Putting College Degrees into Context

In bad economic times the conventional wisdom holds that people retreat to schooling to improve their skills and make them more employable for when the economy turns around. Further, college degrees, in particular, are supposed to increase one’s lifetime earnings so much that we encourage students and their families to take mortgage-sized loans to fund higher education on the grounds that the salary one receives from the jobs one gets with a degree will offset the incurred debt.  I’ve argued for years that this isn’t a fair depiction of the value of a college degree since it doesn’t account for the context that one uses the degree for.

For instance, a person with a community college degree in business or finance will probably earn more money and be more employable than a person who earns a B.A. in psychology from a four-year private or public college and seeks work as a social worker. Ironically, the low-paying social work job requires a B.A. and therefore its associated debt, whereas a person who can prove equivalent experience in lieu of a degree in business or finance at least stands a chance of getting hired without incurring college debt.

However I didn’t think about the context of recessions upon college degrees until now. David Leonhardt touches upon this in the current issue of Atlantic Magazine, noting:

With fewer jobs, more 20-somethings have moved back home with their parents. They have also delayed getting married and having children. Not all of the social trends are bad. Surprisingly, the crime rate and the divorce rate have continued falling. But the economic toll is still a pernicious one: young people have been robbed of opportunities at a time in life when getting workplace experience may be most valuable. Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at Yale, has found that white males who graduated from college during and just after the recession of the early 1980s—which was similar in severity to the recent one—paid a permanent price. Even 15 years later, they were making 10 percent less, on average, than workers who had graduated in good times. It’s a safe bet that the impact on those grads who couldn’t land work for a while—the NEETs [“not in employment, education, or training”—PF]—was even worse.

The cost of college degrees has grown exponentially over the past two decades, and there is plenty of data that show salaries and wages for the middle-class and lower income earners haven’t kept pace with costs in the same period. When coupled with the research above, I think the advice we give our kids about going to college needs to be radically changed.

College is not an automatic ticket to higher earnings and, as this research indicates, WHEN you go to college is probably more important than WHERE you go to college for getting the most bang for your college buck. Also, as college degrees get more plentiful among the population their value goes down. There are jobs that require college degrees now that didn’t require them earlier, such as air traffic controllers, pre-school teachers, secretaries, and bookstore cashiers. There is no evidence that employees in these fields with college degrees perform any better than their counterparts without degrees. Dr. Ivar Berg, in his book Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, noted how insisting on college degrees for employment in most areas creates a cruel and unnecessary barrier to the advancement of the poor. These jobs were all done well by people who only held, at best, high school degrees in the past.  

The flip side of this problem is the underemployed college graduate, who is becoming more of a reality in today’s economy. Indeed, I read an article just this week about out-of-work people who deliberately “dumb down” their resumes so they won’t appear over-qualified to prospective employers. Such is the value of higher education: buyer beware!



Sweden Bans Homeschooling: What would Pippi Longstocking say?

Educational Freedom Takes Another Hit: Sweden makes homeschooling illegal

Our homeschooling friends in Sweden have suffered a major blow: On June 22, 2010 the Swedish Parliament effectively wiped-out the ability of families to choose homeschooling except under “exceptional circumstances.” Swedish homeschoolers explain why this is so bad on their website:

The writing on homeschooling in the new law is basically the same as in the old law. The law requires a fully satisfactory alternative to school and that the authorities can look into the homeschooling. However, the new law adds a third requirement: "there must be exceptional circumstances". Lawyers have told us that “exceptional circumstances” in a Swedish juridical context means as close to a definite "no" as you can get, regardless of the circumstances.

Also in the motivational text of the law, which explains how the new law on homeschooling is to be interpreted, the following can be read:

"Current school conventions make it clear that the education in school shall be comprehensive and objective, and thereby be created so that all pupils can participate, no matter what religious or philosophical views the pupil or its legal guardian/s may have. In accordance with this it is the opinion of the Government that there is no need of a law to make possible homeschooling based on the religious of philosophical views of the family."

Page 523 in Prop. 2009/10:165 (Swedish Government proposition)

So with the stroke of a pen we see how one’s religious and philosophical views are viewed as subjective baggage that government bureaucrats can dictate to be discarded and left at the door of government schooling. I’m surprised that Swedish alternative schools didn’t kick up more of a fuss about how this law will affect them, but my understanding is that they, too, are of recent vintage in Sweden and therefore are not that well established as a political or social force.

My contacts in Sweden have indicated they will probably move to Great Britain next year, which recently dodged it's own bullet to educational freedom (see my earlier entries re. The Badman Report), when the law takes effect, so they can continue homeschooling in accordance to their religious and philosophical beliefs. Swedish homeschoolers note that their government hates bad publicity and hope that an international outcry might shame the government into repealing or not enforcing the law.

The fierce independence and unconventional philosophical views of Pippi Longstocking, one of Sweden's most famous fictional characters and an autodidact, certainly seem diminished in light of this law. Indeed, a modern-day Pippi would have to flee to a country with more educational and personal freedom than Sweden in order to have her adventures now. Perhaps we should encourage all homeschoolers to boycott travel and goods from Sweden until they allow families the educational freedom to raise and teach their children in accordance with their religious and philosophical views?

