(good arguments for your use.)
Christopher,
This self-serving post is disingenuous at best.
As far as we know, right now, students learn almost nothing in university that is used in life. University largely performs a filtering and indoctrination service. So students are filtered out of the workforce by extremely expensive procedural gymnastics. They are not taught anything that helps them in the workforce. They are only taught the work discipline that was not provided to them in public k-12. We can test this argument fairly easily by employment and productivity comparisons of other northern European education systems and ours – which expensively educate far fewer, but impose far greater discipline in k-12.
The empirical and honest analysis, which has been provided by economists for years now, is to (a) perform output rankings of colleges by the performance of students, giving no weight to capital resources, (b) to measure how much of the revenue capture is devoted to undergraduates and teaching professors, versus how much of the revenue is spent on dead weight (administration), profiteering (the physical plant and endowment), and graduate programs (profiteering). (c) how much retention there is of the freshman class through graduation(test of honesty rather than entrapment). (d) how much is diverted for publicity and status purposes (sports).
The empirical test of education is this: If (1)overhead was capped at 15%, and (2) all but an additional 10% was required to stay within the departments that performed the teaching, and (3) if teaching and research departments were separated, and (4) if graduate programs had to be self-funding, and (5) if universities were only able to collect a percentage of income from their graduates for a period of 30 years, and so if graduates could not earn, then universities could not collect income, then what would universities teach, and how would they teach instead?
That is the reform that is required.
As far as we know, educational institutions since at least 1963 have provided a means of privatizing public wealth that parents could have saved for their retirements, and we have now a generation about to retire that has been sold a defective product without warranty, at the expense of their retirements, for no marginal increase in the employability of their offspring.
This is era has been one of the most massive misappropriations of public wealth in western history – equal to that of the church’s selling of indulgences, and the reason for the protestant reformation against the church. The military industrial complex at very least, is a net break even for Americans because of the petro-dollar, and the regulatory capture we impose on world politics, finance and trade. But the academy literally sells indulgences: fraudulent, underperforming products without warranty, insulated from claims against warranty by the state, and the outcome of which produce seriously damaging externalities for our economy, culture, and civilization.
Those are the facts. The boomer-generation’s Academy has not only been a bastion of pseudoscience in the social sciences, instituted a permanent degradation of the western canon, and has been a bastion of financial privatization on a scale we have not seen since the late middle ages.
We should note that all of the sources you quote are paid interests, and that none of the sources you list are independent economists specializing in education, nor advocates of education reform.
We are conservatives. We are supposed to be the people that tell the truth.
Postmodern deceits, pseudoscience, statistical deception, propagandism, and reality-by-chanting are tactics of, and mastered by, the left. There is no room in conservatism (aristocracy) for foolery and deceit. Civilization is too important a craft to be left to the foolish and corrupt.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.