The credentialing power of modern educational institutions entrenches their format and makes them arms of the administrative state that controls access to professions, from attorney and physician to hair dresser. This method of controlling competition in the labor market is growing, not shrinking, a direct result of the old Slaughterhouse Cases decision that citizens have no Constitutional right or privilege to practice a lawful profession.
I have long contemplated the possibility of reducing cost to students by elimination of the expensive middleman that David has identified as the Corporate University. Such a system would empowers students to obtain the education in matters they choose to study rather than a curriculum chosen for them. It requires a true libertarian attitude to consider young people to be wise enough to know what knowledge is good for them. Student choice pf teachers inevitably implies student choice of educational content.
The fundamental impediment to any reform lies in the credentialing power of schools that are themselves credentialed, directly or indirectly, by the state. Thus the state outsources to these schools the power to control entry into a substantial part of the labor market. Because credentialing imposes legal barriers to entry into numerous professions, universities, colleges, and trade schools can and do turn their door keeping function, a form of monopoly, into profits. They are unlikely to willingly relinquish this power to a market-based education system that empowers student choice.
Maintaining their monopoly position is in the interest of the Universities but a university that breaks ranks by awarding external degrees to students who have gotten their education somewhere else is imposing costs mostly on other universities, the usual problem of maintaining a cartel. So the question is to what degree present institutions provide enforcement mechanisms for the cartel. If one respectable university starts awarding external degrees how easily can other universities get its credentialing power removed? Could it use antitrust law to fight them? Courts have been willing to rule against university cartel arrangements re admission and student aid in the past.
This would probably work fine in fields where there isn't a government mandated monopoly already. Google is pretty famous for hiring skills over a degree, or at least did so in the past. What you suggested was already taking place with those jobs - alternate training programs that taught what the major tech companies wanted people to know.
Public school teaching, as an obvious counter, is highly regulated in each state. To get a teaching certificate not only requires passing certain tests, but often very specifically state-sanctioned programs that outline very specific classes, student teaching programs, etc. In my state, people who want to be teachers have to complete a four year program that's specifically recognized by the state. It can't even be a three year program that covers the same material (though students can overload in some years to shorten the timeframe).
If you could instead only require passing the Praxis exam for the intended subject, it would dramatically change how public education works.
None of that can happen so long as states add those additional requirements. Universities cannot unilaterally decide to award certifications without having students complete the required program.
If any one doctrine underpinned Aaron Director’s theory of monopoly, it was that government was usually actively supporting a disruption of capitalism. In the case of universities, not only are they subsidized by government loan programs, they are the means by which employment licensing prevents competition in the better paid labor markets. So long as government licenses professions, “private” gatekeepers, or the government itself as in the case of the civil service system, will be essential. Educational institutions and testing institutes are part of an integrated system designed to limit competition in aspects of the labor market. Mandated “education” and testing restrict free enterprise for the benefit of a select group of elite wage earners.
But what do the students want? In many cases, they want some combination of:
- a credential that will get them better jobs
- a chance to get away from their parents and party for four years
- a marriage market, ideally one pre-selecting those of similar age, social class, earning potential, and intelligence
- to make connections that might help their future financial success
A few mostly want to play college sports as a step to professional sports. They may also have some of the other motives above, or even the one below.
Some presumably want to learn useful skills, or learn things that interest them, regardless of their financial usefulness. A few would even put that first, as demonstrated by actions as well as words. (That would be me, as an undergraduate, but I was 'weird'.)
But I think the list I gave includes most students' actual first priority, and probably their second as well.
And that's one problem with your proposal. Will desirable employers recruit people who merely have a certifying firm's degree? Will a school that focusses on teaching provide the desired extracurricular advantages?
FWIW, what you are proposing could be said to already exist, in the form of MOOCs, especially certificate-granting MOOCs. They don't seem to be taking the world by storm; I don't recall seeing resumes citing such things even getting past the HR filter where I worked.
The marriage market and related social activities is one of the reasons I want my university to locate in Cambridge or Berkeley. Getting away from their parents and partying are still available. Sixty or seventy years ago, when schools took seriously their in loco parentis status, parents might for that reason have preferred the conventional model for their students but that is no longer an option.
The one hard part is getting a degree that will be taken seriously. Ideally they get some established university to offer degrees based on examination.
