The question is: Who is the customer? You could say the customer is the student who pays the university for the education. Or you could say the customer is the employer who hires the graduate.
There has been the impression in the past that getting a degree meant getting a job, but this is not the case. Employers, who have more at stake when hiring don't have to wait 4 years to learn whether or not their "purchase" was a good one. They are learning that the value of a college degree is not much when used as a predictor of job success. More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't.
This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after.
This is a problem with money really. It's a philosophical life issue. Is your goal to receive value from the rest of the world, or to create value for the rest of the world. No one wants to work anymore. We've gotten lazy and complacent. The job has become avoiding work, when all too often, doing the work is easier than avoiding it.
Life has become too easy for too many. The rest of the world is eating America's lunch. Even our president thinks it's fine to "bailout" businesses who don't want to put the effort into producing products the world wants to buy. They are losing out to better innovation, better business models, and harder work from their competitors around the world.
For too long, education has been selling hope for a better life, a better job, a higher income. So students go into debt. Debt has allowed universities to continue charging more and more and more over time with deferred payment plans that yield little consequence to the full time student who doesn't yet understand the concept of debt or even money.
And let's not forget the parents who spend more time at work than at home teaching their children good values, a work ethic, how to care for themselves, the value of money.
America is really in a sad state of affairs. A depression is definitely on the way. Life has been too easy for too long. It's amazing as I think about it right now, I can feel it. I can feel the exhuberance evaporating. I can feel the realization setting in that our hopes and dreams for an easy future are being dashed. Only a few people really get it right now. There is still an air of optimism floating around. People are thinking, "No... no really, we can keep going like this... we can. If only we try."
But we can't. We can't keep going like this and be worth anything. What we are doing isn't worth anything. Who wants to pay for it? What is the value? What's the value of your college degree? What's the value of your employment? What's the value of your iPod and your 6 room house in the suburbs and your SUV and your $20,000 in credit card debt and $125,000 in student loans.
Too many people are falling for the clever sales and marketing strategy of the universities, the car companies, the banks, the real estate agents. The irrational are the prey. The predators are eating your money and you are left empty -- today and tomorrow.
The easy path is the path to destruction. You have to work. You have to think. You have to analyze and predict and learn math.
This stuff is hard folks. It's hard to do things faster, or cheaper, or better than everyone else. Mediocrity isn't valuable. You have to be the cream of the crop. You have to work and practice and strive for perfection every day.
No one said life was going to be easy. It's even harder now that the competition has become everyone in the world.
Well, if we're ranting, I might as well add my gripes:
One of the things people need to realize is that in order to earn $80.000 a year, you have to create say $130.000 for the company to break even on you. It isn't easy to create this kind of value every year. If you're in the producing layer of a company (software engineer / graphic designer) you have to create enough value to also pay for all the salaries of your managers, testers, secretaries and all other non-producing employees.
People focus way too much on what their want to earn, not on how to create value. The reasoning often goes like this "I have to do X, which is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y, so I should earn more than that!". Almost everybody has this weird concept of a "fair" salary, that has no bearing on reality.
This is a very idealistic approach. There are industries which have not produced a dime of revenue for many years and keep existing and employing a lot of people for political reasons.
Even in sectors actually governed by the free market, what you say only has to be true on average. As a software engineer I know I have worked at places that produced no value whatsoever to anyone. Once I wrote a Perl script that immediately saved the guy I worked for something in the neighborhood of my monthly salary per day. That was the only time in my life that I could actually say that I understood how my work translated to money. Usually you just write code which is a small part of someone's great plan which in a few years time may go somewhere or not depending on things that are outside of your control.
Except... if X is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y dollars, but people who do X will earn less than Y dollars, who in their right mind is going to go and do X?
If the effort/reward/value equation doesn't balance, the role will go unfilled until it does.
But that's the way it's supposed to work. If nobody is willing to pay more than $Y for X that is harder than Y, then you shouldn't go into it. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
You're looking at an instantaneous snapshot of a dynamic system. If it's a problem that nobody will do X, then people will pay more for it once the feedback propagates through. If it never does, then it wasn't worth it and you shouldn't specialize in it.
jerf, you aren't looking at it from two perspectives. Both employers and employees have options. If an employee could do teaching or job x, and teaching pays $30k and job x pays $60k, which should the employee take? If teachers earned more, then the pool of talent gets larger.
You say, If it's a problem that nobody will do X, when really the issue is, "Nobody will do X for $X, but lots will do X for $Y."
In something as complex as a society, society has to make investments it its future. In our society, we have become so short focused on quarterly reports, that we have forgotten the value of education. The payoff of education to a society takes years, decades, generations... this is beyond simple supply/demand microeconomics.
You've attached extra semantics to X and Y that were not in the original post. I do not apologize for failing to guess what you would read those variables as.
I acknowledge the value of government in tweaking the market values of some things; I'm only a little-l libertarian. However, as an engineer, I observe that in order to do that successfully, you have to start with a correct understanding of how the market works, dynamically, not just statically. Getting emotional about valuations the market gives is not a good start.
