I feel like all this talk about CC being ignored and underutilized, is a distraction from the core issue of the rest of Higher Ed being so messed up. People want to talk about CC because it's low stakes; no one's defending big revenue streams here.
IMO there are two core problems with Higher Ed:
1. A professionalized administrator class is using accreditation commissions to behave like a cartel. Professor salaries/spending on instruction have actually stayed more or less in line with general inflation and population growth for the past 40 years; it's administrative costs that have skyrocketed. You ever notice how the people who populate HR departments and university administrations feel eerily similar to each other? It's because they're all ultimately involved in the same scheme: a system of inflated job credentialing, which props up demand for a cartelized resource. Both are purported to be self-justifying - accreditation keeps the cranks out, while HR is just about matching people to jobs. But the rhetoric doesn't match the reality - they go above and beyond those callings.
2. The financing mechanism for all that demand is fundamentally unsound - an education is not a securable asset, and it violates the conditions when unsecured debt might generally be considered acceptable in other contexts: it's not a moderate-to-low (for a loan) principal value, extremely high interest is not legally or practically workable, and it's a long-term commitment. The only thing that makes it remotely viable is that it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. And not coincidentally, the only reason that was made a law, was that private loans were allowed to fester until med students started walking away from them in bankruptcy.
It's really easy to look at the magnitude of these two problems, and just decide that it's easier to deal with CC.
But let's say we somehow managed to stand up a CC system that was viably competitive to the for-profit and non-profit sectors. How do we know the top performers won't just try to get staked in on the credentialing racket with the non-profits? They're already halfway there with all the matriculation agreements. How do we keep them from jacking up their tuitions to the legal loan limits, like the for-profits do? How do we know they won't fail in some other unforeseen way?
And moreover, if and when they DO fail to solve the entire problem for us, what other low-stakes sector of education are we left with to try again? Bible colleges? What happens to the people the other sectors have continued to screw in the meantime - and the mountain of *unsecured* student loan debt crushing their backs?
The underlying problem of America is concentration of power - political, corporate, what have you. Higher education is a solved problem: what I’ve described are merely 3 instances of overly concentrated power: (1) accreditation commissions, (2) monopsony hiring power, and (3) big banks. Am I really that insane for suggesting that maybe we should address the concentrations of power, before trying to create another one?
From The Comments: Community College
From The Comments: Community College
From The Comments: Community College
Heh heh...
I feel like all this talk about CC being ignored and underutilized, is a distraction from the core issue of the rest of Higher Ed being so messed up. People want to talk about CC because it's low stakes; no one's defending big revenue streams here.
IMO there are two core problems with Higher Ed:
1. A professionalized administrator class is using accreditation commissions to behave like a cartel. Professor salaries/spending on instruction have actually stayed more or less in line with general inflation and population growth for the past 40 years; it's administrative costs that have skyrocketed. You ever notice how the people who populate HR departments and university administrations feel eerily similar to each other? It's because they're all ultimately involved in the same scheme: a system of inflated job credentialing, which props up demand for a cartelized resource. Both are purported to be self-justifying - accreditation keeps the cranks out, while HR is just about matching people to jobs. But the rhetoric doesn't match the reality - they go above and beyond those callings.
2. The financing mechanism for all that demand is fundamentally unsound - an education is not a securable asset, and it violates the conditions when unsecured debt might generally be considered acceptable in other contexts: it's not a moderate-to-low (for a loan) principal value, extremely high interest is not legally or practically workable, and it's a long-term commitment. The only thing that makes it remotely viable is that it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. And not coincidentally, the only reason that was made a law, was that private loans were allowed to fester until med students started walking away from them in bankruptcy.
It's really easy to look at the magnitude of these two problems, and just decide that it's easier to deal with CC.
But let's say we somehow managed to stand up a CC system that was viably competitive to the for-profit and non-profit sectors. How do we know the top performers won't just try to get staked in on the credentialing racket with the non-profits? They're already halfway there with all the matriculation agreements. How do we keep them from jacking up their tuitions to the legal loan limits, like the for-profits do? How do we know they won't fail in some other unforeseen way?
And moreover, if and when they DO fail to solve the entire problem for us, what other low-stakes sector of education are we left with to try again? Bible colleges? What happens to the people the other sectors have continued to screw in the meantime - and the mountain of *unsecured* student loan debt crushing their backs?
The underlying problem of America is concentration of power - political, corporate, what have you. Higher education is a solved problem: what I’ve described are merely 3 instances of overly concentrated power: (1) accreditation commissions, (2) monopsony hiring power, and (3) big banks. Am I really that insane for suggesting that maybe we should address the concentrations of power, before trying to create another one?