Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education!! And e-…
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Politics
— 4 years ago(July 17, 2021 08:36 AM)lite universities deserve a huge share of the blame.
You can enter Harvard here or from any laptop on the planet.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a troubling exposé on the crushing debt burdens that students accumulate while pursuing master’s degrees at elite universities in fields like drama and film, where the job prospects are limited and the chances of making enough to repay their debt are slim. Because it focused on MFA programs at Ivy League schools—one subject accumulated around $300,000 in loans pursuing screenwriting—the article rocketed around the creative class on Twitter. But it also pointed to a more fundamental, troubling development in the world of higher education: For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.
Few have written more convincingly on this topic than Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at New America. As a journalist and think tanker, he’s argued for years that “universities see master’s degree programs as largely unregulated cash cows that help shore up their bottom line,” and shown how even schools like Harvard offer effectively predatory programs. The rise of online learning has only supercharged the problem, by allowing universities to parlay their brands nationally and internationally in order to enroll students at an industrial scale.
In 2019, Carey took a long, dispiriting look at the rise of so-called online program managers, or OPMs—the private companies like 2U that major universities from Yale to small schools like Oregon’s Concordia University use to build their online offerings. These companies design and operate courses on behalf of schools—sometimes essentially offering a class in a box—that the university can slap its branding on. The OPM then takes as much as 70 percent of tuition revenue. That money is largely being funded with government loans, which may never be paid back.
After reading the Journal’s article, I called up Carey to ask him his thoughts on the current state of the master’s degree market, and what should be done to fix it.
Jordan Weissmann: I feel like you have been methodically building up this thesis—which you would never quite put this bluntly—that master’s degrees are basically the biggest scam in higher education, and it seems like prestigious nonprofit universities are in on the grift along with for-profits. Would you say that’s an accurate description of your take at this point, or have I wildly distorted it?
Kevin Carey: Probably the biggest scam in higher education remains one-year certificates offered by shady for-profit colleges that cost, like, $25,000 and don’t lead to a job. Master’s degrees are probably No. 2. Certainly, within the confines of colleges that are not legally for-profit, they are the biggest scam by far.
Right, and what makes master’s degrees a little different from those one-year certificate programs that are offered by fly-by-night schools is that they are being delivered by Ivy League universities and online schools alike.
In some ways, they’re more similar than they might seem. Many of them are one-year certificate programs. We don’t call them that. We call them master’s degrees, but that’s part of the problem. They are in fact often one-year job-oriented programs that are heavily debt-financed, marketed very aggressively through online web advertising. They purport to provide very specific economic opportunities in a given field. It’s just one are being marketed to students who just graduated from high school and the other are being marketed to people who just graduated with bachelor’s degrees, but other than that, they’re kind of the same.
Can you give me examples of the types of programs you’re talking about?
The Columbia School of Journalism offers what is essentially a 10-month master’s degree that costs $70,000 or something like that. It starts in September, ends in June. You can only do so much in less than a year. It’s completely a career-oriented degree. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of [career-oriented] programs out there.
One of the reasons that universities are able to be exploitative in the master’s degree market is because they’re not constrained in the same way that they are in the market for bachelor’s degrees. If you’re offering bachelor’s degrees, they all have to be four years long. You don’t have a two-year bachelor’s degree or a six-year bachelor’s degree. You have to publicly publish your acceptance rates, your average SAT scores, so to the extent that you’re selling selectivity, you actually have to back it up with data, whereas in the master’s degree market, you can call almost anything a master’s degree. Master’s degree programs do not have to publish thei -
PurpleStuff — 4 years ago(July 20, 2021 07:29 PM)
College is largely a scam that preys on young people without much concept of money and puts them into a lifetime of debt, working to pay off the mostly worthless degrees they wasted thousands of dollars getting. Society needs to move away from the idea that colleges are necessary.
-
️ Christina 1986-05-20 
— 4 years ago(July 21, 2021 01:14 AM)Some classes are as easy as a chat board, some are impossible, in my experience, but it was a school with a campus elsewhere and free.
½ S/N Asian (40%+ Chinese) ½ Norwegian/Danish-Irish Swiss (Amish/PA) German French Dutch? French+Dutch Celtic-Irish English-Irish?
..? -
TheAdlerian — 4 years ago(July 21, 2021 01:53 AM)
Grad degrees are legit if you have a field with A LOT of information. The higher you go the more specific stuff you learn.
The deal is that getting a BA is kind of exactly like high school. You take the same range of classes and don't focus on much. So, it's like a movie that starts an hour in.
Back in the 30s etc you could become a doctor in like four years, now it takes 12 and doctors don't know that much. I mean a general practitioner.
If a four year degree was specialized, you would not need a masters.
In psychology, they try to wear you out with all you must do. So, it's a money hustle and to keep people out.