RWL #235
Unbundling Education
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I’ve started my site visits to check on my interns and will be bombing around NH/ME/MA for the next few weeks as I go see all of them. It’s a lot of fun to visit them at their internships because they are so excited and engaged, and often startled to discover that what we teach them in the classroom actually applies in the field. Imagine that.
As an undergraduate, I double-majored in English and Philosophy. I loved my studies and I worked very hard at them. I think I learned a lot, but not a lot that prepared me for the practical realities of the world. The value of a liberal arts education is more at the meta level - you learn to process complex texts, make connections, and draw conclusions. I think that served me well in the military as I moved from job to job in rapid succession and had to learn new things all the time. The meta skills lent themselves to learning how to learn. But it would have been great to have had some more practical skills and knowledge. Of course, it wasn’t until the last semester of my college career that I knew I was going to go into the medical field, courtesy of the Army.
After I joined the Army, I started working on my MS in Finance at night, and later the Army sent me to earn an MBA. I came to really love business education. A good MBA (or similar degree) opens up the world of commerce, which is basically a black box when you come out of high school, and remains so if you do a liberal arts or even a STEM degree. But the world of commerce is where most of us compete and struggle for most of our lives - often in continued ignorance. I love when I get to teach an MBA course in economics or finance, and I show students competitive models, or even teach them how to read an income statement - and suddenly you can see their eyes get wide as they have new understanding. “That’s what that means!” they say, as the light bulbs come on. It’s one of the best things about being a teacher, and one of the reasons I really enjoy graduate education in particular. A good business education gives a student an understanding of the world, and that is what education is really about.
So this week I read a piece by Arnold Kling, an economist whom I have followed for many years, called Doing Away with College (link to the article is the first Read this week). Kling argues higher education has “has lost its sense of purpose and instead is focused on self-perpetuation”. He argues that we should do away with college and replace it with a series of exams modeled after the AP exams. If you pass the exam, you get a badge - a microcredential. A potential employer could look at your stack of microcredentials and decide if you are a good match for a job. You could accomplish these microcredentials without paying for the college bundle - all the courses you don’t want, the social context (living in a dorm, etc), extracurriculars, and importantly, much of the expense. There are a lot of people who have graduated from college and have significant debt because of how bloated the cost of attending college has become, and the jobs they get, at least initially, probably could have been performed without the degree. The graph above shows the cost of college tuition and fees (the orange line) vs. the consumer price index, which measures overall inflation. College tuition has increased more than 900% since 1982, while the CPI has only increased 180%. That means college tuition has risen almost 5 times general costs.
I said I love business education, and I meant it. I also loved my liberal arts education. But Kling, and many others, have a point. College is expensive, and it’s not clear what it really does for an individual, other than provide a bulky, imprecise credential. What if we could unbundle college? Separate the learning (and credentialing), the social experience, and the network? The pandemic has forced us to do that over the last year, at least in part. The pandemic wiped out much of the social component. Torenberg (below in Listen) argues that the pandemic proved we are willing to pay $250K for a credential - because everything else wasn’t really happening. I’m not sure I completely agree, but you can listen to him and decide for yourself.
Does education, even business education, need to be bundled? Could it be replaced by free standing micro-credentials (like the CPA or CFA which already exist)? Could we have free standing status networks? I’d argue we already do through professional associations, but now also programs like YCombinator. It would be bad for me - given I’ve just now been granted tenure - but maybe it’s the future? Should it be?
I’d love to get your feedback - feel free to write or comment on the Substack comment function.
(the source for my graph was the BLS: CUUR0000SEEB01, College tuition and fees in U.S. city average, all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted, and CUUR0000SA0, All items in U.S. city average, all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted. You can get this data yourself by going to https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls )
**
Read
What: Arnold Kling, In My Tribe, Doing Away with College
Why: As I mentioned above, this is the piece that got me thinking on this topic. He makes a pretty damning case against the traditional undergraduate experience.
**
What: The Atlantic, The Case Against Credentialism
Why: Kling’s piece got me thinking about credentialism. This was one of the first pieces that popped up when I hit Google. It’s from 1985, but it reads like it could be from yesterday. This is a long piece, but it’s really worthwhile.
This piece is not really about the unbundling issue I mentioned in the introduction. Instead it is an indictment against the movement in America away from the individual, entrepreneurial spirit. The author argues our society was becoming crystalized into castes based on bureaucratically determined credentials. He makes the argument many people, especially at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, won’t ever be able to get the credentials necessary to rise to the top. But I think what is worse is it changes what our best and brightest in our society seek.
"The lack of entrepreneurial daring in today's professional class seems to come instead from a sense of entitlement. Nearly everyone admitted to a professional school graduates; most of those accredited live well. If an “achieving” society requires a balance between confidence and anxiety, can it afford a swelling class whose chief ambition is one day to “make partner?""
I especially love this passage where he references blackjack:
"Not many professionals become truly rich, but neither do many doctors, lawyers, consultants, and (today's business students hope) M.B.A.s fall out of the upper tier of income and status. An entrepreneurial society is like a game of draw poker; you take a lot of chances, because you're rarely dealt a pat hand and you never know exactly what you have to beat. A professionalized society is more like blackjack, and getting a degree is like being dealt nineteen. You could try for more, but why?"
This article is packed with incredible insight about our country. It was spot on in 1985, and it continues to be so (unfortunately).
(FYI - the article appears to be a digitized version of a print article - there are clearly some typos from the conversion)
**
Watch
What: Reason TV, Stossel: The College Scam (6 min)
Why: This short piece features John Stossel talking to one of my former professors, Brian Caplan at GMU, who has written a book, The Case Against Education. I remember Caplan talking at length about the fact that much of the value of a degree is the signal. As he says in the video, if you want to learn, you can just do it. That might be hard for, say electrical engineering, but not so much for most other subjects (like economics). Caplan alludes to the idea that for many fields you would be better off just going to work, rather than taking four years to study a broad variety of topics, which you may just go through the motions to get through, not really enjoying or embracing them. The beautiful thing about the liberal arts is you can just go to a library and engage with them.
(Contra what Caplan says at the end, I think he does more than five hours of work each week related to his role as a professor, but I could be wrong. I know I do a lot more than that. I happen to love what I do, so it doesn’t feel like a grind, but it’s definitely more than five hours.)
**
Listen
What: The Deep End, Higher Education with Erik Torenberg, co-founder of On Deck and Village Global
https://ideas.beondeck.com/episodes/1-higher-education-with-erik-torenberg-rjoY_0W_
Why: This is a fast-paced and fairly wide-ranging conversation. The guest is the founder of On Deck, which seems to aspire to be an online, larger scale version of YCombinator. It answers part of the unbundling of college by providing the network component that you would get from going to a good business school. If you buy into the idea of unbundling, how will you build a potent network of elites? If you go to an Ivy League school, that’s probably the most important thing you get, other than the credential. Being a YCombinator grad is a big deal, as I understand it (though admittedly, I am as far from the VC world as one could imagine). I guess we could have these stand alone networking organizations that one could be accepted into. That could be an interesting solution.
They also talk about life-long learning, and how you become a person who wants to read more. I think that is where the “study buddy” idea Kling talks about comes in. The idea that you don’t get any additional formal training after you graduate from college seems absurd. I agree.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)