Quote of the Day: Liberalism’s trifecta

The industry was liberalism’s trifecta: newspapers, television networks, and the school system. Two are bleeding red ink. The third soon will be, as online education enables students to live at home, take courses online, graduate with accredited degrees, and pay $15,000 in tuition, total. A widely accepted estimate is that half of all American universities will go under over the next five decades. It won’t take anywhere near that long. The no-name private colleges will go under first, Cutbacks in tax funding will complete the procedure. Legislators will figure out that they can fire two-thirds of the faculty and replace them with online lectures and low-paid, untenured professors and graduate students to grade written exams.

All that liberalism will have left is the public school system, K-12. This dinosaur has been caught trapped in the tar pit ever since 1963, when SAT scores peaked. Online education is invading today. The American Federation of Teachers is on the defensive. In 50 years, the suburban schools will be online. Competition will demonstrate that the public school bureaucracies cannot compete.

Liberalism made entrepreneurial decisions on where the future was headed. The World Wide Web is taking the world in a different direction. It is leaving liberalism behind.

Liberals call this process of ideological decentralization “Balkanization.” I call it the break-up of a cartel that can no longer compete on the free market.

This is from Austrian economist Gary North at the lewrockwell.com. Decentralization will likewise erode the 20th century top-down political institutions.

Education Bubble: 20 Laughable College Courses

The deterioration of state of politically distorted educational system can be seen from the following "innovative" lobotomizing courses

From the Economic Collapse Blog:

Would you like to know what America's young people are actually learning while they are away at college?  It isn't pretty.  Yes, there are some very highly technical fields where students are being taught some very important skills, but for the most part U.S. college students are learning very little that they will actually use out in the real world when they graduate.  Some of the college courses listed below are funny, others are truly bizarre, others are just plain outrageous, but all of them are a waste of money.  If we are going to continue to have a system where we insist that our young people invest several years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars getting a "college education", they might as well be learning some useful skills in the process.  This is especially true considering how much student loan debt many of our young people are piling up.  Sadly, the truth is that right now college education in the United States is a total joke.  I know - I spent eight years in the system.  Most college courses are so easy that they could be passed by the family dog, and many of these courses "study" some of the most absurd things imaginable.

Listed below are 20 completely ridiculous college courses being offered at U.S. universities.  The description following each course title either comes directly from the official course description or from a news story about the course...

1. "What If Harry Potter Is Real?" (Appalachian State University) - This course will engage students with questions about the very nature of history. Who decides what history is? Who decides how it is used or mis-used? How does this use or misuse affect us? How can the historical imagination inform literature and fantasy? How can fantasy reshape how we look at history? The Harry Potter novels and films are fertile ground for exploring all of these deeper questions. By looking at the actual geography of the novels, real and imagined historical events portrayed in the novels, the reactions of scholars in all the social sciences to the novels, and the world-wide frenzy inspired by them, students will examine issues of race, class, gender, time, place, the uses of space and movement, the role of multiculturalism in history as well as how to read a novel and how to read scholarly essays to get the most out of them.

2. "God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path" (UC San Diego) - Who shapes our desire? Who suffers for it? Do we control our desire or does desire control us? When we yield to desire, do we become more fully ourselves or must we deny it to find an authentic identity beneath? How have religious & philosophical approaches dealt with the problem of desire?

3. "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity" (The University Of Virginia) - In Graduate Arts & Sciences student Christa Romanosky's ongoing ENWR 1510 class, "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity," students analyze how the musician pushes social boundaries with her work. For this introductory course to argumentative essay writing, Romanosky chose the Lady Gaga theme to establish an engaging framework for critical analysis.

4. "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame" (The University Of South Carolina) - Lady Gaga may not have much class but now there is a class on her. The University of South Carolina is offering a class called Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.  Mathieu Deflem, the professor teaching the course describes it as aiming to “unravel some of the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga with respect to her music, videos, fashion, and other artistic endeavours.”

5. "Philosophy And Star Trek" (Georgetown) - Star Trek is very philosophical. What better way, then, to learn philosophy, than to watch Star Trek, read philosophy, and hash it all out in class? That's the plan. This course is basically an introduction to certain topics in metaphysics and epistemology philosophy, centered around major philosophical questions that come up again and again in Star Trek. In conjunction with watching Star Trek, we will read excerpts from the writings of great philosophers, extract key concepts and arguments and then analyze those arguments.

