#3 - College Part 3: WHAT HAPPENED
Colleges: A BRAND
Increased customer base
Repeatedly moved financial goal posts
Grew in size and scale consistently
Became synonymous with the key parts of American culture
Past 2 episode topics:
Big growth in college attendance
Out of control cost growth post 1980
DEBT
Part 3 Topics
The Social and cultural forces that enabled the growth
Some of the out-of-control ways colleges have increased their expenses outside the classroom.
Why and how some uncertainty about college’s importance has begun to creep into conversations around the country
Why college as an institution is still critical & What questions we need to ask to better the system moving forward
Keeping Up With The Joneses: All Attitudes develop at the cultural level.
The college brand is Ingrained in the deepest parts of common society
Parents
Post WWII, it was competition over whether kids went to college or not
Especially with baby boomer kids
They passed this mentality down and its power strengthened among each subsequent generation
Then it changed From:
“Who went and who didn’t”
To:
“Who went to the best schools and who didn’t.”
SOCIAL MEDIA
Made the parental competition even more fierce
The Workforce
Competitors drive each other to require degrees for all different jobs
And this has increased to ridiculous levels
Ernst & Young
Fought this trend a few years back by removing the degree requirement for some entry level consultant jobs
Few companies have followed suit across industries
The Politicians
Ran on sending kids to go to college
They had to keep up with their opponents after all
“Equality, jobs, and education, amirite?”
And now the government has literally wittingly or unwittingly helped colleges orchestrate this debt cyclone
Now some politicians are beginning to campaign fighting back against the costs and the debt those costs force upon many Americans
How Colleges Sell to Us
By Selling An Experience
Demographics:
Boomers’ wanted independence
Birthed counter culture movement
So college then sold itself as “independence” and “lifestyle”
Look at college ads--they don’t sell the classroom.
They sell the environment, the vibe, the getaway
They sell a community
They sell that aforementioned independence every kid craves
College Institutional Spending Patterns
Massive administration increases
And an admissions focus on the highest paying international student candidates (among other things).
An overemphasis on research for the sake of research
“Colleges Became Businesses”
NYU Professors & Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
The Coddling of the American Mind
Somewhere along the way, colleges morphed from schools to businesses.
2015-2016 combined revenues at US post secondary institutions totaled $548 billion
This number as GDP would’ve ranked US colleges as the 21st largest country in the world
Endowments at top 120 universities alone was $547 billion
INTERNET 2.0
Massive opportunities self/social education/learning
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s)
Youtube
Masterclass Example
Social media
Content-sharing and consumption
Global communication
We learn best from each other
Google
New York Fed found in 2012 that, across 15 popular college majors, only 62.1% of all degree holders were holding jobs that required a degree at all
And just 27.3% were holding jobs that matched their degree skillset
Fed Underemployment for recent and long term grads haven’t changed since 1990--and costs WAY UP
Recent grads just above 40% in 90 & today--long-term grads are in the mid-30’s % area.
Poor Earnings Growth for College Grads Over time
STARTING average salary for RECENT college graduates across a broad range of common degrees over time (REAL Dollars)
1980: $51,047
2015: $50,219
DECREASE of 1.62%
College costs up 165% in REAL dollars from 1980 - 2017
The MEDIAN view for ALL COLLEGE Grads isn’t much better of a number:
CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE
9.3% median wage increase from 1979 - 2018 for Bachelor’s Degree recipients
COST of education up 165% from 1980-2017
People are losing faith for MANY REASONS
The ridiculous costs
The watered-down degrees
The success of college drop-outs on Social media and even in Silicon Valley itself
The close-minded cultures perpetuated on many campuses
THE UNBEARABLE DEBT
The Growing gap between the few “winners”--and everybody else
And NOW: COVID-19
It’s tough to make an argument for $50,000+ zoom educations
The Stats & Norms That Support College
Has Seen a massive growth in lower income bracket student attendance over time:
The College Wage Premium has increased big time since 1990 among both men & women
A-TEAM / B-TEAM Example
So the premium is increasing even though the wages for college grads are stagnant
High School-only Grads are getting left way behind
USA Today found that non-college grads are increasingly less likely to:
Have a job
Get married
Own Homes
Belong to a labor union
Have a 401k-style retirement plan
The Case For College
American growth since WWII economically in relation to rest of the world
A key pillar of a powerful country is educating its citizens
The experience that we questioned earlier with respect to how colleges “suck you in”--leaving your roots and only known reality to get a new perspective
Even in some of the key creators we see didn’t go to college or dropped out--most of them still did
And just about everyone who works to help them create the things they do, learned the skills needed to do so at college
The great technologists like Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, Marc Benioff, etc.--they all learned their engineering and frames of thought at college
Business schools teaches “frames of thought” as well
A Few Of The Critical Questions We Need To Ask Ourselves About College
Is there an optimal population of total colleges/college attendees? A specific “break-even” area where some combination of education above replacement, degree-based earnability, wage-growth over time, and academic curriculum improvement over time can increase unhindered year-after-year
If a potential answer is decreasing the number of people attending college, how do we figure out who should *not* be going--and what freedom-oriented systems can help these people use other means to pursue their dreams?
How do we change the stigma around companies not requiring college degrees for jobs where they currently do? Meaning, plenty of jobs require a college degree--and carry with them little to no skills that must be picked up in a college education...yet the companies still require the degree because that’s what “respected” companies are supposed to do. How do we change that?
Without choking off competition between schools to provide the best education, how can we create a system that competes on said “education” over “amenities, most professor-research-works, biggest administrative ‘resources,’ etc?”
