Glenn Reynolds on the Future of Higher Education & How Kids are Getting Wise to Student Loan Debt

"It's kind of a weird thing that's happened with American society—this idea that you have to have a college degree to be a respectable member of the middle class," says Glenn Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee and purveyor of the popular Instapundit blog. Reynolds' latest work, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself, looks at the higher education bubble and how parents, students, and educators can remake the education system.

Reynolds sat down with Reason TV's Alexis Garcia to discuss why Americans are spending more for a college education and how students are responding to increasing tuition costs. "Given how expensive it is to go to college, there has to be a return sufficient to make it worth the time and especially the money," Reynolds states. "You're seeing declining enrollment in some schools and you're seeing much more price resistance on the part of both parents and students."

The discussion also includes Reynolds' take on school choice, the upcoming elections, the current state of the blogosphere, and whether or not both political parties are necessary. Nearly a decade after Reynolds published An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, the blogfather still remains optimistic about technology's ability to empower the individual and inspire grassroots movements.

Approximately 19 minutes long.

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick, Zach Weissmueller, and Tracy Oppenheimer. After Effects graphics by William Neff.

[TheRussRave]

6:00 "The logical trend is for people to say, "wait a minute, - if we can take the test, why do the college beforehand?""
Exactly, ... great to see that people are starting to wake up and realize what the game is and that they have much more practical (and far less time consuming and expensive) alternatives available  than traditional schooling!

[stonewall]

Very true.   THe one course i will take in college is Electrician.  Electricians are in demand WORLDWIDE.  with pay as high as $40 per hour.     Now that is what i call a great pay rate. lol

[BgHagar]

Excellent interview.  

I like his saying of "something that can't go on forever, won't".  That line is true for so many things.

The conversation about the state of public schools is very revealing.

[rafaelchavez]

I wish I could have gone to college fresh out of high school. I'm inspired by these doctors that helped with my brothers surgery. Stanford

[JohnWake]

She's a really good interviewer. Good questions. Good interview.

[msmcneill]

Meet a guy once, worked as an independent contractor.  Knew allot about his field and was fully competent in his job.  Ask him what college he went to...  "(University Name), that's my team."  And no one ever knew the wiser that he was self educated.

[AMReed]

I did read Andrew Rosen's Club College... I recommend it.

[slhines]

College Tuition costs have inflated over 900% since 1982. Now that's F'N WHACK!!

[juliaisafilmbuff]

"What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to write and to add – i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’, which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn know-how.
"But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules’ of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is ‘destined’ for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination. They also learn to ‘speak proper French’, to ‘handle’ the workers correctly, i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their servants) to ‘order them about’ properly, i.e. (ideally) to ‘speak to them’ in the right way, etc.
"To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’." - Louis Althusser, Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus

That time when a MAOIST has a better analysis of the education system than you.

[GrimrDirge]

Somebody make me a GIF of Alexis Garcia smiling and nodding. She's bloody charming.

[Joefest]

A college degree doesn't mean jack!  They have lowered the bar so much in order to broaden their customer base, that I personally know several individuals that can literally barely read that have degrees!!!   It's a

[ASDFASDFism]

Sell-out and bias. This guy is just being a Public Relations puppet and a Social Engineer. I understand one sentence of this 20 minute video is somewhat true. 99.8% is not noteworthy and unoriginal. Boo.