Looking for a Good Bang for Your Buck? Try These Colleges—Maybe

The gaps in reasoning in this piece accommodate a 747! This entire piece of illogic is more about inputs than anything else. The contribution of a college is its value added (outputs/inputs, adding resource expenditures, opportunity costs, etc. if you want to get fancy).In the MIT example, the apt comparison would be between MIT graduates and MIT eligible/qualified/accepted individuals who ended up choosing other paths, including other colleges or no college. It is shamefully bad reasoning to compare the graduates of MIT, where admissions standards virtually assure accepting only individuals who will succeed with or without MIT, with graduates of BigStateUniversity, where admissions standards are minimal, perhaps avoidable entirely for some in-state residents. It looks like there are flaws as well within the model’s assumptions. One must debit the college grads for 4-6 years worth of opportunity costs. This variable is substantial. It can take between seven and ten years for an $80K grad to catch up to a $40K drop out, including opportunity cost, advancement costs, net present value, deferred investments, etc. Often, the compensation margin is not that wide, especially in the early years of employment (another flaw in the model: no compensation acceleration coefficients).Why does the Chronicle publish something so badly flawed, even within its own specious assumptions?- Robert W Tucker

Tucker – the piece is about PauScale’s rankings. The Chronicle did not produce the rankings. I think the author agrees with you that the logic used to create the report has many flaws…

@ericb47,Understood but there are such things as limiting flaws, then there are devastating flaws in logic. The Chronicle reported on limiting flaws, implicitly according some level of credence to the work. As far as I can see, there is no rational basis for reporting this at all. The only sound generalization that devolves from the “study” is that universities that admit only highly intelligent students possessing demonstrated unique abilities prior to admission have (not cause) graduates who go on to earn more money than graduates of universities that are not so selective with respect to intelligence and demonstrated abilities. Did I miss anything and is any of it news?

So you get the best “bang” for your buck by going to prestigous universities … wow what an amazing discovery. Maybe that’s why everyone wants to go there. If only I would have known.

@crichter –I know several engineers from LA Tech – one just finished his master’s in teaching also at LA Tech, he is currently also without a job.The couple of people from VA Tech I know are either history or psych majors — it hasn’t done any of them much good. So I would say Engineer at ULL, Enlish at Mason.

First, it’s worth reporting because the mainstream media has picked this story up and run with it. It’s a story about higher education so the Chronicle would be remiss to just let it go, particularly if a contributor can argue that the findings gaining so much public attention are flawed. Second, the findings, flawed as they may be, point to the (increasing) fallacy of the conventional wisdom that a college degree equates to significantly more earning power than a high school diploma. That this may not be true is indeed news for a great many people, especially students who openly and proudly announce that they are only in school to get a credential that will help them earn more than if they just went to work. Third, many people believe a Bachelor’s degree is a Bachelor’s degree, regardless of school. Many seem to believe that the only difference between an MIT degree and one from BigState University is just snobbery. Evidence that exposes this bit of wishful thinking for what it is is news as well. That people believe these things (that a degree equals much more earning power and that a degree is a degree no matter where it’s from) is nowhere more evident than in the explosive growth of for-profit universities that explicitly tap into both of these beliefs.I think a take-away from this research, no matter how inaccurate the exact numbers, is that most students should not be going to school just to earn a credential that will make them more money than a high school diploma. To my view, this research supports those of us who want to promote the other, and in my view more important reasons for getting a college education that have to do with the intangibles many have already referred to.

And I’d like to change “no matter how inaccurate the exact numbers” to “even if the exact numbers are in dispute.” I think the overall narrative of the research is on the right track even if a change in methodology would yield different numbers.