6. "Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond" (The University Of Texas) - Why would anyone want to learn Klingon? Who really speaks Esperanto, anyway? Could there ever be a language based entirely on musical scales? Using constructed/invented languages as a vehicle, we will try to answer these questions as we discuss current ideas about linguistic theory, especially ideas surrounding the interaction of language and society. For example, what is it about the structure of Klingon that makes it look so "alien"? What was it about early 20th century Europe that spawned so many so-called "universal" languages? Can a language be inherently sexist? We will consider constructed/invented languages from a variety of viewpoints, such as languages created as fictional plot-devices, for philosophical debates, to serve an international function, and languages created for private fun. We wont be learning any one language specifically, but we will be learning about the art, ideas, and goals behind invented languages using diverse sources from literature, the internet, films, video games, and other aspects of popular culture.

7. "The Science Of Superheroes" (UC Irvine) - Have you ever wondered if Superman could really bend steel bars? Would a “gamma ray” accident turn you into the Hulk? What is a “spidey-sense”? And just who did think of all these superheroes and their powers? In this seminar, we discuss the science (or lack of science) behind many of the most famous superheroes. Even more amazing, we will discuss what kind of superheroes might be imagined using our current scientific understanding.

8. "Learning From YouTube" (Pitzer College) - About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.  Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling.

Read the rest here

No wonder the high unemployment rates.

Bankers Warn US Federal Reserve of Bubbles in Farmlands and Student Loans, More Signs of US Asset Bubbles

Aside from record high stock markets underpinned by exploding net margin debt, there are many side-effects from the Fed’s bubble blowing policies.

Bankers themselves are now warning the US Federal Reserve of asset bubbles evident in farmland and in student loans

From Bloomberg:

A Federal Reserve (TREFTOTL) panel of bankers warned policy makers in February that record stimulus was pushing financial institutions to take on more credit risk and creating a “bubble” in the price of U.S. farmland.

“The margin pressures that the low-rate environment has put on financial institutions, coupled with dramatically increased compliance and other infrastructure costs, have caused many to seek higher returns by accepting greater interest-rate or credit risk,” the bankers said on Feb. 8, following a Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Jan. 29-30.

the farmland bubble chart courtesy of the Zero Hedge

More on the farmland bubble

The panel also said in February that farmland valuations posed an asset-price bubble caused by unusually low interest rates, echoing concerns expressed by Kansas City Fed President Esther George.

“Agricultural land prices are veering further from what makes sense,” according to minutes of the council’s Feb. 8 gathering. “Members believe the run-up in agriculture land prices is a bubble resulting from persistently low interest rates.”

The Fed pledged to hold the benchmark interest rate at zero until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5 percent, as long as inflation expectations don’t exceed 2.5 percent. The U.S. central bank has also engaged in three rounds of bond purchases, known as quantitative easing.

Data compiled by the regional Fed banks have documented a rapid run-up in farmland prices, particularly across the Midwest’s Corn Belt. The Kansas City Fed said irrigated cropland in its district rose 30 percent during 2012, while the Chicago Fed reported a 16 percent increase.

The panel of bankers is appointed by regional Fed banks and dates to the founding of the central bank in 1913. Bloomberg obtained minutes from the quarterly meetings from May 2011 until February.

Student loan bubble chart from the Zero Hedge

Now the student loan bubble

At a meeting in February 2012, the council said “growth in student-loan debt, to nearly $1 trillion, now exceeds credit-card outstandings and has parallels to the housing crisis.”

Student lending shares features of the housing crisis including “significant growth of subsidized lending in pursuit of a social good,” in this case higher education instead of expanded home ownership, the council said.

Bubbles have been ballooning in many areas.

Corporate bonds has likewise been exploding.

From another Bloomberg article:

Sales of bonds from the U.S. to Europe and Asia exceeded 2012’s pace after offerings surged this month to at least $318 billion, compared with $205.3 billion in the similar period last year, Bloomberg data show. Issuance lagged last year’s pace during the first quarter, falling 7.6 percent behind a record $1.174 trillion in the first three months of 2012.

