When digital economy and Big Data empower our lives and increase inequalities of the UK’s education system, student protests turn out to be powerful very quickly. The article of James Meadway we publish explains why this method of algorithmic working was bound to fail and our hypothesis is that “Fuck the algorithm” could become a worldwide slogan!
Blog editorial team
Protesting students and a national outcry have forced a U-turn over A-level marking in Scotland, and subsequently Wales, England and Northern Ireland in quick succession, despite the UK government’s public belligerence at the prospect of revising students’ algorithmically-moderated grades. The modelling that had been applied will now be scrapped in favour of teachers’ assessments for both A-level and GSCE students. It’s a major victory for the thousands of students who have protested.
The anger has been completely justified. The model that had been applied appears to have been designed to produce results that, on the headline measures, looked ‘fair’ (in that the averages could look about right) whilst forgetting that the distribution of overall marks was itself the product of many thousands of individual results. Throw in the fact that searching for an average based on historic performance inevitably tends to favour those who have historically done well – which, in the British case, has privileged the private sector – and the stage was set for a spectacular government failure. It’s now clear that education secretary Gavin Williamson, “promoted beyond his competence”, needs to go.
Beyond the specific government failures here, however, such as the lack of oversight and review – including attempting to silence competent professionals – the fiasco and the protests indicate a trend for the future.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak erupted, fundamentally (and permanently) disrupting how we live and work, the presence of data and statistical modelling in all our lives has accelerated markedly. From working-from-home on one side to increased biosecurity surveillance on the other (itself ranging from contact-tracing apps to temperature monitoring to “pandemic drones”) – the weight of data in our everyday lives has dramatically increased.
We’ve all become very familiar with this ghostly digital presence in the decade since the Great Financial Crisis, as (mainly US) Big Data companies have exercised their extraordinary capacities to gather, store and analyse our data, resulting in immense gains for them and an increasingly data-saturated world for the rest of us.
One way or another, the fact of algorithmic prediction has become an accepted part of how we live, most obviously online in the form of recommendation algorithms. One set of consequences – surveillance capitalism’s insatiable greed for the data we produce – is becoming better-known. The hunger is driven by the raw economics of the digital economy: each dataset that can be obtained is worth more if it can be compared with another dataset, so the value of a data company is always maximised by grabbing as much data as it can.
Usually, we don’t notice the algorithms that are used to do this. The entire purpose of those used for behavioural analysis is to forecast, as far as possible, the actions of individuals on the basis of past data. Increasingly, they are also intended to shape the behaviour of individuals in particular ways – to guide us to specific YouTube videos or Facebook advertisers or whatever. They might also be used to shape our political beliefs and preferences, as we have seen.
The critical issue with exam results is that this method of algorithmic working was bound to fail. On average, the algorithm may be more or less correct, but the ‘average student’ does not really exist – it’s a statistical fiction, generated from data which describes many thousands of individuals, none of whom are the ‘average’. Specifically for exams, moreover, there are individual people who we expect to be judged against the criteria of both their own performance and some objective standard – not against the performance of the average, either today or historically. In situations like marking exams we have specific expectations of individual autonomy and the recognition of individual merit which statistical techniques tend to override.
So what we can tolerate for, say, targeted advertising, we find intolerable for exams, which have precisely the worst possible combination – from the point of view of algorithmic processing – of four factors: being applied en masse, in public, where specific individualised results are required, and where the results for an individual are supposed to say something about their merit or worth in a particular dimension with meaningful consequences.
(Obviously, exam results aren’t the only dimension we might judge people on, and mercifully, we tend not to filter any of the others through any sort of marking scheme – although, inevitably, one UK government advisor is at least interested in China-style social credit systems.)
