The College Teaching Mill

Consider the dismal teaching quality of colleges. Over 4,000 colleges and universities now enroll over 17 million students. College has become a huge growth industry. Unfortunately the industry has also changed and mutated negatively, with far too little oversight of quality.

Colleges appear to be primarily in the business of acquiring students, differing to a degree, only in their approach to marketing.

Some do so as research centers. They may boast professors with science awards and Nobel Prizes. These are very appealing marketing devices. Such esteemed faculty also attract grants and endowments, as well as students.

But even that’s a façade and not a teaching-type institution to attend.

Realistic College Planning

Are you or your kids really college material and worth the sacrifice of cost and effort?

Be realistic about yourself or any of your children going to college. It’s a major budget-busting factor that has been tossed about for years in a sea of misinformation. The facts about education, especially college, are about as corrupted as those that surround investing.

They also impact the family positive, even negative net worth, and deserve full family thought, discussion and proper planning. ( See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments.)

Futures Markets on Future Events

Some businesses have had employees create a futures market on a subject of importance to their company. They feel that certain points of view, though a gamble, can be prescient, if the gamblers or speculators have no inherent bias in their choices.

Future projections on business concerns always are difficult to estimate. If any can be predicted with more independent accuracy, they would be immensely practical.

But caution is needed. For such markets to have value, they must have lots of independent input. Sampling should be efficient and unbiased.

I find that is almost impractical in most business projections. However, futures markets may have their place in foretelling political outcomes and general marketing concepts.

Joseph Schumpeter on Capitalism

Those who know the least about capitalism rant the most about its negatives and never appreciate its overwhelming positives.. To those I would suggest a review of the life and work of Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-German-American economist. He died in 1950 and has been since overlooked in academic circles and the media.

His view of “creative destruction,” how the demise of established companies led to a growing economy has been the foundation of the American dream for so many.

Personal incomes have doubled every fifty or sixty years in America, when entrepreneurial zeal is permitted to operate.

Yet, left-leaning politicians will never guess there is any economic opportunity without government being the instrument of largess.

Labor Unions and Real Wages

In an ideal productive society, a worker gets what he or she produces. Labor has to be productive. If it is not, there is an eventual disconnect somewhere.

The perfect example is the downfall of the American automobile industry which priced itself out of business primarily because of its labor costs. You can talk style and product non-competitiveness, but the bottom line is this: Management was bulldozed into giving eventually catastrophic labor contracts, in order to avoid immediate catastrophic union walkouts.

The breakdown in schools can be attributed to the same cause. Here it is the avoidance of competition in the form of breaking the public-school-only monopoly that unionized teachers have. A choice of vouchers would make for better productivity of teachers and better schools.

Unfortunately, the labor unions and its wage conflict has grown into the American social and cultural contract, and has been so highly politicized by union campaign funding, it will be almost impossible to rectify in the foreseeable future.

Inept Colleges

Too many schools market themselves by appealing to the baser instincts of students. The idea is to fill the rosters by making it easier to attend. So many graduates are unable to find real, practical jobs. Or why we have so many with easy-to-get law degrees and few who are doctors and scientists.

Affirmative action is practiced, not just for conventional minorities. It is there for any group that is not equally represented on attendance roles.

The truth is, few undergraduate students have celebrity professors. They often are taught, instead, by graduate students.

In fact, Colleges and universities engage in "bait and switch;" confer what are actually deficient degrees, and engage in other practices that would bring legal sanctions if done in any other business.

Parents and taxpayers pay billions of dollars to colleges and universities. Schools make money whether students learn or not, whether students graduate or not, and whether they get good jobs after leaving school, or not.

The College Education Scam

College education has become a scam in many ways. College administrators and politicians should drop promotional hype. Higher college enrollment and government loan programs and subsidies may be good for the college marketers, but they don’t produce the training needed to fill real, paying jobs in industry.

Too many degrees, especially from four-year institutions, offer graduates little skills but a resume, when they go looking for a job in the real world.