Reworking Higher Education

submitted by jwithrow.
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Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Reworking Higher Education

January 26, 2016
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P closed out Monday at $1,877. Gold closed at $1,108 per ounce. Crude Oil closed at $29.77 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 2.02%. Bitcoin is trading around $395 per BTC today.

Dear Journal,

I am too happy to be snowed in with my family! ” Wife Rachel scolded me for suggesting she wasn’t enthused about the snow days in my last journal entry.

Well honey, the art of story-telling requires a little flare every now and then…

But you make me sound like a bad… oh crap, now you are going to use this in your next article!

She makes it too easy for me. Continue reading “Reworking Higher Education”

College Alternatives

submitted by jwithrow.college alternatives

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
College Alternatives

March 20, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $2,090 today. Gold is up to $1,170 per ounce. Oil checks in at $46 per barrel. Bitcoin is still trading around $262 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 1.96% today.

Yesterday we opined that the proverbial needle was rapidly approaching the student loan bubble and that the American system of higher education would shrink significantly once the bubble popped. Today I feel it prudent to discuss why this is not such a bad thing.

We briefly analyzed the student loan racket yesterday and discussed how students currently graduate college with a mound of debt disproportionate to the job market and income-prospects they face. This is enough to warrant questioning, but the ills of the college system run even deeper.

We have discussed at length the problems inherent within the public school system here and we have noted how the system systematically conveys a lack of purpose to students. Students are force-fed a medley of politically correct information on various subjects and they are expected to memorize and then regurgitate this information. They are told this is important so they can get good grades which they need to get into college. This is a very vague purpose which tends to lead students away from critical thinking and introspection thus few students really discover and cultivate their individual talents and passions.

To the students’ surprise, the higher education system simply expands upon this vagueness of purpose. Students arrive at these beautiful campuses expecting to learn the secrets to success but they soon find out the college curriculum is mostly more of the same – memorize the chapters in this standardized textbook and regurgitate the information on the test. Oh, and this textbook costs $200 but don’t worry you can get a student loan to cover it. So our student quickly learns that college is not a fountain of knowledge but rather just another system to be gamed.

This model of education encourages what Napoleon Hill, in Outwitting the Devil, referred to as ‘drifting’. Hill defines ‘drift’ by saying “people who think for themselves never drift, while those who do little or no thinking for themselves are drifters”. Hill continues: “A drifter is one who permits himself to be influenced and controlled by circumstances outside of his own mind… He doesn’t know what he wants from life and spends all of his time getting just that. A drifter has lots of opinions but they are not his own.”

The habit of drifting is exactly what the American higher educational system reinforces. Just as high school students were told college acceptance is their ultimate goal, college students are told a high-paying job is the ultimate goal to be pursued. Their focus then is on building best possible ‘resume’ (with as little work as possible) so as to impress the corporate recruiters who show up at job fairs on their campus every spring. Further, the college grading system reinforces the fear of making of mistakes already deeply imbedded in the minds of the students who have completed twelve years of public education. Errors are ridiculed and scorned in college just as they were in high school so the necessity to conform is hammered home even harder.

So upon graduating college most students: lack a defining sense of purpose, have been cultured to avoid mistakes at all costs, and are knee deep in debt. Naturally, they are compelled to take the first job that offers them a decently salary and a health insurance plan regardless of their actual interest in the particular job or industry.

Welcome to the rat-race.

Hill would admonish me for focusing exclusively on the negatives so I will humbly labor to present some positive alternatives to the current model of higher education. Mind you, the current system operates under the institutional model and that is a large part of the problem. The best alternatives are individualized in nature thus they require a break from the institutional way of thinking; simply replacing one institutional model with another will never accomplish much of anything.

Where to start?

Life is meant to be lived. Life is about freedom. Governments and institutions infringe upon personal freedom but try to convince you they are morally justified in doing so. Despite these constant infringements, we have the ability to claim more individual freedom today than ever before in modern history. Technology is the great enabler. It is also the great decentralizer.