Hi David! My view is that the dating and social aspect of modern universities is subversive to their highest purpose. The great teachers and students of the past were, I assume, dedicated to ideas and to truth. But places like today’s Harvard distract scholars with shiny objects like political correctness.
A better way to organize the pursuit of knowledge is offered by digital technology like YouTube or Substack. Over time these platforms might evolve in the way you advocate here.
There's some question about whether the students at the expensive, exclusive local universities will regard the students at the (presumably) less expensive, less exclusive new universities as peers. If they are seen as mere townies, or mere community college students, or similar, the social opportunities presumably won't be up to snuff.
Back when I was at Harvard, here was still a tradition of dating girls from local women's colleges, but I imagine that's long gone - they aren't quite peers now that everyone knows Harvard accepts a lot of women, and is more exclusive. And it never worked the other way - Radcliffe girls didn't date outside the Ivy league.
Of course I'm no longer at all plugged in to young people's attitudes and preferences, particularly those of elite young people. But they do seem to prefer to marry each other.
I expect some of that would happen, but different students will be sorting in different ways. For someone actually interested in his subject, the fact that someone else is interested and knowledgeable is likely to be more important than the status of being a student. Similarly for someone with athletic interests, or a guy mostly interested in dating good looking girls, or ...
"It could mean finding an existing university willing to give external degrees to students passing suitable examinations."
University of the State of New York kind of or close to did that and, I haven't checked but still may today.
I dropped out, U. of Fla., after two years in '59. In '86 my daughter was having trouble with calculus at Michigan Tech so I told her I'd race her to see which of us got our BS first.
Though I'd stopped matriculating, over the years since I'd been doing night and correspondence courses that interested me and had a respectable pile of credits. I contacted University of the State of New York's correspondence folks and with what I had plus a couple of night classes as U. of Alaska I was able to satisfy their degree requirements.
& Yes my daughter earned her engineering degree though I did beat her getting my sheepskin a few weeks earlier.
I especially like separating degrees and teaching, with degrees based on tests. One way to test the testers would be to have everyone tested repeat the test 5 and 10 years later. It would at least be interesting.
Having a degree that is taken seriously is possible. For example I've heard that having a CFA (chartered financial analyst) level 2 is as prestigious as having a MA in finance
We already have that model in places like the University of Phoenix, Heald, etc i.e. where you have to compete not on reputation but outcomes and most of the teachers are 1099 contractors moonlighting their day job. The students pretend to learn, the teachers pretend to work, and in the end everybody gets what they want, a cheap efficient accredited degree mill since degrees are worthless in most fields as a practical matter outside signalling.
It's not so much universities are broken, it's that the median university is, i.e. satellite public schools, etc. Flagships and Ivy's are there for reputation hence the material is irrelevant, you aren't there to learn and likewise degree mills already do what you want and learning likewise is irrelevant. If you are looking to learn you simply go to a tech school or a community college with tech school adjacent programs. All three are priced appropriately relatively speaking.
The problem is with satellite public schools and non-Ivy privates, which I'm guessing is the vast majority of the student body, where you are paying $70K+ a year to learn nothing nor do you get a reputational boost all while getting a overpriced degree and dealing with all the drama of the day which currently plagues them. Northwestern and MATC aren't the problem, taking underwater basket weaving at UH-Hilo is.
Aside: Why is Adam Smith so far ahead of almost everyone else on so many ideas? Was he just a smart guy? How big of a factor were his friends? His financial independence?
Thanks for writing on this topic. I like your idea about setting up next to an existing university. Here’s another thought I had:
“Does this sounds like a good idea? To have students directly pay professors. As we do here on Substack. What’s stopping people from teaching courses on Substack right now? What’s stopping “packagers of Substack courses” to create degrees certifying that students have attained a reasonably high level of competence?”
Substack isn't designed to support such a thing. It's an also-ran blogging platform, focussed on financial gain. Or perhaps it's a semi-decent aggregator of online many-to-one media like newspapers, magazines, and similar.
Absolutely no facility for testing and similar.
If someone wanted to do this, they'd be better off with a MOOC platform. But note that MOOCs haven't made it into the big time as a credentialler.
Interesting idea! But I think it would only work if it was combined with a better education qualifications to job requirement feedback loop. Some kind of better algorithmic way of scoring applicants based on their course work, rather than merely their majors or the classes they mention in interviews. Otherwise this idea would just worsen the tendency for students to choose easy classes and demand easy coursework.
