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Saturday, August 24, 2013

College Performance Standards: An Idea Whose Time Had Come?

     Credit where credit is due, this is an idea suggested by the Diary of a Republican Hater reader Greg. Its something that I never thought of and have not seen anyone suggest but it's a great idea. Basically college tuition should be linked to results-the tuition they receive is commensurate with the kind of job a student gets out of college.

     "Maybe performance should be based on getting them employed in the field of study. Since corporate America is getting more and more involved with our University system there should be able to be some sort of connection. Companies tell them what they need , universities produce them. It should probably be shorter than 4 years though.

Kids who dont find jobs? 50% off? 65%?

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/08/two-things-to-love-about-obamas.html

     I personally love this idea. It may be that others have suggested this too but this is the first I've come across this-as best I can remember. Kudos to Greg. He's been a great resource lately-which is great. My hope for this blog is always that more than anything it can be a conduit for learning and adding to our knowledge. First he had what I find a very helpful distinction between monetary and fiscal policy-MP is more like bringing down the debt of Americans but FP is the only way to really increase their income-so MP is effective, at least by itself, only during milder recessions-which is what we had gotten used to in the postwar era prior to 2008.

     On the pressing problem of keeping college costs down-we need this on both that tuition and debt side-it may be that colleges will have to be held accountable in this way. Obama's proposal-where no one's student loan payments can be more than 10% of their income is kind of a backdoor way of achieving this, though as Greg points out, limiting the amount of loan repayments doesn't take away the huge government subsidy to the college industry as the schools are still guaranteed their money, but the government may later recover considerably less on the loans they pay out to the colleges.

    Greg does voice concern-as others have-that this could lead to a further corporatization of college. I think this is a concern though as I see it, simply limiting the amount a school can receive for tuition based on what the students actually end up earning doesn't necessarily mean this. I guess it might seem that this will discourage offering a well rounded liberal arts education. I'm not sure that's true, but in any case even if it were I tend to see it as a lower level concern, I admit. It's like why the Dems should do filibuster reform-while this could lead to other problems, the outcome couldn't be worse than the current status quo as this is the worst-both in terms of Congressional obstruction and to channel William Jennings Bryan, 'crucifying our young people on a cross of college loan repayments.' I mean I'd rather have a society where most people have good jobs than one where they have a well rounded liberal arts education if faced with the choice, and it's not even close.

   Essentially until about 13 years ago if you got a college education you were guaranteed a good job. As this is no longer the case tuition costs need to reflect that. Obama from everything you're hearing, may be way off base on monetary policy.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/08/inflationphobia-does-president-obama.html

Thankfully he has always had religion on the problem of spiraling college tuition costs and crushing debt.

   

5 comments:

  1. Thanks Mike for the shout out!

    Another thing to consider however is that much of this talk gives too much credence to the idea that workers are responsible for their own unemployment. That it is mostly structural reasons we have the job market problems we have..... which I find complete BS. Now, there are structural issues but its about what the owners arent doing not what the workers arent doing. The owners (corps and politicians) arent using the public sector, they are insisting that only private sector jobs count. They are also beholden to shareholders and thunking onlyquarterly numbers and therefore find labor as a cost on their balance sheet that needs to be cut. Fighting decent wages is a huge part too.

    The truth is if everyone over the age of 21 had a college degree we would have a lot of very smart unemployed people. I want to make education useful and I want corporations to be accountable too. When someone is in college on a job track, there better be one at the end or the corporate sponsor should lose something.

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  2. "The truth is if everyone over the age of 21 had a college degree we would have a lot of very smart unemployed people. I want to make education useful and I want corporations to be accountable too. When someone is in college on a job track, there better be one at the end or the corporate sponsor should lose something."

    AMEN.

    I agree the government should invest more as well. We should do both-government investment in jobs including something like the MMT Job Guarantee-Minsky's Employer of Last Resort-and hold colleges accountable for job outcomes.

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  3. BTW why shouldnt corporations be accountable..... arent they people too!

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  4. I didn't say they shouldn't. I was specifically talking about colleges here. Corporations should be too but that's another discussion. Schools shouldn't get the same tutition whether a student cashes in on their education or not.

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    1. I didnt mean to imply by my BTW comment that you didnt agree with that, I figured you did actually. We are on the same page here.

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