An extremely interesting blog post by Marc Cuban on the economic status of higher education in the US. I really enjoy Marc Cuban’s posts, since he always goes straight to the issue. I think he has a couple of good points, that resonate with some of my thoughts:
- We have always considered a good thing to have a higher percentage of graduates, as in the US, UK, France, Germany. In 2010 the percentage of graduates in Italy was 13%, compared with 30% in the US and 24.2 in EC12). Not all degrees can lead to a well-paid job. I covered in part this issue here (post in Italian). Now we probably should reflect on the fact that some countries might have overshot. And it does not depend on whether the University system is public, mostly public, or mostly private. It is a call to reconsider the relevance of technical and vocational high schools.
- Higher education as an economic activity has not followed the deflationary path or the productivity improvements that other economic activities have experienced, pushed by globalization and ICT technologies [1][2]. In the US they have actually gone the opposite direction in recent years, with a large increase in academic fees fueled by student debt. I think at this point the “classical” model of the research University is at risk, unless an updated scalable model can be found. I covered some of the points here (in Italian), but plan to talk about it some more in one of the next posts. For those interested, there’s a great recent opinion piece on this issue by David Brooks on the NYTimes.
[1] This is also true for the national health systems both in Europe and in the US.
[2] Oh yes: higher education is an economic activity. I do not mean it is “only” an economic activity.
