Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
8 Comments:
There seem to be a lot of degrees in counties that are having severe financial problems.
Hmm.
Michael Hoff, what counties are you referring and what is the geographical dispersion of them?
Looks like Arlington, Virginia is the highest with 68.8%.
If 27.5% of adults have a college degree, aren't we overvaluing what a college degree is worth? A college degree was worth more financially in the 40s than it is now. But colleges don't want to talk about college degrees being overvalued. Paying college tuition was once seen as an investment. Now, students are graduating college with so much debt that there is no way they'll ever be able to pay off student loans before they retire.
Troyt, the cost of not getting an education may be higher:
High School Dropouts Costly for American Economy
May 28, 2010
"High school dropouts earn about $10 thousand less a year than workers with diplomas... They're more likely to be unemployed: 15 percent are out of work versus a national average of 9.4 percent.
...worse in big cities. Almost half of all students in the country's 50 largest school districts fail to get a high school diploma..."You have high schools in Los Angeles that send more kids to prison, than they graduate from college.""
My comment: Government should set priorities. I noticed when government gets involved in too many things, e.g. in California, people work harder for a lower standard of living, and even people who don't work are seeing their living standards decline. In Colorado, people don't have to work that hard for a higher standard of living.
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“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”
Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen, NYT
And all that stress is not the result of cracking the books.
"... two economists at the University of California found that over the past four decades the time college students spend in class and studying has decreased substantially, from 40 hours a week in 1961 to 27 hours a week in 2003. At the same time, a report released in July by the Delta Cost Project found colleges spending a declining share of their budgets on instruction while spending more on recreation and student services."
Too Much Free Time on Campus?, NYT
Which begs the question, how much are they really learning?
"A new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press) by a professor at New York University and another at the University of Virginia .... the authors followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at two dozen universities, and concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.”
How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?, NYT
Meanwhile, they're putting moms in jail for trying to get their kids into a better primary schools.
Perhaps, we should be following the lead of that lefty paradise - Sweden:
"In 1993, Sweden introduced a system of school choice and vouchers, inspired by the ideas of American economists Milton and Rose Friedman. Even though the system was just as controversial then as any U.S. voucher proposal, the right to chose your school and bring the funding with you is today considered a natural right for families and is widely accepted by all political parties."
"Even Sweden’s Social Democratic Party supports the system and recently closed an internal debate on for-profit schools by deciding that there is no virtue in running schools at a loss: schools should be judged on their academic performance, not financial."
"The reason for the Swedish voucher reform was both philosophical and practical. The philosophical argument was that since taxpayers have agreed to share the cost for a free and good education, then why should some have to pay for it twice — first with taxes and then in private school fees? The more practical argument came from Swedish experience with educational reforms and innovations in the 1970s that to a large degree failed. It not only caused high costs for society and generations of students who saw few improvements, but it also created an aversion against further innovations and pedagogical experiments."
The Daily Caller
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