I love being a career and personal coach and writing my Psychology Today blog: How to Do Life.
My latest books, are "The Best of Marty Nemko" (3rd ed), Modern Fables, Poems Practical, and Careers for Dummies..
Some of my best recent work is linked to on this blog, but my older writings and the archive of my KALW (NPR-San Francisco) radio show are free on www.martynemko.com.
If you would rather email me than post your comments on this blog, my email address is mnemko@comcast.net.
What was amazing to me is that they recorded five hours of interview with me about higher education's deceptive practices and about alternatives to college. During those five hours, I made a total of three jokes. All three made it into the segment.
Of course, I don't mind at all. The creators of The Daily Show are masters at making serious messages funny without trivializing them.
I continue to try to make the case for requiring college to post a substantive report card on themselves as a condition of receiving federal financial aid. Today, I make that point in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine, Insight.
The article also includes seven questions you should ask a college or graduate admission person before agreeing to attend.
I am honored that the National Association of Scholars chose to include, in its 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education, my proposal that all colleges be required to, on its homepage, post a substantive report card on itself, what I call the College Report Card.
It is far more more helpful than, for example, the College Scorecard President Obama announced in his State of the Union address.
Not only would a College Report Card enable prospective students to more wisely and easily select a college, that transparency would exert real pressure on colleges to finally treat students as the treasure they are rather than a mere "cost center."
Today, 'four-year" colleges behave as irresponsibly as the researchers who ran the The Tuskegee Experiments. Every year, colleges recruit hundreds of thousands of weak students without disclosing to them that 3/4 such students don''t graduate even if given 8 years, meanwhile having accrued a fortune in debt, little learning, a non-stop assault to their self-esteem, no more employability than they could have had straight out of high school and, critically, the opportunity cost: They could have likely learned far more and become far more employable had they pursued an apprenticeship, the millitary, working at the elbow of an entrepreneur, or taken a short career-prep program at a community college.
It is time to stop giving higher education a free pass. We require every tire, every packaged food, every drug, to provide substantive consumer information. We should require no less of colleges.
Michael Kirst is among our most eminent experts on education policy. He invited me to be guest blogger on his blog at Stanford.
In that post, I argue that colleges must show growth in student learning and employability to receive the massive amount of taxpayer dollars it currently gets. HERE is the link.
I am frustrated that my ideas have not been implemented, for example, my ideas on how to improve education, a field in which I have solid bonafides.
For years now, I've done everything I can think of to get those ideas implemented. I have presented them in my columns and articles in The Atlantic and Washington Post as well as on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.I'm spoken about them in public forums, including at The Commonwealth Club, at my alma mater U.C. Berkeley, and on my NPR-San Francisco radio show. I've sent them to many people with the power to implement them--for example, the biggies at the U.S. Office of Education..I've written about them in my new book, What's the Big Idea? 39 Reinventions for a Better America.
I believe these ideas have greater potential for improving education than the traditionally proposed reduce class size, increase expectations, etc.:
A friend, Scott Lubbock, sent me one of many notes I've received that describe college graduates's unemployability. (Not to mention the half that drop out.)
He writes of his college-graduate son: "He's not much more employable beyond the restaurant work he has done the past five years." Scott included a June 2012, Harper's column excoriating colleges.
I responded with this:
Beyond the dollar cost, one of higher ed's enormous underconsidered costs is the opportunity cost: what your son could have been doing with his time if he wasn't at college being taught and not remembering endless arcana in that four-to-six-year-long summer camp we call college.
Then there's the decrement to self-esteem that accrues from not understanding significant percentages of what those brilliant esoterica-obsessed, often poor-communicating professors teach.
Yes, I agree with much of the Harper's article but it downplays how the government's continuing to raise the amount of taxpayer-funded financial aid encourages colleges to raise tuition more. Colleges think, "Ooh good, the government is providing more financial aid, so now we can raise tuition more." If government provided no aid, colleges would be forced to reduce their prices because far fewer than the 70% of high school graduates who now attend college could afford to pay their sticker price. Can anyone reasonably think it requires anywhere near $100,000 of student money to educate a student for four years at U of O on top of the enormous taxpayer-paid subsidies that it gives to public universities? Could it cost anywhere near $250,000 that brand-name private colleges charge a student? (And private colleges too receive tremendous amounts of government financial aid.)