Environmental instability
The combination of the first three factors – mass processing, public display, individualised results – makes the case for protests clear, and the last – that the results should bear some relationship to true merit – makes it desirable. Most algorithmic processing will have only one or two of these four factors: the fact that Facebook is choosing to display some adverts to you on the basis of the statistical assumptions it makes about you is certainly individualised, but it is also not something intended for wider social comparison. Most algorithmic processing will not result in protests; as it becomes ubiquitous, we may be largely unaware it is even happening, and we may not care too much.
But one thing we have learned from this pandemic is that environmental instability – of which Covid-19 is a profound example – brings with it a deeper and deeper dependency on data. The semblance of accounting and control that Big Data provides, built-in to the business models of our data economy and increasingly factored into the functioning of government, becomes more – not less – appealing in unstable conditions.
The social structures we currently use to manage our glut of digital information – principally the giant tech companies – have every incentive to maximise their reach across social life, given the blunt economics of data: more data means more value, so grab more data. And governments, confronted by conditions over which they have increasingly little control or sway, facing populations whose cynicism about government itself remains at historically high levels, have every incentive to try to utilise mass data techniques themselves. The (relatively unsophisticated) A-level results modelling was introduced, for instance, precisely because the pandemic had resulted in the cancellation of the actual exams: it was an attempt to cope with contingency on the basis of a forecasting model.
Put these two elements together – the raw economics of Big Data that drive its expansion, and the desire of governments to try to assert some control in situations of instability – and the likelihood is that algorithmic management becomes more common as part of how government operates, not less. And of course to the extent that government data is immensely valuable, like the treasure trove of NHS data, Big Data will be more than happy to assist governments in making use of it. Michael Gove’s recent speech on the future of government, for example, explicitly highlighted the need to “open up” government data in this fashion. The direction of travel is clear, and – under current circumstances – instability will accelerate us along it.
Politicisation
But as the techniques of modelling and forecasting become a more significant part of government, they become politicised. Alongside our belief in the autonomy of individuals and the belief that they ought to be assessed according to their own merits is a belief that government should be fair and transparent.
We have built entire systems of governance and rule around roughly those ideas: the legal system depends on this principle – that the assessments it produces are fair because they are delivered on the basis of evidence that is seen, and made on the basis of the individual standing trial or settling a dispute. We elect governments in a process that hides our personal choice, but which is intended to provide scrutiny and transparency of whatever government then emerges. Both systems may fail, but they fail relative to that approximate (and widely-held) ideal.
Statistical modelling, particularly as it becomes more sophisticated, does not work like this.
It is hard for us to understand even a relatively simple model, such as that used for the A-level results. (The Royal Statistical Society’s letter to the Office for Statistics Regulation is a good guide to the problems, however.) By the time very large datasets are being used, particularly in machine learning, the results that are produced may become literally indecipherable – they are, in the jargon, not ‘interpretable’. It is not possible to see why a large statistical model produces a result, and nor is it possible for the computer – unlike a judge or a politician, say – to explain why it reached a particular conclusion. Increasingly sophisticated machine learning means that algorithms are getting better at accounting for individual nuance. But if what they are going on is past behaviour, they still start to hem in future choices and can produce radically unfair outcomes.
Again, we might tolerate this in much of our online life. The fact a particular shop is being advertised to you in particular probably doesn’t matter too much. But if the decision-making process starts to intrude on questions of underlying value, or where the outcome has profound consequences on your life, it matters a great deal. And if it is the government making those decisions, the clash between our expectations of fairness and the actual results produced by government may become profound. This is the moment of politicisation: once a procedure is moved from the realm of the mundane, or from where a market can be blamed for an outcome, and into the realm of what we think of as government, it is open to political protest.
(I’m reminded somewhat of the politicisation of the labour market that took place in the West during the post-war boom. Once governments broke with liberal capitalism and accepted some responsibility for the management of labour, it politicised the question of how labour was managed. The early years of neoliberalism in the West were, in part, an attempt to break out of this problem by having states refuse to accept this responsibility. For the regimes in the East, the problem was chronic: the attempt by government to set the conditions in every market, including labour, meant everything was always the government’s problem. Every strike suddenly took on a political character.)
