Half Way Through My MBA

After turning in my 60-slide Power Point Presentation today, I am now officially half way through my MBA program at Norwich University. Next up: Strategic Operations Management.

Seminar 4 confronts the student with the challenges of managing the operations of an organization. Understanding the complex nature of transformation processes requires knowledge of how to use quantitative analysis to identify the value-adding steps of a process and recognize the problems that exist in a given process. This perspective is essential for developing an organized plan for improving the value-adding process, enabling managers to take ownership of the problems and the leadership for improvement.

Fan Mail From Lee

Lee writes:

I’m attending Kaplan University for my MBA. I’ve read that you got your BS degree from there. I want to know how good this school is. Is it hard to graduate from here?  Is it very well-known by most employers?  If I got my MBA degree from here, do you think I can get a good job in the east coast somewhere?  I hope they’re not ‘diploma-mill’ like some people have posted online!

All of these are good concerns.  First of all, if you are attending Kaplan for your MBA, I would change schools immediately before you spend more money and time.  This is NOT a knock on Kaplan, but their MBA program is not accredited by one of the two primary agencies that oversee this type of program.  Those agencies are the AACSB and ACBSP.  I have posted extensively about these agencies.

What employers will generally look for is the school you attend for your MBA, but it does matter if they’ve heard of the school or not.  There are tons of colleges of all different sizes that people have not heard of.  What they are looking for is their accreditation status.  Unless the program is accredited by one of the aforementioned agencies, the employer might not look too highly on your efforts.

Finding a good job is relevant.  There are a lot of factors.  Is the job you are training for in high demand?  Is the economy good?  Are you willing to relocate to find a good job?  This is a question that I can’t answer directly because of those factors.

Finally, Kaplan is not a diploma mill.  Their undergraduate programs are accredited by a recognized regional agency.  I have no problem recommending Kaplan to anyone looking for an accredited undergrad degree.  For a graduate degree (especially the MBA) I would suggest that you find a school that is accredited.  Perhaps Kaplan will achieve this milestone in the future.  But my opinion is that you could be spinning your wheels by going to a school that is not accredited by AACSB or ACBSP.

Declining by Degrees

In what little spare time I have, I try to see a documentary of some kind. The latest one was Declining by Degrees. I was pleasantly surprised. When I hear about a documentary about higher education, I immediately suspect a translucent, deeply rooted political bias that clouds any originality or usefulness the production may have had otherwise. Not this one.

Some of the topics the program covers are the inability for some people to make the cut in college, how it is increasingly difficult for professors to concentrate on teaching due to research requirements, the marketing and retention efforts of colleges and more.

Also discussed is the trade-offs in having instructors that work part-time vs. full-time faculty. More importantly, they talk about how people need a 4-year degree just to remain viable in our new society and global economy. There is a great divide that has been created over the years. There are many reasons for it, but education seems to be the bridge that connects the two. This documentary is dedicated to how that bridge is still very much broken.

One of the topics that caught my ear was how college has become a marketing juggernaut and has potentially cheapened the prestige that came with a degree some years ago.

The marketization of the admissions process has intensified at both ends of the process. High school guidance counselors report that they are under ceaseless pressure to produce by getting students into exclusive colleges. This pressure is greatest at the most elite private schools, where parents feel they are paying extra for results. A sense that high school counselors are not doing enough has also led to booming business for private admissions consultants, most of them hired by relatively affluent families. ¹

And ..

Evidence for the increasing marketization of the college scene is ubiquitous and indisputable. Responding to the ever-rising costs of an education and the never-ending desire for expansion, the development offices of both private and public colleges have increased dramatically in size and budget. Mirroring this growth, far greater efforts are expended in attracting prospective students to learn more about the school, recruiting them to apply, furnish pleasurable visits to the college before and after admission, providing ample rewards for those athletes, artists, academic stars whose attendance promises to reflect glory on the institution. ²

Somewhat related: I found an article the other day that discusses some of that being based on IQ and how the “working class” should not expect access to the best colleges. Take a look and parse it for yourself. The article and the DVD have some correlation, although not directly related.