The college years are a time to learn how to live independently and to explore various interests and passions. As we have pointed out, college does a poor job of facilitating real learning. I would suggest that college also does a poor job of aiding students in learning to live independently. Cramming two eighteen-year-old kids into a room the size of a single office and forcing them to share a bathroom with even more eighteen-year-olds is not realistic prep for the real world unless the kids plan to live on a commune somewhere. Likewise, living with four or five other twenty-year-old kids in frat (and sorority) houses doesn’t really facilitate independent learning unless the kids want to make a career out of party planning.

At the same time, college towns are a great place to meet people with all kinds of backgrounds and cultures. They are also great places to meet people with similar passions and interests. This exposure certainly fosters a tolerance for different ideas as well as the potential to form lasting partnerships with others of like-mind.

College Alternatives Number One: What if our eighteen-year-old, instead of enrolling in college, simply moved to a college town of their choice? They could take on internships with local businesses for low (or no) pay to explore traditional career paths. They could organize or attend meet-up groups for students with similar passions to share ideas and knowledge. They could work to develop online business opportunities around those passions and interests to learn what works and what doesn’t. They could potentially sit-in on select classes of interest if they wanted to as well. Though the overall curriculum may largely be a waste of time, there are certainly individual classes that are interesting and valuable. Whether it’s art or computer programming or classic literature or astronomy or whatever, the professor would probably be thrilled to have someone in the class who is actually interested in what he has to say… everyone else is simply interested in getting a good grade and moving on within the system. And I am sure our eighteen-year-old would do all kinds of other interesting things that I have never thought of before also.

All with zero student loan debt. Sure there would be living expenses but they would pale in comparison to tuition, room, board, and textbooks. If the parents had employed the Infinite Banking Concept for our student then living expenses would already covered for several years at least.

College Alternatives Number Two: what if our hypothetical eighteen-year-old spent a year traveling internationally? They would experience all sorts of different worldviews and cultures and probably learn a foreign language or two in the process. Maybe they would observe a growing trend somewhere which could lead to a tremendous business or investment opportunity. Maybe they would become a freelance travel writer and make a career out of the experience. Maybe they would blog about their travel and build a readership that would lead to income opportunities. Maybe they would see an underserved community and start a niche charity dedicated to a singular mission.

College Alternatives Number Three: Suppose our eighteen-year-old has been homeschooled and permitted to develop skills around a particular passion already? He could go directly into his chosen field either by starting a business or by seeking out internships and mentors in the chosen industry. If he already knows what he would like his first career to be then there is no reason for him to pursue additional generalized education at this point. The beauty of this scenario is that our eighteen year old will have twenty years of experience in his industry by the young age of thirty-eight. In all likelihood financial success will have followed his career mastership and he will be free to then explore other interests or passions if he desires something new and exciting. The notion of working in a single industry for one’s entire life and then retiring to go fishing and piddle around the house all day is a New Deal relic that will die off when Social Security implodes. Mastering two or three different careers over one’s lifetime will be extremely common going forward. And following this individualized model will leave plenty of time for fishing and piddling should you so desire as well. After all, it’s not work if you are doing what interests you.

These are just three examples of many possible college alternatives. With a little vision and a little faith, anything is possible.

More to come,

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Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and the paradigm shift currently in motion please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

The Coming College Collapse

submitted by jwithrow.college

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The Coming College Collapse

March 19, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $2,093 today. Gold is checking in at $1,166 per ounce. Oil is floating around $46 per barrel. Bitcoin is down to $262 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 1.94% today.

Big news this month… two colleges died! Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia recently announced its own funeral scheduled for the end of the 2014-2015 academic year. Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga also pronounced its coming death scheduled for May 1, 2015.

Sweet Briar is a small liberal arts women’s college with less than 750 students and Tennessee Temple is a small Christian university with less than 500 students so these are certainly niche schools that faced challenges not yet encountered by their larger peers. I think it would be unwise to dismiss these closures at outliers, however. Instead, this may be foreshadowing the coming student loan bubble collapse and the growing obsolescence of traditional higher education. Beware bubble, the needle approacheth.