We have already seen multiplying protests during the pandemic, from Black Lives Matter to an uptick in strikes. We have also seen legal objections being raised, successfully, to the use of automated facial recognition, and we should expect further legal challenges to the encroachment of algorithmic methods in future. But what the A-level protests point towards are the opening rounds of a new form of protest, against a new style of government: one that appeals directly to our faith in fair, transparent, and human-centred processes, on one side, and against the opacity and unfairness of statistically-determined outcomes on the other.
Aux quatre coins de la planète, des étudiants, des universitaires, des chercheurs, mais aussi des lycéens ou des enseignants, se mobilisent pour s’opposer aux politiques néolibérales et conquérir de nouveaux droits. Et la plupart du temps, nous n’en savons rien ou si peu…
Nous nous proposons donc de tenir sur ce blog une « météo des luttes », organisée sous la forme de textes courts, de « brèves », suivis de liens à consulter ou de documents à télécharger.
Dans ce bulletin météo, nous vous signalons quelques-uns de ces combats, locaux et universels...
All over the world, students, academics, researchers, as well as high school students and teachers are mobilizing to oppose neoliberal policies and conquer new rights. But most of the time, we hear little or no wind of it...
We therefore propose to keep on this blog a “barometer of struggles” organized in the form of news in brief, followed by links to consult or documents to download.
In this weathercast, we signal to you a few of these recent fights, local and universal…
Überall auf der Welt kämpfen Studierende, Lehrende und Forschende, aber auch SchülerInnen oder gar Eltern, gegen neoliberale Politik und für neue Rechte. Davon erfahren wir in der Regel nur wenig…
Auf dieser Seite verzeichnen wir also einen wissenschaftlichen Streikwetterdienst aus kurzen Texten und Meldungen mit Links und Dokumenten zum Herunterladen.
In diesem Bericht stellen wir Euch einige dieser lokalen und allgemeinen Kämpfe vor.
En todas partes del mundo, estudiantes, académicos, investigadores, pero también estudiantes y profesores de secundaria se movilizan para oponerse a las políticas neoliberales y conquistar nuevos derechos. Pero la mayor parte del tiempo, no sabemos nada o muy poco....
Por lo tanto, proponemos mantener en este blog un "barómetro de las luchas", organizado en forma de resúmenes, seguidos de enlaces para consultar o documentos para descargar.
En este reporte meteorológico, señalamos algunas de estas luchas, locales y universales…
In tutto il mondo, studenti, accademici, ricercatori, ma anche studenti delle scuole superiori e insegnanti si stanno mobilitando per contrastare le politiche neoliberali e conquistare nuovi diritti. E il più delle volte non ne sappiamo nulla, o molto poco...
Proponiamo quindi di tenere su questo blog un "meteo delle lotte", organizzato in forma di brevi testi, seguiti da link da consultare o documenti da scaricare.
In questo bollettino meteorologico, diamo notizia di alcune lotte, locali e universali…
Em todo o mundo, estudantes, acadêmicos, pesquisadores, mas também estudantes do ensino médio e professores estão se mobilizando para se opor às políticas neoliberais e conquistar novos direitos. E, na maioria das vezes, não sabemos nada ou tão pouco acerca disso...
Propomos portanto manter neste blog um "clima das lutas", composto por textos curtos, "resumos", seguidos de links para consulta ou documentos para download.
Neste boletim meteorológico, relatamos algumas dessas batalhas, locais e universais…
Monde
La lutte mondiale des jeunes pour le climat s’intensifie
Une semaine mondiale d’action est organisée du 20 au 27 septembre 2019 avec grève scolaire mondiale le 20 septembre et grève totale le 27 septembre.
Afrique
Guinée
Plusieurs blessés étudiants et gendarmes lors des heurts à l’université de Labé, située dans la province de Hafia.
Sénégal
Un étudiant de l’université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor a été blessé par balle lors des affrontements entre la police et les étudiants le 15 juin. Ces derniers manifestent depuis plusieurs mois pour obtenir le paiement de leur bourse.