John Holt on Children as Scientists, Spelling, and Observing Learning

I posted a new segment of the John Holt lecture today. This picks up where the previous one, about children learning pronouns, ended. The opening is a bit disjointed, so let me fill in the gap: John is referring to the girl he described earlier who correctly learned to use pronouns by making knowledge out of her experience of using words. John then compares this process to what scientists do in their work.

Besides some good insights into how and why children learn, you can also hear John offer some advice that might seem unlike Holt, namely if you use a quiz or curriculum because it makes you comfortable, then that’s okay because that benefit outweighs philosophical concerns. As John says, “If you worry less your kids will worry less…”

John earlier described how children often don’t know what they know, and how it takes a long time for some children to realize they actually know how to read or solve a math problem on their own. Change occurs gradually for adults too, and John’s empathy is born from his own experience: he was a superstar classroom teacher who gradually learned that great teaching techniques are not enough for helping people learn. So it is with us homeschoolers: we can eventually learn to trust our children to learn in their own ways, but we have to give ourselves time and permission to learn how to do that with each one of our children.

Learning is a natural process that can easily become muddled by unnecessary interventions, no matter how well intentioned. Being worried and uptight about children’s learning seems to be the default position for most parents and schools; this video clip shows an alternative. There’s John talking about all the clever things he did to help kids learn to spell in his fifth grade class, and then saying he doubted any of it was really necessary. In the video you can hear children playing and John observing and commenting about them, providing ample evidence that children are active, joyful learners who want to be part of adult activities but in their own ways. The ease John displays with this audience of children and adults shows us another way we can engage in helping people learn without making all parties feel uptight and worried that they aren’t learning enough or teaching properly. Here are the words that John uses to end this segment; I think they’re worth repeating.

“There is no way to meddle with or speed it up [i.e. the process of children learning—PF] without doing damage to them… I’ve been saying this to the schools for over twenty years and got absolutely nowhere. So I’m saying it to what I take to be a more serious audience, with a stronger commitment to success, namely homeschoolers. I don’t necessarily expect that everyone’s going to walk out of the room thinking that I’m right. But I want you to be sensitive to the kinds of experiences which will confirm this for you. So if you see your kids doing some of these things, you think, “Maybe John is right.” I don’t particularly ask you to take it on faith but I do ask you to do what I did, which is to observe your children learning with these ideas in mind.”



Homeschooling Update from the United Kingdom

As reported elsewhere in my writings about the Badman report, Great Britain narrowly missed a legislative bullet that would have crippled independent homeschooling in the UK. Homeschoolers fear the government will attempt similar legislation again soon, as the article I reproduce below from The Journal of Personalized Education Now indicates.

Of particular interest to all homeschoolers is the second paragraph. The idea that children must be protected by the state from their parents because some parents may be sex abusers takes the concept of children’s rights to an Orwellian plane.

Note: I kept the British punctuation as it appears in the original article.

Home Education Update—only a small celebration

By Leslie Barson

Home educators and their supports can breathe a very short sigh of relief as the clauses relating to the compulsory registration and monitoring of home education in the then Children, Schools and Families (CSF) Bill were removed in the ‘wash up.’ Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had made it known to the home education community that they would not let the CSF Bill pass in the ‘wash up’ if it included the clauses on home education. They were true to their word and all the clauses were removed before the bill passed unopposed into law. The fact that these two major parties agreed to this owes much to the determination, organization and intellect of the home educating community. Some celebration is deserved!

This attack by government has to do with the fact that the main responsibility for education in law resides with parents, not the state. It is the only area in law where parents still retain the prime responsibility for their children after the passing of the Children Act 2004. The state holds the principal responsibility for children in every other area of their lives. Coupled with the media fuelled ‘terror’ campaign which sees all adults as sex abusers it has been easy for government to convince the population that it knows what is best for children. It prepared the ground for government to pass any law accordingly. Parents who protest are immediately suspect. We are headed to a situation of having to prove innocence… an impossible thing.

The removal of the clauses is greatly welcomed and has bought time for everyone interested in freedom and self-autonomy in education. It is, however, only a battle won. The war is not over by any means. Next time we will not have an impending election to break the flow of legislation. This is an attack on all our civil liberties, schooled or home educated. It is one more example of a ‘citizen’ being replaced with ‘client’ and ‘consumer.’ We will need your help again soon. Watch this space!



Homeschooling swap for books, music, video games and movies

Homeschoolers are always seeking bargains for learning materials and I have found a new site (to me) that makes online bartering fast, cheap, easy and green. Swaptree lets you swap books, music, movies and video games, one for one, at no cost to you. Your only expense is shipping your item to the person you swap with. I found a lot of school texts, both teacher and student books, as well as a plethora of homeschooling books here: http://www.swaptree.com/books/home-schooling-books/593/

Here is a description of the site from a press release of theirs:

In 2009 alone, Swaptree.com members conducted more than one million swaps on the site; saved members $5,549,058; and enabled members to reduce their carbon footprint by 5,011,078 pounds, in total. Swaptree.com is often referred to by mainstream media outlets as “the eBay of Swap.” The swapping platform offers an easy, feel good way for people to recycle the stuff they have and get things they want while reducing consumption of new products.