Indeed, the Obama administration is now pushing a “student aid bill of rights” chock full of government regulations, controls, and oversight… what could be a better sign of the impending college collapse than that? And the federal government already finances or guarantees ninety-some percent of all student loans as it is.

College is still the holy grail of success in many American minds but that sentiment is gradually changing. Colleges, in most cases (specialized fields of study being the exception), are little more than glorified diploma mills. Everyone goes to college primarily to receive a degree that is seen as a ‘certification’ of sorts to work a corporate job. That’s why college graduates list their degree at the top of their resume and they mention it first thing in job interviews – having a degree demonstrates that they are qualified to hold a job.

So the system works like this:

1. Kids are told to get good grades in high school so they can get into college.

2. As high school graduation approaches, kids are hustled through the college application process. They are encouraged to apply early to as many schools as possible to give themselves the best chance of getting in. Critical thinking and introspection can wait.

3. Once accepted into college, the kids are walked through the student loan process. It is understood that they don’t have enough money to pay for tuition so someone else must lend it to them. And that someone else is probably the federal government.

4. Colleges raise tuition each year because the federal government is willing to finance or guarantee nearly all student loans sans sound underwriting guidelines.

5. Students apply for new student loans at the higher tuition rate for each subsequent year in college.

6. Students graduate with massive student loan debt and face a competitive job market because nearly all of their peers have a bachelor’s degree as well.

As you can see, the student loan racket is perpetuated by cheap money supplied by the Feds. The only reason colleges can raise tuitions significantly each and every year is because a very large percentage of the population attends college. The only reason a very large percentage of the population attends college is because the Feds supply them with cheap money to do so with few questions asked.

But there’s a catch. When we talk about this cheap “money” supplied by the Feds we are really talking about credit. This credit is created ex nihilo (out of nothing) – it only exists as an electronic record on a computer network somewhere in the “cloud”. Unlike real money, credit can vanish just as quickly as it appeared in the first place. You can’t put it in a safe. You can’t put it under your mattress for a rainy day. Credit is intangible.

The current model of higher education depends on constant credit expansion. Students don’t pay for college up front; they finance it as they go by obtaining multiple loans over time. Their continued enrollment depends upon their ability to get the next loan. It is assumed by pretty much everyone – parents, students, guidance counselors, professors, university presidents, Wall Street CEOs, government officials – that this system of constant credit expansion can continue into the future.

The word credit is derived from the Latin credere which means “to believe”. Credit depends on trust; it’s all a confidence game. And we are starting to see the trust in American higher education teeter. This trust will continue to degenerate as student loan debt continues to pile up and the job market continues to be flooded with bachelor’s degrees. This process is accentuated by the mountain of debt being accumulated by the federal government – the same group that finances the student loan bubble.

When the trust disappears, so does the credit… probably to the tune of trillions of dollars overnight. What happens then? Common sense suggests that colleges would be forced to reduce tuition drastically if students actually had to pay for college themselves. But have you been to a college campus recently? The campuses are pristine, the buildings are luxurious, and the amenities are plentiful. Have you looked at your alma mater’s annual financial statements recently? What does its long-term debt look like? How about its pension liabilities?

The fact is most American colleges would be insolvent if it weren’t for the Fed’s exponential credit expansion. If you think the credit can expand forever then this fact doesn’t really matter. But if you think the credit will eventually dry up then we are likely to see many more Sweet Briars and Tennessee Temple’s to come.

So do not despair, dear Vixens and Crusaders, you will not be the only alma mater-less Americans for long.

Until the morrow,

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Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and the paradigm shift currently in motion please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

A Liberal Education at a Zero Price

by Christopher Westley – Mises Dailyliberal

Frank Bruni saw a woman swoon and sway back in the 1980s, and the recent memory of it caused him to call for increased federal support for liberal arts education.

The woman, Anne Hall, taught Shakespeare at UNC-Chapel Hill back in the days when North Carolina students were more focused on beating Duke in basketball than on Hall’s captivating performance of King Lear. Nonetheless, she made quite an impact on Bruni. “It was by far my favorite class at the University of North Carolina,” he wrote, “though I couldn’t and can’t think of any bluntly practical application for it, not unless you’re bound for a career on the stage or in academia.”