A lot of these bond issuance have been used as vehicles to buyback on stocks in response to tax policies and the cheap money environment that has led to the record levels.

This is why both the US bond markets and stock markets are becoming intertwined.

And more signs of the tightening relationship between stock market and bonds: the bond fund hybrids

From the Wall Street Journal

The number of bond funds that own stocks has surged to its highest point in at least 18 years, another sign that typically conservative investors are taking bigger risks to boost returns.

Regulators generally allow funds to hold a mix of assets, but the scale of bond funds' shift into stocks is unusual, fund experts said, and could expose investors to unexpected losses.

In all, 352 mutual funds that are classified by Morningstar Inc. as bond funds held stocks as of their last reporting date, up from 312 at the end of 2012 and 283 in the first quarter of 2012, according to the investment-research firm.

The rush into stocks illustrates the dilemma bond investors face. The bond market has rallied for much of the last 30 years, and yields, which move in the opposite direction of prices, stand near record lows.

Tightening interdependence of stocks and bonds makes both asset classes equally vulnerable to market shocks.

The deepening of inflationary boom has led credit swaps falling into 5 year lows which are signs of increasing complacency.

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) “bad boys of the financial crisis of 2008” according to the Wharton Knowledge, have also been making coming back.

There are many more signs of bubbles being blown. So it would be naïve or downright silly to suggest or proclaim that there has been “no-side effects” from Fed Policies.

Remember inflationary booms leads to deflationary bust. And a bust will likely spur the US Federal Reserve to double or more the $85 billion a month in bond purchases which may expand to include other assets. 

All these means two things: more bubbles or a currency collapse.

Online Education: Movement for College Credits Gain Momentum

One of the main objections to online education has been in the aspect of credentials, i.e. it is not recognized by traditional universities and or colleges which makes them less appealing to prospective employers.

I’ve been saying that the deepening of information age will radically transform people’s lifestyle which should include education.

This will happen for many reasons; such as cost efficiency (more profitable), increasing network (more online graduates percolating the job markets will become future bosses, thus will likely decrease resistance; an estimated 4 million students are enrolled online in the US), better performance, greater specialization and or simply more tolerance for online graduates or a combination of all these and perhaps more unidentified factors.

In his defense essay at Cato Unbound on the online education debate, George Mason University Professor and Marginal Revolution blogger Alex Tabarrok (who along with colleague Professor Tyler Cowen has their own free online learning platform university called MR University)  notes of the other advantages:

1. Leverage of the best professors teaching more students.

2. Large time savings from less repetition in lectures (students in control of what to repeat) and from lower fixed costs (no need to drive to university). 

3. Greater flexibility in when lectures are consumed (universities open 24 hours a day) and in the lecture format (no need to limit to 50 minutes).

4. Greater scope for productivity improvements as capital substitutes for labor and greater incentive to invest in productivity when the size of the market increases.

5. Greater scope for randomized controlled trials of educational strategies thus more learning about what works in education.

Read the insightful arguments on the online education here.

Academicians can debate the merits or demerits of online education but the world has been moving forward: traditional colleges are now considering to give credit to online courses.

Notes the USA Today:

The American Council on Education, a non-profit organization that represents most of the nation's college and university presidents, is preparing to weigh in on massive open online courses — MOOCs, for short — a new way of teaching and learning that has taken higher education by storm in recent months.

A stamp of approval from the organization could enhance the value of MOOCs to universities and lead to lower tuition costs for students, who could earn credit toward a college degree for passing a particular course. At issue is whether the quality of the courses offered through MOOCs are equivalent to similar courses offered in traditional classrooms.

The popularity of MOOCs, which have been around for barely a year, has intensified quickly. Top faculty at dozens of the world's most elite colleges and universities are teaching hundreds of online courses in a variety of disciplines to millions of students around the world. The courses are free, but they don't count toward traditional degree programs

Online education will pop the government inflated education bubble and democratize ‘education’ via the competitive free markets. 

In the future I envision the proliferation of domestic graduates of Mises Academy, Coursera, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, MIT-Harvard, MR University, Stanford, University of People and more.

Traditional universities will either have to adapt or perish.

