then if you discover that you need a degree after all, you’ll A) be more mature and therefore get more out of the experience and B) know why you’re there and what skill sets you need for your career of choice.
    This is what I’m advocating for my own kid, and he agrees. Then again, he wants to be a filmmaker, and the only real value in that particular BFA is the networking opportunity it may provide. In any case, a few internships under his belt will help him get into film school, should he choose that.

    LikeLike

17. I think my problem with all this is that we are all so unclear about what we expect colleges to do. Is college supposed to teach skills? Content? Love of learning? Something else? And is it different for different kinds of jobs? What does a college degree mean to employers? That students know certain things? That they have certain skills? Is it a rite of passage? Is it supposed to be a pre-professional experience, to prepare kids for the professional world?
    And the students themselves need to think about why they want to go to college. Is it to get a credential? Is it to learn a skill? Is it to meet some prepackaged idea of employability–a crazy concept considering that no two employers really want the same things?
    I’m not sure college should be a farm system for the workplace. In the field of comp/rhet these days, there’s an emphasis on the different kinds of writing we do, often divided into 3 categories: writing for yourself, writing in the workplace, and civic writing. What you’re suggesting is that there isn’t really any need for education for yourself or a kind of civic education (to educate people to be part of a community). There’s only educating people to work.
    Also, communications majors are not stupid. 🙂 We don’t have a communications major, but sheesh, if we ever get something anywhere close to a major in English, it would be communications. There are so many career-friendly appeals of that major.

    LikeLike

18. There are small state colleges. I taught at one for three years.
    Do not go to a mediocre private college, even if they give you a lot of money and you major in science. If you are smart enough to get money from the crappy private school, then you can get into a better state college. Avoid the crappy private colleges at all costs. Steve puts those resumes immediately in the trash. Sorry, but it is true.
    99% of college kids are there because you have to go to get a job and because you can drink a lot of beer and maybe get laid. in this economy, we can’t have a bunch if unemployed college grads with $80K in debt, even if they did get laid a lot of times.
    I don’t feel like telling college professor what they should teach. But I will tell college administrators that they can’t keep jacking up the price of tuition, while putting adjuncts in the classroom. They need to consolidate some majors, while strengthening others. I would put more money into community colleges.
    Employers do know what they want, Wendy. Right now, they are weeding through the bounty of college grads and looking for hungry, sharp kids who know how to think analytically, can write a grammatical memo, take notes, take direction, work independently, and blends into the office. A good philosophy degree can provide those skills in spades, btw.

    LikeLike

19. I think we need to keep in mind that the unemployment rate is much higher for those without college degrees. I would never tell someone who didn’t want to go to college to go, but the idea that there are lost of jobs for people without college diplomas just isn’t correct. I keep hearing about the need for plumbers, but where in the country is there a deficit of plumbers? Surely we need fewer plumbers now that the housing market has crashed?

    LikeLike

20. Laura, you’re contradicting yourself. On one hand you say that Steve throws resumes of kids from crappy colleges in the trash, and on the other you say employers know what they want, and they want kids who think analytically etc. Which is it?

    LikeLike

21. The kids aren’t coming out of the crappy colleges with analytical skills.

    LikeLike

22. Hm, I dispute that assumption. You really want to stand by that?

    LikeLike

23. Some of those state schools, even for in-state tuition are pretty pricey and pretty hard to get into. Getting into college is, quite frankly, a total racket. Kids with money and resources can get in wherever they want. Kids without those things have a tougher time. Ivy Leagues aren’t always worth the money. Yes, you get connections there, but I’m not convinced the education is 20k/yr better.
    And STEM is still a good thing outside of academia, especially Computer Science.

    LikeLike

24. I disagree with you about the mediocre private college — if you’re not paying for it. I don’t think people get bad educations at those colleges. In fact, I think they’re staffed by the same kind of people as the state universities and I don’t think the students at the mediocre privates are worse than those at the middling (non-flagship) public colleges.
    Which of those non-top tier resumes gets tossed without consideration depends a lot on where the tossing is happening and where the school is. Out here in the west, no one has heard of the NY state schools, but they’ve heard of some of the local privates.
    I think the issue with judging the value of college is that there a lot of different value people are looking for, the education, the training, the perception of what you’ve learned or been trained for, the signalling (of how good you are), the connections, . . . .

    LikeLike

25. I have nothing good to say about for profit privates, though. I think they should be judged by a harsh criterion of how successfully they place their students into jobs and should be cut off from loans rapidly if they aren’t successfully placing students in employment.

    LikeLike

26. STEM degrees can be good, because sometimes they offer training in skills employers actually need (computer programming, for example, or running lab tests) and because science and math education really does teach analytic skills. And I certainly can’t deny the statistic that CS grads (and engineering grads) are being offered jobs coming out of college. But they face an uncertain future, too, unless they also have hustle and risk taking skills, ’cause the coding jobs are being outsourced (and can be).

    LikeLike

27. I agree with bj about the mediocre privates. The Northeast is skewed to deal only with the ivies and the top state schools. When I was in the south, my local small liberal arts college that I attended and that everyone had heard of was a great door opener.
    Some coding jobs are being outsourced, but not most. And the good research jobs are not. Computer Science is useful in many other areas as well.

    LikeLike

28. “Kids with money and resources can get in wherever they want.”
    O my goodness, our hostess is in a hyperbolic mood. This statement is true, if you mean that a million or two will buy you a place at any college (though it will definitely be two of those millions at my own alma mater). And it’s also true that a good high school, tutors, and expensive summer programs can marginally improve your chances across the board. But if it means that the average offspring of the 1% can go to Harvard solely because of her parent’s money, it’s not true.
    “Ivy Leagues aren’t always worth the money. Yes, you get connections there, but I’m not convinced the education is 20k/yr better.”
    I would live in an apartment that cost $80,000 less, or service a mortgage that was $80,000 higher, or cut the household budget by $4,000 a year, before I gave up an Ivy League degree. Some things last a lifetime. More practically, no one throws those resumes away.

    LikeLike

29. That was me, y81–the other Laura/Geekymom–sorry. I don’t mean they buy their way in, but that because of all the support that you mention, their options are much greater than the average student. I think it’s more true now than it was because many of those parents do shell out the money for all that support.
    And maybe you’re right about the degree. I think it depends on what you want to do with your life. If you want to go to Wall Street or another Ivy for grad school or become President of the US, but if just want a decent job that allows you to live a comfortable life, an Ivy isn’t the only game in town.

    LikeLike

30. I have had three (3) “adjunct” faculty that worked for me in a high school electives program. One graduated from Harvard, one Vassar and one from Yale. I went to a state school and took years to graduate (debt free). I was their boss. Over the last fiver years I’m still more highly employed than the three of them. We all have liberal arts degrees. By the way, mine is in communication. Not communications, but communication- the way we communicate.

    LikeLike

31. I think a spot at an top ivy costs 10m, not 2. Though I guess if you give 2 but seem like there will be more in the future, that might do.

    LikeLike

32. I don’t mean to insult you, Wendy. I’m sure you’re a wonderful teacher. I have no idea which school you teach at; I’m sure that it’s also a great school. But I think we should all be honest that there are some colleges out there that are charging a lot of money for a mediocre college education, and those kids are coming out with a lot of debt and no job.

