Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Recently Zdeno, who not long ago attended University in Canada, presented his take on the state of things in higher education in North America. He promised a follow-up with his views on how to fix things, and here it is.

About which: As your one-armed buddy says when you ask him what it was like back in ‘Nam, I can only say, “You had to be there.” Mountains of textbooks, lectures and PowerPoint slides, all repackaging whichever pseudo-scientific theories-of-week were published in this month’s Harvard Business Review. I won’t be so cruel as to recommend you actually peruse any of this material, but please spend a few minutes clicking through some Dilbert comics. There is a reason why Scott Adam’s caricature of the useless, pointy-haired business-school graduate resonates with so many.

But let’s say we give every business school the axe. What will replace them? My answer: Nothing. Craters, hopefully. If a kid wants to learn about business, the best thing he can do is go work in one. Once he figures out what kind of role he’s best suited for, he can learn the skills required along the way. How hard is it to calculate a net present value? Not very. Next up: The Arts.

This one’s not so hard either. Most of what is taught in Arts departments is either completely worthless - Gender, Ethnic, Post-Colonial, and Marxist-Leninist Studies – or so poorly taught that their inclusion in any sane curriculum of the future would require a complete break from any pre-2009 intellectual tradition – Anthropology, Sociology, English Literature, Criminology, Political Science. Without the University system as it exists today, these areas of inquiry would be relegated to the fringe, studied only by those interested in understanding the peculiarities of 20th-century academia.

The more sensible subjects in the Arts faculty, such as Psychology, Economics, and foreign Languages - are green shoots pushing through the cracks in a concrete parking lot. I will punt these into the next category: Legitimate fields of inquiry.

This group comprises areas of study that I consider valid, interesting and useful. Unlike the above-mentioned departments, I feel the world would be a much poorer place without dedicated people and institutions advancing the state of human knowledge in the Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Economics, History, and (after a complete revamp) Literature, Poli Sci and Anthropology.

I also include in this category the professions that currently require many years of intensive schooling, such as Law and Medicine.

These subjects – and here I tip my hand, revealing my radical Libertarian leanings – can and should be taught and researched by private citizens, free from government funding and influence. For-profit R&D institutions will advance the state of human knowledge in science and technology. The rest can be taken up by individuals, motivated by curiosity and linked together by this wonderful thing called “the internet”.

So there’s my big idea. Insane? Perhaps. But in my opinion, no more insane than maintaining the fatally flawed status quo. For those interested in further reading on the subject, Check out Murray Rothbard on compulsory education here. Wash that down with some Milton Friedman, and finish it all off with Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man [link is to pdf]. If you can make it through them without developing a healthy skepticism of government-monopolized education, than your convictions are strong indeed.

Of course, I doubt you’re a convert to my admittedly eccentric viewpoint yet. My question to you, Blowhards: Why not? What would we miss out on, if we shut down all post-secondary education funding tomorrow, and deregulated every profession that currently requires a state-sanctioned accreditation?

Thank you for stirring the pot again, Zdeno.

I'll kick off comments by wondering how you would deal with the two-headed monster Accreditation / Credentialism that is deeply buried into hiring practices and requirements of governments and larger businesses.

Later,

Donald

As a long time denizen of the humanities branch of academics (and a self-exile) I really need to think this one out. It merits more than a small broadside.

Posted by: Spike Gomes on October 28, 2009 1:05 AM

These subjects – and here I tip my hand, revealing my radical Libertarian leanings – can and should be taught and researched by private citizens, free from government funding and influence.

Here I'm in the Moldbug camp. The problem is not the bulldozer, it's the gorilla.

I think a reasonably competent government could do a good job of funding basic research. I obviously wouldn't want it to be the only source. But plenty of great technology has come out of government research.

As a short term solution, there may be a few ways for a government to effectively manage the science/medicine/history departments.

option a) Congress could simply split out the departments as independent non-profits, with its own board of directors. It would be given a set of consol bonds (government bonds with no maturity date). Rather than having a grant process, each department would determine it's own path of research.

option b) USG could switch management of the sciences from a grant based system to a prize based system. So if you found a certain medicine that passed X tests for curing cancer, then your department would receive $500 million.

option c) Split off each department as it's own non-profit. Then have a jury of nine citizens sit as the board of directors. Candidates for the jury would have to pass a battery of scientific tests, then they would be picked randomly. They would serve for four years as members of the board, and would be responsible for appointing the executive director of the science department.

I think any of the above options, if implemented properly, would be superior to complete abolition. Of course, there is no chance of our political system implementing any of these ideas properly, which gets us back to the real problem: the gorilla on the loose.

