Higher Education: What are you paying for?

[JPhillips]

With graduation yesterday, I've been thinking about what people expect when they come to college. So I ask everybody here, what do you expect for your tuition dollars?

[Mustang]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

So I ask everybody here, what do you expect for your tuition dollars?

I expected nothing more than to fill out someone's prerequisite for a job.

[Lathum]

I am fiercely proud of the fact that I graduated college since I went back full time at 32. The main reason I did was to get a decent job. It's just a fact that if you don't have your degree you greatly reduce your odds of finding a good job.

[JPhillips]

Should you get anything outside of specific, job related skills?

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

Should you get anything outside of specific, job related skills?

Sure, a piece of paper. Technically that isn't a specific "skill" but more like a sweepstakes entry.

[lungs]

College for me wasn't really about learning the "how to" but more the "why".

I was a pretty weak college student with a terrible GPA but I've been able to apply what I've learned well in the field. Some people are brilliant students but once they get into the field they don't know how to apply their brains to do what they are doing.

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

Sure, a piece of paper. Technically that isn't a specific "skill" but more like a sweepstakes entry.

Do you feel like you were owed the diploma for your tuition dollars?

[Buccaneer]

Your question in the post was not what I anticipated in reading the title. My first answer to your thread title is that you are paying for a lot of waste, entitlements and a merit-less, gameplaying system. But that wasn't your question.

I echo what the others are saying - you are paying for a resume ticket and a job requirement. For some, esp. those paying obscene tuition, you are also paying for a social network. For many, the content does not matter - it's just being able to complete the goal.

I have been on many interview panels for filling highly-paid IT positions. Not once in all of the years did we ask or care about what college or what coursework. HR filters out the ones without a degree before the apps get to us, so that becomes irrelevant.

[QuikSand]

Okay, maybe a slightly fairer answer, then.

I think higher education is a setting where people, especially young people who are at a pretty critical point in their maturity, can make decisions about who they are going to be, and what their priorities will be. I think investing in higher education, for yourself or for a loved one, is in pursuit of making that environment a productive and positive one so that those decisions may be beneficial.

Overall, a traditional college-age student who spends 4 years (or whatever) in college is faced with a variety of complicated things like time management, seriousness of academic pursuits, and management of social pressures and stresses. The way she deals with these things, and the outcomes she derives from them, can direct a great deal of what she has ahead -- yes, professionally, but much wider than that.

I'm generally of the opinion that a "good enough" collegiate setting is a positive environment for people of that age to experience those changes, and that by having a range of educational, social, political, and cultural opportunities surround her then offers some real opportunities for development and maturity that she probably wouldn't have received had she opted instead to go to work in retail or some other nominally defensible choice

[Buccaneer]

Well, it HAS been 25 years since I left college and we had only interviewed candidates with 5-15 years of experience. College is a distant memory...

[wade moore]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

Okay, maybe a slightly fairer answer, then.

I think higher education is a setting where people, especially young people who are at a pretty critical point in their maturity, can make decisions about who they are going to be, and what their priorities will be. I think investing in higher education, for yourself or for a loved one, is in pursuit of making that environment a productive and positive one so that those decisions may be beneficial.

Overall, a traditional college-age student who spends 4 years (or whatever) in college is faced with a variety of complicated things like time management, seriousness of academic pursuits, and management of social pressures and stresses. The way she deals with these things, and the outcomes she derives from them, can direct a great deal of what she has ahead -- yes, professionally, but much wider than that.

I'm generally of the opinion that a "good enough" collegiate setting is a positive environment for people of that age to experience those changes, and that by having a range of educational, social, political, and cultural opportunities surround her then offers some real opportunities for development and maturity that she probably wouldn't have received had she opted instead to go to work in retail or some other nominally defensible choice

Quik said a lot of what I think in a much better way. I think those that say "just a piece of paper" have various biases and are not looking at it objectively.

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

Your question in the post was not what I anticipated in reading the title. My first answer to your thread title is that you are paying for a lot of waste, entitlements and a merit-less, gameplaying system. But that wasn't your question.

