What Will They Learn at College?
    
For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That’s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA’s findings were published in their report “What Will They Learn? 2018-19.” It doesn’t look good.

The ACTA assigned grades tell some of the story. Just 23 (2%) of the over 1,100 colleges earn an A grade; 343 colleges (31%) earn a B grade; 347 (31%) get a C grade; 273 (24%) earn a D; and 134 (12%) colleges earn an F. If you’re thinking that your youngster will get a truly liberal arts education, you are sadly mistaken. It turns out that less than half of the schools studied require courses in traditional literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history and economics. At some colleges, students can fulfill their humanities requirement with a course titled “Global X: Zombies!” A U.S. cultural pluralism requirement can be fulfilled with “The Economics of ‘Star Trek.’” And an arts and Literature requirement can be fulfilled with either the “History of Comics” or “Game Design for Non-Majors.”

Colleges often do not live up to their own promises. In college mission statements, as well as their course catalogs, they frequently exalt the virtues of a “well-rounded” liberal arts education. The reality is something different with only 68% of the schools ACTA surveyed requiring three or fewer of the seven core subjects. Their curricula poorly represent critical subjects such as U.S. history, economics and foreign languages.

The list of schools that received ACTA’s “A” grades includes Pepperdine and Baylor, known for their commitment to the liberal arts and academic excellence. But there are some lesser-known colleges such as Christopher Newport University, Colorado Christian University, Kennesaw State University, Bluefield College and Regent University that deserve accolades.

ACTA’s “F” list includes prestigious names such as University of California, Berkeley, Bowdoin, Hamilton and Vassar colleges. Ivy League colleges received ACTA’s two “Bs,” four “Cs,” one “D” and one “F.” These grades reflect significant overall curricular weaknesses. For example, Yale doesn’t require college-level math courses; Harvard accepts an elementary-level foreign language study; and Brown has an “open curriculum,” which means students may take whatever classes they want, without strict requirements. Even though some of the best-known colleges earn poor marks for their general education curricula, it doesn’t necessarily mean they do all things poorly. A student can get an excellent education at these schools if classes are chosen wisely.

There’s another college-related issue not given much voice and that’s how important is a college education in the first place. That’s an issue raised by a Market Watch article, “Half of young Americans say their degree is irrelevant to their work.”

Parents think a college education is necessary for success. Their youngsters think differently. According to the TD Ameritrade study, 49% of young millennials said their degree was “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current job. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, found that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen.

The bottom line for parents and their youngsters is that spending four or more years in college and accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt is not the only road to a successful life.

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Who Needs Harvard? Amazon University and Other Options
    
For more than a decade, ever since I served on the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, I have wondered: where is the American business community in higher education reform? Doesn’t it realize that the extremely inefficient existing way in which we certify competency for most managerial, technical, and professional jobs ultimately raises employment costs, making it less competitive in the global marketplace? I have made pleas literally in the halls of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for greater business involvement.

College is mainly a screening device, separating those with intelligence, discipline, honesty, good communication skills and good work ethics from those with fewer of those desirable attributes. In most cases, graduates use very little that they learned in the classroom directly in their work. Given rising college costs, we need to find cheaper, better ways of certifying competence, both in identifying the best future workers, but also in training them for specific tasks.

Wage and salary data make it perfectly clear that a majority of the “human capital” that workers acquire comes from on-the-job training and experience. Companies are in the education business informally whether they like it or not. For decades, some companies have had formal training programs and some have even sponsored university-level training. In the golden age of American automobile manufacturing, for example, General Motors owned the “General Motors Institute,” which stressed engineering studies and a co-op model where students combined traditional learning with lots of practical experience. Similarly, for more than 50 years, McDonald’s Hamburger University has offered management training to thousands of mid-level-and-above managers, not offering degrees but certification that the trained individuals are knowledgeable about how McDonald’s runs its operations. Indeed, nearly all large businesses have some formal training for new entry-level workers.

Now Amazon is entering the fray, not offering college degrees (the importance of which is being increasingly questioned anyway by some in the business world), but rather practical training for ultimately 100,000 employees. The technology used by Amazon is constantly evolving, so it needs to continuously train workers in productivity-enhancing procedures. This suggests a new employment norm might evolve: businesses test potential employees to see if they are functionally literate, and also check their high school performance to see if they are likely reasonably intelligent and disciplined. Then the firm hires the worker and gives them training—sometimes a few weeks, maybe many months or even years. The employee signs a multiyear contract giving her or him some job security and the company is assured at least some return on its human capital investment. College may, or may not, be at least partially circumvented.