Amérique du Sud
Brazil
Nationwide Student Strike began in Brazil Over Bolsonaro’s budget cuts. Many demonstrations took place on May 15, in 15 on 17 of Brazil’s states with particularly large ones in major cities like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte. Despite the cuts affecting only federal institutions, the protest movement has been joined by many private universities such as Rio’s Pontifical University which voted last week to join the nationwide demonstration. Em defensa da universidades públicas brasileiras, circulam petições. A de Daniel Peres, (Salvador-Bahia) dirigida em particular ao Congresso Nacional, já recolheu mais de um milhão e meio de assinaturas.
TheGuardian 30.05.2019, Tens of thousands of students, academics and teachers have taken to the streets of Brazil for their latest mass protest against what they call far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on education. Up and down the country – from Amazon cities to small towns in Brazil’s deep south – demonstrators turned out to condemn Bolsonaro’s highly controversial moves to slash funding for public education and science.
The Conversation 05.06.2019, Tens of thousands of students and professors protested nationwide on May 30 against a Jair Bolsonaro administration proposal to slash Brazil’s public education budget and starve university humanities departments of resources. It was the second mass demonstration in two weeks against the education policies of Brazil’s divisive new president. Protesters in cities and towns across Brazil took to the streets to condemn an education ministry proposal to reduce funding for Brazilian public universities by 30% during the remainder of 2019. The ministry is also considering withdrawing financing entirely from the philosophy and sociology departments of public universities. The objective would be to “focus on areas that generate immediate return to the taxpayer such as veterinary, engineering and medicine,” Bolsonaro wrote on Twitter on April 26.
Chile
En todo el país, se contesta mucho la Reforma de la Educación Superior y de Universidades Estatales llevada por el Mineduc (Ministerio de Educación). En Santiago el 6 de junio, profesores y estudiantes marchan contra el presidente Piñera que mantiene su silencio frente a las demandas. "Nos estamos manifestando por los problemas graves de la educación pública", dijo durante la marcha Mario Aguilar, presidente del Colegio de Profesores, mientras un docente grita "Chile no es una empresa y nosotros no somos los empleados de su empresa". "Avanzar hacia una educación pública, gratuita y sin deuda" es el lema bajo el cual miles de estudiantes universitarios y secundarios del país se movilizaron el 20 de junio a la llammada de la Confech (Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile).
Honduras
El Heraldo, 22.05.2019 Tegucigalpa. Este miércoles, un nutrido grupo de docentes, médicos y estudiantes del sector público llevaron a cabo desde horas de la mañana una marcha para evitar la supuesta privatización del sistema educativo y exigir la derogación de los decretos ejecutivos que le dieron vida a las comisiones especiales de transformación en las secretarías de Salud y Educación. Los maestros y docentes son apoyados en sus pretensiones por estudiantes, padres de familia y sindicatos. Las universidades, colegios y escuelas de la capital cerraron sus puertas en Tegucigalpa y muchos lugares del territorio hondureño. El caos, zozobra y vandalismo se apoderó de la capital este jueves (30 mayo). Un grupo de manifestantes protagonizó violentos enfrentamientos con policías, enfrente del Aeropuerto Internacional Toncontín, en la capital de Honduras.
Santo Domingo
Noticias SIN, 06.06.2019, Santo Domingo. Tras intentar cruzar el cerco de seguridad, la situación pasó de pacífica a disturbios. Los manifestantes lanzaban botellas de agua a los policías pero cuando comenzaron a lanzarles piedras, los agentes respondieron con bombas lacrimógenas. Las pedradas alcanzaron la cara de uno de los uniformados. La escuela de medicina de la UASD y el Colegio Médico se oponen al proyecto de ley porque aseguran que este quitará a la universidad del Estado la potestad de impartir y calificar la prueba para dejarlo en manos del sector privado.