I echo what the others are saying - you are paying for a resume ticket and a job requirement. For some, esp. those paying obscene tuition, you are also paying for a social network. For many, the content does not matter - it's just being able to complete the goal.

I have been on many interview panels for filling highly-paid IT positions. Not once in all of the years did we ask or care about what college or what coursework. HR filters out the ones without a degree before the apps get to us, so that becomes irrelevant.

So for you, or your children, are you expecting more than a signal for perspective employers?

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by wade moore

Quik said a lot of what I think in a much better way. I think those that say "just a piece of paper" have various biases and are not looking at it objectively.

Just to be clear, I'm not looking for unbiased opinions. I'm not after the "true value" of higher ed, but the perceived value. As a professor I'd like to better understand what people think they should be getting when they come to college.

[wade moore]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

Just to be clear, I'm not looking for unbiased opinions. I'm not after the "true value" of higher ed, but the perceived value. As a professor I'd like to better understand what people think they should be getting when they come to college.

Ok, fair enough.

I still think those that say "just a piece of paper" are jaded and misguided.

[Buccaneer]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

So for you, or your children, are you expecting more than a signal for perspective employers?

Education, as a means without an end, is both selfish and a waste, imo. While I agree with Quik, I don't think it applies to a majority of college graduates from public colleges (in my perception). If a person is able to use the degree as a ticket to a professional career, whether in white-collar, blue-collar or self-employed, then it becomes worth it (as I did). My profession is not unlike many in that a college graduate may not mean much in the "real world". That's why we only look towards those with a proven track record of professional job experience and not a successful academic experience. In IT, the "value" of higher education has gone way down since the 1980s, mainly because of the rapid change in technology and the endless professional training opportunities. Maybe IT is somewhat unique in that and perhaps my bias in the way I/we measure the value of higher education.

[Comey]

My undergrad was about the experience, and then about getting something that would help me get a job.

My grad school experience is specific to what I want to do in my life. I don't think it's a coincidence that these two experiences were seven years apart (from the end of my undergrad to the beginning of grad school).

[flounder]

My wife is a professor, and listening to her vent has given me some insight, I think, to what students are looking for. (SHE DOES NOT ENDORSE THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HERE!!!1!Q)

Most of them just want the piece of paper. They want a job and to get a good job you need a degree. They are only interested in doing the bare minimum to get that degree. They learn something in order to pass the next test and then it's immediately forgotten. The more enterprising among them have figured out that it's much easier to pester the professor to get your grade raised (or cheat) than it is to actually put in the work necessary. This has no correlation with the student's intelligence; some of the worst offenders are the brightest (pre-med being the stereotypical major).

Some of them are there to learn job related skills. They put in the work necessary, but if it's in a field unrelated to their desired occupation they won't be enthusiastic. They don't particularly care why things are done a certain way, but they'll learn the hell out of doing it that way. These tend to be older students who have gone back to school to improve their job prospects. I think my wife would much rather teach someone from this group than someone three times as intelligent from the first group.

Rarely you find someone who is actually in school to learn how to think. They not only want to know how to do something, they want to know why and if it can be done in a better way. They will apply knowledge learned in other classes to new problems. These students drive her crazy sometimes because they ask a lot of questions that wander off subject and can derail the lecture if not corralled. Still, I can tell when she has one of these students in her class because she enjoys the job much more. These people, whether they realize it or not, are in college to learn to think critically and analytically.

As someone who's been involved in hiring, I can tell you what I wish a college diploma meant. I wish it meant that the applicant was from the last group, or at least could fake it enough to get by. There is just such an incredible shortage of people who can think critically. Our job applicants tend to be from two groups. The first are young people who forgot everything they learned in college and have to be trained from the ground up. The second are older people who learned how to do one or two things really well. Unfortunately, we don't do those one or two things anymore, and they are unwilling or unable to learn something new.

