Paging through The Last Knight, Guido Hülsmann summarizes the dismal conditions, the zeitgeist of the tertiary educational system Mises endured at the University of Vienna:
The lectures were infamously bad, resulting in part from a distinctive lack of consumer orientation on the part of the professors. After the government takeover of the Austrian universities, the professors had become financially independent of their audience and had little incentive to accommodate the needs of their students. This affected both their behavior and their public status. The government had turned them into civil-servant scholars—or to put it less flatteringly, into court intellectuals. “Academic freedom” no longer meant political autonomy. When the public spoke of “limitless academic liberty,” they referred to freedom from responsibility or consequences.
That is on page 64 of the actual book (80 in the PDF).
Unfortunately the validity his observation has not faded with time. Arguably this is due in part to state intervention (the criminalization of discriminatory association practices by businesses [e.g., screening for intelligence]), accreditation cartelism, a unionized labor force, and various strains of a low-time preference “get-rich-quick” mentality spurred by degree inflation.
Maybe another hundred years will be enough time for positive changes to overcome these anti-consumer phenomena. See also: 1 2
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Though I see what you are getting at, I am not too convinced that the problems you outline in “Will the University Survive” are endemic at all academic institutions.
Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure that making collegiate education consumer-oriented is the ideal way to solve these problems either, simply because the average consumer today is (dare I say it) too stupid to know what they’re looking for. They look to incredibly asinine rankings to examine the higher learning institutions.
Many institutions compete for top listings in news and consumer publications for “Best Value” or “Most Prestigious” rankings – undermining the specific benefits or drawbacks of each institution. Many schools will flaunt a ranking in their teaser materials, only to have admissions counselors disregard the statistics as pointless. The methods that are used to sort and rank institutions, and even make projections about future “quality” (and I say “quality” with sarcasm) seem almost like one is reading about commodities rather than colleges.
You do point this out – there is a huge amount of pressure on college administrations to focus on the bottom line, and if that means focusing on these kind of ratings, they have little choice for the time being.
I’m not sure that the education community needs to mimic the enterprise to solve its issues, but it certainly needs some kind of new standard to live up to.
“…needs some kind of new standard to live up to.”
Consumer satisfaction appears to be the only valid standard that ever existed.
I think its pretty simple. They look for an education which will increase their earning capabilities. If you wonder why earning capabilities based on many modern universities seem divorced from the reality of the workplace, its probably because of the educational institutions. Those institutions are heavily subsidized, making any competition with them unlikely to succeed. So employers use them, and base hiring off of them. Their subsidization means they are unlikely to reform in any meaningful way – they’ve got no reason to as long as state money keeps flowing in.
I think its a textbook example of oversupply due to subsidization. The state pays for so much, no one questions the need for engineers to pay money to be educated in things like English literature in college, or the need for people to still publish expensive printed textbooks. In my opinion, potential job performance needs to be divorced from the educational process itself, and thats not going to happen as long as obsolete educational practices are propped up by the state.
G makes a good point – employers have come to regard universities as cost-free training centres. They’re beginning to realize, though, that their hopes were misplaced. Universities always have been and should remain centres of learning. Businesses and other voluntary associations can cover the task of training.
thanks for sharing the ideas
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