Higher ed is business at its worst--a horribly overpriced product providing remarkably little value other than the piece of paper, with unconscionably little and usually hidden information on total four- and six-year charges, let alone how little students actually benefit in learning and employability.
I do like the article's only slightly tongue-in-cheek summary of the conservatives' view of higher ed:
College is a gilded re-education camp, where innocent children of the entrepreneurial class are turned into brainwashed Maoist cadres, chanting slogans and grinding away the hours in a sexual frolic. The university's scholarly departments they believe are filled with political extremists; its graduates are snobs; its concern with diversity is a form of censorship; its scientists tell lies to further the "global warming" power grab.
The best antidotes to higher education's robbing and damaging our children, our future, would be to educate the high school counselors about alternatives to that ripoff, yes ripoff, we call college, and to force colleges to provide consumer information, just as we require food to contain nutritional information and tires to bear a report card in its sidewall.
Indeed, I strongly advocate colleges continuing to receive our taxpayer-paid largesse only if they post on their home page a consumerist College Report Card that would shine a light on how much people actually pay for how little. One of my TheAtlantic.com columns makes that case. Click HERE to read it.
The Occupy Wall Streeters are certainly justified in railing against their student loans. College recruitment efforts manipulate students into thinking for the enormous time and money, they'll learn a lot and be professionally employable. The truth is far different.
Perhaps most insulting, the powerful higher education lobby has pressured the government to make student loans the ONLY loan that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Indeed it is time to rage against the higher education machine.
My latest Washington Post Big Idea column argues that we must shine a light on what colleges actually do: that is, to prominently post a Report Card with such items as:
What percent of freshmen graduate in four years, broken down by high school record?
What percent of graduates are, within six months of graduation, professionally employed, broken down by major and high school record?
How much do students grow in critical thinking from freshman to senior year, disaggregated by high school record?
Not only would that inform consumers, it would likely finally pressure colleges into spending less on ego-driven new buildings, fat administrations, and silly-research-focused professors and more on transformational undergraduate instructors, mentoring, and a career center that actually is helpful. It might even push colleges to replace lackluster lectures with courses taught on video by a dream team of the world's most transformational instructors.
This animated discussion between a parent and college counselor reveals what parents of college-bound students must know and probably don't. An enhanced transcript appears below the video.
FOR YOUR CHILD, FOR ALL OUR CHILDREN by Marty Nemko
B: My son will be applying to college soon. I'm scared.
M: Scared?
B: First, I'm scared about the cost. It was really hard even to find the sticker price on the colleges' websites and when I did, I nearly had a heart attack.
M: I don't mean to scare you more, but the amount most colleges post omits thousands of dollars that the average student ends up spending each year?
B: The college's admission counselor...
M: You mean salesperson.
B: Don't be cynical.
M: Many college admissions people, including the campus tour guides receive sales training. They are salespeople. For example, how often will they suggest that your child attend some other college?
B: Anyway, the admissions counselor told me not to worry, that most people don't pay the sticker price.
M: Sounds like a rug dealer.
B: He said there's financial aid.
M: Did you ask him for an estimate of what the college would cost you, given your income and assets and your child's academic record?
B: That's a good idea. I will.
M: Be sure to ask for an estimate for the total cost for at least four years.
B: Why?
M: Because some colleges use the drug dealer scam: They give you a big discount in Year One to get you hooked and then jack up the price each year after.
B: That's disgusting. I'm also scared because I read an op-ed on cnn.com called "College is a Waste of Time."
M: That's just the tip of the iceberg. This year alone, there were similar articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Atlantic. And prestigious book publishers like Knopf have published books with titles like Crisis on Campus, The Five Year Party, No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the great college rip-off, University Inc: the corporate corruption of higher education, Academically Adrift: limited learning on college campuses, and Higher Education? How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids.
B. And I keep hearing how even if you graduate...
M. And nationwide, more than half don't, even if they take six years!
B. You're kidding?
M. I wish I were. Dept. of Education statistics. The Education Dept. also reports that if your child graduated in the bottom 40% of his high school class, his chances of graduating from a so-called four-year college is only 1 in 4 even if he takes 8 1/2 years!
B: All that tuition. All that time.
M: All that assault to their self-esteem.
B: But even if they drop out, they will have learned a lot, right?
