Struck by all the hoopla about the irrelevance of college education to success in our new world of technology, we decided to ask two talented research assistants from the Spencer Foundation, Charles Kurose and Amato Nocera, to look into the matter. Here, in their own words, is what they found.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Will Dropouts Save America?”, Michael Ellsberg gives an increasingly popular argument against a college education. The argument runs something like this: wildly successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college. They didn’t need a college degree or the kind of skills that are learned from textbooks or in the classroom: passion, creativity, and a revolutionary idea fueled their success and gave the world two of its greatest tech companies: Microsoft and Apple.

Although the anecdote about Gates and Jobs is true, the…

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President Obama shaped his State of the Union address around the notion of creating an America that is “built to last.” This idea invites us to build solid, continuing progress around a strong, stable foundation. It’s a refreshing change from the more familiar, and sometimes self-defeating, political rhetoric of “crisis” and “crash programs,” make-or-break deadlines, and heroic (unsustainable) efforts. We should bring this perspective to discussions of education, including higher education.

The Obama Administration, the Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the College Board, many states, and no doubt other entities have announced educational attainment and/or degree completion goals with hard deadlines attached. Sometimes we talk about these goals as if once we meet them all will be well. But, as we know deep down, implicit in these goals is the presumption that when…

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A few days ago the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators held a welcome forum on “The State of College Access.”  The session was motivated by concern over the future of the Pell Grant program. Panels addressed “The Future Role of Federal Pell Grants” and “Beyond Pell – Other Pieces to the Access Puzzle.” Congressman Tim Bishop, a strong supporter of federal student-aid programs, opened the session with a discussion of recent changes to the Pell program designed to reduce costs and an explanation of upcoming deficit-reduction requirements, emphasizing that both revenue increases and significant spending cuts will be required.

For the rest of the morning, there was a lot of discussion about important issues related to college access and success.  But even with so many seasoned access advocates, financial-aid experts, and others committed to the goal of…

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It’s been a while since we have treated ourselves (and we hope you) to one of our occasional pieces on applying basic economic concepts to problems in higher education.

Today, we want to take a look at the idea of “monopolistic competition”, a notion introduced to the profession by Edward Chamberlin and separately by Joan Robinson in the 1930s.

Classically, economists have distinguished between competitive industries and monopolies. Under “perfect” competition, a number of firms produce an identical product (wheat) and all sell it at the same price, a price determined by the market and not the individual firm. In “pure” monopoly one firm is uniquely equipped to sell a certain product and has control over some resource that stops other firms from selling the same product or a close substitute. Microsoft Office, drugs whose patents have not expired, and cable companies …

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Many need-based student aid programs are designed to solve only one problem–inadequate funds to pay for education. There is no doubt that transferring funds to low- and moderate-income students is a critical component of making postsecondary education an option for them.  But necessary is not the same as sufficient.  And we may have focused so much on attempting to increase the number of dollars we provide to students that we have lost track of some of the other things they need to succeed.

It is not news that financial barriers don’t explain all of the differences in educational attainment across socioeconomic groups. There is extensive evidence that inadequate academic preparation, combined with low expectations and a discouraging history of past schooling experiences, often plays a large role. Nonetheless, we remain highly focused on dollars. One reason is because we know how…

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There is something a bit odd about the terms on which we debate the merits of for-profit vs. community colleges: thinking of one as a bastion of private enterprise and the other as an example of low-cost provision of services through the public sector.

The fact is that both community colleges and for-profit colleges are in large measure government-financed arrangements to pay for the postsecondary training of people who can’t afford to pay the costs of college and lack the qualifications to be admitted to selective institutions.

Community colleges are publicly owned and get the bulk of their financing through operating subsidies from state and local governments. For-profit colleges are privately owned and get the bulk of their financing through student aid (grants and loans) from the federal government. The grants are of course direct costs to the federal budget. Some of the…

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The national agenda for increasing educational attainment requires a clear focus on postsecondary access and affordability for students in all 50 states. Yet each of those states has a unique population, a unique set of public colleges and universities with responsibility for providing opportunity to residents, and unique fiscal circumstances and priorities.

Focusing on rising tuition levels at public institutions is the simplest way to frame concerns about assuring access. But a clear understanding of developing problems requires a view of the diversity across states—including tuition levels, state grant programs, and state funding. Some examples of individual states (drawing on data from the College Board’s recently released Trends in College Pricing 2011 and Trends in Student Aid 2011 reports) illustrate the array of patterns.

In Arizona, tuition and fees at public…

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When a public-policy matter becomes an intense focus of ideological controversy, facts often become inconvenient obstacles to upholding an already determined view, instead of being received as instruments for refining one’s views. Unfortunately, there is reason to worry that this kind of ideological warfare has overtaken the important national discussion of the role and the management of student debt. Is the total amount of student debt bigger or smaller than $1-trillion? Do students right now owe more to banks and the federal government than Americans owe to credit-card companies? By what standard should we judge these numbers?  We can’t think of any social or ethical judgment or any practical decision that turns on the answers to these two numerical questions.

Our aim in this post is not to contribute to advocacy on one side or the other of the student-debt question—a…

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The “Trends in College Pricing” and “Trends in Student Aid” reports released by the College Board earlier this week contain some interesting information about changes in the way we finance higher education in the U.S.  Few people are surprised to hear that once again, tuition and fee charges increased faster than average prices of goods and services in the economy. A passing knowledge of the fiscal troubles facing state governments is sufficient to anticipate the continuing decline in the appropriated funds available to public colleges and universities to educate the growing number of students enrolling on campuses across the country. That the federal government would take up a significant portion of the slack, and that it would do so in new ways, was less predictable.

The increase in federal spending on Pell Grants for low-and moderate-income students has received considerable…

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The Spencer Foundation has been working on finding way to get philosophers and political theorists more engaged with issues in educational policy and practice.  (Thanks to Richard Kahlenberg for calling attention to Spencer’s recent conference on this subject in an Innovations blog post. See http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/calling-philosophers-of-education/30542.) Many philosophers know a lot about, and especially know how to think well about, questions about values and morality – questions of a kind that abound in education.

A big challenge in tapping into what philosophers have to offer to work on contemporary educational issues is that they don’t for the most part know much in detail about actual problems of policy and practice in education. Even many philosophers of education are most at home working at high levels of abstraction, questions say of ultimate purposes…

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