Attention Economy


Thursday, August 18, 2022

Challenges Facing US Higher Education System

The Shrinking of Higher Ed
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-shrinking-of-higher-ed
In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

Should we continue to encourage ill-prepared students to attend college?
Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam (HT to Tyler Cowen)
The Quantity versus Quality Debate –
https://www.chronicle.com/article/some-students-are-smarter-than-others-and-thats-ok
Fredrik DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, notes:
“To say that everyone should go to college presumes that everyone has the aptitude and desire to go to college. We have every reason to suspect that isn’t true. Already today, the national college-graduation rate tends to hover around 60 percent. And that’s among students who start college; the many millions who don’t attempt college are surely among those least likely to succeed in higher education. What would happen to the graduation rate if millions of people who previously did not attempt college were to flood our campuses? I have no doubt that some of them would flourish, but on balance we can certainly expect more dropouts, more remediation costs, more debt, and more stress on colleges that already struggle to graduate an adequate percentage of enrollees …It also strikes me that if the inevitable outcome of significantly greater college participation rates is lower standards, then our national response to hordes of new college students would be to make college significantly easier to get through.”


Higher Education - Challenges
Higher Ed Must Change or Die
Some Colleges Don’t Produce Big Earners. Are They Worth It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/business/college-graduate-earnings.html
A good place to start is studying available government data for any school you’re considering to see whether people who attended earn more than they would have if they had gone straight into the work force after high school.
At many schools, the answer is no. Three years ago, in an examination that should have received a lot more attention, the center-left think tank Third Way put all available data for all higher education institutions together. It found that at 52 percent of the schools, more than half of the enrollees were not earning more than the typical high school graduate six years after they began their studies. After 10 years, the figure was still 29 percent.

Higher Ed’s Cult of Growth
Chinese Student Visas to U.S. Tumble

After 4 Years of College, Too Many Students Don’t Know Where to Go Next
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/opinion/college-students-happiness-liberal-arts.html

My take:

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