Free Online Education: 100k Signs Up for Harvard’s Offer; Minnesota’s Aborted Ban

One of the top universities of the world, Harvard University, has joined the bandwagon in offering free online education.

From Boston.com 

About 100,000 students have signed up for Harvard University’s first free online courses — computer science and an adaptation of the Harvard School of Public Health’s classes in epidemiology and biostatics. The online courses, part of a joint venture called edX, begin Monday, according to Harvard.

The university’s provost, Alan Garber, said Friday that the free courses are part of an effort to educate people worldwide and that the effort will help improve education on Harvard’s own campus.

“We really think that the first courses we offer will be great, but long term, the payoff is going to come from a better understanding about how people learn,” Garber said.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established edX, a nonprofit organization, in the spring, and the University of California Berkeley joined the effort over the summer.

Courses offered through edX are branded MITx, HarvardX, and BerkeleyX. Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said interest has been equally high for the courses offered by all three schools: 155,000 students registered for a course in circuits and electronics that MIT offered through edX in the spring.

Students taking the online courses hail from around the world, but Agarwal said most of those in the spring course were in the United States, India, Britain, and Colombia.

Students can take as many courses as they wish through edX, and when they demonstrate mastery of a course they can receive a certificate of completion.

Graduates of online courses will eventually challenge those of the traditional courses on the job markets. And this will ultimately pop the current education bubble and radically alter current classroom based paradigms—which have been designed from 20^th century—as well as reduce  state indoctrination, diminish the welfare state, promote competition and lay emphasis on individualization/personalization of education (one teacher per student), expand knowledge specialization and democratize knowledge--yes, education for all willing to be educated. 

Free online education, thus, represents the diffusion and acceleration of the great F. A. Hayek’s knowledge revolution.   

The knowledge revolution will undermine justifications for government interference traditionally channeled through the politicization of the "poor" and "uneducated".

Meanwhile on a related field, politicians who pretentiously claim that they are for “education for all”, and the quack “education is a right” has shown their true colors by an attempted ban on free online education for specious reasons: legal technicalities or the enforcement of a state law that requires authorization from the state government

Notes the conservative Heritage Foundation

Lifelong learners, students wanting supplemental courses, professionals, and Americans across the country interested in enrolling in physics, history, music, and a variety of other courses can do so for free from the open-source provider Coursera. But Minnesota has just informed its residents that they are now prohibited by law from furthering their own education for free through courses offered on Coursera by the likes of Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and more than a dozen other universities.

As several reports have noted, the Chronicle of Higher Education first reported the following:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

While students who enroll in a Coursera class cannot get college credit (although they can request that a professor send an email to a prospective employer, for instance, confirming that they took the course and reporting their success), models like Coursera are beginning to change the way Americans think about higher education and provide a huge opportunity to reduce costs and improve access.

Coursera—and others such as EdX (a Harvard/MIT online collaboration), Udacity, and Udemy—represent a shift in higher education toward credentialing content knowledge. Such a shift lays the groundwork for a revolution in higher education, allowing students to attain various credentials by demonstrating content and knowledge mastery from a variety of course providers. But that (literally) free pursuit of knowledge for their own personal edification or skill attainment is no longer available to Minnesota residents.

Politicians have obviously been feeling the heat from the internet whom threatens their longstanding privileges.

Cato’s Andrew Coulson wry but relevant commentary on the ban,

One of the classes you can take at Coursera is “Principles of Macroeconomics.” Maybe the folks who lobbied for and enacted the state’s education regulations are afraid that free learning and economic literacy would threaten their phony-baloney jobs. 

Fortunately, the snowballing forces of decentralization which has been enabled and substantially facilitated and buttressed by the internet has forced the Minnesota government to backtrack.

More signs of the deepening of the information-digital age

Chart of the Day: Education and Medical Care Inflation in the US

Speaking of the US education bubble, the chart below demonstrates of the runaway inflation in tuition and education related fees.

Another area where price inflation has been surging is in Medical care

Explains Dr. Ed Yardeni at his blog

If you are looking for out-of-control inflation in the US, look no further than the college and hospital next door.The CPI data show that college tuition and fees have increased 1,036% since January 1979 vs. 546% for Medical Care Goods & Services vs. 238% for the overall CPI. In other words, college costs have more than quadrupled relative to the CPI over this period, while Medical Care has more than doubled relative to the CPI.