I'll kick off comments by wondering how you would deal with the two-headed monster Accreditation / Credentialism that is deeply buried into hiring practices and requirements of governments and larger businesses

Well, if we're going to liquidate the universities, we might as well repeal all laws that create the degree requirements for various jobs. The rest will take care of itself. I do plenty of hiring at a tech company, and I really wish people would just stop putting their college on their resume, it just introduces noise.

Posted by: Devin Finbarr on October 28, 2009 1:56 AM

Okay, I'm vehemently opposed to most of this, but I'll play along anyway.

There's a strong claim to be made that universities mostly provide a signaling mechanism for businesses that wish to hire. i.e. you can be reasonably certain that someone with a university degree from somewhere reasonably reputable shows at least a minimal amount of conscientiousness.

For those students interested in the arts, how do they signal their worthiness to hold a job (where, we assume, little specific education is needed (i.e. management))?

Don't go saying business will have to change. In my experience, they're as hidebound as government, if not more so.

Posted by: Tom West on October 28, 2009 2:05 AM

Whoops, Donald already covered by question. It always helps if you read the last paragraph of the post. Oh well, I blame my education :-).

However, I do look forward to Zdeno's response to Donald's question.

Credentialism *is* valuable. Devin Finbar might not care which college someone went to, but would he be happy not knowing whether someone went to college at all? Personally, I'd like to be assured that a potential hiree has demonstrated at least the ability to work independently.

Posted by: Tom West on October 28, 2009 9:11 AM

Thanks again Donald for my fifteen minutes!

@ Devon:

Appreciate the thoughtful comment. Needless to say, I am well-steeped in Moldbuggery, although my thoughts on most matters skew towards Burkean caution, relative to MM.

As for government funded research, I think a responsible government could do some good. Indeed, when the chips have been down in the past, the US Government split the atom and put a man on the moon. But since then? Bueller? Bueller? I think our research priorities should be determined by 1) What creates value, as measured by what people are willing to pay for, and 2) What interests people, as measured by their willingness to devote their free time to it. For projects that generate large externalities - take carbon abatement as an example, even if the only externality you associate with it is that we'll be rid of "Green" as a rhetorical tactic for increasing the size and scope of government - I am all in favour of prize-based funding.

The solution to the accreditation mess is simple: Make it illegal for employers to discriminate based on educational attainment, and forbid applicants from including such information on their resume, just as we do now with race, marital status etc. I first heard this idea somewhere at UR although I can't dig up the post right now, and I think it's a good one.

@ Tom:

You raise a good point, but if you really think we would lose a valuable source of quality-signaling, check out this study:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/data_and_dogma.html

Educational attainment is about as useful as handwriting analysis in assessing applicant quality. If you want to hire a doctor, have him write a week-long MCAT and work in a 12-month assessment/internship. Any doctors (or lawyers, dentists, etc) want to comment on which they think would provide a better signal?

Education is only a useful signal today because it is a proxy for variables that are illegal to measure. Once you include IQ in the regression, the significance of education as a predictor of quality dries up. Microsoft, and most big tech firms if I've heard right, are notorious for basing their hiring decisions on what basically amount to IQ/critical thinking tests. There's a book out there that purports to collect all of MS's infamous interview questions, a little googling should turn it up.

@ Spike:

Bring it =)

Cheers,

Zdeno

Posted by: Zdeno on October 28, 2009 9:33 AM

Tom-

Not having gone to college is actually a plus in my book, assuming that their other experience is satisfactory (ie, that they have a solid portfolio/history of accomplishment). Not going to college indicates that they had the drive and ability to teach themselves.

From an employers perspective, a degree could easily be replaced by a portfolio plus assessment tests plus resume.

Posted by: Devin Finbarr on October 28, 2009 9:42 AM

All -- Quick administrative note: I'm driving towards California today, so I won't be able to screen and post comments often until we haul into a motel.

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on October 28, 2009 9:55 AM

For-profit R&D institutions will advance the state of human knowledge in science and technology. The rest can be taken up by individuals, motivated by curiosity and linked together by this wonderful thing called “the internet”.

Ugh. Libertarianism is so stupid. Federal spending on R&D has been immensely useful. Private companies suck at research that won't bear fruits for a few years (or decades) but has to be done and curious individuals can't afford it.

Posted by: JewishAtheist on October 28, 2009 11:44 AM

please spend a few minutes clicking through some Dilbert comics. There is a reason why Scott Adam’s caricature of the useless, pointy-haired business-school graduate resonates with so many

Minor nitpick: the people in Dilbert are engineers.