Contre la Réforme Blanquer, les enseignants des filières professionnelles et générales poursuivent leur lutte. Certains s’organisent pour une grève des corrections ou une rétention de notes du baccalauréat. Rappelons qu’en 2019, ce sont 743 000 élèves, qui passent cet examen final remis en cause par la réforme Blanquer dès la rentrée 2020. On ne lâchera pas ! Un programme d’action bien rempli en ce mois de juin pour défendre les filières professionnelles. Les professeurs d’histoire-géographie des filières générales de l’académie de Dijon votent quant à eux pour une rétention des notes comme moyen d’action. Dans l’académie de Créteil, les professeurs de philosophie votent également pour une rétention des notes pour une durée illimitée.
Assembly of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW)
Assemblée Générale de la Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS)
The 22nd General Assembly of the World Federation of Scientific Workers met in Dakar on December 8th, 2017. It agreed to call upon governments, the world scientific community and all the inhabitants of our planet facing a serious environmental crisis, in order to launch an exceptional research project to an amount of about 1200 billion euros per year, based on the principles of cooperation and solidarity. It is a global and urgent requirement.
Climate, biosphere, oceans…, the Earth system is destabilized. It enters unknown territory. The living conditions of all humanity and even that of all animal and vegetal beings are threatened. Ultimately, the very survival of the human species could be posed. The way that human activities are currently carried out is at the root of this situation. A rapid and deep transformation of how these activities are being developed is indispensable. A technical, ecological and even civilizational transition, that benefits all human beings, must bring about a change in the relationship between humanity and the Earth system, ensuring the conditions for its survival, for peace, well-being and life fulfillment of all populations. These stakes are global. They require a takeover by and mobilization of all nations, all populations and all sectors of activity. Such a transition requires that: – the principles of solidarity and cooperation overcome the principle of competition; – new financing and technology transfer mechanisms be implemented adapted to the needs and trajectories of the different countries; – procedures be developed that take into account the needs, uses and specific knowledges of populations; – inequalities be reduced.
A major contribution of research – including the social and human sciences – is essential for such a transition. With that aim, it is important to put an end to policies primarily focused on meeting the demands of multinational companies and on promoting the competitiveness of the territories subject to extreme international economic competition created by free trade agreements. Key sectors, such as education, energy, health, agriculture, food, industry, are strategic for the future of humanity. They require the establishment, under the umbrella of the United Nations, of an agency, with the necessary legal and financial resources, responsible for an international program of the transition, based on global aims and with enough flexibility to consider, and be enriched by, local and national specificities. This transition program must include exceptionally major research programs of a size unmatched by current ones, and subordinated to the principles of cooperation and solidarity. Such major international research programs shall also be supported by current national and international research networks and programs. It is urgent to reach exceptional levels of financial investments of the order of 1200 billion euros, about the 2% of the world PIB, to mobilize the world scientific power towards these projects, without any exclusion, allowing for the participation of all countries.
At stake it is the achievement of the following objectives: – increasing energy efficiency and reducing cost of generating, storing and transporting renewable energy, while drastically minimizing adverse environmental and health effects; stopping all exploitation of fossil fuels as soon as possible; – increasing uptake of carbon dioxide by agricultural soils and through reforestation, and using CO2 as a raw material to obtain carbon based chemicals, fuels and materials; – reducing agricultural methane emissions; improving the nutritional and sanitary quality of the diet; strongly reducing the negative effects on health and the environment resulting from human activities; – preserving freshwater sources, rivers and oceans and allowing universal access to drinking water; preserving biodiversity; – developing technologies and techniques adapted to the diversity of local situations, especially in their cultural, environmental and climatic conditions (for instance, housing or energy).
