What’s a College Education?
I have seen this meme shared quite a few times through various social media sites.
Let me first say that “I get it.” There is a conversation about the current youth not being willing to work as hard as their parents and grandparents to get the same things. The response which is being expressed through the meme is that minimum things are different today than yesteryear, if not the worst case of things being more difficult.
Learning about basket weaving in college
What got me into economics was having a professor who didn’t get his feelings hurt when I asked about things. One day he began teaching about the consumer price index, or CPI. The CPI is a tool used to represent an average cost of an activity for an average individual or household in a given state. Whenever you have a conversation about the cost of living, you are by proxy having a conversation about the topic that CPIs cover. While the usual one spoken about is the general one for households, you can have price indexes, and examine the changes over periods of time for anything. Our meme is talking about the CPI for education.
The question I asked was about the items changing over time. The professor pointed out that indeed, lamp oil was in the basket maybe 100 years ago, but now few homes are illuminated that way. Today cellphones and phone bills are a part of the average american consumers basket. We can better visualize our basket as a pie chart of consumption. Examine this chart I pulled off the internet from 2012. You can see rent, mortgages, home repairs and maintenance represented as “housing”.
What our meme dodges is the contents of the education basket.
Our meme talks about the size of the education basket, as communicated through pointing out how much more labor hours a student needs to perform today as compared to the previous period of time. A rough check showed these numbers honest. What I argue is being left out is what is contained inside the “college basket”.What our meme dodges is the contents of the education basket.
Its a bit of a shell game..
Back in the 1980s, a much larger portion of the basket consisted of education.
Today, colleges are competing for students based on amenities. Today your dorms must be state of the art, have the coolest look but the coolest architects and designers. You must have an appealing eating and common area. Correction, areas. You must have some on campus activities. You must have OFF campus activities. If they don’t exist, put some cash out to incubate them.
You must have a rock wall for climbing
These numbers exist….what percentage of a 1980’s college tuition went towards remodeling dorms periodically and what percentage goes towards that today.
We must respect the reality that the basket of a 2016 college student in no way resembled the basket of a 1980 student. When we talk about these price disparities we act as if the same items and amenities are being provided. The narrative is that education itself is what has become so amazingly expensive. I argue we could ask instead is the rock wall possibly affecting the price, and maybe even ask if the rock wall was necessary. We ask if teachers are being paid too much. I argue we could also ask if the students truly need the fancy dorms and views of which the cost much be rolled into the classes the teacher is teaching. We ask if the administration needs to be as large as it is. I argue that we could examine whether a resort campus setup that requires Disney Land level management is really necessary.
I went to college and learned how to weave these baskets together. It was either economics or rock wall for climbing for that final class slot.
Thanks for taking the time to read my opines. If you have a meme or narrative that you see shared on social media and would like me to “give it a go” as I have done here, drop the meme on my twitter feed @RaymondKRoberts . We the People decide the value and utility of engaging each other in this many-to-many format that technology has provided us.
Fight the Good Fight — Raymond K Roberts