Posted by: Peter on October 28, 2009 2:00 PM

@ Peter:

Yes, but the boss is a biz-school guy, or so is my understanding. I'd look it up, but I've been taught by our postmodern Universities that authorial intent is irrelevant - my interpretation of the text is sufficient =)

@ JA:

Libertarianism thinks YOU'RE stupid. And that your mother wears army boots. You, Libertarianism, flagpole, tomorrow at recess.

Alternatively, you could make a list of all the wonderful life-changing technological advances that have been handed down to us from the post-1960's University system. Or you could explain how all the legitimately life-changing technology being produced by Google, Apple, Wal-Mart, etc., actually "suck."

Also, seeing as how firms are too stupid to conduct research that will take years to pay off, perhaps we can get together and start some sort of business that tackles these areas. We may not have the VC to kick it off ourselves, but being as you are better able to spot profitable research opportunities than our current crop of investors, I'm sure we can throw together some PowerPoint slides persuasive enough to get some Angel investors on our side.

In all seriousness, I'm hoping you come back with something more substantial - you're generally an insightful commenter around these parts, and I'd be interested in finding out exactly where we disagree.

Cheers,

Zdeno

Posted by: Zdeno on October 28, 2009 3:01 PM

assuming that their other experience is satisfactory (ie, that they have a solid portfolio/history of accomplishment)

I would certainly agree that work experience trumps education in terms of predictive ability. But what about when they *don't* have any track record? If you hire any students straight out of university, would you also consider hiring students straight out of High School?

Posted by: Tom West on October 28, 2009 3:17 PM

"Indeed, when the chips have been down in the past, the US Government split the atom ...": only in an alternative universe. I don't know, the standard of history teaching nowadays.....

Posted by: dearieme on October 28, 2009 4:20 PM

"Indeed, when the chips have been down in the past, the US Government split the atom ...": only in an alternative universe. I don't know, the standard of history teaching nowadays.....

Posted by: dearieme on October 28, 2009 4:20 PM

B-b-b-but...what do we do without college football??!!??

Posted by: Bob Grier on October 28, 2009 5:48 PM

Zdeno, I am sympathetic to the general theory behind your essay. I often think that a lot of the problems with public schools could be lessened by adopting Milton Friedman's voucher idea. BUT, I too went to university (McGill) in Canada, in the humanities, and while some of it is as you depict, a great deal of it isn't. I did 2.5 degrees in music (bachelor's, master's equivalent and all the seminars for a doctorate) and while there was a small amount of 'studies' nonsense, for the most part the courses were good old-fashioned tough courses in music theory, ear-training, instrumental instruction, history and so on. People that couldn't cut it were failed. The faculty had an immense store of knowledge and the library contained much that would probably be irreplaceable. So, destroying this department would certainly be the act of barbarians and cause irreparable harm to the practice of music. And these days, with boom-box cars roaming the streets like demons from the pit of hell, you aren't going to convince me that we don't need a few Bach scholars.

Sorry, agree, partly, in theory, but in practice: bad idea.

Posted by: Bryan on October 28, 2009 7:22 PM

"If you want to hire a doctor, have him write a week-long MCAT and work in a 12-month assessment/internship."

Without even so much as a high school level course in physiology, I can't imagine anything short of a catastrophe.

Is it possible for someone to acquire the autodidact's equivalent of a convetional law or medical school's curriculum? It's possible, but it would also take one about as much time as it takes to just to go the appropriate grad school. You'll also need a trust fund to live off while you teach yourself for several years.

Posted by: Peter L. Winkler on October 28, 2009 7:40 PM

Tom West-

First, we expect some sort of track record out of anybody we hire. If they have no job history and no personal projects, then we wouldn't hire them as a programmer.

We would definitely hire students out of high school if a) they actually applied and b) they intended to stick around a few years.

But we don't get any applicants from high schoolers. Why would they work when they can get subsidized to party for four years?

Posted by: Devin Finbarr on October 28, 2009 9:43 PM

Tom-

Check out this article by a the CEO of a major Indian software company, for one take on how recruiting would work in a world without college: http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education

This is, of course, nothing new. This is exactly how things worked before the university system sucked every capable young adult into its tentacles.

Here's a fund little exercise. Find a wikipedia page with a random selection of 19th century professionals ( for instance, page through the Presidents of the British Civil Engineering society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Locke or a list of architects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_architects )

Read their bios. Notice how they got their jobs and when they entered the workforce. You'll notice about half never went to college. Those that went to college were usually out before turning twenty.