M: Wrong. According to the aforementioned book Academically Adrift, published by University of Chicago Press, which summarizes extensive nationwide research, of those who defy the odds and graduate, 36% grow insignificantly in reading, writing, critical thinking!
B: No! But even if you don't learn a lot in college, these days, with this terrible job market, you need the degree, the piece of paper.
M: Awfully expensive piece of paper. Sticker price for even just four years at a brand-name private college, even if you don't count all expenses, is over $200,000 per child! And that doesn't count if it takes the student five or six years.
B: But the colleges are always saying that college graduates, over their lifetime, earn a million dollars more.
M: You've heard the expression, you can lie with statistics. Well universities are pros at it.
B: What do you mean?
M: The lifetime that colleges report is in the past. Today, we have an oversupply of college graduates at the same time as employers are hiring fewer college graduates: they're offshoring and automating as much as possible. And when they hire, they use temps and part-timers as much as possible.
B: But college grads still get better jobs. Right?
M: On average yes, but according to the U.S. Department of Labor, of college graduates under 25, 44% are working at jobs that don't require a college degree or aren't working at all. Also, remember that the pool of college graduates are brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections than the pool of those who didn't attend college. You could have locked them in a closet for four years and they'd have earned lots more money than the pool of students who didn't go to college, which today is just a small percentage, the bottom of the academic barrel. And those college-caliber students wouldn't be locked in a closet: because they are brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections, they'd get launchpad jobs where they could learn on the job and get paid for it rather than pay all that tuition and be taught all the irrelevancies they teach in college: stochastic processes, the causes of the Peloponnesian Wars, the intricacies of Shakespeare.
B: Yeah, I remember Father Guido Sarducci saying he's thinking of starting a college where a degree would only cost $100 and would take only one hour: He'd only teach what students still remembered after they finished college.
M: Good comedy indeed contains grains of truth.
B: Are you telling me my kid shouldn't go to college?
M: I'm saying you should not assume college is the right choice. For many people, an apprenticeship, the military, a short-term career-preparation program at a community college, or on the-job training, for example, at the elbow of an ethical and successful entrepreneur, can be a wiser choice.
B: But my kid has good grades and test scores, he loves learning, and is eager to go to college.
M: Then he probably should go, but please pick wisely.
B: How do you do that?
M: First pick say ten colleges that enroll many students with grades and test scores similar to your child's and that are well-located.
B: Then what?
M: This is critical. Please do it. To narrow your list, ask each college these things: Given my family's income and assets and my son's high school record, what am I likely to pay in cash and take on in loan over the four years my child is there? What would I pay in year 5 and beyond?
B: What if they don't tell you?
M: That's a sign the college is more expensive than you think or that the college doesn't care enough about students to provide even that basic information: the true cost of attendance.
B: I guess that makes sense.
M: Here's the next thing to ask: What's the average amount of growth that your college's graduates with a high school record similar to my son's make in reading, critical thinking, etc?
B: Do they have that information?
M: Many colleges do, and if they don't care enough to monitor student growth, that's another sign you don't want your child there.
B: What else should I ask?
M: For students with high school records like my son's, what's the 4- and 5-year graduation rate? Also, ask for the results of a student satisfaction survey, the summary of the accreditation visiting team report, and the percent of graduates in your son's intended major who are professionally employed within a year of graduation.
B: That information would seem so helpful to prospective students. I wish all colleges would post it on their website.
M: They don't want to because, per all those articles and books I cited, the results would embarrass them. That's why I'm trying to get Congress to pass a law that would require it.
B: That would sure put pressure on colleges to improve. That would not only provide better education, it would help America remain competitive in a global economy in which India and China are taking so many of our jobs.
M: That's why I'd love it if more parents would demand answers to those questions: Tell or I won't apply!
B: That's a great idea! I'll tell each college: Tell or I won't apply! Hey, if I want a written copy of those questions...
M: I call it the College Report Card.
B: If I want a copy of the College Report Card, where can I find it?
M: The College Report Card is free on my blog, which can be reached from my site: www.martynemko.com.
I continue to experiment with ways to get my College Report Card idea to go viral. This time, it's an animation.
I'm convinced that, while simple, government requiring all colleges to post an externally audited report card on themselves is, arguably, the most potent yet practical way yet proposed to get colleges to dramatically improve the quality of higher education.
