Higher Education Bubble


A great example is the University of California System where, excluding the number of faculty members, there is roughly one administrator per student.  The daughter of a friend enrolled at UCLA last year.  I suggested that she ask to meet her administrator.

These bloated costs result in constantly increasing tuition, fees, and room and board.  Another friend has a 12 year old who hopes to go to Stanford in six years.  This friend is planning on Stanford costing $100,000 per year by then, and saving accordingly.  This is all but impossible for the vast majority of families.

In a recent meeting of academic health centers, the impact of healthcare reform on physician salaries was discussed.  Physicians’ pieces of the pie are likely to get smaller when payment for outcomes replaces fees for services.  With lower incomes, physicians are unlikely to be willing to finish their education with $300,000 of student debt.

More typical student debts are much smaller, in the range of $30-50,000, with repayment amounting to roughly $500 per month over ten years.  Ben Casselman (2016) reports, “New graduates’ wages are rising faster than those of most other groups; the typical recent college graduate earned $13 an hour.”  $26,000 per year translates into a bit over $20,000 after taxes, social security, Medicare, etc.  So these new graduates will need roughly 30% of their after-tax income to repay their loans.

This leaves about $1,200 per month for everything else.  The possibility of buying a home disappears.  Marriage may be avoided or long delayed.  Children are unaffordable.  Without owning homes or having children, young people are not buying appliances, carpeting, strollers, etc. There are frequent reports of data that portray these trends.

How will the higher education bubble burst?  I think it will be a combination of technological disruption and changing values and norms. Online education, in its many forms, will continually get better.  Studies will eventually show that online education yields superior results to traditional education in many, but not all, areas.  In a recent analysis, I show how this could result in the total cost of a college degree being $16,000 (Rouse, 2016).

Values and norms will change in the sense that employers will come to accept credentials earned online as equivalent to those earned in traditional education.  In parallel, accreditation bodies will adapt to these trends rather then thwart them.  These changes will not happen all at once.  Hybrid offerings might, for example, involve years 1-2 online and years 3-4 on campus.  Those who drop out in the first two years will have $4-8,000 of debt, at most.

What happens to all the bricks and mortar of higher education when on campus enrollments steadily decrease?  One idea is to turn facilities into retirement homes.  It has often been noted that retiring in a college community has several attractions, one of which is the possibility of taking classes and perhaps earning credits in literature, history, political science or art.  The growing demand for education by much older students is another scenario that I have recently explored (Rouse, 2016).


Casselman, B. (2016). This Year’s College Grads Are The Luckiest In A Decade, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-years-college-grads-are-the-luckiest-in-a-decade/

Rouse, W.B. (2016). Universities as Complex Enterprises: How Academia Works, Why It Works These Ways, and Where the University Enterprise is Headed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

The Allure of Quests


Movies that come to mind are North by Northwest (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint), Charade (Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn), and The Big Sleep (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).  There is an emergent romantic undertone in these stories, but the plot is dominated by the quest.  The older man helps the younger woman to achieve her goals, in these examples, stopping the bad guys, finding the murderers, and saving her sister from her fate.  Once the quest is successful, the romantic undertones take center stage as the story ends.

I think that what appeals to me is the idea of shared aspirations to achieve substantial goals involving some risks of failure.  The couple – actually a team more than a couple – support each other to contribute to progress toward the goal.  Conflicts of priorities and personalities emerge along the way, but the importance of the quest helps them to move beyond these conflicts. Respect for each other’s role and competency grows.  They become truly interdependent.  And, of course, the team achieves its goal, with warm affection as the immediate reward.

It seems to me that male-female relationships are much richer when there is a shared sense of purpose beyond going to respective jobs, keeping house, paying the bills, eating and drinking, and taking holidays and vacations.  Raising children can, of course, provide a shared purpose, but also can tend to feel like another job with enormous responsibilities to buy more and more things, oversee schooling and homework, address logistics of extracurricular activities, and save for higher education.  The idea that your only purpose is to foster the next generation has always felt rather limiting to me.

Yet, quests that benefit humankind are very appealing and, certainly, raising children to become good citizens fits in here.  Plus, the joys of seeing your progeny succeed in life are difficult to overestimate.  Nevertheless, the idea that your primary role is to prepare the next generation to accomplish what you could not seems like passing the buck – why couldn’t you do it?  My sense is that you can have both great accomplishments and great kids.  In fact, your kids can be even greater if they experience what you accomplish.