@intered,I think the question I’m pressing is what, specifically, counts as “value added.” As I understand it, you’re arguing that for a less-motivated kid from a less-privileged background (the input), the “value added” of attending BSU can be measured in the improved access to opportunities and the improved ability to take advantage of them upon graduation; whereas for the supremely motivated student from a privileged background that attends MIT the opportunities and ability would have been there anyway. In the latter case, MIT is getting credit for something that would have happened no matter what.What the former case appears to assume is that going to BSU transforms the “input.” That is, the less-motivated student becomes more motivated, more creative, etc. because of BSU. This doesn’t seem likely, and to the extent this maturity takes place it is unlikely attributable to BSU since a similar or more rapid transformation would have been necessary in “the real world.” The student who begins as a lazy student is as likely as not to continue as a lazy student, especially if she is doing what she must to earn the degree. Which leaves us with opportunity. What opportunities persent themselves to the student who nevertheless earned a degre? As someone commented in the Businessweek piece circulated by Yahoo!, many students are graduating BSUs only to find themselves working at a neighborhood Walmart rather than on the fast track to a high-paying, white collar career. In the meantime, the MIT graduate has as many if not more opportunities available to her as those who graduated generations ago. And I suspect this opportunity differential only gets wider as more schools enter the fray and produce more college graduates. The consequence is an increased premium on Bachelor’s degrees from elite institutions even as the value of a Bachelor’s degree from other schools plummet. One of the ironies of the democratization and massification of higher education is that it seems to make the class stratification of universities all the more stark.Since it is unlikely that schools like MIT are going to start admitting less motivated students, I suspect that where we would find the greatest value added outcome would be for highly motivated but under-privileged kids who are admitted to schools like MIT and get access to opportunities that would have been almost unimaginable elsewhere.In short, I’m not sure that even a metric that measures schools in the way you suggest would show all that much of a difference in the results we’re talking about here. In my view, this is why we need to stress the point that going to college is about more than getting a degree that will get you a job; that the “value added” inherent in a broad education is the primary goal.

This assumes that MIT and other elite schools ONLY accept people from elite backgrounds, which is simply not true. Most if not all of the elite universities do indeed seek out highly motivated students from underprivileged backgrounds (or underclass as you call it), and they have the resources to provide generous scholarships and support. Since only schools like this offer “bang for your buck” according to this study, then the incremental value for those students is simply stupendous and far outstrips that offered by the vast majority of the BSUs.On the other hand, the BSU’s are often not in a position to offer such generous packages, which means that many of the students it accepts either cannot afford to go, must too often work full time in order to go, or must take out sizable student loans that will ensure that they extend opportunity costs well beyond the years they were actually in school. These stresses find their way into the classroom, which then affects the quality of education being offered. Add to that the fact that graduating from a BSU is increasingly less likely to result in “the self-respect and other benefits that accrue to having a real job and real professional colleagues” because of the overproduction of bachelor’s degrees, is it not hard to see why the incremental value you posit is not always all that great. To suggest that the elite universities should somehow be judged separately from the non-elites is to promote and reify a class distinction that completely contradicts the intervention I assume you’re trying to stage here. What you’re doing is reproducing the idea that the elite universities produce the leaders and thinkers of society; the BSUs the managers, administrators, other professionals; and the other schools train the skilled workers. What happens in that model is the traditional aims of education (aka the aims of liberal education) get devalued in all but the top level. From the BSUs down the focus is increasingly on training workers for very specific jobs (which, incidentally, is empirically measurable) rather than producing an intellectually well-rounded, broadly educated citizenry (which is not as easily measured). As a result the elites win on two counts– the better jobs are conceeded to them and they are free to offer the more challenging and satisfying intellectual experiences. Again, as there are more schools entering the system (especially the for-profits), and as the BSUs try to educate more and more students with shrinking budgets (while also under increasing pressure to keep these “clients” entertained), the likelihood of that non-elite education leading to middle-class respectability decreases, which naturally leads to the perception that these universities are not doing their job. So begins the hunt for scapegoats, and the most obvious target are those things that keep students in school too long learning useless things for too much money. Thus, the continuous threat to defund the humanities and liberal education in these schools, which leads to a greater impoverishment of the intellectual culture of these schools and society at large. Additionally, this produces an even greater divide between the education offered at an elite university and that offered elsewhere.Since the problem leading to this crisis is based on the assumption that a degree equals a job, and there’s precious little the BSUs can do about creating jobs, it’s time for some serious soul-searching about what an education can legitimately be expected to do.

I would like to meet one of these magical, bound-to-succeed people you seem to assume make it to MIT and its peer institutions. As a less-privileged product of one of those institutions, I can tell you that the schools only offer more opportunities. They do not in any way, shape, or form assure success. That kind of assurance is more positively correlated to the SES of the family of origin. Similarly, there are many who attend the BSUs from prominent families in the state of the school who are similarly assured success, if on a more local level. But I see that our difference is fundamental. You seem to suggest that there is a way to precisely define the purposes of higher education and ways to accurately measure our effectiveness in delivering. My view is that the effort to quantify the benefits of education is itself part of the problem. I find the idea that we should quantify what I find most valuable about a quality education to be as distasteful and undesirable as it is impossible. For example, that one may be able to measure my ability to “understand and act upon the distinctions in expression among 20th-[Century?] painters” does not begin to touch what those expressions mean to me, or how they inspire me, or what effect those works may have on my appreciation of, say, 18th-Century music. In my view, any attempt to boil the aims and successes of education down to some set of abstract, quantifiable formulae completely misses the point.This is not to say that measurements do not have their place. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of grades, but I don’t see any other way to prove my effectiveness of conveying certain kinds of information and certain skills in the short time I have with my students. But if I am truly successful that will only measure the most immediate and superficial features of what I have taught.