And of course, if all colleges posted a College Report Card, it would help prospective students to more wisely choose a college or graduate or to decide that a non-school option may be wiser.
I created this animation using a website, Xtranormal.com, that makes it remarkably easy to convert your text into animation. I did it in 20 minutes. I don't find that the animation adds sufficiently to the text but I thought it was worth sharing with you. A transcript of this 3-minute animation appears below.
TRANSCRIPT
There once was a young man, and he was admitted to a college. And he liked the college. He sang the song he had so often heard: "American higher education is a national treasure."
But decades passed and the man learned that his college had changed. The buildings were now fancier but instead of college costing what nearly anyone could afford, now everyone except rich people has to take out big loans. Really big loans.
And now, the college admits many weak students along with the good ones so the classes have to be dumbed-down. And so students learn much less. Despite the dumbing-down, most of the college's students, really most, 55%, dropped out. Even many who graduate, deeply in debt, can find only a job they could have done without college. And most dispiriting to the man, most of the students learn little--the tests show that half of them read, wrote, and reasoned no better than when they began college. The man didn't believe it at first but after reading the authoritative nationwide study: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, he had to accept that it was true.
And the man was sad. He thought and he thought. What could make colleges better? Finally, he had an idea: He asked, "If the government requires each tire to have a "report card" molded into it, if government requires all packaged food to have a "report card" on the package, why doesn't government require all colleges to have a report card posted on its website: how much students learn in reading, writing, thinking, broken down by students' high school record? What percent graduate in four years? After deducting cash financial aid, how much four or five years costs? What percentage of graduates have professional jobs within a year of graduation, broken down by major--sociology majors aren't going to be as employable as computer science majors.
Having all colleges post a College Report Card would help students choose a good college. More important, it would embarrass the colleges into improving their poor quality of education: Instead of hiring professors based mainly on how many research dollars they can bring in, they'd hire professors because they were great at educating and inspiring students. Instead of spending on fat administrations and fancy buildings and shrubs, they'd spend on providing mentors and coaches to students.
And so the man went to Congress to try to get a law passed requiring colleges to prominently post a report card on themselves, with companies like Price Waterhouse coming in to audit them to avoid cheating. But that scared the colleges, so their very powerful lobby squashed the man--or at least his idea.
And so now, everyone continues to sing: "American higher education is a national treasure." And everyone is living happily ever after. But not really.
Here's a three-minute version of my video arguing that perhaps the most potent thing that could be done to improve the quality of college education and, in turn, improve society, is for the federal government to require all colleges to post on their website an externally audited report card on themselves.
Below the video is a transcript of it as well as links to a longer version of this video, other writings on the College Report Card, including an actual proposed Report Card, and a version of a College Report Card that would be invaluable for students and families to use in choosing a college.
* * * * *
Here is the transcript:
There has finally been a spate of books and articles in major publications asserting that higher education adds remarkably little value for all the time, money, and opportunity cost.
Colleges have been extremely resistant to change but I've come up with an approach that is remarkably simple yet would be remarkably potent: requiring all colleges to post a College Report Card on themselves on their website. The College Report Card would be externally audited to avoid cheating.
A College Report Card would include such items as:
how much freshman-to-senior growth occurs in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc.,
the graduation rate in 4, 5, and six years, broken down by students' high school records.
employability: what percentage of graduates are professional employed within a year of graduation, broken down by major.
a student satisfaction survey-It's of course valuable to hear what the customer says.
A summary of the accreditation team's visiting report.
(Note: I neglected to include one key item: the true cost of attendance for four, five, and six years broken down by family income and assets.)
Of course, a College Report Card would help students choose a college, which is critical because it's one of the largest and most important purchases people ever make.
But also, importantly, a College Report Card would--because the students, the public, and legislators would see how much or how little value the college provides--would finally put real pressure on colleges to compete, to improve, rather than allocate so much of their resources to fat administrations and to research, so much of which they know apriori will be of little value.
I'm doing my best to promulgate the idea of requiring all colleges to post a substantive College Report Card. I think that would do great good not only for students and for higher education, but for the nation as a whole because while education is far from the magic pill we wish it would be, educating our best and brightest, most of whom go to college, could go a long way to helping us survive if not thrive in our ever more challenging global economy.
* * * *
HERE is a link to a longer (14-minute) version of this video.