Deepening Information Age: In the US, Public Education is being Undermined by the Internet

The internet seems on path to unravel 20th century welfare state institutions partly through the public education model.

Professor Gary North explains,

Parents are pulling their children out of the government schools. This is happening across the USA.

In city after city, enrollment is declining. This is not a recent development. It has been going on for a half a decade. It has taken place in half of the nation’s largest districts.

The trend looks irreversible.

As the Web offers better programs free of charge, the public schools cannot compete. The inner city schools are catastrophic. They are getting worse. As whites ans Asians flee the cities, the inner-city schools get worse.

The tax base shrinks. The teachers union demands more pay and smaller classes. The city governments are trapped. Solution: cut programs, fire teachers, and enlarge classes back to (horror!) 1959?s 33 students.

Nobody is supposed to talk about this. It is time to talk about it. Public education will not recover. The longer the decline takes place, the more parents will conclude that there is only one solution: pull their kids out.

At some point, voters will not pass any more bond issues. They will not consent to higher property taxes. They will let the public schools sink.

Read the rest here

Democratization (and the de-politicization) of education will become a global phenomenon as educational platform will mostly migrate to the internet.

One example:

Coursera a free internet educational platform that offers high quality courses from the top universities recently announced that 12 universities — including three international institutions — will be joining them particularly, the Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania in offering Coursera classes (Coursera Blog)

On Coursera, you will now be able to access world-class courses from:

• California Institute of Technology
• Duke University
• École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Johns Hopkins University
• Princeton University
• Rice University
• Stanford University
• University of California, San Francisco
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Michigan
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Toronto
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington

For traditional schools, it would be adapt or perish.

The salad days of the education bubble in the US or even in the Philippines have been numbered.

Peter Thiel Pays People to Drop Out of College and Pursue Entrepreneurship

Billionaire entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel pays students to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurship.

From CBSNews.com

One of the wealthiest, best-educated American entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, isn't convinced college is worth the cost. With only half of recent U.S. college graduates in full-time jobs, and student loans now at $1 trillion, Thiel has come up with his own small-scale solution: pay a couple dozen of the nation's most promising students $100,000 to walk away from college and pursue their passions.

See the interview below.

Some noteworthy parts of the interview… [bold emphasis mine]

Peter Thiel: We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing in the last decade. Everybody believed you had to have a house. They'd pay whatever it took. Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay whatever it takes.

Morley Safer: You describe college administrators as subprime mortgage lenders, in other words conmen.

Peter Thiel: Not all of them, but certainly the for-profit schools, the less good colleges are like the subprime mortgage lenders where people are being conned into thinking that this credential is the one thing you need to do better in life. And they're actually not any better off after having gone to college; they typically are worse off because they've amassed all this debt.

More Peter Thiel quotes:

Peter Thiel: I'm saying that people should think hard about why they're going to college. If your life plan is to be a professor or to be a doctor or some other career where you need a specific credential you should and probably have to go to college. If your plan is to do something very different you should think really hard about it.

Peter Thiel: I did not realize how wrong-- how screwed up the education system is. We now have $1 trillion in student debt in the U.S. That trillion dollars-- wanna describe it cynically? You can say it's paid for $1 trillion of lies about how good education is.

Peter Thiel: We have a society where successful people are encouraged to go to college. But it is a-- it's a mistake to think that that's what makes people successful.

In the interview, Mr. Peter Thiel has been criticized for advocating or pursuing “anti-education” sentiment. But such accusation represents a misplaced understanding of Mr. Thiel’s position: the growing impracticability and irrelevance of the current “screwed up” educational system.

In other words, Mr. Thiel has not been anti-education “where you need a specific credential you should and probably have to go to college”, but rather he points out that the cost benefit tradeoff of higher education has become infeasible, and worse, the quality of education has not been aligned with the “education” necessary for work. And this is evidenced by the decreasing returns of higher education.

Finally Mr. Thiel doesn’t really pay people to drop out of college to become bums. He has instead been preaching entrepreneurship to students.

To quote anew the great Ludwig von Mises on the relationship between education and entrepreneurship,

In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal [p. 315] to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.