The Purpose of a Liberal Education

Today, some thirty years later and as a New York Times columnist, Bruni recalls this memory to bemoan the loss of liberal education at the large state universities in favor of piddling concerns such as skill acquisition and job placement. Will future generations learn like he did when they are instead focused on learning things that might actually land them a job?

Bruni is right to revere the liberal arts, but wrong to assume that its benefits are purely emotional. The goal of liberal education — at least before state funding diluted it — has always been about teaching students to think clearly about the world around them, develop a sense of right reason when confronting the great questions life, and grasp natural laws so as to better follow them and live happier lives. There is no question that the widespread effect of liberal ideas throughout Europe in the Middle Ages gave common man the framework within which to question the outlandish claims of kings over the people, such as those of divine rights and tribute.

From parish to pub and from family and factory, they were a major contributor to a decentralized Europe, leading to unprecedented levels of human flourishing and social freedom. Indeed, the liberal ideas had to be denigrated and then overcome in order for the modern nation-state to emerge in the nineteenth century, and we know the suffering and death this brought about in the century that followed.

The Shakespeare whom Bruni so admires was himself a product of liberal ideas still reverberating in England despite the efforts of Henry VIII, Cromwell, and others to squelch them. Furthermore, a modern-day Shakespeare would rightly ask the question Bruni avoids, which is whether one can receive the benefits of Lear and the liberal arts without also assuming $40K in debt in order to continue to feed the education-industrial complex (for which Bruni is actually lobbying).

To Bruni, such spending can never be enough, because liberal education is priceless. Whether it is or not, the irony is that the internet can now spread the benefits of liberal education at practically a zero-price, and one no longer must sit in a dank classroom of an elite university to receive its benefits. I speak with experience as a home-schooling father whose children have learned logic, Latin, the Classics, and the sciences, and whose freshman son is now nodding off in the logic class at his university that I (a public-school product) once struggled through as an undergraduate.

Do We Need Government To Fund the Liberal Arts?

Bruni should take heart: Many firms desiring a talented and smart labor force recruit liberal arts graduates. But do tuition revenue-focused public universities now oversupply them, and does this contribute to the problems associated today with the Millennials who are often over-trained, unemployable, and living with their parents? And do those graduates really learn to be critical of, well, anything, as opposed to having developed a sense of (in Bruni’s words) a “rawness and majesty of emotion”?

If so, the liberal education in its modern form has become part of the problem and should no longer be left to postmodern thinkers tied to the government dole. In the 1980s, Peter Drucker predicted that firms would start hiring workers out of high school because (1) they required a lower reservation wage, and (2) they could be trained to suit the needs of the firm in ways that were no longer happening at the universities. Many firms are doing just this in 2015. Thanks in part to the state of federally-funded liberal education, such practices will become more common.

None of this is meant to deny the tremendous need for classical liberal education, as our body-politic is directly affected by the loss of critical thinking skills by the median voter underexposed to it. One might argue this was the actual intent of Progressive Era education reformers who wanted to implement a national education system — modeled after the one in Bismarck’s Germany — in which the masses would be forced into public schools to be prepared for lives in the factory or army. People like Obama or Boehner want the man-on-the-street to be compliant and unquestioning of the world around him, thinking more about Fifty Shades of Grey than perpetual war, the national debt, and the NSA. So from that perspective, it’s exciting to think about how technology is wresting liberal education from those avenues favored by the State, largely by rebels who value it more and who opt out of the system.

Liberal education and the liberal society it fosters, noted Mises in Human Action, brought about “an age of immortal musicians, writers, poets, painters, and sculptors; it revolutionized philosophy, economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. And, for the first time in history, it made the great works and the great thoughts accessible to the common man.”

It still does. Although much of this is happening sub rosa, the liberal arts are actually flourishing relative to where they were twenty years ago, thanks to the internet and without regard to higher-education funding levels. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the New York Timesto acknowledge it.

Please see Mises Daily for the original article and others like it.