    LikeLike

33. Laura, I’m not insulted, because it’s not about me or my teaching. I just think you’re wrong. You tend to have a worldview that sees only one way of success, but I spend my days around kids who see multiple paths to success. They may not work in Steve’s office, but they are successful.
    We can’t change education/higher ed until we acknowledge that. And I think we also need to think deeply about what it means to be educated and maybe instead of trying to force consensus on the idea of an educated person, we need to think about different kinds of education. (I’m not sure it’s vocational education vs. classical education, but maybe something more like that.)
    I think you know that because you keep contradicting yourself. On one hand, you still have an attachment to the idea of the credential, the “name brand.” But on the other, you know full well that an Ivy education doesn’t guarantee good critical thinking skills, and you know many state schools are awesome. And even those mediocre private schools have positive aspects you’re not even considering. My university had an amazing job placement rate up until the recession. I mean, you would be astounded at the number. The only reason they can’t keep that up is because there are no jobs anywhere. You can’t criticize colleges for job placement failures when there are no jobs out there.
    You’re never going to be the Suze Orman for college admissions until you truly understand the variety of college experiences and needs out there. You’re still in Ivy-centric mode (and the best state schools are public Ivies, really). I’ve taught now at 2 “mediocre” colleges, one for 6 years as an adjunct and this one, where I’m in my 9th year. They weren’t Ivies, but they have thought deeply about their role in higher education and what they have to offer, and they succeed at what they do.

    LikeLike

34. One last example (the previous comment was getting too long :): Last weekend my students worked with the students of a local Ivy on a community service event. Oh man, did those Ivy students f- it up–and they were in charge (my kids were helped in one smaller capacity). When we got back to class on Monday, I asked my students about problems that occurred, and they not only had a long laundry list of complaints but also quite a lot of possible solutions. One of my students explained that the Ivy kids violated everything she had been taught in her events-planning class and proceeded to explain everything they should have done differently. It was a nice moment because they realized how much they have to offer, that they shouldn’t just assume that the Ivy League kids are “better.”
    The Ivy kids had to train my kids to do their volunteer assignment, and my students were critical of that training. They said, “They thought they could just write it down and we’d understand, but they should have done X, Y and Z.” I totally got that! It’s taken me 20+ years of teaching (ok, I finally figured it out after 10 or so) to realize that not everyone learns by reading (the way I learn).
    I wouldn’t be in this job if I didn’t learn something every day. 🙂

    LikeLike

35. I’m with Wendy–using Steve’s hiring practices as justification for what you’re arguing here is kind of ridiculous, on many levels. There are many definitions of success that don’t include Wall Street, Ivies or even the privileged Northeast. This is one of the moments in history when it should be crystal clear that we find little to emulate in Wall Street, period.
    I got my degrees on scholarship at state colleges (neither one of which was a public Ivy) and now teach at a rigorous independent school, alongside plenty of people with Ivy degrees and teaching students, some of whom will go to Ivies and many of whom will end up at good schools that will train them in critical thinking and analysis, even if you or Steve wouldn’t recognize their names.
    The shot about colleges not being able to help you write a resume is also laughable and relatively unfounded.

    LikeLike

36. Seriously, every college that I’ve attended or taught at had a terrible job placement department. I’ve spent countless hours rewriting student resumes. If you know of a college with an excellent job placement department, I would love to hear about it.
    Wendy, you’re misunderstanding me and putting words in my mouth. You are taking this post into an entirely different direction. You still haven’t explained why a kid who isn’t up to Ivy League education should go to a pricy private college, when there is a perfectly good public school down the road. What are they getting at a private school to justify $80K of debt?
    I am not Ivy Centric. I am state schooled centric.

    LikeLike

37. I can criticize schools for not placing students, but taking all their money. I can criticize them for not being honest with students that the BA, which is being financed with a second mortgage on their house, is not going to get them a job.
    How many of these 4th tier schools are just plugging the gaps in a high school education?
    I am sure that your students, Wendy, are very smart, thoughtful individuals who will offer much to society. But I think that they will have a hard time getting their dream job in this economy and they will also be saddled with a lot of debt. That worries me.

    LikeLike

38. Laura, I totally agree about the amount of debt and do wonder if a college education is worth that debt. But it will be so long as the idea of credentialing is in place, so long as the college degree is necessary, so long as people like Steve throw away the resumes of students who don’t go to the “right” colleges. I can’t in good conscience tell the kids at my college they don’t need a degree –not because my job would go away but because it would be a lie. Few people will employ them without that degree even if they demonstrate they have the skills needed.
    Most of my students are not necessarily thoughtful and wonderful. 🙂 Well, they are in their own ways. My student A, who has told me to my face he doesn’t really care about writing, has an internship at Foxwoods starting in January. He may really thrive at Foxwoods without being someone who cares about writing. His buddy M doesn’t write much better but is also going to Foxwoods. These guys will work their asses off at this internship, and for all I know will end up being very successful and getting their dream jobs. Part of my education in this job is realizing that they might not need writing skills as much as I think they do in order to be successful on their own terms.
    Maybe we should also be asking what a dream job is. Does anyone get his or her dream job straight out of college? I don’t think so. We work at jobs to gain experience and knowledge about ourselves, and we work towards our goals, which change and evolve and stuff.
    I think we also should be talking about motivation and passion. I spent time Wednesday talking with a student who is at her 4th college. She is incredibly smart and bright (she has AS too, which she just revealed to me on Wednesday, but she’s been an A student all term). She was just telling me she knows she just has to get her degree. And she’s right. She’s finally motivated to just do it instead of screw around questioning authority (she kept saying she has a bit of a problem with authority–and now she’s a criminal justice major. I love it).
    I get a lot of students who show up after they’ve been to other colleges and “failed” there (not always technically failed–failed to make the most of it and realized soon enough it wasn’t working for them). They weren’t motivated by anything, so they couldn’t make the best use of their time at college. Sometimes I think the problem is that we send kids to college immediately after high school. The kids who come straight from HS really don’t know why they want to be in college. It’s these kids who are wasting time and money. And there is probably where we agree.
    I think a lot about my own kids and whether they should go to college right away. I’m confident in their ability to do well academically, so I think a lot about the other stuff–their goals, their emotional intelligence/social skills, etc. But I tend to assume my kids are Jobsian geniuses who will find their own way regardless of the system. I am probably delusional. 🙂