This turned into a really long rant that's only tangently related to your question, but I really wanted to urge you as a professor to do one thing: insist on teaching to that third group. I know that there is a lot of pressure on you to water down your classes to improve "student retention", but critical thinking needs to be taught. Right now, I'm just like Bucc. I don't care where you went or what you did at college because it doesn't tell me what I need to know. We have to rely on other things to evaluate our applicants. However, I really believe our colleges need to stop being extended high school and go back to being the institutions of higher learning they profess to be. Even if that means, God forbid, we might have to fail a student.

[Marc Vaughan]

My daughter will go off to university in approximately a year and a bits time - I sincerely hope that experience will give her a way in which to become more independant from my wife and I while at the same time not being fully part of the 'real world' (ie. having to fully pay bills etc.) .... I also hope she ends up with qualifacations which will help guide her into a career she enjoys, but thats only part of the package when it comes to university imho.

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

My daughter will go off to university in approximately a year and a bits time - I sincerely hope that experience will give her a way in which to become more independant from my wife and I while at the same time not being fully part of the 'real world' (ie. having to fully pay bills etc.) .... I also hope she ends up with qualifacations which will help guide her into a career she enjoys, but thats only part of the package when it comes to university imho.

Can you specify the other parts of the package?

[Young Drachma]

The world has changed a great deal in the past ten years, which I think has changed the way we view higher education and I think that's the dichotomy that we're seeing with the way we view what the value of a college degree really is.

The marketplace seems to have its own perspective about what the value of degrees are and I think we'll see a market correction as degrees are starting to become like most things we value. That is to say they're losing their value relative to their worth.

I still think they have immense value, but like most things it's all relative and it has something to do with who the person who is getting it. It's clearly no longer an instant scratchoff ticket to a job.

We've made a huge mistake as a society failing to provide real stewardship for kids who are trying to grow into new roles, preferring nepotism and just ignoring the things that provided upward mobility to so many.

To answer the question, I think a market correction would be good.

[molson]

Even back in 1996 when I started undergrad it just felt like a requirement. Kind of like a tax that kicked in at that age that I could borrow money to pay for. It would have been far more notable as an omission than it was for anything I received.

Law school was different. That was an investment that could have paid off or could have blown up in my face. But I was paying for an opportunity to increase my lifetime earnings, and do it in a field I enjoyed - the intellectual challenges and social aspects were a nice add-on to what I got for that tuition - but I don't think of those things as being a part of what I paid for. I paid for a piece of paper, an the job opportunities that absolutely require that piece of paper (I'm sure I could have acquired the knowledge, and achieved the necessary skills on my own, if that had been an option.) Undergrad, forget it - there's zero knowledge/skills there I couldn't have acquired on my own. But society and employers still want that verification of that knowledge and those skills, which higher learning provides. It gives you a checkmark of sorts, "ya, this guy can read and write."

[Izulde]

From my own admittedly scant experiences teaching at collegiate campuses, it seems that this generation of college-age students is very much interested in the practical value of the education and tend to regard anything they can't see the practical value (read: transferable to the workplace) of much less seriously.

This makes teaching classes in the humanities a bit problematic. Not so much composition classes, which they can readily see the value of, but literature-based classes, etc. Instructor enthusiasm can do a lot to overcome this resistance and make students more open to seeing the value and lessons able to be learned from studying the humanities.

In my opinion the -real- reason colleges have Gen Ed requirements is not so that you learn about all these different areas, but rather, so that you learn different ways of critical thinking and approaching problem solving. ...And in the case of a lot of freshman composition classes, teaching students the stuff they should have learned in high school but didn't, because the American high school system is a joke academically speaking. But that's a rant for another time.

I realized that totally didn't answer the original question, but oh well.

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

Can you specify the other parts of the package?

The bits I mentioned - the fact that its a step outside of living at home with 'mom and dad' fully taking care of things for her, for many people University is the first time they leave home.

They have semi-independance, in that while they're still 'funded' by grants/parents/whatever they have to learn to look after themselves (washing, cooking etc.) and managing their own time without parents nagging them continually.

That side of things is as important imho as the education itself ... if you never learn self motivation and self reliance then you're sodded regardless of the qualifacations you have really ..

