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samboct -> RE: Is Education Overrated? (4/10/2009 6:16:43 AM)
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One thing I didn't point out in my previous ramble....
The cost of education has largely stayed the same over the past 40 years (and perhaps longer- don't recall.) adjusted for inflation. How the education has been paid for has changed. Back in the 60s- tuition used to account for roughly a quarter of the cost. Most of the rest came from state and federal spending. But the percentage of the cost of an education coming from the feds has been dropping over time (again, going back to Ronnie) which is why tuition hikes have been the order of the day. Tuition hikes however, are hitting a wall, because in order to attract qualified students, schools have to make up the deficits with aid packages.
One of the worst ideas in financing education has been student loans- especially coupled with commercial interest rates. The cost of repaying these loans places an enormous burden on students and often limits both career choices, jobs, and selection of majors. People get stuck in dead end jobs in order to make enough money to pay back loans, which in earlier times would have been grants. I still recall the hypocrisy of some of my fellow students who were there because of federal aid programs targeted at the poor. Without those aid programs, they would never have been at the school with me. (OK, my grad degree is from an Ivy.) Yet, there they were, cheering Ronnie on as he was cutting the aid programs that got them there since the poor people following them- "weren't deserving."
I'm one of those folks who think that an undergrad should major in what they find interesting. What you're taught as an undergrad should not be rote memorization (any idiot can do that) but how to think critically, how to look at multiple viewpoints of a problem, how to recognize another valid viewpoint etc. This can be taught through a wide variety of subjects.
As has been noted previously, finance majors are often poorly educated. But I think finance majors are very much a function of the consumer mentality in an education. Kids are desperate to get a good job, and they flock to whatever major has good job prospects at the moment. (Previously it was computer science.) Schools that pander to their students demands often wind up turning out students that are ill prepared for the world. They don't think critically, they don't have imagination, they can only parrot what other people in business have done before.
Finance majors also don't enrich the world in other ways. English majors can occasionally produce good poetry (scientists attempts at poetry are often pretty lame in my opinion) art majors can produce art, and music majors produce music. None of these professions are particularly lucrative, yet they enrich our lives in all sorts of ways. I think they help spur the creative process, which is critical to our economic success. As such, they need to be supported by all of us, rather than forced to bear the burden of their education alone. I don't want to even think about the costs of the financial bailout. That money would have been far, far better spent on providing a better education for our citizens. However, an education alone isn't sufficient for financial success. There has to be financial capital available that is not risk averse, and a first customer willing to pay for performance. If an education alone would be sufficient, then India should have clobbered us already, and they haven't, even though most administrations from Reagan on have been shooting us in the foot, giving everybody else a chance to catch up.
Sam
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