US College is too damned expensive
A couple of days ago, I was walking around downtown Berkeley yesterday reflecting on my time there with the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program (BCEMBA). The BCEMBA was a joint executive MBA program between UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and Columbia University Business School. I wandered extensively, lazily observing many students going about their work/tasks/leisure.
BCEMBA has helped me in many tangible and intangible ways, even though it took 2 years of my life and cost a lot of money. But I was lucky — there are many class mates who were not as able or lucky to parlay that experience into some kind of advantage or acceleration. And this is especially galling because everyone in my class left with some student debt. As I reflected on this and other things, I sought to think about patterns I had absorbed through my own educational journey. And this is the start of one of my main critiques of the education I see in the American marketplace: too general and too costly. I really don’t believe its serving American society well anymore. Some sacred cows may need to die.
My education is extensive, but to be honest with you, its mainly a signaling tool for how smart I am; how much I am able to solve business problems — basically an external confirmation of an internal truth, at least as I believe it to be true. Its the elimination of downside risk for those who consider my candidacy as an employee or any of my endeavors as an investment vehicle. As a black man, that signaling may be even more important, as a decisive body slam against intentional or inadvertent prejudice. The individual classes and learnings don’t matter nearly as much as THAT particular utility of my degrees.
The actual knowledge does help me now and then when I am solving problems. But if you took the information content of the classes I have had, end on end, I would probably only need about 20% of it, for what I do right now. If you zoom out and think of the pieces I have needed for every job I have ever had, You might stretch to 35%. In fact, in many ways, to keep up to date, I have to constantly refresh and remix the information that I have been taught because some of that information has a very short half life in a constantly changing field of interest (high technology).
So 2 essential things are emergent from my experience — a base level of terse information that I can remix. And a signaling tool. Given this, I would suggest that I overpaid for the utility that education has had in my life (in the United States). American education can often be like being charged premium for a product that is loaded down with extras that you don’t need. A general education is usually fine if its free and in many cases, learning for itself can be the last refuge of childhood. But having to pay astronomical sums for it, changes the calculus significantly in a world where the cost of information is much closer to zero than ever before.
If those essential functions — conciseness and signaling — (I’m sure we can have principled disagreements here) of education are right, then it feels like there can be better solutions to the problem of acquiring the knowledge we need to become productive members of society.
One proposal is a skinnied down (and cheaper) formal education. This should be abbreviated, wide and deep — but not frivolous. And did I mention cheaper?
Some of the saved resources can then be diverted to employers — 2nd proposal — for doing more on the job training.
One way to do this is to use tax breaks to incentivize this, funded from reduced public spending on education. This on-the-job training gives more specific tools to be productive within the context of your current employment. And this training can be offered at any level of job expertise, in order to make it a systemic change and approach to continuous learning.
Its unclear that the for-profit education system we have, is ultimately serving to get us the society we need to succeed in the 21st century. There are plenty of ideas in the debate and mine are likely not new. But they seem like solid swings in rethinking what’s working and what’s not.
What do you think?