and I decided it was time for a rant about the many things I think are wrong with the system of education in this country, as well as how they got so broken in the first place. Eventually, I would like to get to a discussion of why college is so expensive, but first I would like to make a few fundamental arguments. Most decisions about education are made not by students but by their parents, and thus parents are the focus of what follows.
My first claim is that most parents don't have specific knowledge about how their children should be educated. I mean this in the following way: parents do not remember many of the things their children are supposed to be learning in school. Obviously this is not true in elementary school, but starting in middle school or high school students learn material many of their parents forgot long ago. Parents are thus not positioned to evaluate their children's education in an objective way; not knowing the material themselves, they can't evaluate how well their children know it or make judgments about whether it is being taught in an effective way.
Parents are thus being forced to judge their children's education by other means. In particular, parents judge a school by standardized tests, the general health of the school as an institution, and by their perceptions of both the school's alumni and current students. One thing worth noting about the latter two criteria is that they are very relative; I would argue they are viewed in a much more relative way than education would be if education could be measured differently. Standardized tests are almost relative by design, as on any standardized test a decline in scores across the board would certainly result in a re-writing of the test. Viewing schools as institutions becomes relative in that it is always desirable for a school to have more money, nicer buildings, better educated teachers, more better bigger faster cleaner everything. Education itself is less relative; there is a limit on how well society demands high school students understand calculus, a specific and limited understanding of American history required for civic health, a finite set of novels that are regarded as significant, and so on. Certainly we can always demand that schools do better, but it is much easier to assign education an objective passing grade than it is to assign one to test scores or school spending per student.
The problem with judging schools by their students is that the perception a school is good allows it to attract good students. Parents who value education highly are more likely to have children who are good students. Thus when these parents seek out schools with high performing students they are also ensuring that these schools will have high performing students in the future. For example, private schools and other schools with selective admission will always have higher performing students than public schools because their incoming students are more talented. This phenomenon has a number of consequences I will discuss later.
My second claim is that parents in the United States are primarily focused on their children eventually obtaining high paying jobs. Parents are primarily interested in educating their children in the service of this goal and education itself (as a means of self-improvement) is a secondary or non-existent concern. To justify this point, I have only my own observations about how education is presented to young people: high school is presented as the barest pre-requisite for employment and college is presented as the pre-requisite for any remotely decent job. In high school, getting good grades and participating in extra-curicular activitities is important for getting into college. In college, grades are important where they influence the prospect of getting into graduate school, usually some kind of professional graduate school which leads to a lucrative career. Education is always presented to young people as something which is done in the service of eventually making money.
The New York Times article referenced above bemoans the rising cost of higher education; I think that skyrocketing tuition is easy to explain granted the claims I make above. My key points are as follows:
- Education is now an economic commodity used to make money. Schools are providing something financially valuable, so if they charge a lot for it people will pay it. Tuition has skyrocketed because of increased demand and because universities have realized they are sitting on a gold mine.
- School's dont compete by providing the best education because parents can't directly perceive what they are buying. They compete by providing the perception of the best education, in ways I will discuss in a moment.
Universities can create the perception of excellence by attracting good students or by generally looking like a healthy, vibrant institution. One way a university can attract good students is by having them already; other than this, every way in which a university can do one of the above things better requires $$$ MONEY $$$. Elite universities these days have their own PR people which costs money. They send massive amounts of mail out to every student in the country; many send mail to students they would not dream of admitting simply to create an image of exclusiveness by attracting more applicants. All of this costs money. Universities that want to move up in prestige build beautiful dorms, have awesome professional landscaping, and constantly build new buildings. This costs money. Parents use all of these things to try and evaluation the quality of education because they can't evaluate it directly, and all of these things cost tons of money. [I have some more to say here]