There would presumably be a competitive market for the equivalent of grading, producing a certificate that measured how much a student had learned. Students would want to be graded by a system that produced results employers took seriously.
I'm pretty sure that the majority of students aren't future-orientated enough to actually demand these classes at the level that they ought to be demanded. The virtue of your scheme is that the few that *are* might be able to self-select into these courses. But I don't expect there to be many of them - and this only works if there's enough of them such that employers shift to credibly signaling preference for this group.
It's just too much to ask for students to individually choose to make things harder for themselves at every turn, for a vague idea of future hiring patterns. There's essentially a collective action problem: any given student has no reason to choose harder courses: it just wouldn't be noticed. If some critical mass of students did so too? Then he would have incentive to follow, to avoid being left behind. Major requirements are currently an imperfect solution to this problem, without them, standards would drop.
Plus, the natural tendency is already to blame professors for bad grades and students-as-customers would just make this worse.
I taught as an employee and also free-lance. A couple of times my students paid me to continue teaching them after their corporate class ended. It worked. They could take a competency test and get a certificate of proficiency either way.
As with so many good ideas, the difficulty is getting the thing started and running long enough for paying customers to perceive the value.
There were professors I would have paid $1000 (constant dollars) to be in a group of 20 interested students, and professors that would have had to pay me more than $1000 to be in their class (and not wildly interested to be there).
I worked hard to find something good, and useful, in every course I took, and generally managed to do that. But too many times it was depites the 'efforts' of the professor, not due to them.
Over a 22-year period of taking classes and seminars) I took, for a grade, at least 91 separate courses. (I.e. 273 total credits on the way to a BS, an MS, and a PhD.)
I was lucky in that I estimate at least 1/3 of the professors in those courses were not just adequate but superior, and perhaps only 10-15% were useless and I learned on my own.
The credentialing power of modern educational institutions entrenches their format and makes them arms of the administrative state that controls access to professions, from attorney and physician to hair dresser. This method of controlling competition in the labor market is growing, not shrinking, a direct result of the old Slaughterhouse Cases decision that citizens have no Constitutional right or privilege to practice a lawful profession.
I have long contemplated the possibility of reducing cost to students by elimination of the expensive middleman that David has identified as the Corporate University. Such a system would empowers students to obtain the education in matters they choose to study rather than a curriculum chosen for them. It requires a true libertarian attitude to consider young people to be wise enough to know what knowledge is good for them. Student choice pf teachers inevitably implies student choice of educational content.
The fundamental impediment to any reform lies in the credentialing power of schools that are themselves credentialed, directly or indirectly, by the state. Thus the state outsources to these schools the power to control entry into a substantial part of the labor market. Because credentialing imposes legal barriers to entry into numerous professions, universities, colleges, and trade schools can and do turn their door keeping function, a form of monopoly, into profits. They are unlikely to willingly relinquish this power to a market-based education system that empowers student choice.
Maintaining their monopoly position is in the interest of the Universities but a university that breaks ranks by awarding external degrees to students who have gotten their education somewhere else is imposing costs mostly on other universities, the usual problem of maintaining a cartel. So the question is to what degree present institutions provide enforcement mechanisms for the cartel. If one respectable university starts awarding external degrees how easily can other universities get its credentialing power removed? Could it use antitrust law to fight them? Courts have been willing to rule against university cartel arrangements re admission and student aid in the past.
This would probably work fine in fields where there isn't a government mandated monopoly already. Google is pretty famous for hiring skills over a degree, or at least did so in the past. What you suggested was already taking place with those jobs - alternate training programs that taught what the major tech companies wanted people to know.
Public school teaching, as an obvious counter, is highly regulated in each state. To get a teaching certificate not only requires passing certain tests, but often very specifically state-sanctioned programs that outline very specific classes, student teaching programs, etc. In my state, people who want to be teachers have to complete a four year program that's specifically recognized by the state. It can't even be a three year program that covers the same material (though students can overload in some years to shorten the timeframe).
If you could instead only require passing the Praxis exam for the intended subject, it would dramatically change how public education works.
None of that can happen so long as states add those additional requirements. Universities cannot unilaterally decide to award certifications without having students complete the required program.