    LikeLike

39. Ragtime said:
    “What will fix the problem is: (A) Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy 5 years after graduation; (B) make schools eat some of the loss if their students default; (C) set standards for student loans so they don’t all look like their from the mortgage-bubble days; etc.
    Indeed. There needs to be more reality and more feedback in the system, which there won’t be as long as students (or taxpayers) are the only ones paying for bad decisions.
    Laura says:
    “I don’t think that colleges are like housing, because I think that most college consumers don’t know what they are buying.”
    It’s actually much more similar than you think. I’m an aficionado of the housing market, and (without even addressing the issue of loan terms), lots of people didn’t know what sort of baggage their new homes carry. Even before the housing bust, one of my cousins bought a newly-built house that turned out to have a catastrophic $50,000 drainage issue. Then you hear about people who buy into new developments, only to find themselves be the only family living in a scary half-built ghost town. Or you buy a condo and then it turns out that as the foreclosures mount up in the building, fewer and fewer people are paying condo association dues, so that the surviving solvent owners need to contribute more and more and property values fall and fall, creating a foreclosure death spiral in the building.
    A few more thoughts.
    1. There are lousy state schools, too.
    2. With some well-known exceptions, schools with the words “Eastern,” “Southern,” “Northern,” or “Western” are to be avoided.
    3. It doesn’t matter what the sticker price is–it matters what the school is going to be charging you personally.
    4. I suspect the killer football team is worth paying at least a little attention to. A killer football team drives alumni and regional loyalty and raises a school’s national profile, increasing the graduate’s employability.
    5. As somebody mentioned upthread, some colleges have tremendous brand loyalty in the areas where they are well-known.
    6. I think it’s probably a good idea to choose a college based on the geographic area where you would like to work eventually, because being in one location for four years will tend to push you toward opportunities in that area.
    7. I just saw a college parade with representation from the bass fishing club, the riding club (it has 10 horses), and the driving club. Oh my goodness. When I was an undergraduate, a USC college t-shirt said, “a 4-year party with a $100,000 cover charge,” and ain’t that the truth. There’s nothing wrong with that stuff (if you can afford it), but you really don’t want to be paying 20 years for the privilege of the college having a bass club.
    More later.

    LikeLike

40. I don’t (obviously) know anything about the specific place where Wendy teaches, but, in general, I wouldn’t say that lower-tier private colleges don’t offer something of value. It’s just that they don’t offer something worth $200,000.
    The structure of higher education needs to be rethought. Why on earth does it cost $50,000 to attend a few hundred lectures and have a handful of exams and papers graded?
    A major part of the problem, I suggest, is that the students are subsidizing the research function. In the case of Yale and Harvard (you see, I’m even more exclusive than Laura), this cross-subsidy can be justified on the grounds that research has great social benefits. But, at least in the humanities and social sciences, the amount of research has expanded far beyond the point of zero marginal social benefit. No one reads or remembers most of the academic work published each year. It’s very unfair to force students who won’t be in the top 1% or even the top 5% to subsidize this work.
    If faculty members worked full-time as teachers, and stopped publishing or trying to publish, the typical private college could function at much lower cost.

    LikeLike

41. The Ivy kids had to train my kids to do their volunteer assignment, and my students were critical of that training. They said, “They thought they could just write it down and we’d understand, but they should have done X, Y and Z.” I totally got that! It’s taken me 20+ years of teaching (ok, I finally figured it out after 10 or so) to realize that not everyone learns by reading (the way I learn).
    Your complaint is that the Ivy League kids weren’t snobbish enough to assume that your kids wouldn’t be able to follow written directions?

    LikeLike

42. y81: “Why on earth does it cost $50,000 to attend a few hundred lectures and have a handful of exams and papers graded?”
    Laura, upthread: “Avoid the crappy private colleges at all costs. Steve puts those resumes immediately in the trash.”
    Simple answers to simple questions.

    LikeLike

43. “If faculty members worked full-time as teachers, and stopped publishing or trying to publish, the typical private college could function at much lower cost.”
    Not true. Publishing/research is not required at my college, and it’s no cheaper than other private colleges.
    “Your complaint is that the Ivy League kids weren’t snobbish enough to assume that your kids wouldn’t be able to follow written directions?”
    Your question begs the question. Many people can’t follow written directions about complex activities without additional methods of instruction. It’s not snobbery to realize this; it’s reality.
    Parents of kids with learning disabilities know this already, but I learned it way before I ever had a kid with AS. Do my students have learning disabilities? No, maybe, who knows. What I do know is that some people have to do it to learn it, some people have to hear it to learn it, some people have to watch others do it. Not everyone learns by looking at 26 characters arranged on a piece of paper or a computer screen.

    LikeLike

44. I’m with Wendy in thinking there’s a huge middle ground between “crappy private college” and “Ivy.” There are great private colleges (Williams, Amherst, etc) and there are also very good private colleges and universities (I teach at one and my daughter attends one). You can go to the good privates with no debt (my daughter will graduate with no debt; my institution, which has need-blind admissions and meets all stated need, tries to minimize debt). You will get a better education at these schools than at some state schools simply because they have more money and can therefore have smaller classes, more personal attention, etc. Or more programs, or more funding for the same programs.
    And this is not what I call a college education: “attend a few hundred lectures and have a handful of exams and papers graded.” My classes, and most of the classes where I teach, are small discussion classes. Students do hands-on research in STEM classes. They write papers that get intensive commentary, they meet with professors about their writing, they do internships in local businesses and non-profits.
    I do have to do research to keep my job–or I did; I’m tenured now and only *need* to do it for raises. But that costs the institution very little, really–a pittance in travel money, subscriptions to some data bases (that students also use), etc. And it keeps me fresh and my teaching vital. It “costs” even more to educate college students than we charge to do it–heat, light, internet, equipment, football teams, food, building maintenance, administrators (many of them affiliated with student life), all add up along with faculty salaries (which are flat at most private institutions and have been for a while, and are often less than at flagship publics).

    LikeLike

45. Have an advice from UK leading expert for company insolvency. We are highly ranked among the top insolvency auditors in the country, with two marvelous books over their credits.

    LikeLike

46. Well, I’m open to suggestions in a field where I’m not very expert. (Including the suggestion that nothing can be done, that the OWS protesters got very good value for educational bucks, and that they should shut up and be grateful for the valuable learning embodied in a degree in environmental studies even if it doesn’t lead to an actual job.) But I believe that there has to be a way to turn an 18-year-old with basic verbal, mathematical and historical literacy into a 22-year-old critical thinker who can add value for an employer for less than $50,000 per year. I would like to know what it is.
    At the personal level, I have high hopes that little Miss y81 can go to someplace which, if not quite up to Laura’s standards, nonetheless delivers sufficient value for the tuition dollar, such as Tufts (worked for Jamie Dimon) or Vanderbilt. But if not, I would certainly send a child to Wisconsin or Michigan over someplace like Skidmore.

    LikeLike

47. And it keeps me fresh and my teaching vital.
    In some fields, I don’t see how you’d keep the knowledge of the teachers fresh if there weren’t at least some doing research.
    Of course, most university research is paid for my grants and the like. My department gets over $100 million a year in grants which I’m guessing is more than the entire college of arts and sciences spends in a year.

    LikeLike

48. Tufts and Vanderbelt are great schools. I was questioning colleges several rungs down on the ladder. I don’t want to mention specific schools, but we sure seem to have a lot of them in the NE. And I am sure that the individual college professors at these schools are working their asses off. But, again, the problem is that these schools cost too much money, kids have too high of a loan burden, and they aren’t getting jobs. There are other problems, too. Sigh. Not sure if I really want to tell all the secrets.

