Inefficient Education

randomfool — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:00:29 +0000

After spending seven years in state and private higher education followed a few years later by two more years in an Executive MBA program, I could not agree more with a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Charles Murray, What’s Wrong with Vocational School. I have always felt that our higher education system was inefficient and that we waste valuable resources educating people to levels that are either not appropriate for their level of intelligence or are an inefficient use of resources. I don’t accept the common wisdom (or lack thereof) often promoted by politicians that the best way for us to improve our education system is to simply spend more money on it and make higher education more accessible to more people.
Charles Murray argues that our culture puts a false premium on the college degree which, in turn, causes demand for college education among those that it may not be appropriate to educate at that level. It may be, and probably is, far more efficient to track people early on based on their natural talents to education systems that can provide them with a more appropriate education and prepare them for a job that they will be good a doing and happy to do. Other industrialized countries do just that, tracking kids very early on in the process and spending money far more efficiently.
However, here in the United States, we don’t like the idea of being tested early and assigned to an education path. It seems contrary to the common notion of the American Dream (whatever that is). So, we tell ourselves, or let our opportunistic politicians tell us, that the opportunity should be open to everyone who wants to pursue it whether it makes sense or not.
I noticed this especially in post-graduate professional education. Law school for example, and the law school I went to in particular, mints way too many lawyers than we need with the real opportunities only available to the top percentage of the class (which varies, of course, in times of economic up and down cycles) with the rest of the class serving as a sort of a cash cow for the school. At Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, for example, in the early 90s when I went there they accepted 300 new students each year and that was just in the day program. There just aren’t that many law firms, corporations and government agencies looking for newly minted lawyers…and there are several other major law school programs in Los Angeles plus several more unaccredited or lower tier schools! Moreover, law schools don’t actually bother to teach students how to be lawyers, a function they believe is better left for the law firm to take care of at the expense of clients. Rather, law schools try to teach you to “think like a lawyer” which is really just a sad abdication of their responsibilities as they continue to sell hundreds of seats to new students who have no idea what the situation really is like until they are $100,000 in debt.
Murray argues that our society places a false value on a college education because employers see it as a minimum requirement for certain job opportunities. And, in order to have access to those opportunities, people demand and the government subsidizes more education than we, as a society, really need. So, we overconsume that resource. Murray correctly points out that a college education is really only appropriate for a small minority of young adults but no politician would dare say something like that for fear of being labeled an elitist.

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Inefficient Education