College Tuition Is Marketing Fraud
cactus.substack.com
cactus.substack.com
But then he goes off the rails into conspiracy-theory land, saying that the advantage is "marketing." Marketing is the bogeyman of everything popular that subgroups don't like. Why is Windows more popular than OS/2? Marketing! Why does this game I hate sell better than that game I love? Marketing! It's a lazy way to ignore the other products' real advantages. People who trot it out as an excuse often think "marketing" just means "advertising."
In this case, I think the author is missing the fundamental advantage of college over other educational offerings: signaling. A degree, especially a degree from a prestigious university, is a signal to employers. It's a way of standing out from the crowd. Unfortunately, the crowd is now going to college, so it's harder to stand out. But you still need the degree to compete in most cases.
The solution to this isn't to fight "fradulent marketing," it's to come up with better signals. I don't know how, and it's a big fight. But at least it would be fighting something that exists, not a conspiracy theory.
But who wants to compete in the first place? Those of us in the tech industry know better than anyone that the path that is beneficial is one where employers struggle to hire. Compensation and benefits rise where employers have to compete for talent, not where talent has to compete for jobs. Fortune favours those who are able to offer something that isn't copied a many times over; where competition is nowhere to be found.
Certainly that does make it easy for us in tech to sit in our ivory towers that lack degrees hanging on the wall and scoff at those flipping burgers at McDonalds who perhaps really did need a degree to win the spot, but there's something wrong if you have to burden the opportunity cost that equates to near one million dollars in a lifetime to secure a precarious minimum wage position. That needs to be scrutinized, not emboldened with additional government supports.
Whether or not the marketing was intended to be fraudulent, it is certain that colleges have benefitted from the commonly held, but mistaken, belief that a degree will increase one's income. That notion is what students use to justify the high cost of college, seeing it as a long term investment that will pay dividends later. In fairness, it was a reasonable prediction at the time it was first asserted given the limited information available, but now that we have more data it is abundantly clear that incomes have remained stagnant. The promise of higher incomes did not materialize and colleges are more than happy to sweep that under the rug.
One might even call it "credentialing."
The idea of credentialing seems to make some sense (this person is declared to be [minimally] qualified for some job/position, or at least able to read/write/do basic math), but credentialing organizations tend to act like cartels.
Another advantage colleges provide is networking, including classmates, alumni, recruiting networks, etc..
sometimes I wonder how gen x were cowed into submission by their parents into letting these shenanigans happen
A good article would've broken this down further and asked the question of whether return on college education was causation or reverse-causation or whether lucrative engineering education can now be done online for lower cost. There's also the idea of college as a means of accreditation for the job market. The author goes into none of this.
What about the development of nuclear energy, football, DNA fingerprinting, birth-control and LSD? All created in American colleges.
If tomorrow we closed all public uni doors, the companies that profit from it will finally be pushed to fund education. Especially tech. They have the money, but we keep pulling money out of our neighbors pockets instead.
R&D in private industry does far more than any uni can. They don't have the market to be attracting top talent, or equipment nor facilities. Which is why you see everything under a company, not a university.
These are institutions far out of date. All we need to do is push it and it'll crumble.
A flawed comparison, though. Nobody was ever expecting the academic superstar, who breezed his way through college, to make the same or less than someone who suffers from crippling down syndrome, who was rejected by college admissions. Clearly people exist on a spectrum. Some people are much more capable than others and the marketplace will pay more for those who are more capable. Contrary to popular belief, down syndrome is established in the womb, not caused by not going to college.
What we really want to know is if the same person will realize a higher lifetime income by going to college verses not. That's impossible to determine experimentally, but what we can do is observe people on the spectrum over time. Within a sufficiently large population, the spectrum will remain continuous even as individuals come and go. Unfortunately, when we do that we find that incomes have held stagnant. The matching person of the past without a college degree made the same amount of money as the equivalent person today with a degree. This means that college does not provide an income boost.
The selection bias you point out is real, but doesn't provide anything useful other than to remind us that correlation does not imply causation.
Citation?
The stat you are trying to cite relates to graduating college, not simply "going to". Currently the 4 year graduation rate is ~40%, and the 6 year graduation rate only around 60%.
That is an incredible population to have yoked with debt through their most productive years with nothing to show for it.
There are laws and regulations about marketing a college degree and a college’s accreditation and reputation relies on it. Thousands of human hours are spent every year at every accredited college to avoid inadvertently falling out of compliance and to be in the good graces of accreditors.
In fact, one could argue, and I will, that most of the added administrative cost you see in this articles expense chart is to ensure regulatory compliance.
And colleges that egregiously or repeatedly fall out of compliance either lose accreditation or are sued, sometimes out of existence. This almost always happens at for-profit schools not non-profits, though non-profits do get in trouble every once in awhile.
“I, my class, and their parents were told sternly — commanded is a fair word here — several times throughout every year that the goal of schooling is to send children to universities.”
This isn’t direct marketing. This is people saying what they believe to be true. You can debate the validity of this opinion all day, but these are people giving the best opinion they have. They are not getting paid to say it. There are no kickbacks.
Very interested in this. Do you have links / books?
That's easy to evade by having staff researchers who profit from the success of college publish the marketing material instead.
The popular choice is the one where they show that smart people who have few life challenge are able to graduate college and also do well in the workplace while those who suffer from disabilities and other life challenges fail to graduate and also struggle in the workplace. Often entitled something to the effect of "Is a college degree worth it?"
The research is 100% valid. Smart people with few life challenges statistically do much better in virtually everything they try over people with crippling disabilities and other life challenges (drug addiction, poverty, etc.). That includes college and the workplace along with a whole lot of other things people like to do in life. There is good reason the Fortune 500 doesn't have down syndrome sufferers as CEOs, as unfortunate as that may be.
But it doesn't tell us much and only confuses the issue with selection bias. This is where it gets picked up by the layman who then thinks: "Look! College graduates have an easier life. If I go to college, my life will be easier too!" without realizing that not going to college won't actually cause contraction of down syndrome or push them into a new drug addiction and that colleges fail, if not deny entry to, anyone who struggles.
Unfortunately, unlike a LV purse or Nike sneakers, an alma mater is very difficult to change. So you have an existing, powerful group of people out there that are very interested in protecting the brand of their alma mater.