Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Xxxxxxx population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Xxxxxx now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Xxxxxx took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
One cannot help but ask the Xxxxxxx educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
Guess the country - and no it's not America.
Read further and you find what the author considers to be the source of the problem described above- Teachers protected by a corrupt union.
Now if I were an education reformer (or a GOP congressman / Senator / President) and I was bumping up against the teacher unions I would think seriously about sending out copies of this article to every parent an elected official in the district with the tagline of "This is why it is dangerous to just give teachers jobs for life with no accountability", but that's me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/the-country-that-stopped-reading.html?_r=0
Instapundit - links to an article arguing that there isn't a higher education bubble. It's a weak argument but it got me thinking about whether there is a higher education bubble.
The bubble argument as it is usually presented bothers me because it always seems to lead to the conclusion that a post secondary education is not needed (usually made by someone with an advanced degree) as someone who has gone through most of his life with just a high school diploma let me tell you, that is crap. Yes you can find work and often become successful without a college degree but it is much harder and when the axe drops it's always the "uneducated" who are first in line to be shown the door.
Is that right or fair? Probably not but it is reality just like it was reality in the era immediately after WWII when suddenly the high school diploma was the piece of paper everyone needed to have. Times change, and in fact it is speculated that one of the causes of bubbles is a change in societal norms. The need for a high school diploma was largely driven by the development of an urban industrial workforce, now we are in a post industrial society.
All that being said it's possible we are in a bubble, defined as trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic value and I am not really arguing that point just the conclusions and plans of action that some are drawing from it.
What the bubble argument as advanced by most people says is that the cost of college is now so high that there is no way to earn back your investment therefore you should avoid college. My argument is that the people making this argument are arguing from the specific to the general: They concentrate on private schools and majors like Women's Studies in Pre-Revolutionary French Literature. As an example at the state schools nearest me University of Washington and Washington State University -Vancouver the cost for a degree ranges somewhere between $11,000 and $15,000. While this is a significant amount of debt it is hardly unsustainable for someone who has chosen their degree wisely, i.e an Electrical Engineering major or Biochemistry or Pharmacolgy, but you get the point.
That brings us to another point in this debate, why are people choosing the wrong degrees. Well some of it is because when you are 19 and you just read Madame Bovary in the original French and found it to be a life changing experience a degree in French Literature looks like a good idea and part of it is that people were incentivized too. I linked to a paper by the Economic Policy Institute the other day that made this point using the government's policy papers:
The H-1B-caused internal brain drain was actually anticipated, if not actually planned, in the government’s central science agency back in 1989. The Policy Research and Analysis (PRA) division of the National Science Foundation (NSF) complained that Ph.D. salaries were too high. In an unpublished report, PRA proposed a remedy in the form of importing a large number of foreign students, stating:
These salary data show that real Ph.D.-level pay began to rise after 1982, moving from $52,000 to $64,000 in 1987 (measured in 1984 dollars). One set of salary projections show that real pay will reach $75,000 in 1996 and approach $100,000 shortly beyond the year 2000. …
[To] the extent that increases in foreign student enrollments in doctoral programs decline or turn negative for reasons other than state or national policies it may be in the national interest to actively encourage foreign students. …
A growing influx of foreign Ph.D.s into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of Ph.D. salaries. …[The Americans] will select alternative career paths…by choosing to acquire a “professional” degree in business or law, or by switching into management as rapidly as possible after gaining employment in private industry…[as] the effective premium for acquiring a Ph.D. may actually be negative. (Weinstein 1998; emphasis added)
I sent the link and the quote to Instapundit, but either it was lost in the crush of what I am sure is a huge load of emails or ignored.
TL;DR - Chad rambled a whole lot making the point that there is still value in higher education and that while some fields may be in a bubble many are not.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/164544/
The Hill - House bill would require police to obtain search warrant to access emails
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