College Education at University of Payme

College education is getting more expensive every year and at some point in the future the cost of college education  is going to be higher than all your paychecks after graduation combined which defeats the purpose of getting college education in the first place.

These days you cannot just get a job if you just went to college anymore. You now need an MBA and who knows in the future you may need a double masters or even a PhD to just stand out to recruiters – which means more years in a school and fewer years earning money.

Not to say that an MBA is worth anything at all in this day an age. Your run of the mill present day MBA is nothing more than a spoiled child living in a dream la-la land.

The business and IT course material in bulk of the universities is outdated, perhaps because the traditional mode of education was not ready to cope with the break neck business speed.

It used to be different. I have worked with and for ivy league graduates, and later in my career  interviewed some and I must say things most certainly have changed for the worse.

The largest college in the USA in pure numbers today is the University of Phoenix with over 300,000 clients – yes “clients”. It turns out that the University of Phoenix is just a subsidiary of the Apollo Group (NASDAQ: APOL) a stock listed company with shareholders and a board of directors interested in low cost and high profitability.

This publicly traded company has annual revenues of over $4.7 billion and annual profits of $537.5 million. They also own the Western International University and other schools in Chile, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

If your main goal is to increase profits for your shareholders then you will always fire Professor James Watson and hire a recently graduated student with a PhD in genetics to teach the future generations of scientists about the DNA.

I find it very hard to believe that the “new generation” of scientists trained by a student that took the job just because he has to pay his student loan somehow is going to inspire more people than someone who has a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Thanks to the financial recession and austerity even traditional universities are also taking a more corporate and capitalistic approach to education and the pure scholastic strive for excellence is out the window.

My point is that we need education of the highest quality possible to compete in the global markets but we cannot get that if we are cutting corners or when educational institutes private or public become business enterprises.

That’s where the Catch 22 comes in. Can not have inspiring and innovating workforce without top grade education, and you can not have top grade education without employment.

We all know that there is high unemployment for recent college graduates but we are not going to solve that problem with more people searching for jobs and fewer people starting new companies.

Education, specially higher education in the past guaranteed an edge, it ensured that those obtaining it would be refined professionals groomed to solve complex business problems, increase efficiency, create more jobs, and solve humanities problem.

From lawyers and doctors to anthropologists and teachers everyone was working to improve the society they lived in. Now education is a financial investment for a monetary return and this is exactly how the institutes are marketing themselves as well. U of Nonsense grads make 107% more than other grads. Does it really matter how much the university’s grads really make, because they could be running a Madoff ponzi scheme or founding Enron.

How and who will solve the challenge for a truly quality education is unknown, but what is known is that US is fast loosing its edge of undisputable quality higher education.