    LikeLike

49. Okay, here’s my ivy vs. private vs. state stance. I speak as someone who teaches at a place where at least 50% of our students go to ivies, as a parent of a kid about to choose a college and who will never get into an ivy nor probably a good private, but who went to a good private.
    Okay, state schools are big, mostly. Our two best state schools are in the 30-35k range of students. Kids get lost in that environment. Lectures have 300 or more students in them. There’s almost no individual attention. A kid in that environment has to be proactive. Most kids aren’t. I think that’s the wrong kind of place for an awful lot of kids, including my own. Tuition rates at those two schools are 13k and 15k for in-state tuition. And yes, that’s a bargain compared to 30-50k for privates and ivies, but there are some decent privates that cost just a little more than that but have smaller classes, etc.
    The smaller state schools, which vary in quality, cost between 15k and 20k typically. But I think I’d pay the premium to one of those places for the smaller class sizes and more personal attention. It’s still a bargain compared to ivies and elite slac’s.
    I’m right now the street from several schools in the top ten of liberal arts college. Their tuition ranges from 38k to 41k. I would send my kids to any of them. I’d recommend you send your kids there too if they can get in–seriously.
    The lesser privates also run the gamut. There are some good ones, but they cost nearly as much as the ones at the top of the scale–we’re talking 30-35k. On the one hand, you might shoot for the ones with name recognition, but you might have a better chance at getting into one of the others.
    Yes, people should avoid going just anywhere, but there are a wide array of perfectly good schools. My kid is not going to go to an ivy. My students are all vying to, and to do so, they’re in 6 AP courses, model UN, model Congress, three sports, ballet, piano, participating in the school play, and fencing. I’m not exaggerating.

    LikeLike

50. I personally don’t think that Tufts or Vanderbilt are worth going into debt for. I might consider those schools for my own kids, but only because they won’t have to go into serious debt to pay. It’ll be a luxury good, like the view we have from our windows or the extra bedrooms.
    On the other hand, I can see a student for whom Skidmore (mind you I don’t know much about it) or Lewis and Clark or some other lesser known school could be a better value than a state school, if they weren’t having to take on significant debt (i.e. a version of Tasha’s question above). As Amy points out the sticker price isn’t the real price of a school, and this is becoming even more true, even at state schools.
    In CA & WA, I’d argue that the state is basically in the process of dismantling public support of the flagship state schools. In practice this may mean more aid even at state schools (the high tuition high aid model). But it also means a campus teeming with students and things like “over credits.” I remember the first time someone told me of this phenomenon (that they couldn’t take a class because they’d be over the credit requirement). I was completely confused and simply didn’t understand (and it was so ordinary to them that they couldn’t really explain). The concept didn’t have existed at my small private university (which, admittedly, was elite, so I don’t know if the same would apply at a lower tier private).

    LikeLike

51. You still haven’t explained why a kid who isn’t up to Ivy League education should go to a pricy private college, when there is a perfectly good public school down the road.
    I think we have to name names here.
    Around here in SoJo the “good” privates are obvious (Penn, Princeton, Swarthmore, Haverford, etc.) and the “good” public are Rutgers if you were a good student in high school and Rowan (formerly “Glassboro State”) or Trenton State (currently “The College of New Jersey”) if you were just an okay student. (All three have 50% acceptance rates, but there’s a lot of self selection). From there, it’s a big step down to Camden County College and the like.
    The problem is that, because it actually is a great school, lots of people can’t get in to Rutgers, or else they know they will not thrive in a huge campus like Rutgers (58,000 students), know they don’t want to be an hour and a half away from home, or try it and quickly get lost and drop out. Also, Rowan and Trenton State are small, and still kind of selective.
    So, realistically, the most of the kids who are considering overpaying for lesser private colleges like Rider, Seton Hall, St. Josephs, and Fairleigh Dickinson are considering them compared to Rowan and Trenton State (if they got in) or a County or Community College (if they didn’t) — and I think at that point the money is really only one factor to consider. The private schools are “nicer” and have some good resources.
    Overall, I think the assumption that everyone at the small private school around here could have just gone to Rutgers may be missing the actual choices that the kids are making. How do you advise the kid who have rejection letters from the “good” $13K state school, and acceptance letters from Seton Hall and Fairleigh Dickinson at $31K? (And if the answer is that Seton Hall (132 National) and FDU (#81 Regional) are “good colleges too,” then the problem has become vanishingly small.

    LikeLike

52. I attended Notre Dame, and I’d like to add that to the list of good, non-Ivy privates. It also has an excellent career services department. We definitely didn’t spend Saturdays in the library though – those were spent at the football stadium. But the library was a social hub of campus life as so many people went there to study.
    I also think it’s somewhat elitist to say students should avoid state schools with “Western” and the like in their titles – that’s probably because I teach at just such a school. Not everyone can get in to the top state schools, so what – should they not go to college? Others have life/family obligations that preclude them from attending schools not close to home – should they too be shut out?
    I think the point is that it’s hard to make generalizations about any one right path that’s best for all students – aside from the fact that almost no degree is worth graduating with exorbitant amounts of debt.

    LikeLike

53. …those were spent at the football stadium.
    Notre Dame has the best-mannered drunk people I have seen in my life.

    LikeLike

54. MH needs to visit Sewanee.

    LikeLike

55. Lots of good points in this discussion, but Shannon makes a very important point about the folly of making generalizations, except maybe for these two. 🙂
    1) Do not assume unmanageable debt to attend any college, even an ”elite” one. 2) Investigate the facts supporting any claims in the school’s shiny marketing brochures.
    ’10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges’

    LikeLike

56. @Doug & MH, went to a school similar to Sewannee (Sewannee was our homecoming rival, in fact) and yes, our drunks were quite polite. 😉
    To the larger point, I agree with Ragtime. I’m in the same general area and she hit the nail on the head. I have a kid who actually might not get into the good state schools around here. He certainly can’t get into the elite privates. Then what? He’s interested in a couple of state schools out of state, but then the tuition isn’t much less than a middle of the road private.
    The thing that drives me nuts is that back when we were applying to school (for most of us here, I’m guessing), all you needed was pretty good grades (over a 3.5 with some AP courses), and maybe one or two extracurriculars and good, but not perfect SAT scores to get into one of the top schools in the country–maybe not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts school. Now that’s not good enough even for a school in the top 20-30 in the rankings. Now you need perfect SATs, a 4.0 or better, and you need to have started your own business or non-profit before leaving high school to get into an Ivy, and slightly less than that for the better privates and states.
    Smart kids can no longer screw up high school or they’re cordoned off to community college or told to take a gap year or some such. How unfair is it that a kid’s future is now dependent on 4 good years in high school, years when their brains aren’t fully developed, their impulse control sucks, and they just aren’t emotionally ready for that kind of responsibility.
    I agree wholeheartedly about the debt issue, but I think we have a system where kids are told you have to go to college to have a decent life, and the better college you go to, the better life you’ll have. And so they take on debt, hoping that the maxim is true and that once they’ve landed that good job they were promised for going to a good school, they’ll be able to pay off the debt. First, we all know that the rankings are bogus, so determining what’s better is a real challenge outside of the obvious. And second, is it really true?

