By Jordan Weissmann
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a disturbing investigation into the huge debt students accumulate while pursuing master’s degrees at elite universities in areas such as drama and film, where job prospects are limited and the chances of making money with which to repay. their debt is small. Because it focused on MFA programs in Ivy League schools – one student raised about $ 300,000 in credit to pursue screenwriting studies – the article revolves around creative classes on Twitter. But it also noted a more fundamental, troubling development in the world of higher education: For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become a money-making scheme, where the line between for-profit and non-profit education has been blurred. . There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but looking closely you clearly understand that there is a systemic problem.
Few have written more convincingly on the subject than Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program in New America. As a journalist and member of a think-tank team, he has argued for years that “universities see master’s programs as” cows “from which they make money,” and showed how schools like Harvard successfully offer predatory programs. . The rise of online learning has only exacerbated the problem, allowing universities to present their brands nationally and internationally in order to enroll students on an industrial scale.
In 2019, Carey took a look at the rise of so-called online software managers, or OPMs – private companies like 2U that top Yale universities in small schools like the University of Oregon Concordia use to build their offerings online. These companies design and operate courses on behalf of schools – sometimes essentially offering a “box” classroom – that the university can hit with its own brand. The OPM then receives as much as 70 percent of schooling income. This money is mainly financed by government loans, which may never be repaid.
After reading the Journal article, I talked about the current state of the master market, and what needs to be done to fix it.
I feel like you have been methodically constructing the thesis – which you will never put forward bluntly – that master’s degrees are essentially the biggest hoax in higher education and that prestigious nonprofit universities seem to be in the gut together. with profits. Are you saying it’s an accurate description of your take on this point, or did I distort it savagely?
Perhaps the biggest scam in higher education remains the one-year certificates offered by the lucrative dark colleges that cost about $ 25,000 and do not give you a job. Master’s degrees are probably no. 2 in this list. Of course, within the confines of colleges that are not legally profitable, they are the biggest scam to date.
Right, and what makes master’s degrees a little different from the one-year certificate programs offered by night schools is that they are being submitted by Ivy League universities and online schools.
In some ways, they are more similar than they may seem. Many of them are one-year certification programs. We do not call them that. We call them masters, but that is part of the problem. In fact they are often debt-driven one-year work-oriented programs, marketed very aggressively through online advertising. They aim to offer very specific economic opportunities in a given field. Simply one is traded to students who have just finished high school and the other is traded to people who have just finished their bachelor studies, but other than that, there is nothing else that distinguishes them.
Can you give me examples of the programs you are talking about?
The Columbia School of Journalism offers what is essentially a 10-month master’s degree that costs $ 70,000 or something. Starts in September, ends in June. You can do so much in less than a year. It is a fully career-oriented degree. There are thousands upon thousands of such programs.
One of the reasons that universities are in a exploitative position in the master’s degree market is because they are not limited in the same way that they are in the market for bachelor degrees. If you offer a bachelor’s degree, all must be four years long. There is no two-year bachelor’s degree or one six-year bachelor’s degree. You have to publish admission rates, average SAT scores, so when you are offering something selective, you have to back it up with data, whereas in the master degrees market, you can call almost anything a master. Master’s degree programs should not publish their admission statistics, which creates, I think, a great temptation for institutions that have very attractive brand names, because their undergraduate programs are too selective to open the doors of the master in to a large extent and not to take any punishment in the market because people do not know they are doing it.
I want to talk a little bit about the Wall Street Journal article that caught so much attention last week. There was a lot of focus on MFA programs at Columbia University, in particular, and the huge debts in which some of those students who were attending these programs were owed.
I think there are two big things, both of which are very dangerous for students, that overlap in the case of Columbia programs. First, just generally across higher education, billing people a lot of money for an artistic career is often super problematic.
Next is the broader ability of institutions of all kinds to raise lucrative master’s degrees, which is nurtured in part by the very specific change that was made to federal student loan policy 15 years or more ago , where the federal government lifted any restrictions on how much money you can borrow to fund postgraduate studies.
If you are a student, you can only borrow a certain amount of money from the federal government to fund bachelor studies, and this amount specifically because they do not want people to over-borrow. In graduate school, you can borrow not only for the full cost of tuition, but also for the room, board, living expenses, which, in a city, can be tens of thousands or more dollars a year, no matter how money you owe at that moment to the federal government, and regardless of the prospect you have to pay it.
Why did they make that change?
Partly for a really bad reason, which has to do with the ability these students have to pay. They repay their loans at a higher rate than people in other parts of the system, and these loans have higher interest rates, which means making money for the federal government. So you add this element to the mix of any budget deal you are making and more money to spend.
Also, there is the possibility that if they [studentët] do not do this, they will take out a private loan, and rather a federal loan where you have far more options than a private one.
To what extent are online master’s degrees orienting the market now?
Statistics say we are at the point where, perhaps, at least half of all enrollments in master’s programs are online, far more than undergraduate programs, and perhaps more than doctoral programs, because doctoral programs tend to be much more intensive with relationships with mentors and faculty, and many doctoral students teach on campus. Many of them are just people getting master’s degrees while in most cases or maybe even usually they are working. They are older and may have started a family. It is much more convenient for them to study online.
However, where the online intersects with the most troubling parts of the issue is that it gives colleges with big names an opportunity to make money from those brands in a way that has never existed before, so you could be a very famous college where everyone wants to study, but before the internet option came, this service could only be given to a few people who were able to travel and live where the school was. Now, all of a sudden, you can have a global brand that can be accessed from any corner of the world, and the whole premise of the lucrative OPM market is that all the money in online education is on the scales.
With abbreviations from Slate.com