A Student’s Questions


First, I often get questions from students who are trying to decide on future directions. I have a simple, yet I think powerful, answer.  “Identify a scarce skill that is highly valued and you love doing.”

If the skill you love exercising, is abundant in the population, it will not be highly compensated. If the skill is not highly valued, it will not be highly compensated. Of course, you may be satisfied with modest compensation.

Second, I am rather biased toward recommending STEM fields, particularly engineering. My experiences are that engineering prepares people for an amazing range of futures. People with well-honed problem solving skills can succeed in many arenas.

Now, let’s consider her questions.  How would you choose your dissertation research topic?   Choose what fascinates you, but be realistic. You need to become an expert at something that society cares about. This still leaves a wide range of possibilities.

What courses would you take?  Required courses are, obviously, required. Add courses needed to directly support your research. Throw in a couple for fun, for example, economic history or creative writing.  The payoffs from such courses will surprise you.

What extracurricular activities would best advance your career?  Such activities only count, career wise, if they are related to your research. I chose woodworking, hiking, and travel, but not to advance my career.  Keep in mind that you are creating you, not just your resume.

What internships would best advance your career?  Again, these only count if they are related to your research. On the other hand, paid internships (or just plain jobs) can create a rainy day fund while you are completing your degree program.  I always liked real hands-on work, e.g., plumbing, or real technical work, e.g., engineering analyses.

Overall, I am driven by problems that I want to understand and contribute to solving. I am problem-oriented. In contrast, some people are method-oriented. They look for problems that are good fits for their chosen methods.  They often have to scale down problems to fit their method. In contrast, I often have to scale up methods to fit my problem of interest.

Career success is rather different for these two perspectives. Method-oriented people are judged by their abilities to extend methods in some substantial way, often with associated theorems and proofs.  The domain of application is of less importance.

Problem-oriented people tend to immerse themselves in the domains of the problems of interest. They are judged by their contributions to solving problems in these domains. This often involves providing empirical evidence of the impacts of their contributions.  Advancing methods is secondary.

Keep in mind that the world needs both Newtons and Darwins.  If you are problem person like me, sailing the enterprise seas, you are glad that someone else is forging the next generation methods.  Problem people are often really good at formulating problems, but given a valid formulation, the method people can be invaluable.

Thoughts on Teaching, Classrooms, and Computers










[Shared Inquiry]

Passive Learning

Active Learning








  • Encourages contacts between student and faculty
  • Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students
  • Uses active learning techniques
  • Gives prompt feedback
  • Emphasizes time on task
  • Communicates high expectations
  • Respects diverse talents and ways of learning


  • Social/rapport building
  • Instructional design
  • Interactivity of technology
  • Learner engagement
  • Instructor engagement












Autonomous Vehicles

Various pundits are projecting that by 2020 – just four years – the driving of cars and trucks will be completely automated.  Vehicle services, whether for consumers or businesses, will be readily available for very reasonable prices.  I will not need to own a personal vehicle and my business can dispense with its fleet of delivery trucks.  Taxi or truck drivers will no longer be professions; they will go the ways of elevator operators, bank tellers, and secretaries.

Personal cars are typically in use 5% of their lives.  The maturation of autonomous vehicles will cause utilization to approach 90-100%, dramatically reducing the number of vehicles needed to meet demands.   The greatly reduced number of vehicles will, in turn, enormously decrease the demand for independent servicing of vehicles – the vehicle service companies will handle this.  The number of gas stations, repair shops, and car washes will precipitously drop.

Reduced production of vehicles will result in the supplier base for vehicle manufacturers being steadily weaned due to less demands for nuts, bolts, rims, tires, floor mats, etc.  Auto insurance, the cash cow of the insurance industry, will be transformed once accidents cannot happen.  People will not pay to avoid risks that are no longer at all likely.  I have read projections that 5 million jobs will disappear.

This all seems plausible if the automation performs flawlessly.  Then, I can sit in the back seat and snooze on the way to the office, train station, or airport.  To evaluate this possibility, I have used my frequent Uber rides as an experiment where I ask myself, “What if there were no driver in the car?”  Two examples are very revealing.