If any one doctrine underpinned Aaron Director’s theory of monopoly, it was that government was usually actively supporting a disruption of capitalism. In the case of universities, not only are they subsidized by government loan programs, they are the means by which employment licensing prevents competition in the better paid labor markets. So long as government licenses professions, “private” gatekeepers, or the government itself as in the case of the civil service system, will be essential. Educational institutions and testing institutes are part of an integrated system designed to limit competition in aspects of the labor market. Mandated “education” and testing restrict free enterprise for the benefit of a select group of elite wage earners.
But what do the students want? In many cases, they want some combination of:
- a credential that will get them better jobs
- a chance to get away from their parents and party for four years
- a marriage market, ideally one pre-selecting those of similar age, social class, earning potential, and intelligence
- to make connections that might help their future financial success
A few mostly want to play college sports as a step to professional sports. They may also have some of the other motives above, or even the one below.
Some presumably want to learn useful skills, or learn things that interest them, regardless of their financial usefulness. A few would even put that first, as demonstrated by actions as well as words. (That would be me, as an undergraduate, but I was 'weird'.)
But I think the list I gave includes most students' actual first priority, and probably their second as well.
And that's one problem with your proposal. Will desirable employers recruit people who merely have a certifying firm's degree? Will a school that focusses on teaching provide the desired extracurricular advantages?
FWIW, what you are proposing could be said to already exist, in the form of MOOCs, especially certificate-granting MOOCs. They don't seem to be taking the world by storm; I don't recall seeing resumes citing such things even getting past the HR filter where I worked.
The marriage market and related social activities is one of the reasons I want my university to locate in Cambridge or Berkeley. Getting away from their parents and partying are still available. Sixty or seventy years ago, when schools took seriously their in loco parentis status, parents might for that reason have preferred the conventional model for their students but that is no longer an option.
The one hard part is getting a degree that will be taken seriously. Ideally they get some established university to offer degrees based on examination.
Hi David! My view is that the dating and social aspect of modern universities is subversive to their highest purpose. The great teachers and students of the past were, I assume, dedicated to ideas and to truth. But places like today’s Harvard distract scholars with shiny objects like political correctness.
A better way to organize the pursuit of knowledge is offered by digital technology like YouTube or Substack. Over time these platforms might evolve in the way you advocate here.
I hope these words will reach you.
Best wishes, E.
They indeed reached me. I read all the comments, even the ones that are not from people I know.
There's some question about whether the students at the expensive, exclusive local universities will regard the students at the (presumably) less expensive, less exclusive new universities as peers. If they are seen as mere townies, or mere community college students, or similar, the social opportunities presumably won't be up to snuff.
Back when I was at Harvard, here was still a tradition of dating girls from local women's colleges, but I imagine that's long gone - they aren't quite peers now that everyone knows Harvard accepts a lot of women, and is more exclusive. And it never worked the other way - Radcliffe girls didn't date outside the Ivy league.
Of course I'm no longer at all plugged in to young people's attitudes and preferences, particularly those of elite young people. But they do seem to prefer to marry each other.
I expect some of that would happen, but different students will be sorting in different ways. For someone actually interested in his subject, the fact that someone else is interested and knowledgeable is likely to be more important than the status of being a student. Similarly for someone with athletic interests, or a guy mostly interested in dating good looking girls, or ...
"It could mean finding an existing university willing to give external degrees to students passing suitable examinations."
University of the State of New York kind of or close to did that and, I haven't checked but still may today.
I dropped out, U. of Fla., after two years in '59. In '86 my daughter was having trouble with calculus at Michigan Tech so I told her I'd race her to see which of us got our BS first.
Though I'd stopped matriculating, over the years since I'd been doing night and correspondence courses that interested me and had a respectable pile of credits. I contacted University of the State of New York's correspondence folks and with what I had plus a couple of night classes as U. of Alaska I was able to satisfy their degree requirements.
& Yes my daughter earned her engineering degree though I did beat her getting my sheepskin a few weeks earlier.
I especially like separating degrees and teaching, with degrees based on tests. One way to test the testers would be to have everyone tested repeat the test 5 and 10 years later. It would at least be interesting.