    LikeLike

57. “The thing that drives me nuts is that back when we were applying to school (for most of us here, I’m guessing), all you needed was pretty good grades (over a 3.5 with some AP courses), and maybe one or two extracurriculars and good, but not perfect SAT scores to get into one of the top schools in the country–maybe not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts school.”
    Hell, my husband and I both got into Cornell (A&S, one of the private schools there, no Hum Ec for us) with the above qualifications. My SAT scores were 10 points above his, but neither were perfect. He did newspaper and chess club; I did model Congress and was the manager of the basketball and softball teams (I was just following around my best friend who played on the teams and basically created the job). Neither of us went to the big Long Island school districts like Jericho, Syosset or Great Neck.
    If I had any advice for students, I’d tell them not to go to college until they knew for sure what they wanted to get out of it besides getting out of the house and partying. If they want to intellectually explore for 4 years, I think that’s a pretty good motivation, but then they have to do that and devote themselves to becoming better educated people. If they want a job, then they have to pick a field and find a place that has good career placement. Or they can explore a liberal arts degree while working part-time in their career of choice. The biggest problem I see in colleges are kids who want to do the minimum at college and get the credential, then start their “real” lives.

    LikeLike

58. “The structure of higher education needs to be rethought. Why on earth does it cost $50,000 to attend a few hundred lectures and have a handful of exams and papers graded?”
    Indeed. It may be time to unbundle higher education for the masses and go to an a la carte model.
    A few more thoughts:
    1. The last time I checked UT Austin’s costs, it was $20k a year (including projected living expenses). That’s a state school, a good one, and a good value for the money, but it’s not by any stretch of the imagination cheap.
    2. I don’t know how it is today, but back at the dawn of the 1990s, I visited a Russian language class at University of Washington. It was an excellent teacher who was making good use of time and getting lots of responses from the class, but the room was so packed with dozens of students, that any student was going to get far fewer chances to speak than I did a few years later taking Russian at University of Southern California (a private school where my Russian classes usually contained at most half a dozen students). Of course, at full sticker price at each school, UW would be the better deal per unit of education received, even with the huge class size.
    3. From major to major, there must be a big difference in how well the cattle-car method of education can be applied. There are more than a few where it probably can’t be.
    4. A lot of students lose their way at a huge, impersonal school. I’d be a bit concerned that one of my kids would get lost at a place like UT Austin, whereas she might do better in something like USC’s Thematic Option and/or their Resident Honors program where the academic load is high, but students’ energies are tightly channeled and focused and there’s a natural community.
    http://dornsife.usc.edu/thematic-option/
    http://dornsife.usc.edu/resident-honors-program
    5. I don’t think students should leave for four-year college without exhausting the options at their local community college (I’m hoping to eventually put my kids in summer courses at ours). Four-year college is a very expensive venue for experimentation and making mistakes, and everything moves really fast at that level.
    6. I think it needs to be made painfully clear that if kids seriously intend to go the starving artist route with regard to major, it’s imperative that they not have substantial student debt. Otherwise, you wind up in an O’Henryesque situation where because you studied fine arts, you have so much debt that you can’t afford to be an artist.

    LikeLike

59. “Overall, I think the assumption that everyone at the small private school around here could have just gone to Rutgers may be missing the actual choices that the kids are making.”
    Right. You can’t just sashay into University of Washington or UT Austin and get in. Now, UW’s acceptance rate is 60%, but that’s 40% of applicants who don’t get in. UT Austin accepts 47%. If you are in that 60% or 47%, fantastic, but as I always like to point out, 50% of people are below average.
    “I also think it’s somewhat elitist to say students should avoid state schools with “Western” and the like in their titles…”
    All things being equal.
    “Now you need perfect SATs, a 4.0 or better, and you need to have started your own business or non-profit before leaving high school to get into an Ivy, and slightly less than that for the better privates and states.”
    Which is why the Ivies keep getting stung by too-good-to-be-true applicants that would have looked fake to anybody else.
    http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/5/18/harvard-wheeler-bail-monday/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Opal_Mehta_Got_Kissed,_Got_Wild,_and_Got_a_Life

    LikeLike

60. Here’s a juicier article on Andrew Wheeler, the plagiarist and faker of transcripts and recommendations:
    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/perfect_fool_Rd5thjU7qg8MTJUmoN2FGO
    “The accused Harvard grifter whose over-the-top fictions fooled gullible ad mission officers and professors amazingly claimed on a résumé to have authored scholarly tomes, won heaps of awards, given lectures and mastered three dead languages.
    “Adam Wheeler — who pleaded not guilty yesterday to 20 counts of fraud, larceny and forgery in a Massachusetts court — passed himself off in the document as a Canadian lit erature expert fluent in French, Old English, Classi cal Armenian and Old Persian.
    “The outlandish curriculum vitae was submitted to The New Republic last year for an internship.”
    TNR really dodged a bullet.

    LikeLike

61. After reading Beer and Circus, by Murray Sperber, I’m leaning away from schools with “killer football teams.” As a matter of fact, in compiling lists to discuss with my high school student, I’m looking for high academic ratings, and low “quality of social life” ratings.
    We did do a college visiting swing at the end of the summer. One of the small liberal arts colleges we visited left me cold. I could not see paying tuition for four years of courses taught on the high school level. I would not object to pursuing a degree in philosophy, but I do object to spending money for a four-year party.
    If the student has a good academic record, it seems that merit scholarships can come into play. Merit scholarships can change the calculations.

    LikeLike

62. “but I think we have a system where kids are told you have to go to college to have a decent life, and the better college you go to, the better life you’ll have. ”
    But that’s the myth that Laura, “Suze Ormann” is trying to dispel. I do think that you have to go to college these days to have a “decent” life (bar the very few who find other more entrepreneurial routes to success). As others have pointed out, most employers have opted to require college degree credentialing for many jobs, as an easy way to let someone else do the vetting of employees.
    But it is not true that going to the “better” college will give you the “better” life, almost with any definition of better for either college or life that you use. Debt load, threshold effects of college, what you can put into your educational experience, your specific goals will all play more important roles.

    LikeLike

63. While I pretty much agree in principle with Laura’s advice, I think the “go to a state school” advice is becoming a little dated with the skyrocketing tuitions in many states. In many places, a merit scholarship at a third tier private school might make it cheaper than in state tuition at the non-flagship state universities. In that case, is it better to go to Western Oregon State than Linfield College? If it’s solely about value per dollar, wouldn’t the cheaper school be the better option?
    Secondly, I agree the advice is a bit elitist and NE centric. Even a third tier school can have name recognition and give students a leg up in the local area. There are often lots of affective ties in an area to the local school, and there are also networks, like religious ones, that open doors to graduates of certain schools. If your goal isn’t to work in a whiteshoe law firm in NY but to teach elementary school, become a nurse, or even get some white collar position at a local company, a local degree would probably get you farther than an out of state degree from a school that is objectively “more prestigious.” Plus, many third tier private schools are pre-professional. Most of the ones near Portland are known for a specific program, like physical therapy, or education, or optometry, etc.
    Finally, I’d question that the education you get at a non-prestigious private school is much worse than one you’d get at a state school. I also doubt the professors there are worse than profs at better schools, given the overglut of PhDs and the cutthroat job market, where to get any job anywhere you basically have to have come from a top 10 school in your field. Also, R1 schools hire based on research skills and publications, not teaching ability, so it’s highly possible if you’re not a highly motivated undergrad prodigy you’d learn much more from a prof who’s focused on teaching at xx college rather than a big name at Berkeley who has teaching assistants do all the work and doesn’t even recognize your face.