In this twenty-first century, the preservation of the Earth system and of all the common goods of humanity, the lasting well-being and the life fulfillment of all human beings, shall be the objectives and the compass that guide the scientific community, and beyond it all the human community. The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) works to define, promote and implement strategies to achieve the above mentioned goals. It calls on scientists from all countries to be committed to this task and, in cooperation, contribute to the achievement of these goals, and more broadly to the development of an unstoppable international movement capable of achieving them. The WFSW will direct this call to UN organizations and promote it through international NGOs, regional and international labor movements and labor confederations, and appeal to the world citizens to bring the call to the attention of their respective governments.
La 22e Assemblée Générale de la Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS) s’est tenue à Dakar, en décembre 2017. Face à la crise environnementale, elle a décidé d’appeler la communauté scientifique et toutes les populations de la planète à la mise en place d’un projet de recherche international exceptionnel, d’une hauteur de 2% du PIB mondial, soit environ 1200 milliards d’euros annuels, fondé sur les principes de coopération et de solidarité. Il s’agit d’une exigence mondiale et urgente.
Climat, biosphère, océans…, le système Terre est déstabilisé. Il entre dans une ère inconnue. Les conditions de vie de l’ensemble de l’humanité et des autres espèces animales et végétales sont menacées. A terme, la survie même de l’espèce humaine est posée. Le type d’activités humaines actuel constitue la cause de cette situation. Une transformation rapide et profonde de celles-ci est indispensable. Une transition technique, écologique et civilisationnelle, bénéficiant à tous les êtres humains, doit permettre une évolution du rapport entre l’humanité et le système Terre, assurant à l’humanité les conditions de sa survie, de la paix, du bien-être et de l’épanouissement de chacune de ses populations. L’enjeu est planétaire. Il exige une appropriation et une mobilisation de l’ensemble des nations, des populations et des secteurs d’activité. Il nécessite : – que les principes de solidarité et de coopération doivent supplanter celui de concurrence ; – la mise en œuvre de mécanismes de financement et de transfert de technologies adaptés aux besoins et aux trajectoires des différents pays ; – le développement de dispositifs permettant de prendre en considération les besoins, les usages et les savoirs des populations ; – une réduction des inégalités.
Une contribution majeure de la recherche – y compris en sciences humaines et sociales – est indispensable à cette transition. Pour ce faire, un terme doit être mis aux politiques qui tendent à principalement orienter la recherche vers la satisfaction des demandes des entreprises multinationales, et vers le soutien à la compétitivité des territoires soumis à une concurrence économique internationale aggravée par les accords de libre-échange. Des secteurs clés tels que l’éducation, l’énergie, la santé, l’agriculture, l’alimentation, l’industrie, sont stratégiques pour le devenir de l’humanité. Ils nécessitent la mise en place, sous l’égide de l’ONU, d’une agence – disposant des moyens juridiques contraignants et financiers nécessaires – en charge d’une programmation internationale de la transition, fondée sur des objectifs globaux et sur une flexibilité permettant de prendre en considération – et de s’enrichir- des spécificités nationales et locales. Cette programmation doit inclure des programmes de recherche internationaux d’une ampleur exceptionnelle, sans commune mesure avec les programmes actuels, organisés selon les principes de coopération et de solidarité. Ces programmes de recherche internationaux doivent être soutenus par les programmes et les réseaux de recherche internationaux et nationaux existants. il est urgent de passer à un niveau exceptionnel d’investissement financier – de l’ordre de 1 200 milliards d’euros, soit 2 % du PIB mondial – pour mobiliser les forces scientifiques mondiales dans ces projets, sans exclusive, avec la participation de tous les pays.
Il s’agit de contribuer à la réalisation des objectifs suivants : – augmenter l’efficacité énergétique et diminuer le coût de la production, du stockage et du transport des énergies renouvelables tout en réduisant drastiquement les effets négatifs aux plans environnemental et sanitaire ; cesser au plus vite toute exploitation d’énergies fossiles ; – augmenter la captation de dioxyde de carbone par les sols agricoles et la reforestation, utiliser le CO2 comme une matière première pour produire des composés chimiques, des combustibles et des matériaux à base de carbone ; – réduire les émissions agricoles de méthane ; améliorer la qualité nutritive et sanitaire de l’alimentation ; réduire fortement les effets négatifs aux plans environnemental et sanitaire de l’ensemble des activités humaines ; – préserver les sources d’eau douce, les rivières et les océans et assurer un accès universel à l’eau potable ; préserver la biodiversité ; – développer des technologies et des techniques adaptées à la diversité des situations locales, notamment dans leurs dimensions culturelle, environnementale et climatique (par exemple dans les domaines de l’habitation ou de l’énergie).
