Education for fun and profit - Part 2

In Part 1 yesterday, I used a Matt Yglesias post to speak to the changes that are coming to the relationship of people to institutions of higher education. I argued that the conversion from a complex relationship to a simpler transaction-based model will have rather big effects. Yglesias stated that for-profit colleges are somehow "obliged" to rip off their students in any way possible, which seems like overstatement, but it is valid, I think, to contend that people are going to look at their education in starkly different ways and have higher expectations of what it will do for their lives.

Yglesias goes on:

[T]he nature of the higher education market is such that there’s no way these for-profits can ever be anything other than low-end options.

He doesn't really back that up at all, except by implying that the managers of for-profit colleges have that incentive to "screw you over." Contrast that with the model we have in our not-for-profit research institutions, where undergraduates pay rather large bucks to be taught by poorly-paid TAs, supporting a large R&D facility that is unlikely to have a great effect on their instruction in Beginning Microeconomics. Good luck, young folks, in even getting to see one of the Nobel laureates who is getting major money and incentives to come write their papers and do their experiments (one of those incentives being the opportunity not to teach an undergraduate course).

Yglesias does seem to get that, though this particular post doesn't explicate that well, as he often talks about his unwillingness to give money to his institution of higher learning, Harvard University, because they already have so much, and any contributions could be applied more usefully elsewhere. [I actually agree with this stand, but there is a slight incongruity in that his Harvard affiliation seems to come up quite frequently, an ongoing benefit for which, I guess, he feels he's already paid - or, perhaps, he may feel his current prestige is a plus for Harvard.]

He also writes:

I think the main lesson here is that traditional universities need to do a better job of getting into the niche that’s currently dominated by these poorly performing for-profits. In part, state governments would do well to shift emphasis away from trying to burnish the sheen on their “flagship” traditional universities and toward doing more in the way of providing community college services for working and non-traditional students.

In other words, state university systems need to get more vocational; they need to look at their competition as being the likes of University of Phoenix and not Harvard. They need to respond to the needs of their consumers, presumably through less research and more teaching, flexible hours, perhaps a bigger on-line presence, and so forth.

I can barely sort out the conundra here. First, don't we like, in general, to leave the consumer-responsive aspects of a business to the market? Aren't the for-profits far better positioned to react to the needs of market demand than a governmental agency? Anyone who has watched the tortured attempts of the University of Illinois to develop an on-line program knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Of course, the risk is that we'll find out just how little the market is for some programs and specialties. When we start seeing the new consumer-responsive state colleges dropping history because there just isn't a market for it, how will that go over?

Second, do we really trust the private college system to be able to do all the things we now want a public system to do? If the state colleges move more toward providing "community college services," then all the people who now need the subsidies currently in the public system will have to go to the private system, and they may well not be able to afford it. One could argue that the private system will adjust to those new realities, but that seems more a hope than a plan.

Finally, we hear so much about training students for the needs of the 21st century workplace. I have sincere doubts that this really constitutes a proper strategy, as I've expressed before, but let's take it at face value and assume that we have a consensus, that we need more computer scientists and engineers and mathematicians and so on.

Where will they come from? Yglesias has the public system "dropping down" to meet immediate market needs for "working and non-traditional students," in effect crowding the space of the for-profit and community colleges. Yet we need the highly-trained, highly-developed graduates of the best programs in order to create Tom Friedman's free electrons and the New Energy economy which will enrich us all.

I know that a coherent world view will always be in conflict with what seems to be relatively easy solutions to problems. But I guess I expect more second- and third-order thinking from some people. My ongoing frustrations with Yglesias (who is, after all, the 16th-most influential liberal in the U.S. media) is that, I believe, he writes so much that he tends to dash off thoughts without developing them. It really shouldn't be all that difficult to work through some of the implications of changing the mission of the public education system, especially when you're using that as a way of getting rid of the for-profit institutions that clearly are filling some kind of niche, no matter how incompetently.

And I respect him enough that I'd like to hear his thoughts on that, see his logic. Instead, I just get a blanket statement that, as written, seems fairly unpersuasive.