Alas, there are some wrinkles to be worked out if this is to be a widespread model. Most important, the use of employer testing to see who are potentially trainable workers could run afoul of the unfortunate 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and subsequent legislation making employers fearful of using testing because it could be used to “disparately impact” minorities. Politically, the same progressive politicians who have hounded many for-profit higher education operators out of business could try to block business attempts to more aggressively enter the education business in perceived competition with allies in the university community that provide them with both intellectual ammunition and considerable financial support.

Why should employers start their own training programs? They can hire good high school graduates at salaries well below what they pay college graduates, and invest less than the salary differential into training that they offer cheaper than colleges because they don’t need umpteen diversity or sustainability coordinators, student life administrators or many of the other expensive forms of bureaucratic bloat permeating American higher education. To be sure, much college learning occurs outside the classroom, particularly on residential campuses, and also recent high school graduates are less mature and experienced in making life decisions. Still, for many jobs, the Amazon approach seems wise—offer on-the-job training on a systematic basis, perhaps having employees work part-time on simple, low-skilled tasks while they simultaneously are trained for more skilled and remunerative activities. In doing so, more people will join the growing crowd just saying no to higher education.

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Universities as Rip-Offs: The Costly and Inefficient Edifice Complex
    
For years, my Ohio University office was in a lovely century old home of, I would guess, about 3,200 square feet (the university outlandishly claims 7,800 square feet, including unfinished basement and attic space). It was on the edge of our beautiful College Green, the most historic part of the oldest campus in the Midwest. Students and faculty alike loved the place. The other day, the university trustees approved $711,000 to demolish it. Had the building been properly maintained, it would still be in highly productive use. Moreover, the school is spending about $220 a square foot, not to build something, but to destroy it. I suspect I could quickly find a competent destroyer of old homes who would do the job for at most 20 % of what my university plans on paying. I almost certainly could even find many reputable builders who could essentially built a very nice 3,200 square foot house from scratch for $711,000—including tearing the old house down and using that lot for rebuilding.

In fairness to Ohio University, outrageous expenditures are commonplace for campus buildings. The University of Massachusetts at Boston spent $130 million on a 190,000 square foot academic building recently—$684 per square foot. Princeton built Whitman College (a housing facility named after eBay tycoon Meg Whitman) in 2007, complete with a dining room with a 35 foot oak ceiling that would have awed Harry Potter, and tripled-glazed leaded glass windows, costing over $300,000 per bed or $650 per square foot in today’s dollars. If the money had been borrowed at four percent interest, it would take at least $1,300 monthly per bed just to pay the interest costs of the facility for the nine months used annually. No private developer would rent beds in the complex for much less than $2,500 monthly after accounting for depreciation, taxes, etc. Bloomberg Businessweek termed it “a billionaire’s mansion in the form of a dorm...” Yet presumably Whitman and other donors received tax benefits from the U.S. government for this exercise in conspicuous plutocracy.

In the Bay region, where environmental and regulatory insanity routinely prevent needed new construction, pushing housing costs extremely high, the University of California at Berkeley cannot even rebuild a badly depreciated parking garage without years of delays, wrangling about an environmental impact statement, etc. A fairly reasonable garage was proposed that cost a moderately pricey $30,000 per parking stall, but the inefficiency endemic to modern universities took hold, leading to a facility with per stall costs in the $100,000 range. A private garage operator would need probably $30 daily parking fees per car to make the investment minimally profitable. Adding university bureaucracies and “shared governance” decision-making onto environmental extremism, you get chaos. According to news reports, the AFSCME labor union will not even let Berkeley use modern technology to replace humans in collecting parking fees.

I have said it before but it bears repeating: university buildings are disenfranchised in discussions over university resource allocation—they cannot talk. Students complain they need more recreational space, and faculty say their laboratories need [to be] modernized, administrators want new spiffy teleconferencing facilities and alumni want country club-like areas in the stadium where they can drink while watching ball throwing contests. But the existing buildings are silent. We will let a somewhat decrepit classroom building deteriorate a bit more so we can fund the academic fad de jour: maybe more sustainability administrators. In a few years, we will declare the building beyond repair and replace it with an opulent new facility that lies empty much of the year.

Universities sometimes seem to handle their accounting the same way kids measure the financial success of a lemonade stand: do revenues during the recent time period exceed expenses? Depreciation of assets is largely downplayed—something a CEO of a modern corporation could go to jail for if tried. Sometimes unfunded liabilities are mostly ignored (e.g., employee pensions). Moreover, building proceeds apace, aided by tax deductions for private donors and often municipal bond (low interest) financing of debt. Schools often seem blithely unconcerned or myopic about falling enrollments and the impact of declining birth rates on facility need, at a time when some observers predict thousands of schools will close (I think it may “merely” be hundreds) or merge with other institutions.

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