There were some parts of this movie that showed what I already believe. College is not for everybody. A quarter of the people who start college don’t complete it. At the same time, the material has been so watered down that it seems that the whole educational system is grading and presenting the coursework on a curve. I will let you decide for yourself if that’s the case.

At the end of the day, this is a great documentary. You can get it from Netflix.

1. http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/book-excerpt-fallows.html [↩]
2. http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/book-excerpt-gardner.html [↩]

Thomas Sowell on Education

The great economist Thomas Sowell recently published a 3-part essay on the economics of going to college. As usual, he makes perfect sense. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

In this three-part series, Dr. Sowell tackles two of the most significant issues in education. First, we must find alternative methods of paying for education that don’t include tax payer subsidies. The second issue is the cost of education and why it’s so high. Sowell asks, “How many people would go to college if they had to pay the real cost of all the resources taken from other parts of the economy? Probably a lot fewer people.”

Dr. Sowell explains that the cost of education is so high because so much of it is government subsidized, and as long as that continues to happen, the schools will continue to raise the cost of education. Until something changes, there will be no incentive for schools to lower tuition.

One good way to generate incentive is to change the way the students pay for college. Instead of relying on FASFA and other similar programs, he suggests that students sign a promissory note that states the student will essentially trade a college education for a certain percentage of their future earnings. This way, fewer people will actually go to college because that type of agreement requires more thought than simply filling out a FASFA form and going to school.

The Home Loan Crisis and Distance Education

Before we continue, let me set the stage for this post. The two ramifications of distance education: Large amounts of debt incurred by the students, and the job market being flooded over time with newly-degreed people looking for better jobs.

I have been doing some thinking recently about the home mortgage “crisis”, and it made me think about distance education. Somewhere in the middle of my thought process, I correlated the two into possible scenarios based on shared characteristics of the funding mechanisms of both education and housing. I quickly began to wonder if the education market could turn out like the housing market.

If you look at the housing market, we’re in this problem that was caused by bankers, lenders, speculators, and others pushing property on people who could not afford it. The customer base was filled with people who had eyes and dreams bigger than their wallet. People understood that their rate would fluctuate, but they figured they’d just “deal with it” when the time came.

A few years ago, almost regardless of your qualifications, people could get a home mortgage, get into a big house, reap the benefits of it for a couple of years, then risk losing it because they could not pay for it.

Let’s compare that to distance education. All you have to do is put the words “distance education” into Google to see how much this beast is growing. To achieve and sustain or increase the current rate of growth, education has to be made available to lots of people. Accomplished. It has to be easy, streamlined, and marketed as such. Accomplished. People have to have access to lots of money (loans) to pay for it. Check.

The cost of distance education is very high in a lot of cases, and the students won’t even start paying for those loans until they get done with school. Is it feasible that $30k – $60k in debt is being absorbed by people who won’t really consider the impact until it’s time to pay up? You bet!

Look at my situation. Even if I stopped going to school when I graduated from Kaplan, I would be able to pay the $40k bill I racked up, but not everyone can. I was fortunate enough to have a very well paying job before I started school. I didn’t have dreams of earning $50k a year after graduation. I was well over that along time ago. I was lucky.

How did I get the $40k? I told someone I wanted it. I filled out some paperwork, and poof! It was done. In the four years at Kaplan, I paid less that $1k out of my pocket. It could not have been any easier. I got $40k in debt and didn’t have to lift a finger.

I suspect that a percentage of the thousands of working professionals, stay-at-home moms, and other people who are honestly trying to do well for themselves will end up tanking when they get the final bill. Some people may have the best of intentions, but in reality, they are dreaming when they think their newly-minted degree is going to bring them riches.

They will get the final bill and will be unable capitalize on better pay and other things that they had counted on, because the job market is being flooded with online degree students. The how many of these loans will default? I am willing to bet that the number of defaults is going to rise in the next 5-10 years. I don’t know if it will be labeled a “crisis”, but you see where I am going with this.

Addendum: A couple hours after I wrote this, I found this.