Engineering and architecture doesn't require any more training today than it did back then. We lived without college before and we can do it again. The resulting system would be both cheaper and more productive. There's no need to put young adults in a holding pattern for four years, where they can drink themselves silly.

Posted by: Devin Finbarr on October 28, 2009 10:09 PM

Okay, having had a chance to think about it, let me get to the meat of my disagreement.

Zdeno's proposals have two aspects to them

(1) I'm inferring from his choice of departments that he's not really in favour (at least for purposes of this article) of education that isn't immediately job-related.

Well, we have institutions for that specific purpose - community colleges. In fact, my experience with a computer science education was that I received almost no directly applicable skills. When I graduated, I did not use a single one of the languages or operating systems that we had been taught with.

However, that was beside the point. We weren't there to pick up specific skills, we were there to, as they say, "learn how to learn". Obviously, these ways of thinking were geared to CS, but they weren't *directly* applicable immediately.

Yet, for all the nebulous non-job oriented education, university students have been, in my experience, better suited to an ever-changing environment.

Likewise, I strongly suspect that those being educated in other non-technical departments *are* obtaining valuable skills, but also of a non-easily measured nature.

(2) I think our research priorities should be determined by 1) What creates value, as measured by what people are willing to pay for, and 2) What interests people, as measured by their willingness to devote their free time to it.

The trouble is that the most valuable type of research is not simply the first level of technological development, but providing the infrastructure that makes thinking/reasoning about such developments even possible.

That sort of research isn't directly monetizable in any fashion whatsoever. Instead, it becomes part of the fabric from which other research can spring.

All in all, the proposal reeks of the "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist". While frustrating (after all, how can you argue for or against something if you don't have numbers to back up one side or the other), I have to take a conservative view. Even if we don't understand exactly how universities contribute both socially and economically to society, we do know that pretty consistently societies that don't have some sort of university structure are usually bereft of many of the attributes that we most admire. That is enough to persuade me that universities in general add something to society that makes them worth preserving.

I'm not really in a hurry to see North America adopt the strongly materialistic approach to education that characterizes India or China.

Posted by: Tom West on October 28, 2009 11:51 PM

We lived without college before and we can do it again. The resulting system would be both cheaper and more productive.

Yes and no. It would certainly be so in the short term. But my personal experience has been that the college/university experience tends to provide a much wider set of perspectives that allow for greater productivity in the long run by allowing non-traditional (that get adopted and eventually become the new tradition) approaches to problems.

I'll admit that if creativity of approach is not particularly needed or desired, the advantages of such an education are not going to have any opportunity to pay off. I'll also admit the payoffs are *highly* non-linear.

But with a sharp reduction in those who are willing and able to shift paradigms (and they may be small ones, such as how a department approaches a problem, or large ones, such as entering new lines of businesses), I think you'd see a real long-term harm in reducing education to simply skills-of-the-moment based corporate training.

Just to be clear here - there's absolutely nothing that prevents those without a college education from achieving any of the same results as a college educated student. It's simply the ease and likelihood of such, given an opportunity to sample dozens of different academic disciplines, tackle larger open ended questions, etc.

Honestly, I think the Western university tradition is one of the reasons that our social and economic path differs from countries like India and China. Given their challenges, they simply can't afford (at the moment) an education system that fosters a sort of nebulous and impossible to measure creativity.

As to all those 19th century engineers who didn't have formal qualifications - I admire them greatly. I also wonder that if such education had been more generally available whether we would have had ten times as many of them.

And yes, spending four years drinking isn't going to get you very far, but then I don't know anyone who actually did and managed to graduate. Like welfare queens and hypergamy, we risk turning entertaining anecdote into a fictitious perception of reality.

Posted by: Tom West on October 29, 2009 9:51 AM

The University system of the United States long ago dispensed of the idea of creating an educated man. They are indeed diploma mills, and the emphasis that Zdeno puts on making that diploma pay off for the increasingly ridiculous investment of money that's required for a paper certification is not only practical, but proper. Anything else can be classified as theft on the part of the University.

As far as teaching students to appreciate the arts, how to read and understand literature, or argument, or pure science, that can be done at the community college level. These fall under the banner of teaching the student a particular worldview, and that is where the propagandizing of the studnet body, currently into the arms of the most bizarre forms of communism, is taking place. Putting that aspect of University education back under community control would put the brakes on the loony leftist agenda.

And if the practical were the emphasis of the mercenary educators of the University, the curriculums could be shaved down considerably.

As it stands, the overall agenda of the University system is to financially, culturally, and intellectually impoverish the vast majority of its students, all while claiming the exact opposite. That's what needs to change.