HERE is a link to a four-page proposal for a College Report Card, which includes a sample Report Card.
HERE is a link to a College Report Card that students and families might use to help pick a college
Here is a video--with lots of visuals with supporting data and photos--in which I make the case for colleges to be required to prominently post on its website an externally audited report card on itself.
Such a College Report Card would help students choose a college more wisely. Even more important, it would pressure colleges to finally add sufficient value for the enormous time and money that a college or graduate degree demands.
Below the video is a transcript of it as well as links to my other recent writings about The College Report Card, including a version for students and parents to use in selecting a college.
It's very difficult to choose a college wisely.
And it's not surprising. We require tires to have "report card" grades molded into their sidewalls. We require packaged foods to prominently list their calories, fat, even vitamins and minerals. Yet, colleges, one of our most important and expensive purchases are required to prominently post nothing on their websites.
So colleges just hire marketing firms to manipulate students into choosing their college based on such things as deceptive pictures, for example, pointing out the prettiest part of campus. It will not point out, for example, that the weather is bone-chilling miserable half the year or that the campus crime rate is terrible. At Tulane, despite all the pretty pictures on the website, there were three rapes, 30 burglaries, 193 cases of larceny--in just one school year.
Or the pretty pictures somehow don't include, for example, a picture of the mice and rats in Georgetown dorms, which I first heard about decades ago and recently in College Prowler, which posts student reviews said, "Often you will find rats. There are lots of rats."
The colleges post photos on their websites of small, personalized classes taught by an inspired professor and deeply engaged students, even on campuses where most of a student's time is spent in large lectures, or with boring professors.
Colleges post pictures of an engaged student peering into a test tube, which implies that many undergraduates are intimately involved in important research,when in fact only a small percentage are and even if they are, it's usually of little or no benefit to their development let alone their career.
Of course, nearly all college websites include a shot of happy graduates. But few colleges reveal the fact that most students don't graduate even if they take six years. Most students!
And in the coup de gras, the colleges post pictures that suggest that a degree from their school is the key to a great job. In fact, almost half of students are not working or with jobs that don't require a college degree.
Colleges love to trumpet the grossly misleading statistic that college graduates earn a million dollars more over their lifetime. Why misleading? It would take a long time to fully explain, but I'll just quickly say here that that data looks backward not forward--today we have an oversupply of college students. Second, the pool of college graduates is very different in ability, motivation and connections than the pool of non-graduates, so you could have locked the graduates in a closet for four years and they'd have earned more money. And indeed, they wouldn't be locked in a closet, they'd be learning on the job, making connections. Don't fall for deceptive statistics marketed by colleges and repeated in the media.
More basic, on most colleges' sites, it's hard to even find out the total cost of four years: assuming you graduate in four years. (I showed U.S.C.'s financial aid page.) No cost listing.Where's the sticker price?! Note their again deceiving with statistics: "60% of students at USC receive some type of financial assistance." How much? Where, based on your family's income and assets is an estimate of how much financial aid you'll get--not loan, the cash aid!Not just in year one, where they may give you a bigger discount to get you in the door, like the drug dealer who gives you the first dose of crack free or cheap to get you hooked and then jacks up the price.
And indeed, graduates and dropouts alike are terribly weighed down in student debt at the same time as the glut of college graduates has resulted in nearly half of them unemployed or doing jobs they could have done with a mere high school diploma.
It's particularly important to report the true cost of a college education with report after report showing how little value students actually get from higher education. Here, I include shots of articles excoriating higher education in New York magazine, the LA Times, New York Times, CNN.com, the Wall Street Journal, and books: Crisis on Campus (Knopf), The Five-Year Party, No Sucker Left Behind, University Inc, Higher Education?: How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids.
Among the most scathing books is Academically Adrift, the 2011 authoritative report from the University of Chicago that found that nationwide, students grow frighteningly little even if they defy the odds and graduate: 45% grew not at all in the first two years. 36% not at all from freshman to senior!
Again, may I remind you how many even of the graduates are unemployed and countless more underemployed? Nearly half!
It's time for government to mandate that each college issue an externally audited Report Card on itself. It should include:
The full projected four-year cost of attendance (subtracting cash financial aid), disaggregated by family income and assets.
Freshman-to-senior growth in reading, critical thinking, etc., disaggregated by student’s high school record.