En ce XXIe siècle, la préservation du système Terre et de l’ensemble des biens communs de l’humanité, le bien être durable et l’épanouissement de l’ensemble des humains, constituent les objectifs et la boussole devant orienter la communauté scientifique, et au-delà l’ensemble de la communauté humaine. La Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS) se mobilise pour la définition, la promotion et la mise en œuvre de stratégies visant ces objectifs. Elle appelle les scientifiques de tous les pays à s’engager dans des coopérations contribuant à la réalisation de ces objectifs, et plus largement dans le développement d’un mouvement international puissant en capacité de les atteindre. La FMTS portera les exigences de cet appel auprès des organisations de l’ONU et en fera la promotion auprès des ONG internationales et des fédérations et confédérations syndicales internationales et régionales. Elle appelle les citoyens du monde à porter cet appel devant leurs gouvernements.
Before the automobile, before the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges existed, the rising cost of higher education was shocking the American conscience: “Gentlemen have to pay for their sons in one year more than they spent themselves in the whole four years of their course,” The New York Times lamented in 1875.
Decadence was to blame, the writer argued: fancy student apartments, expensive meals, and “the mania for athletic sports.”
Today, the U.S. spends more on college than almost any other country, according to the 2018 Education at a Glance report released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
All told, including the contributions of individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants, and other assistance), Americans spend about $30,000 per student a year — nearly twice as much as the average developed country. “The U.S. is in a class of its own,” says Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD, and he does not mean this as a compliment. “Spending per student is exorbitant, and it has virtually no relationship to the value that students could possibly get in exchange.”
Only one country spends more per student, and that country is Luxembourg — where tuition is nevertheless free for students, thanks to government outlays. In fact, a third of developed countries offer college free of charge to their citizens. (And another third keep tuition very cheap — less than $2,400 a year.) The farther away you get from the United States, the more baffling it looks.
This back-to-school season, The Atlantic is investigating a classic American mystery: Why does college cost so much? And is it worth it?
At first, like the 19th-century writer of yore, I wanted to blame the curdled indulgences of campus life: fancy dormitories, climbing walls, lazy rivers, dining halls with open-fire-pit grills. And most of all — college sports. Certainly sports deserved blame.
On first glance, the new international data provide some support for this narrative. The U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world for spending on student-welfare services such as housing, meals, health care, and transportation, a category of spending that the OECD lumps together under “ancillary services.” All in all, American taxpayers and families spend about $3,370 on these services per student — more than three times the average for the developed world.
One reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”
But on closer inspection, the data suggest a bigger problem than fancy room and board. Even if we were to zero out all these ancillary services tomorrow, the U.S. would still spend more per college student than any other country (except, again, Luxembourg). It turns out that the vast majority of American college spending goes to routine educational operations — like paying staff and faculty — not to dining halls. These costs add up to about $23,000 per student a year — more than twice what Finland, Sweden, or Germany spends on core services. “Lazy rivers are decadent and unnecessary, but they are not in and of themselves the main culprit,” says Kevin Carey, the author of The End of College and the director of the education-policy program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank.
The business of providing an education is so expensive because college is different from other things that people buy, argue Feldman and his colleague Robert Archibald in their 2011 book, Why Does College Cost So Much? College is a service, for one thing, not a product, which means it doesn’t get cheaper along with changes in manufacturing technology (economists call this affliction “cost disease”). And college is a service delivered mostly by workers with college degrees — whose salaries have risen more dramatically than those of low-skilled service workers over the past several decades.