@walrus,Sometimes it is difficult to discern the nature of differences until one gets to the bottom of them.Whereas it was once something else, higher education has become a family resemblance construct. This means that there are no non-trivial specific definitional elements that unite all things there are to mean by the construct. Like a rope (to borrow from Wittgenstein) strands run together for awhile, some end, some are added; end to end, we have a rope nonetheless even though no single strand runs its length.With the above in mind, many of the strands to which you refer are grand in nature, some metaphysical, some subtle, many long term. I have no quarrel with these imputed effects. I believe in many of them, including some that I have thus far found it difficult to find a way to measure. But it does not follow that they will come about merely because I believe in them or think that they will occur. Otherwise, I am treading close to the canons of reasoning that apply to faith rather than to the empirical world. In the latter case, we must generate falsifiable propositions (whether theoretical constructs or empirical relations) in order to step away from the canons or reasoning that are the province of faith. To guard against possible misinterpretation here, I also find merit in the canons of reasoning that instantiate faith. I do not, however, believe that the public and students hire us as teachers to be administrators of faith. For all of the potential subtle, long term outcomes attributable to higher education, it is not satisfactory to say that teaching impact can only be evaluated in the long term or, worse yet, cannot be evaluated at all because it is somehow too ineffable. To do so sets the professoriate up as unaccountable Mandarins who have no regard for the learners’ goals. To do so also allows good, bad, and egregiously bad teaching to persist until, for all practical purposes, it is too late to do anything about it. Whatever else it may be, teaching those old enough to vote, etc. is a social contract. Students select courses, degrees, etc. to meet specific goals which, in my years of experience with them, they are quite capable of specifying, even if not to formal standards. What would you say about a teacher who says to a student, “I’m sorry I didn’t meet your goals for this course because I never got around to teaching all of the course objectives that you signed up for but, hey, I still did a great job, no matter what you think. Why? Because 10 years from now, you will be enlightened in a grand metaphysical way and you will realize that I did it. I’m the guy who set you up for those insights. Don’t ask me how I know this. Its ineffable. I just know. Want to thank me now?” Or, what would you say about a teacher who says, “I’m sorry, most of the real stuff I teach you can’t be measured and I’ll be dead before you learn the rest of it so, sorry, I can’t be held accountable. Too bad.”Neither you nor I would step into an airplane engineered under such teaching and evaluation standards. Neither would we subject ourselves to medical care at the hands of someone whose learning had only been evaluated in terms coefficients of downstream inspiration. We expect, long before we see them, that our accountants, physicians, and engineers will have been put under a microscope of knowledge and performance-based scrutiny with respect to what they learned and how well they apply it. For those who say, “Yes, but that’s a trade and I teach metaphysical stuff.” OK, one question for society might be to decide which cognitive, affective, and psycho-motor domains get a free pass on these accountability issues? It might be a worthwhile public debate.With respect to this core aspect of accountability, I’m a minimalist who finds the following logic compelling: Stipulating that a teacher has the capability of determining whether or not his student learned what he taught (i.e., his performance evaluation is not fiat), at the very least, those same criteria of determination can be employed again as the performance standards for that course and can be conveyed to others, including systematically.In conclusion, I’m not suggesting that every possible outcome of a course can or should be operationalized into metrics. I am suggesting: (a) that every course, degree, etc. should specify a core set of outcomes and impacts (durable generalizable, job-relevant if applicable, etc.) and (b) that at least 90% of the specific instances I have seen in the last 35 ears in which I have been told, “What I teach just can’t be measured” the discovered explanation turned out to be nothing more than, “I know very little about modern measurement science and, worse yet, I don’t know what I don’t know.” When we take care of the 90%, that’s usually more than enough to define a course to the satisfaction of our students.

@intered,Despite my tone, I have enjoyed this exchange. Oddly enough, it is motivating me to get out of summer mode and back to my writing because I am not expressing my ideas as well as I might. Thank you for that!