Higher education recap

Over the last month, I've been doing some blogging on the relationship between higher education and the economy. Make no mistake, I'm not anti-education (despite what some university professors have said about me in the press). My argument is that universities have been growing their budget rapidly and spending money on many things besides education and research. It now seems that much of the tuition and tax increases devoted to higher education didn't go to fund actual education and research - this is problematic.

Last month, Chancellor Dan Klaich claimed that the relationship between higher education and economic growth was "indisputable" He and other education insiders claimed we needed to protect the higher education investment because they are the "engine of economic growth." Through them we'd educate the populace, attract high tech jobs, reduce the unemployment rate and grow the economy.

I decided to put this "indisputable" relationship to the test.

I put up a detailed (although simple) analysis on my blog and wrote a column for the Las Vegas Review Journal on the results. This post isn't to go back into the mathematics of the findings only recap the narrative of my findings.

• There was no relationship between the percentage of people with college degrees in a state and unemployment rates in states
• There was no relationship between the percentage of people with college degrees in a state and GDP growth from 2007-2009 (latest data available, coincides with recession. Also no relationship for 2006-09 or 08-09).
• There was no relationship between the percentage of people with college degrees in a state and state budget shortfalls
• States with a Top 100 university experienced statistically higher unemployment rates on average
• States with Ivy League schools experienced a combined net migration rate of -2.5 million from 2000 to 2008 (latest data available). Ironically, defenders of higher education throw out this finding, claiming that educated people move, to which I say, DUH! College educated people move around so if we need them in Nevada we can attract them to the state (college educated people don't move to states because of colleges, but because of jobs).

Basically, the findings above means higher education isn't likely to reduce unemployment, grow the economy, or help close the budget shortfall. In other words, it seems it fails to do any of the things it claims it can do.

Michael Pravica a UNLV physics professor followed up with a letter to the editor (mostly missing the mark) asking why not look at state support for higher education and the results. I did just that in this blog post here. The results?

• State spending on higher education "education and research spending per-pupil" was not correlated with economic growth between 2007-09
• State spending on higher education "education and research spending per-pupil" was not correlated with unemployment rates in 2009 or 2010
• State spending on higher education "education and research spending per-pupil" was not correlated with college attainment rates.

Basically this means spending more tax dollars on higher education does not produce greater economic growth, more employment or even more people with college degrees!

Admittedly the analysis I've done so far is very simple. More complex analysis can and should be done, but so far the people claiming higher education is a silver bullet to our state's economic woes have failed to even do the most basic of analysis.  This is very important because we're talking about spending billions of dollars extra over the next decade on an enterprise which may not provide any additional benefit with that extra spending.

Chuck Norris is on my team

And if you're wondering why Chuck Norris keeps appearing on my blog, well, he appears when I find relationships that are random. Not only did most of the relationships above appear very weak, many were also extremely random. Some relationships were so random you'd get better odds from flipping a coin - that is random, kinda like putting up pictures of Chuck Norris on a blog about education.