Alex Tabarrok has an provoking post at Marginal Revolution indicating that a college has been oversold. And I think he misses the point, a college degree has been oversold because like so many things in the past twenty years it has lost its signaling validity. This ironically has been flooded by the availability of cheap money for an education. And as the supply of money increased, the cost and distribution of college degrees increased as well. This is exactly the same thing that happened with the oversupply of money for housing led to an increase in the number of homes bought. The increase of housing funds led to more houses, the flood of education money led to more degrees. But as housing an degrees are non fungible goods, the range of degree quality increased as well. As such a degree's signaling value diminished, but the brand name degree signaling value increased because it was the only reliable indicator. Look at Michael Lewis, what did he study at Princeton? Art History! Now a single anecdote does not refute Tabarrok's point, but instead asks the larger question by what is meant by a college education.
In the past, the expectation was that students would do badly in college, that the graduating was a sufficient signal of ability. The ability to reason and learn. Despite your major. How else would Lewis be able to go from Art History to Economics at the London School of Economics. Somehow the market focus shifted from the process of education, to the product of education which is the transcript. Students behaved accordingly. Want evidence, at my alma mater Cornell, the publishing of median grades on transcripts instead of encouraging students to take harder classes provided hard information on what were the "gut" classes. And students optimized for efficiency. No surprise in hindsight, and probably in foresight as well.
My background is unique in that I studied the STEM curriculum at Cornell, (Computer Science and Biochemistry) but I switched over to the college of Arts and Sciences from Engineering while maintaining my majors. (A quirk of Cornell). Part of my motivation was to graduate in as close to 4 years as possible, but the other was that I realized I had to contravert some stereotypes. The other reason and most clear was that I enjoyed a broader education. My conclusion in twenty years after graduation is that my liberal arts classes probably were more important to my career than my engineering classes, BUT the classes in history, philosophy and literature were accelerants to my technical education. They probably were not sufficient in themselves.
The insight to my education was that every discipline has its own established models of thinking. And the way I was taught uniformly at Cornell was the question, how do you evaluate those models and under what conditions do you modify the models or accept new models. This was uniform from my literature classes (how do you critique a piece), to history (great men vs turn of events), to physics (classical vs quantum vs relativistic) to computer science (how do you determine a good solution). In Computer Science we never had a class on "C" or "Pascal" or whatever, we never argued about operating systems except in the analysis of what design decisions were made. What unified these classes was not the facts, but the mode of thinking. The other thing that tied these classes was that they were HARD. This was not fact based education, and as such it was labor intensive for both the student and the professors. That process for me was the education, not the facts and the skills were not tangible skills such as running a gel electrophoresis or programming in a language.
I left college with an understanding that the key things to approaching any problem are "What is the problem?", "what is the outcome?", "what do I know now?", "what don't I know to get to the outcome?" and lastly "how do I remove what I don't know?" And how did I get this conclusion, it was drilled repeatedly until it became second nature. Mr. Miyagi was right "wax on, wax off"
So in this discursive blog post, how did we get here. The truth is that fact based are easier for all parties involved, they are objective, they are quantifiable and they are easy to implements. Students just have to do pattern matching to solve a problem, they don't have to understand the problem. Students will gravitate to those classes since the probability of a higher grade is greater. To get a "real" college education there is heavy labor involved. For my non-technical classes there would be multiple drafts that focused on refining the argument, not just the grammar. This sucks for both students and professors. I was lucky that I had involved professors. What sucked for me was that through the process, I discovered that I am really not that smart and I have the grades to prove it. But what I can say is the process did improve me, and in the end I developed a level of competency to be a semi-functioning member of society.
The STEM curriculum is not as amenable to making less rigorous (though it can be done, fact based questions such as F = ? really are not different from who won the 1997 world series"). However the non STEM curriculum can be made perfunctory, student writes paper, professor grades, end of story.
Despite accreditation bodies, and other efforts and standardization. True college education is a messy process, and employers don't like messy processes, students want simple checkpoints but in the end all we have is a piece of paper that has no accurate signaling value. Just as today if you see someone with a nice car, do they make a lot of money or do they have the ability to get a loan. A college graduate, they have a degree but do they have an education.
A college degree has not been oversold, it's just been rendered meaningless through devaluation chasing available money. But a college education, it's priceless. It's too bad I can't use a college degree to find out if someone has a college education.