It is not beyond supply/demand. If I can see the value of education for my lifetime of earnings is greater than what it will cost me I will do it. If it's not or I can't tell, I will not. Crying about the short sightedness of others on this dimension or many others is nothing new.
You made several points, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, but I am just going to address a couple that I consider key.
"More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't."
I agree with this statement, but it comes with a caveat you left out. When most people are just starting out, they don't have any work experience with mentioning. The way to get this is to get that first professional job, but having a degree is (for most people) the best way to get that first professional job. Now once you have that work experience the degree matters a lot less, but it is easiest to get that work experience in the first place with a degree.
"This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after."
I largely disagree with this. After going through numerous interviews and hiring cycles as both a job seeker and a hiring manager, I have never asked a candidate for their GPA nor have I been asked for mine. GPA does matter for some things (Grad schools always ask for it, and so do some government agencies) but most employers don't care about it.
"A depression is definitely on the way."
Can you justify this? Most of the economicists I listen to predict that our current recession is going to end by 2010. That of course does not mean we are going to return to where things where. It takes a long time after a recession ends for the economy as a whole (and particularly) jobs return to their previous levels, but it does mean things seem to be getting better, not worse.
Which economists? Most economists I listened to 3-5 years ago thought everything was fine.
I can justify it by looking around at the world. I see an over-abundance of debt. I see too many imports and not enough exports. I see a housing market that is continuing to decline. More layoffs on the way means even more people won't be able to pay their bills. I see that we are spending too much money on guns and not enough money on butter.
I only took micro and macro in college, so I'm no economist, but all the signs are pointing to more decline. I look to history to tell me what the future will hold and it's looking a lot like 1929, years before the depression started.
My question for you is: What is going to pull us up? What value are we going to create that is going to bring us money?
I do not know when the recession will end, but I would prefer a stronger justification before believing that professional economicists like Dr. Duy of the University of Oregon are necessarily wrong about the recession ending around 2010, and saying that we are heading for a depression is a very strong statement indeed.
Yes, the housing and employment markets are continuing to decline. This is expected. We are still in a recession, and even when it ends those are lagging indicators so they are likely to remain bad even after the recession is over. But the rate at which they decline (in other words, their second derivative) has lessened. Also, many of the leading indicators (stock market, bond market) have stabilized.
I do not understand the relavence of your statement about guns and butter, and if this is so like 1929, how so?
I do not know what will end the recession, or even if something specifically needs to end it. The economy is after all cyclic. but you made a very strong and direct statement that we are heading for a depression. Given that this is contradicted by most of the economic experts that are referenced in newspapers, do you have any stronger justification?
There has been the impression in the past that getting a degree meant getting a job, but this is not the case. Employers, who have more at stake when hiring don't have to wait 4 years to learn whether or not their "purchase" was a good one. They are learning that the value of a college degree is not much when used as a predictor of job success. More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't.
This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after.
This is a problem with money really. It's a philosophical life issue. Is your goal to receive value from the rest of the world, or to create value for the rest of the world. No one wants to work anymore. We've gotten lazy and complacent. The job has become avoiding work, when all too often, doing the work is easier than avoiding it.
Life has become too easy for too many. The rest of the world is eating America's lunch. Even our president thinks it's fine to "bailout" businesses who don't want to put the effort into producing products the world wants to buy. They are losing out to better innovation, better business models, and harder work from their competitors around the world.
For too long, education has been selling hope for a better life, a better job, a higher income. So students go into debt. Debt has allowed universities to continue charging more and more and more over time with deferred payment plans that yield little consequence to the full time student who doesn't yet understand the concept of debt or even money.
And let's not forget the parents who spend more time at work than at home teaching their children good values, a work ethic, how to care for themselves, the value of money.
America is really in a sad state of affairs. A depression is definitely on the way. Life has been too easy for too long. It's amazing as I think about it right now, I can feel it. I can feel the exhuberance evaporating. I can feel the realization setting in that our hopes and dreams for an easy future are being dashed. Only a few people really get it right now. There is still an air of optimism floating around. People are thinking, "No... no really, we can keep going like this... we can. If only we try."
But we can't. We can't keep going like this and be worth anything. What we are doing isn't worth anything. Who wants to pay for it? What is the value? What's the value of your college degree? What's the value of your employment? What's the value of your iPod and your 6 room house in the suburbs and your SUV and your $20,000 in credit card debt and $125,000 in student loans.
Too many people are falling for the clever sales and marketing strategy of the universities, the car companies, the banks, the real estate agents. The irrational are the prey. The predators are eating your money and you are left empty -- today and tomorrow.
The easy path is the path to destruction. You have to work. You have to think. You have to analyze and predict and learn math.
This stuff is hard folks. It's hard to do things faster, or cheaper, or better than everyone else. Mediocrity isn't valuable. You have to be the cream of the crop. You have to work and practice and strive for perfection every day.
No one said life was going to be easy. It's even harder now that the competition has become everyone in the world.