    LikeLike

64. One of my older male relatives operates on the assumption that if a college fields a respectable football team, it must be a decent college (and he can’t be the only person to make that assumption).
    At first glance, that doesn’t seem to make any sense. What is the connection between football prowess and academic heft? However, on reflection football may be to state colleges what huge, colorful tails are to peacocks or other biologically expensive display items are to other male animals. They demonstrate that the individual is healthy enough to engage in wasteful display, which (paradoxically) means that the display is not wasteful at all.
    (I had a bit of esprit de l’escalier this morning after realizing that both my husband and I did our undergraduate at Directional U locations, me at USC, him at Western Something U. It obviously didn’t kill either of us, but given the choice between U Something and Eastern Something U, with both being otherwise equal, I think U Something is preferable.)

    LikeLike

65. I do find it funny that academics could say that this advice is elitist. Ever sit in on an academic job search? I have. Good luck getting a job any where if your PHD isn’t from a top 20 school. Everything else – publications, teaching prowess – all irrelevant. It’s all about the name of your school and membership in the old boys network. You wouldn”t believe the nasty, elitist, hypocritical shit that I’ve heard over the years. Back stabbing. Just horrific stuff. Let me tell you that Wall street is much, much kinder to its employees and job applicants than any academic.

    LikeLike

66. The 4th tier colleges used to provide BAs for kids who needed them to get jobs as kindergarten teachers, managers at DMV, or social workers. Those jobs have dried up, because state gov’t is in such terrible shape. So, now these kids have lots of debt and no jobs.
    And more on the elitist comment. Steve would like to point out that he loves to hire grads from suny stonybrook, especially if they show during the interview that they had to work their asses off to get there, because they came from working class or immigrant families. Suny stonybrook gave them a good education. He also just hired someone from a state svhool ith eastern in the title.

    LikeLike

67. I’m fascinated by the discussion, as I’m on the other side of the desk now.
    We’re starting a college recruiting program at my 12-year-old software company of approximately 500 employees. This follows a great deal of difficulty hiring developers locally and frustration at our experiences with offshore development teams. Most of our engineers are quite senior, so we no longer have the contacts to refer/recruit our target–people with 2-5 years of experience, who are good communicators, good problem solvers, and who can deal with a variety of technologies and frameworks. We have something like 6-18 juniorish-level positions to fill by the end of next year, so we’re scrambling.
    What are we looking for in schools? We’re looking for places where we can recruit effectively, quite simple. We need top or near-top CS programs with a lot of students who’d be interested in working 1) in Austin, 2) for a company of our size and age, 3) in technology that varies from cutting-edge-for-1999 to actual bleeding edge. There’s a lot of cost involved in switching from 2-3 year graduates to fresh college hires, as there’s a whole raft of training you have to do with new grads, so we’re already concerned about costs. Sending staff out of town for campus recruiting means we need to be going to a target-rich environment.
    What would constitute such an environment? UT-Austin, obviously, being close and full of qualified students. Texas A&M would also make sense, since it’s large, has a good program, and is close. What about smaller privates? Rice has a good program, but is tiny, so it’s a bit of a risk. I’m not sure what the nearby equivalent of Seton Hall would be–Trinity in San Antonio or Southwestern in Georgetown?–but it would take a lot to sell a program of unknown quality. A Wofford would be out of the question. But a rust-belt school with a good program, like Carnegie Mellon perhaps, might be an option despite the travel costs.

    LikeLike

68. But a rust-belt school with a good program, like Carnegie Mellon perhaps, might be an option despite the travel costs.
    There’s a city bus from the airport to CMU’s campus which only costs $3.25. Does that make it more attractive?

    LikeLike

69. “I do find it funny that academics could say that this advice is elitist. Ever sit in on an academic job search?”
    I’ve heard about this stuff. It’s not just snobbery, but the effect of looking at a huge pile of hundreds of applications and trying to winnow the thing down to manageable size.

    LikeLike

70. Funny story: I share a last name with someone else in the department, who also was hired the same year I was and we’re good friends. One day, a third colleague came up to us and said, I have one of your former students in my class, but I don’t know which one of you he was talking about. Apparently, he told her he had ProfOurLastName. My colleague said, Oh, we have two profs with that last name. Which one was it? He said, Oh, the one with the real degree.
    At this point, colleague-with-same-last-name and I were on the floor laughing. Because there are only two people in our entire department who have what he apparently meant by “real” degrees, and it’s me and her. (Her degree is from an Ivy, and I did my time, aka “the therapy years,” at Duke.) Most everyone else in the department has masters and PhDs from non-top 20 colleges. We just hired someone from Drew, in fact.
    What’s even funnier? When the third colleague told us his name, neither of us recognized it. G thinks that he was someone she met once at a student-life/faculty collaboration.

    LikeLike

71. Well – I made the elitist comment, and I’ll say that the three times I’ve sat on a search committee (in political science), I have actively screened against Top-20 degrees. Why? Because those folks won’t want to teach at our directional university. My degree comes from an institution that is WELL outside the top 20, so maybe I have a bias here towards helping others in a similar position out, but we’ve never hired from a top institution. So while I understand the difficulties of the job market, I think it’s tough to make generalizations about the entire college or academic experience because they’re so darned varied.

    LikeLike

72. I went to a top 20 Ph.D. program, but I saved myself by not finishing.

    LikeLike

73. My wife asked me “Why A&M, but not Trinity, St. Ed’s, or Baylor?” Her point was that we’d never worked with programmers from any of those four schools.
    While I can’t answer the first part of that, I think the second speaks to more general concerns raised in this thread. Fundamentally, we evaluate most programs (or majors and schools more generally) based on people we’ve worked who had that background. If I’d worked with a lot of spectacular Trinity grads or incompetent Baylor grads, I’d be tempted to go hiring at Trinity and skip Baylor. (All examples hypothetical; in fact I don’t know if either school even has a CS program.) This leads to a sort of incumbent effect, in that my department is likely to hire from the schools that its current employees graduated from.
    The point made above about degrees in new fields ties in with this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if among the for-profit college’s other flaws was their graduates’ competitive disadvantage on this metric. Although Steve is in an entirely different field, I wonder if he uses the same ‘who have I worked with from X’ process?

    LikeLike

74. “I have actively screened against Top-20 degrees.”
    I was once adjuncting at a third or fourth tier women’s college in Pittsburgh. MH knows which one I mean, but I bet none of the rest of you have ever even heard the name. Anyway, I somehow noticed that one of the faculty had a doctorate from Princeton. That really blew me away at the time that Princeton was able to cascade that far down the rankings to this totally no-name school, which is not even a top 3 school in Pittsburgh.
    My husband says he would personally be open to hiring somebody from a top-50 ranked department. His department’s most recent hire is brilliant and from a school ranked #48 at Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet.
    “Because those folks won’t want to teach at our directional university.”
    Or they will come (having no better offers on hand) and they’ll whine about how much they are suffering in your miserable, podunk little town.