4- and 6-year graduation rates, disaggregated by student’s high school record.
The results of a student satisfaction survey
The summary of the accreditation visiting team report.
The % of graduates who are professionally employed within one year of graduation, broken down by major.
Of course, such a College Report Card would empower students to choose their college wisely or even to decide that, for that person, a wiser choice would be a short program at a community college for example in robotics repair or cheffing, the military, or on-the-job training, for example, at the elbow of a journeyman electrician or an ethical and successful small business owner.
Bringing transparency to how much value-added a college provides for all the time, money, and opportunity cost would bring another important benefit: It would pressure colleges that add too little value for all that time and money, which according to the research, is MOST colleges, to improve. (Currently, colleges experience no such pressure.
Mandating a College Report Card would help colleges become the national treasure they claim they are, help our students to get an education that will make them more thoughtful human beings, better citizens, and more employable. That, in turn, would help America remain vibrant in our ever tougher global economy.
* * * * *
HERE is a link to a four-page proposal for a College Report Card.
And HERE is a link to a College Report Card that students and families might use to help pick a college.
Higher education's first major salvo is a study reported in the New York Times, authored by Anthony Carnevale (pictured right,) one of higher education's long-standing insiders and apologists. He argues, deceptively, for higher education's value while skirting inconvenient truths about the hundreds of thousands of weak students admitted to so-called four-year colleges.
As I've reported previously (probably ad nauseam at this point--here's a link to an NPR interview and article,) most such students don't graduate even if they're given eight years. And because of the elitist, real-world-irrelevant arcana so heavily taught in higher education, even many students who graduate grow nearly not at all in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc., nor become employed in a job they wouldn't be qualified for without college. And of course, there's the opportunity costs: what the students could have been doing if they hadn't been spending the enormous sums of money, time, and assaults to their self-esteem in college, for example, in an apprenticeship program or learning entrepreneurship at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur.
As I've also written previously, the federal government should mandate that all colleges prominently post an externally audited report card on themselves disclosing key information that prospective students can use to decide whether a college, indeed any college, is--given their high school record--the wisest post-high-school choice. And of course, colleges' being forced to report their shockingly bad product would pressure them to improve and perhaps become the national treasure that the higher education marketing machine has led us to believe it is.
For two decades, I've written books and articles and given speeches documenting that education is overrated. Education generates surprisingly small benefits relative to its costs, time, and opportunity costs.
I've been particularly critical of higher education and of education as a tool for lifting people out of poverty. I've felt like a lone voice.
But suddenly there's been a spate of research and articles in prestigious publications that have come to the same conclusion.
I've occasionally blogged about education here but more often, I've simply tweeted about it, usually providing a link to one of those recent articles. Here are the tweets I've written on education since March 1.
The first group of tweets is on K-12 education. The second is on college & graduate school.
Finally, HERE is an article of mine, America's Most Overrated Product: Higher Education, which first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was republished in a number of other places. I like to think it encouraged the current examination of higher education, which had been America's most underexamined icon.
I want to thank readers of this blog, for example, Peter Christensen and Mark Drevno for sending me a number of the cited articles. I apologize for not recalling the other contributors' names.
In preparation for meetings with legislators, I've developed a proposal for mandating that all colleges post a College Report Card on themselves.
Here is the Executive Summary:
Higher education is among the few important purchases that essentially is unregulated, unaccountable, and opaque. That causes great harm to students and society. The research has become unambiguous that American higher education does a far worse job of education than what the higher education marketing and lobbying machines would have us believe.
This proposal recommends that all colleges be required or at least encouraged to prominently post on its website a substantive College Report Card. That would enable students to make a more informed choices of college. Perhaps even more important, it would encourage colleges to reallocate resources from ego-driven new buildings, bloated administrations, lush landscaping, and low-impact research to efforts to improve student growth and in turn the quality of the American workforce, citizenry, and the nation as we face ever greater challenges.
HERE is the link to the proposal. It's four pages long. (My wife says it's the best thing I've ever written.)
The Occupy Wall Streeters are certainly justified in railing against their student loans. College recruitment efforts manipulate students into thinking for the enormous time and money, they'll learn a lot and be professionally employable. The truth is far different. 
I knew it couldn't be long before the higher education marketing army started to counterattack the media's recent, powerful excoriations of colleges for the horrendously low value they provide. 