Once again Peter Thiel

Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook didn't complete Harvard. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. When you do something entrepreneurial, the credentials are not what really matters. What matters is having the right idea at the right time, the right place.

Peter Thiel has definitely not been out of touch with reality.

Chart of the Day: Decreasing Returns of Higher Education

From the Investor’s Business Daily

For the first time in history, the number of jobless workers age 25 and up who have attended some college now exceeds the ranks of those who settled for a high school diploma or less.

Read the article here

Politicization of any social activities eventually lead to the law of decreasing returns, higher education in the US notwithstanding.

This applies to the Philippines as well.

The information age will accelerate the deflation of this education bubble.

Quote of the Day: The Information Age will Revolutionize Higher Education

Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to retard it. The strategy has been to make a few easy, low-cost, conservative moves that preserve the status quo, such as putting some existing courses online, while trying to suppress the innovative outsiders like Phoenix, DeVry, TED, Kahn Academy, etc. It’s a classic example of what Clayton Christensen calls sustaining innovation — incremental changes that keep the existing market structure intact. The last thing the higher-ed establishment wants is disruptive innovation that challenges its dominant incumbent position.

This is from Austrian economist Peter G. Klein at the Mises Blog.

Accelerating instances of "disruptive innovation" from the information age will help collapse the current education bubble.

The Kind of Education that will Get a Job in the Information Age

As I have been repeatedly saying, the information change will radically change the way we do things. This will partly include the nature of digital economy businesses which will be reflected on jobs, as well as, many aspects of the employee-employer relationship such as recruitment.

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute has this insightful piece of advice for job seekers.

First is to give less importance to college

So many college degrees today are intrinsically worthless that it should really not be possible to find people willing to pay for them

[Edited to add: In the US 1 out of 2 college graduates have been unemployed. In the Philippines 2 out of 5 graduates have been unemployed.]

Next is to build relevant skills through self-learning by using the web. (bold emphasis)

So what’s the alternative if you’re a high school senior seeking higher education? How about this: instead of handing control over that education to someone else, decide what it is you would like to learn over those four years and then… learn it. Thanks to the Web, the material covered in virtually every undergraduate program is readily available at little cost—and the same is true for many advanced programs. And, having learned it, spend a few hundred dollars to create a website or even simply a YouTube channel on which you demonstrate your new skills/understanding. Conduct research. Write it up. Build something. Translate Cyrano into English, maintaining the Alexandrine meter and rhyme. Whatever it is. Then, when you’re ready to apply for work, submit your resume with a link to this portfolio of relevant work.

Employers, ask yourself this question: Would you rather hire someone with a portfolio such as the one described above, visibly demonstrating competency and personal initiative, or someone with a degree that is generally supposed to signal that competency, but that you can’t readily assess for yourself?

My blog is a testament of self-learning acquired through the web. But I am self-employed.

Does Higher Education Pay Off?

Higher education is not only in a bubble, but is fast becoming an unviable activity or unworthy of personal investments—meaning costs exceeds the returns.

So argues Professor Laurence Kotlikoff at the Bloomberg, (bold highlights mine)

The notion that education pays and that better education pays better is taken for granted by almost everyone. For college professors like me, this is a very convenient idea, providing a high and growing demand for our services.

Unfortunately, the facts seem to disagree. A recent study by economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger showed that going to more selective colleges and universities makes little difference to future income once one accounts for the underlying ability of the student. Their work confirms other studies that find no financial benefit to attending top-tier schools.

It’s good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University (my employer), and that "better" higher education doesn’t pay better. But does higher education pay in the first place?

The answer seems obvious. On average, doctorate holders earn more than those with master degrees, who earn more than those with bachelor degrees, who earn more than high school graduates. How can education not pay?

The answer is that education isn’t free. Top undergraduate programs are now charging students $50,000 a year to eat, sleep and, hopefully, attend class. But that’s just the direct cost. Education’s hidden cost is the time spent learning rather than earning.

Read the rest here

Again the soaring costs of education are largely due to government’s numerous interventions, which renders what used to be a stepping stone personal development, as unfeasible.

Moreover, rising costs of education also reflects on the old political economic order. This is going to change see here and here.