    LikeLike

75. MH knows which one I mean.
    I do know.
    ranked #48 at Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet.
    They may be elitists, but I guess they have a sense of humor about their elite.

    LikeLike

76. Ben, I just want to chime in that you’re dealing a bit with a numbers game. Trinity may indeed have a CS program, but only have 10-20 graduates, whereas UT Austin is likely to have close to 100. I’m only guessing.
    My husband teaches in a small CS program–all women. Their graduates end up at Microsoft and Google, as well as some regional tech companies, startups, good graduate schools, etc. Those students from smaller schools might have had opportunities the ones at larger schools didn’t. You never know.

    LikeLike

77. There’s a city bus from the airport to CMU’s campus which only costs $3.25. Does that make it more attractive?
    I appreciate the humor, but I’m afraid it’s not much. The problem is that to interview at CMU, we’d have to send two engineers flying to whereever-it-is for the career fair, then again for on-campus interviews. And then we’d fly the candidates (say six of them) to Austin and put them through our on-site interviews, which would put another 8 engineers out of commission all day. All told, that’s 12 person-days, plus the cost of airfare and hotels.
    That had better yield at least a few qualified acceptances, and if the job market for CS grads locally is as good as it is here, I’d have serious concerns that we wouldn’t get that many.

    LikeLike

78. “They may be elitists, but I guess they have a sense of humor about their elite.”
    Leiter’s site is like People Magazine for eggheads.

    LikeLike

79. Ben, O.K. But I personally love that bus even though it wastes 10 minutes to take people to the Ikea. It has its own tunnel so that at rush hour, you might actually beat the guy who paid $30 for a taxi.

    LikeLike

80. Shannon may have said “elitist” first, but Laura, your initial comment about Steve throwing resumes in the trashcan really set the elitist bar for me.

    LikeLike

81. I’ve got to move onto a new topic for tomorrow. Not sure what it’s going to be yet, but I really should move on. But just want to summarize.
    We all agree that taking on massive amounts of debt for an undergraduate degree is a bad idea, especially in this job market.
    I think that students should avoid private 4th tier schools, due to this economy, and attend public schools instead in order to keep their debt burden low. Nearly everyone agreed with that comment. Some thought that some students need the attention that you can get at a private college. I know of several smaller public colleges that can give that private experience.
    I also think that graduates from 4th tier schools, both public and private, are having a hard time finding work, because the typical placements for those kids are drying up.
    We touched on why college costs have doubled in the past ten years, but didn’t really go into it in depth. We sort of danced around the question of whether kids should attend 4th tier colleges right now and whether these schools should be doing a better job giving kids job-ready skills.
    After spending a lot of time talking to unemployed college grads and reading their stories on various websites, I think that these issues need to be examined and talked about in serious ways.
    (And Shannon, so glad that your department is hiring non-top 20 PhDs. I went to a top 20 college for my masters (maybe top 2 for my subfield at that time) and to a non top-20 college for the PhD. The non-prestigious PhD is not the reason that I’m not in academia at this moment; motherhood and non-mobility were bigger obstacles. It did shut certain doors though.)

    LikeLike

82. Jackie – I was just trying to be realistic, not elitist. I know so many kids with degrees from local colleges (OK, I’ll name names) like Farleigh Dickinson, Mercy College, William Paterson who are unemployed. They can’t even get an interview, unless they have significant job history. And, as I also said, Steve loves kids from non-prestigious state colleges. It’s not just Steve. It’s everyone he works with. Don’t you think that kids should know that? Don’t you think that if your kid had a choice between going to Rutgers or Fairleigh Dickinson that that bit of information would be useful to them? I think that kids should have all the information out there in order to make the best decisions with their education dollar.

    LikeLike

83. We never get piles of resumes when we try to hire somebody. Maybe that’s because of the whole demanding high skills for not much pay thing or maybe it’s because Pittsburgh actually is the ass-end of nowhere. I could go either way.

    LikeLike

84. I think the point about academics being hypocrites is a bit irrelevant, because we’re talking about where to go to undergrad, not grad school. I would readily agree don’t go to a PhD program unless it’s top 20 and you’re funded, but I wouldn’t extend that advice necessarily to the undergrad level. Also, is there really a quality difference between the least selective directional public university and a fourth tier private university? What if the private university were cheaper, would it still be a bad decision to go there? Finally, different people seem to have a very different idea on what “waste of money” is. Lewis & Clark (a top regional school) was thrown out as such a school. If we’re talking about schools still in the top 100 rankings, then it is getting a bit elitist.
    Another part of the problem is, while college grads are kind of screwed, non-college grads are even more so. If you’re not getting a degree, you need to be doing something else that’s cheaper and more worthwhile, because fastfood workers and gas station attendants aren’t exactly flourishing in this economy either.

    LikeLike

85. “Don’t you think that if your kid had a choice between going to Rutgers or Fairleigh Dickinson that that bit of information would be useful to them?”
    I’ve mentioned in previous discussions that a lot of non-Jerseyites (especially non-Northeasterners) think that Rutgers is a hotsy-totsy private school. I thought so too, right up until my husband interviewed there.
    Also, Leiter has Rutgers listed as the #2 US school for philosophy in the 2009 rankings, finishing in front of Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and many others.

    LikeLike

86. I brought Lewis and Clark into the discussion — but not as a waste of money, but perhaps as a school not worth taking on large amounts of debt for. But then I said the same for tufts and vanderbilt and nyu.
    It’s the debt that’s the sticking point for me because it means the education has to be an investment and not an experience. And not just an investment, but one with sufficient return to service the debt load.
    And it’s the lack of focus on that — on what people are paying, including loans, but on the private/public distinction that I find missing in Laura’s summary.

    LikeLike

87. Right, bj. I know people who get packages to lower-tier privates that make it cheaper to attend than the state school. Then what? Is the state school better, even though it might cost more? I think we’re also forgetting about the kids. Not every kid is going to thrive at a big state school. This may not be true everywhere, but around here, the smaller states are not nearly as good as some of the lower-tier privates. And the smaller states tend to cost about the same. So it’s not apples to apples.

    LikeLike

88. “And it’s the lack of focus on that — on what people are paying, including loans, but on the private/public distinction that I find missing in Laura’s summary.”
    The financial aid system is not exactly super transparent or predictable, that makes it very difficult to generalize and advise.
    By the way, one of the commenters here (not me) runs a blog called Cost of College:
    http://costofcollege.wordpress.com/

    LikeLike

89. “Don’t you think that if your kid had a choice between going to Rutgers or Fairleigh Dickinson that that bit of information would be useful to them?”
    And I think that is pretty well understood. The advice is kind of like great-grampa saying, “Why don’t you just go to Princeton on the G. I. Bill like I did?” Sure, grandad. Why didn’t I think of that?
    When I was applying to colleges, my friends and I applied to “good” private school, and then (the Maryland equivalents of) Rutgers and Trenton State as “back-ups.” Your experience was probably similar. But people whose best private-school option is FDU probably can’t get in to Rutgers. They are comparing FDU to Montclair State and William Patterson.