Having a degree that is taken seriously is possible. For example I've heard that having a CFA (chartered financial analyst) level 2 is as prestigious as having a MA in finance
We already have that model in places like the University of Phoenix, Heald, etc i.e. where you have to compete not on reputation but outcomes and most of the teachers are 1099 contractors moonlighting their day job. The students pretend to learn, the teachers pretend to work, and in the end everybody gets what they want, a cheap efficient accredited degree mill since degrees are worthless in most fields as a practical matter outside signalling.
It's not so much universities are broken, it's that the median university is, i.e. satellite public schools, etc. Flagships and Ivy's are there for reputation hence the material is irrelevant, you aren't there to learn and likewise degree mills already do what you want and learning likewise is irrelevant. If you are looking to learn you simply go to a tech school or a community college with tech school adjacent programs. All three are priced appropriately relatively speaking.
The problem is with satellite public schools and non-Ivy privates, which I'm guessing is the vast majority of the student body, where you are paying $70K+ a year to learn nothing nor do you get a reputational boost all while getting a overpriced degree and dealing with all the drama of the day which currently plagues them. Northwestern and MATC aren't the problem, taking underwater basket weaving at UH-Hilo is.
Aside: Why is Adam Smith so far ahead of almost everyone else on so many ideas? Was he just a smart guy? How big of a factor were his friends? His financial independence?
There may have been other people as good we don't know about. A little later Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham, and Galton are similarly impressive.
That's true. I've never thought of that.
Thanks for writing on this topic. I like your idea about setting up next to an existing university. Here’s another thought I had:
“Does this sounds like a good idea? To have students directly pay professors. As we do here on Substack. What’s stopping people from teaching courses on Substack right now? What’s stopping “packagers of Substack courses” to create degrees certifying that students have attained a reasonably high level of competence?”
Here’s my similar post from a few months ago.
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-152187930
Substack isn't designed to support such a thing. It's an also-ran blogging platform, focussed on financial gain. Or perhaps it's a semi-decent aggregator of online many-to-one media like newspapers, magazines, and similar.
Absolutely no facility for testing and similar.
If someone wanted to do this, they'd be better off with a MOOC platform. But note that MOOCs haven't made it into the big time as a credentialler.
Good. How about we brainstorm features that we would like to see in such platform?
First we need a goal or goals for the platform.
What should our goals be?
After we agree on goals let’s move onto: 1) high level requirements, and 2) design concepts.
Are you game? I’ll let you go first.
Interesting idea! But I think it would only work if it was combined with a better education qualifications to job requirement feedback loop. Some kind of better algorithmic way of scoring applicants based on their course work, rather than merely their majors or the classes they mention in interviews. Otherwise this idea would just worsen the tendency for students to choose easy classes and demand easy coursework.
There would presumably be a competitive market for the equivalent of grading, producing a certificate that measured how much a student had learned. Students would want to be graded by a system that produced results employers took seriously.
I'm pretty sure that the majority of students aren't future-orientated enough to actually demand these classes at the level that they ought to be demanded. The virtue of your scheme is that the few that *are* might be able to self-select into these courses. But I don't expect there to be many of them - and this only works if there's enough of them such that employers shift to credibly signaling preference for this group.
It's just too much to ask for students to individually choose to make things harder for themselves at every turn, for a vague idea of future hiring patterns. There's essentially a collective action problem: any given student has no reason to choose harder courses: it just wouldn't be noticed. If some critical mass of students did so too? Then he would have incentive to follow, to avoid being left behind. Major requirements are currently an imperfect solution to this problem, without them, standards would drop.
Plus, the natural tendency is already to blame professors for bad grades and students-as-customers would just make this worse.
I taught as an employee and also free-lance. A couple of times my students paid me to continue teaching them after their corporate class ended. It worked. They could take a competency test and get a certificate of proficiency either way.
As with so many good ideas, the difficulty is getting the thing started and running long enough for paying customers to perceive the value.
There were professors I would have paid $1000 (constant dollars) to be in a group of 20 interested students, and professors that would have had to pay me more than $1000 to be in their class (and not wildly interested to be there).
I worked hard to find something good, and useful, in every course I took, and generally managed to do that. But too many times it was depites the 'efforts' of the professor, not due to them.
Over a 22-year period of taking classes and seminars) I took, for a grade, at least 91 separate courses. (I.e. 273 total credits on the way to a BS, an MS, and a PhD.)
I was lucky in that I estimate at least 1/3 of the professors in those courses were not just adequate but superior, and perhaps only 10-15% were useless and I learned on my own.