I was going to the airport for a flight to Los Angeles.  The Uber app guided the driver to take a route that would have taken us away from the airport, not towards it.  I told this to the Uber driver and he said, “I have not driven this route before.  If you know a better way, just tell me what to do.”  Everything worked out fine.  What if there had been no driver?

More recently, I was taking Uber to work on a very cold morning.  I saw that the driver who would pick me up was just three blocks away and would pick me up in three minutes.  As I watched his car on my phone, it did not move and the time increased for 3, to 4, to 5, to 8 minutes.  I called him, and he said he would be there in five minutes, which he was.

Upon entering the car, I asked him, “You weren’t in your car when you responded to my request, were you?”  He responded, “No I was in my apartment, headed to my car in the parking garage.  It took me a few minutes to get there and then drive the three blocks to you.”  Driverless cars are unlikely to have apartments, but how will customers deal with departures from “normal” operations?

One extreme possibility is that drivers will be able to ignore vehicle operations until just before an imminent accident when the vehicle signals that the human driver should take over.  They will not have manually driven a vehicle in perhaps months and they now have a few seconds to get back in the loop.  Not surprisingly, this will not work. Decades of research have repeatedly shown this.

The impacts of autonomous vehicles on the overall economy will be pervasive.  The impact on the notion of “driving” will be profound.  We need to explore these futures deeply and carefully.  Like the canal barges, steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, these changes will inevitably happen. How can we better understand and facilitate such changes to assure positive outcomes?

The Quartet

In “The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789,” Joseph J. Ellis chronicles the planning, drafting, and ratification of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights in 1789.  The title refers to George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison.  These four men, with support from Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris and Thomas Jefferson, led the transformation of thirteen colonies into a united republic.

It had never occurred to me that formation of the United States of America was not necessarily the outcome sought via the Revolutionary War.  The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1777.  They were ratified by all thirteen states by 1781.  The thirteen states remained sovereign and independent.  The role of the federal government was limited to diplomacy and resolving territorial disputes.

The basic idea was to form a federation of thirteen independent countries, each with their own constitution, laws, processes, and so on.  Thus, during the Revolutionary War (1776-1783), the federal government had no power to raise troops and collect taxes.  Each state made its own decisions with regard to contributing troops and money.  The result was thousands of poorly equipped and unpaid soldiers.

Having escaped the reins of the British King and Parliament, the states were in no mood to reinstitute centralized governance and control.  However, the Treaty of Paris in 1784 required payment of pre-war debts and return of confiscated properties.  The credit ratings of each of the states were such that money could not be borrowed to address these needs.  The minimal central government could not borrow either because it had no sources of revenue.

The Treaty also resulted in the Mississippi River being the western border of the colonial territories.  There would eventually be 26 states east of the Mississippi.   However, there were at that time many competing claims on the less settled portions of these territories.  Virginia, for example, was quite aggressive in its territorial claims.  There was need for a mechanism to address claims and form new states.

Washington, Hamilton, Jay and Madison felt that the federation was at great risk of imploding.  Many European powers hoped this would happen, as they did not want the competition likely from a large united republic.  Ellis masterfully tells the story of how these four men planned and orchestrated a process that resulted in thirteen states voting for something that most of their citizens did not want.  Ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in 1789 was the result.

The tension between states’ rights and federal governance is woven into the fabric of our national culture.  The Tea Party is just the latest manifestation of this tension.  The Constitution provides the means for addressing this tension but does inherently resolve it.  As Ellis explains, the quartet facilitated creating, in effect, a work in progress.

The Big Short


I asked him if senior executives at his bank understood the questionable assumptions underlying the mortgage-based derivative securities.  He responded, “I understood, but we were making so much money from these securities that it was socially unacceptable to raise any questions.”  Put simply, they wanted to milk the real estate bubble as long as they could.

Of course, the bubble burst and millions of people lost their jobs and their homes.  The assets of the executives in these financial firms were protected.  They even received their usual bonuses, funded by the federal bailout of these firms.  Despite the obvious fraud by financial firms and rating agencies, almost no one was indicted and convicted.  Taxpayers paid, in one way or another, for the $5 trillion of lost wealth.

This movie certainly renews the anger felt in 2007-09.  I felt then, but less so now, that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, et al. should have been forced to fail, with top executives losing all of their personal assets and serving long prison terms, eventually emerging impoverished.  This would have been cathartic, but would it have made a difference in the longer term?  Would greed, fraud, and crime in general have been deterred?