    LikeLike

90. Ragtime – Alright then. Instead of going to FDU, students should go to Montclair or Ramapo or other state colleges in NJ. Even out of state tuition in NY is cheaper than FDU. Yes, that would seem to be common sense info, yet still kids are going to FDU and accumulating a lot of debt. My 3rd cousin, Jill, did that. Her dad put a second mortgage on his house to send her there. She never finished. She’s a dental hygienist now.

    LikeLike

91. “Even out of state tuition in NY is cheaper than FDU.”
    But if you could live at home with parents and have an easy commute, it might actually make sense.
    “Yes, that would seem to be common sense info, yet still kids are going to FDU and accumulating a lot of debt. My 3rd cousin, Jill, did that. Her dad put a second mortgage on his house to send her there. She never finished. She’s a dental hygienist now.”
    That’s actually a pretty happy ending, all possibilities considered.

    LikeLike

92. I think it’s a valid point to say there are some absolutely awful private schools out there (there are also absolutely awful public schools, but they’re cheaper), and it would be better to go to CC for several years over some of these schools. I think it’s also true that things that are obvious or transparent to people of a certain social class are confusing and unknown to people of other classes, and how college works is one of those. I imagine that for people who have never been to college and know nothing about higher education can’t tell the difference between a really terrible school and a much better school, and the slick marketing is hard to interpret. I think for those people, this advice is really important.
    However, your first point was “only Ivy League colleges are worth the price of admission.” Even assuming you’re using “Ivy league” as a metonym for “exclusive schools,” there is a HUGE gap between Farleigh-Dickinson and Harvard, and it seems elitist (and untrue, in both directions–I know enough under and unemployed Ivy grads to say that it might not always be worth it) to assume that only graduates of Ivy Leagues do well outside certain industries in the NE corridor. In the rest of the country, highly regarded regional schools often have better networking systems in that area than even the Ivies. I know that if you’re going to be a lawyer in Portland, and Lewis & Clark or Willamette law degree opens more doors than a Harvard one. Most of Oregon’s most successful and prominent people were educated in state, where I doubt there is a college people here would think worth paying full tuition for. This applies elsewhere, and the problem with saying “don’t pay full fare for NYU, or L&C, or Tufts” is the assumption that by attending such a school, your lifelong earnings are stunted compared to an Ivy grad. However, NYU grads can become ibankers, and Harvard grads can end up working in coffee shops (I know several). Given variables such as the individual personality and qualities, major, other contextual things, etc., it’s really hard to say that x at NYU will do much worse in their life than y at Harvard. The implication of this advice is, of course, that Ivies and their graduates are inherently a class apart, which simply isn’t true.

    LikeLike

93. B.I., I really want to move on to another post. I just put up a similar post above, but I must respond to your charges of elitism.
    1. In the comment section, I quickly revised my claim about the value of paying for Ivy League schools to include 40-60 other elite colleges. But I don’t know if even Tufts is worth all the debt.
    2. There is a difference between elitism and realism. The economy sucks right now. There are few jobs. The kids who are going to non-elite colleges are really screwed. To add college debt onto their burden is just awful. That is NOT elitism. Those are facts. The world isn’t fair.

    LikeLike

94. See, I still can’t agree that this is a fact:
    “The kids who are going to non-elite colleges are really screwed.”
    The kids going to non-elite colleges without a clue are screwed. Those who know what they’re doing and have picked the college that’s right for them and gets them into a job they enjoy doing and feel good about are hardly screwed.

    LikeLike

95. Ok, I’ll move on too, but I just want to respond. It’s simply not true that a graduate of a non top 50 private school can’t find a job. You’re making a factual claim with zero evidence to support it. In general, yeah, I’d agree that if you have a choice, it’s better to go to Harvard over NYU if they cost the same amount. But that doesn’t mean that, if you work it right, it can’t be the right decision to go to NYU, or that you’re destined to debt penury if you attend there. Maybe it’s true for certain industries in certain areas of the NE, but in the rest of the country, it’s just really not the case. I still stand by my elitist claim. L&C grads are getting jobs in Portland. They’re getting good jobs. So are Reed grads, and U Portland grads. Many of them are getting hired over Ivy League grads. As I pointed out, if you want to be a lawyer in Portland, a law degree from L&C opens more doors than Harvard. Why? Because our top lawyers went there, and that’s how networking works. Likewise, OHSU is a great medical school if you want to practice medecine in Oregon (or be governor). I’d imagine if you want to work in the South, a degree from Duke or Emory or Ol’ Miss would also get you further than one from Cornell. There are different social networks that operate, and different systems of value, and not everyone cares about ‘name brand’ of school (or they care about it differently). The Ivies really aren’t a big deal in much of the country, and people really don’t care about Harvard, outside of places where they do care. I come from an Ivy-league educated, professional, culturally elite family in Portland, and I was SHOCKED at how much people care about where you went to school when I went to college on the East Coast. It’s really myopic to think that across the country, employers are throwing non-Ivy league resumes into the trash. Most employers don’t care, and many actively prefer students from their alma mater, or even actively prefer to give the bright locally educated kid a chance over the kid from the “big name” school.

    LikeLike

96. Ok, I apologize if the above sounds overly cranky, and I really do agree with you. I just get tetchy about people generalizing from one subculture (UMC in the NE corridor) to the entire US, because it is really different elsewhere, so some parts of the advice aren’t one size fits all. I think a better way of framing it is that people should do a very sensible cost/benefit analysis, but that’s not going to look the same for everyone, and things like 1) region you want to get a job in, 2) what sorts of networks they want to be plugged into, 3) personal skills, 4) choice of major. These are going to factor in there and change whether NYU, or USC, or L&C are worth it or not.

    LikeLike

97. I think B.I. is correct about life outside the NE corridor, although I bet NE rules do apply in the academic diaspora.

    LikeLike

98. See, the thing is I am in the NE corridor, and I still don’t see the elitism in, say, academic job searches. We didn’t hire the Harvard grad who applied. We know what we want when we’re hiring, and we don’t automatically impute a certain status to people with degrees from certain places.
    Is academia f-ed up in many ways? Yes. And the higher up you go, the more f-ed up it is. But don’t underestimate the number of colleges below the top tier that have a good idea about their mission and market themselves accordingly.

    LikeLike

99. OK, so I know what college you teach at now, Wendy. Questions. It seems like your school provides a real service. It specializes in the the culinary arts, right? Yes, the kids can learn skills there, like (I don’t know anything about this, just guessing) food prep, menus, ordering supplies, whatever. They need classes like yours to buff up their writing skills, because everyone needs that. But should that knowledge be given a BA? Is it the same animal as a BA in American History from Duke? I haven’t come across a school like this before, so I’m honestly curious.

    LikeLike

100. I cannot speak of my workplace here, but maybe I could do e-mail. Sorry. I’ll speak about/name my previous workplace if you like (Pace U). No loyalty there… but that’s a really interesting place, and I don’t mean “interesting” in a shifty-eyes kind of way. It was just an incredible difference from the colleges I’d been involved with, and it took me a while to appreciate what it had to offer. Does Steve ever hire anyone from Pace? I know they place grads all over the financial sector of NYC. They also have nursing, education, and computer science programs.

     LikeLike

101. I hear Penn State is going to buy hiring administrators soon, if anybody is looking.

     LikeLike

Comments are closed.