[Noop]

As a guy with way to many degrees with another pending this fall. I think my undergrad degree were worth the price with the exception of Business which was a colossal time waste. My Liberal Arts degree (English) I feel prepared me for my next degree and allowed me to meet a lot of cool people.

I think school is worth it but not if it is going to put you in serious debt. I was fortunate to graduate with zero debt but I have heard of others who have serious debt. If wasn't able to get a scholarship to get my JD I would be afraid of that debt that is associated with law school. However like Molson and other lawyers I have spoken too it is well worth it especially if you can land a big law job.

[molson]

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

The bits I mentioned - the fact that its a step outside of living at home with 'mom and dad' fully taking care of things for her, for many people University is the first time they leave home.

They have semi-independance, in that while they're still 'funded' by grants/parents/whatever they have to learn to look after themselves (washing, cooking etc.) and managing their own time without parents nagging them continually.

That side of things is as important imho as the education itself ... if you never learn self motivation and self reliance then you're sodded regardless of the qualifacations you have really ..

I agree that that side of things is as important, and most American undergrad colleges actually offer literal parental services with the tuition - you have RAs, meal plans, health clinics that actually kind of treat you like a child, discipline, etc.

[JPhillips]

I want to steer the conversation a little. I'd like to stay away from reflections on what college has done for you and instead look at what you think you should get for your money. I know they overlap some, but I think we're moving away from my original question.

However, thanks to everyone participating. I'm going to try to find a creative way to include this question/discussion with my students.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

Do you feel like you were owed the diploma for your tuition dollars?

No ... which makes me wonder if I misread what you were really asking. If so, my bad.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

Just to be clear, I'm not looking for unbiased opinions. I'm not after the "true value" of higher ed, but the perceived value. As a professor I'd like to better understand what people think they should be getting when they come to college.

Okay, upon further reading of the thread, maybe I didn't misread the thread as badly as I thought after all.

In the end, the value of it is that lottery ticket. As someone else alluded to up the thread, anything beyond a means to an end is a luxury for the idle rich & largely a waste of time and resources afaic. That said, I don't begrudge that in the least, their money so by all means do what they will with it. Not much different than regular folks going to a movie or a concert, it's an entertainment expense of sorts.

But in connection to what you asked me as a follow-up question previously, the tuition isn't the only investment required by the student in order to get that ticket, it's just part of the entry fee. (borrowing from my entertainment analogy earlier, even if you pay the skydiving instructor, you still gotta jump out of the plane to get the experience). So no, I don't think tuition = entitled to that piece of paper at all.

[molson]

It wouldn't surprise me if kids these days (grumpy old man voice) thought tuition entitled them to the diploma. If that was the case - why doesn't the school just give the diploma after you pay money, what's all the nonsense about the classes for?

[JPhillips]

I don't necessarily blame kids for thinking they are entitled to a diploma. The marketing most colleges use leads pretty easily to that conclusion.

[jeff061]

Never made it through high school, still from a professional standpoint I don't think any form of college could have improved my standing. Missing out on the social aspect of college may have had more of an effect on me than anything.

[britrock88]

College _should_ afford students a challenging environment to learn how to reason, to familarize themselves with the knowledge (science/math, literature/history, whatever) that will allow them to better observe the world around them, and to create opportunities to use that newfound reasoning and knowledge to make the world a better place.

[Young Drachma]

I don't blame students for tuition = entitled to degree. I blame the way schools have evolved to market themselves and the proliferation of for-profit institutions that have cropped up to offer their own lottery tickets in the form of so-called upward mobility. I don't believe students think their tuition entitles them to a degree anymore than a person who gets a hot meal believes they're entitled to something perfect every single time.

The whole idea of higher education as providing a service to the market is flawed, because the market makes its own demands. But much like we criticize college sports as the free labor of pro sports (in football, specifically) the work world has a farm system of its own through the burdens placed on universities and colleges to deliver what the marketplace wants without having a strong pulse on the future needs.

Some can keep high minded ideals, but many are just adapting themselves to the latest whims and trends under the cloak of high-minded ideals. Faculty usually maintain their belief in teaching this way, but administrators are focused on the bottom line.