The more fundamental question concerns the nature of value in our society and economy.  I have chaired, or been a member of, a few National Academy committees that wrestled with this question in terms of overarching goals for Academy initiatives.  We eventually agreed on one overarching goal:

To foster and sustain a healthy, educated, and productive population that is competitive in the global marketplace.

This goal is very compelling.  We want people to be healthy and engaged in work and making creative contributions in general.  To do this, we need people to be educated, as that is key to health and readiness for productivity.  People also need to be trained and aided to be productive and educated so they are competitive in the global marketplace.

My earlier post on “Five Million Jobs” outlines how we could accomplish these goals for 3% of the Federal budget.  I also discuss in that post why this obviously highly valuable investment will never happen.  The reason is simple – a sizable portion of our electorate feels that health, education, and productivity are now private goods, no longer public goods.  The idea that we all benefit by everyone being healthy, educated, and productive is no longer par of the national psyche.

So, let’s go back to The Big Short.  Was the financial community focused on improving health, education, or productivity?  More generally, were they providing value to society – and were they rewarded accordingly?  There is certainly value in providing capital to buy homes, start businesses, and develop inventions with potential to become market innovations.  Investors who provide this capital deserve reasonable returns for putting their monies at risk.

The financial community has various mechanisms for decreasing risks, for example, diversifying investment portfolios.  However, the financial players in The Big Short were hiding increasing risks, with the fraudulent compliance of the rating agencies.  These players created toxic portfolios of subprime mortgages.  The risks of default were steadily increasing, in part due to adjustable mortgage interest rates that resulted in payments that many borrowers could not possibly sustain.

The rating agencies helped the banks to hide ballooning risks, but savvy players realized that the bubble must eventually burst and sold these portfolios short. Some of our smartest people found a way to make billions of dollars betting that the marketplace would soon recognize the worthless investment instruments created by the financial community.  In effect, these smart people bet against the economy, against sustained value creation.

It is terrible when the smart money bets on failure.  Greed, fraud, and other criminal activities, in contrast to value, created this situation.  The financial community often talked value creation, but they did not walk it.  Instead, they focused on big paychecks, associated perks, and enormous bonuses.  In the end, they got to keep their windfall earnings while US taxpayers bailed out their enterprises.  Their homes in the Hamptons have kept them safely shielded from the broad loss of confidence they created.

NFL Denies Referee Conspiracy

There is growing evidence that NFL referees have been instructed to make calls – particularly pass interference calls and false start calls – to control the outcomes of NFL games.  The NFL vehemently denies these accusations, but the data are very clear.  The NFL knows the outcomes that will maximize television revenues as well as ticket and clothing sales, and they are determined to make sure these outcomes happen.

Our operatives have managed to make contact with people at Black Rock Big Data Analytics who provide services to the NFL.  None of these people would speak on the record, but they provided various insights.  A key manager said, “Keep in mind that this is all about entertainment, not athletics.  We are focused on earnings per share, not Hall of Fame inductions.  Our goal is to sell beer, pickup trucks, and game shirts.”

We asked, “What does this mean operationally?”  She responded, “The Patriots and Panthers were undefeated until recently.  We maximized the sales of game shirts, and then we needed these teams to lose because there were no more shirts to sell.”  She continued, “We instructed the referees to make sure these teams lost.”  They delivered, sales improved, and the referees got their bonuses.

“Doesn’t this conflict with the whole spirit of the game?” we asked.  The response was simply, “College and pro sports are the essence of corruption, exploiting talented athletes for maximal corporate earnings.”  So, we asked, “Does it not matter that millions of people are totally focused on their teams and their success?”  The response was simple, “Of course this matters.  Our goal is to maximize the percent of their income that ends up in the NFL coffers.”

Finally, our contacts added, “You realize that the whole athletics enterprise is focused on exploiting talented athletes, university presidents, and the general public to fill corporate coffers at the expense of the health and well-being of athletics and academia.  The idea of a student athlete is a farce.  All that matters is earnings per share.”

So, we asked, how far might you take this idea?  “Well, if we look at ultimate fighting, the extreme is death of the competitors.  This could generate enormous amounts of revenue.”  We could not help but ask, “Is this ethical?”  The answer was simple, “All that matters is earnings per share.  Dead athletes are just an insurance premium payment.”