Posted by: Y on October 29, 2009 10:24 AM

Three points.
First, I agree academics are too soft and easily swayed by pandering to biases. I once wrote an anthro paper on "The Terminator," for crying out loud. I also got through a religion exam by bad-mouthing Nixon. So changing the professorial pool would help.
Second, many of these issues can be addressed by making students work harder. You're only in class for a few hours a day. The recent of the time you're supposed to be studying. How do you ensure students are doing what they're supposed to? By testing them and grading them. By making the tests include both subjects covered in lecture and subjects covered in the extensive reading lists. Then grading those tests on an actual display of knowledge and learning. (I'm counting papers as a form of testing).
Finally, schools should release those grades to potential employers. You can graduate from Wharton at the bottom of your class and all the school can tell a potential employer is that student did indeed graduate. A professor there told me his students were worse than the undergrads because they knew they only needed to do enough not to flunk out.

Posted by: Ted Craig on October 29, 2009 11:18 AM

Zdeno:

Libertarianism thinks YOU'RE stupid. And that your mother wears army boots. You, Libertarianism, flagpole, tomorrow at recess.

LOL, point taken.

Alternatively, you could make a list of all the wonderful life-changing technological advances that have been handed down to us from the post-1960's University system.

To be fair, I wasn't thinking just of the University system, but all government-sponsored research. So, for example, the internet!

Also complicating things is the fact that you're asking for technological advances, but government research basically lays the groundwork for those advances. So government-sponsored researchers will study in depth, say, how the flagellum moves in a particular kind of microorganism. Later, a private company (with some public funding, probably) will build on that research to develop an experimental drug.

Or you could explain how all the legitimately life-changing technology being produced by Google, Apple, Wal-Mart, etc., actually "suck."

I said they suck at long-term research. Short term, they're very good. But take voice recognition, for example. Government-sponsored research paid for a lot of the development of various algorithms, I'm sure. And then Apple and Google get to use and modify them.

I'm not aware of any technological advances (as opposed to business "advances") done by Wal-Mart.

Also, seeing as how firms are too stupid to conduct research that will take years to pay off, perhaps we can get together and start some sort of business that tackles these areas. We may not have the VC to kick it off ourselves, but being as you are better able to spot profitable research opportunities than our current crop of investors, I'm sure we can throw together some PowerPoint slides persuasive enough to get some Angel investors on our side.

What, we're going to go to investor and say, hey this thing isn't going to turn a profit for 40 years and even then, most of the profit is going to go to whichever private company ends up marketing it the best, can you give us a few hundred million bucks?

In all seriousness, I'm hoping you come back with something more substantial - you're generally an insightful commenter around these parts, and I'd be interested in finding out exactly where we disagree.

I think we disagree on the value of basic research. Research on things that will probably be helpful to somebody down the line but there's no clear way to turn a profit on anytime soon. Like, bacterial flagella. Or how alligators sense sound in marshes. Or subatomic physics -- what private company is going to build a LHC?

Posted by: JewishAtheist on October 29, 2009 11:44 AM

"Alternatively, you could make a list of all the wonderful life-changing technological advances that have been handed down to us from the post-1960's University system. Or you could explain how all the legitimately life-changing technology being produced by Google, Apple, Wal-Mart, etc., actually "suck.""

This is a common libertarian argument. "Look how well a few extraordinarily gifted and motivated people did without the benefit of a larger institution! Hence, we don't need those institutions!" The reality as I see it is those people will succeed no matter what. That's what extraordinary people do. The rest of us could us a little help and training.

And by the way, who do the companies you mention hire? Almost exclusively, college-educated people, many of them with advanced degrees.

Posted by: JV on October 29, 2009 12:49 PM

You're absolutely correct. We're advocating a similar dismantling of educational system in Israel. The situation is especially bad for schools: no adult remembers anything he had been taught there, it's a complete waste of 12 years time.
Also, you overestimate the value of economy studies. Economics is a false science only good in explaining the failures post factum.

Posted by: Dan @ Israeli Uncensored News on November 2, 2009 2:09 PM

Found some interesting essays from Devlin, one recent and one from few years ago, which are mostly thoughts on academia, his experiences and observations.

http://www.toqonline.com/2009/10/f-roger-devlin-on-why-we-write/

http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol6no4/DevlinV6N47x10.pdf

(Google cache at: http://tinyurl.com/academyd ; mostly intact, except for the first sentence, which is hard to read on my PC.)

Posted by: anon on November 13, 2009 11:14 AM






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