The New Reality

Our operatives have uncovered the motivation and reasoning behind various presidential candidates now emphasizing what many of them are calling the “new realty.”  This reality relates to their personal histories, climate change, economic prospects, and so on.  All of the candidates have “repositioned” their personal stories to gain voter support.

One candidate, born to immense family wealth, tells his story of hardscrabble poverty and Horatio Alger like immersion from this poverty.  The media, their fact checking having discredited this story, finds itself dismissed by the candidate.  They have to ask questions and report answers in the context of this seemingly ridiculous reality.

Other candidates advocate policies, e.g., nuclear attacks on adversaries, which make no sense in terms of costs or consequences but are great pitches for support and votes.  Let’s build a wall between Mexico and the US, or between Canada and the US.  Great idea for construction companies that build walls!

There are lots of ideas about taxes.  The majority of Americans pay no taxes beyond Social Security assessments.  Thus, income tax revenues must come from everybody else.  How can we best redistribute income from earners with high incomes to everyone else?

Our tax policies shield many high-income people by designating their earnings as capital gains.  Thus, they pay 20% rather than 40% of their income in taxes.  The real victims are people whose incomes are designated salaries.  Between federal, state, and local income taxes, as well as property and sales taxes, these people can pay as much as 60% of their income in taxes.

The candidates have long argued for lower taxes, but it has all been just rhetoric.  The country cannot function without many high earners paying 60% in taxes while the majority of people pay 0% in taxes.  This is not going to change.  The minority of people with above average incomes is going to pay dearly to support everyone else.  Otherwise, the stability of the overall social system is at risk.

The candidates, from either political party, cannot embrace this reality.  The idea that we have to redistribute income to avoid social unrest is not acceptable, except for the fact that this is exactly what we do.   The reality is that a minority of people is positioned to benefit enormously from various technology and market opportunities; everybody else will find such changes challenging.  The political system needs to spread the benefits around.

Nevertheless, several candidates are advocating zero income taxes across the board, as well as zero corporate taxes.  They would create a national Value Added Tax.  They suggest 2% but replacing the lost revenue from income and corporate taxes would require a VAT of 15-20%.  Adding this VAT to state and city sales taxes could yield an overall tax of 30% on all consumption.  Commentators have pointed this out but candidates respond with putdowns like, “You need to take a math class.”

The rhetoric really soars when addressing defense spending.  Several candidates have advocated doubling the defense budget immediately.  They argue that this will pump money into the economy.  It has been pointed out to them that the absence of income and corporate taxes will mean that such pump priming will yield little revenue to the government.  They typically respond, “Good.  Less tax revenue the better.”

Candidates’ poll standings reflect the general public’s enthusiasm for the new reality.  The simple fact that the math does not work – the deficits would be immense – is of no interest to the public.  They are apparently believing and very much liking the rhetoric.

We decided it was time to explore the genesis of these audacious positions and promises.  Our operatives posed as representatives of potential European donors to the candidates’ campaigns.  It turns out that a potential donation of $10 million is the price for getting serious attention.  $100 million gets you a meeting with the candidate, but we did not need that.

We ended up meeting with three campaign managers.  We asked about the reality of their candidate’s positions and promises.  All three managers responded similarly, “We are trying to win the nomination and then the presidency.  Period.  We will take whatever position is needed to win convention delegates and electoral votes.”

But, we asked, “What if you win?  How will you deliver on your promises?”  They responded, “Promises?  If we win the presidency, the slate is clean. Whatever we said during the primaries and the election is irrelevant.  Once we are in control, we will do whatever we want.  At that point, the public’s preferences do not matter.”

So, we commented, “You are assuming a one term presidency?”  Their retort was, “Not at all.  Any shortfalls in delivering on promises can easily be attributed to the opposition.  We want to do the right things, but we cannot because the other party stymies our every move.”  We asked, “How do you know that will happen?”  Their response was, “It doesn’t matter.  We weren’t going to do those things anyways.”

This readily begged the question, “Why do you want the presidency if there is nothing that you plan to achieve?”  With a knowing smile, they each responded, “The key objective is to keep anybody else from accomplishing anything.  We want to keep government perpetually dysfunctional.”  We asked, “What’s the purpose of that?”  With a knowing look, they replied, “While the turmoil plays out, our donors and supporters will be making loads of money, which can help fuel the next round of this charade.”