College is not the only service to have gotten wildly more expensive in recent decades, Feldman and Archibald point out. Since 1950, the real prices of the services of doctors, dentists, and lawyers have risen at similar rates as the price of higher education, according to Feldman and Archibald’s book. “The villain, as much as there is one, is economic growth itself,” they write.
This all makes sense, if we just focus on the U.S. But what about the rest of the world? These broader economic trends exist there, too. So why does college still cost half as much, on average, in other countries?
One oddity of America’s higher-education system is that it is actually three different systems masquerading as one: There is one system of public colleges; another of private, nonprofit institutions; and one made up of for-profit colleges.
The biggest system by far is the public one, which includes two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Three out of every four American college students attend a school in this public system, which is funded through state and local subsidies, along with students’ tuition dollars and some federal aid.
In this public system, the high cost of college has as much to do with politics as economics. Many state legislatures have been spending less and less per student on higher education for the past three decades. Bewitched by the ideology of small government (and forced by law to balance their budgets during a period of mounting health-care costs), states have been leaving once-world-class public universities begging for money. The cuts were particularly stark after the 2008 recession, and they set off a cascading series of consequences, some of which were never intended.
The easiest way for universities to make up for the cuts was to shift some of the cost to students — and to find richer students. “Once that sustainable public funding was taken out from under these schools, they started acting more like businesses,” says Maggie Thompson, the executive director of Generation Progress, a nonprofit education-advocacy group. State cutbacks did not necessarily make colleges more efficient, which was the hope; they made colleges more entrepreneurial.
Some universities began to enroll more full-paying foreign and out-of-state students to make up the difference. Over the past decade, for example, Purdue University has reduced its in-state student population by 4,300 while adding 5,300 out-of-state and foreign students, who pay triple the tuition. “They moved away from working to educate people in their region to competing for the most elite and wealthy students — in a way that was unprecedented,” Thompson says.
This competition eventually crept beyond climbing walls and dining halls into major, long-term operating expenses. For example, U.S. colleges spend, relative to other countries, a startling amount of money on their nonteaching staff, according to the OECD data. Some of these people are librarians or career or mental-health counselors who directly benefit students, but many others do tangential jobs that may have more to do with attracting students than with learning. Many U.S. colleges employ armies of fund-raisers, athletic staff, lawyers, admissions and financial-aid officers, diversity-and-inclusion managers, building-operations and maintenance staff, security personnel, transportation workers, and food-service workers.
The international data is not detailed enough to reveal exactly which jobs are diverting the most money, but we can say that U.S. colleges spend more on nonteaching staff than on teachers, which is upside down compared with every other country that provided data to the OECD (with the exception of Luxembourg, naturally).
In addition, most global rankings of universities heavily weight the amount of research published by faculty — a metric that has no relationship to whether students are learning. But in a heated race for students, these rankings get the attention of college administrators, who push faculty to focus on research and pay star professors accordingly.
Likewise, the new data show that U.S. colleges currently have a slightly lower ratio of students to teachers than the average for the developed world — another metric favored in college rankings. But that is a very expensive way to compete. And among education researchers, there is no clear consensus about whether smaller classes are worth the money.
In the beginning, university administrators may have started competing for full-freight paying students in order to help subsidize other, less affluent students. But once other colleges got into the racket, it became a spending arms race. More and more universities had to participate, including private colleges unaffected by state cuts, just to keep their application numbers up. “There is such a thing as wasteful competition,” Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University professor and the author of Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, wrote me in an email.
All that said, it’s also true that state budget cuts were uneven across the country. Today, in-state tuition in Wyoming is about a third of the cost of Vermont, for example. In places where higher education has not been gutted and the cost of living is low, an American college degree can still be a bargain — especially for students who don’t mind living at home and are poor enough to qualify for federal aid. Taking into account living expenses, says Alex Usher of the consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates, a student at a public university in Mississippi will likely end up with similar out-of-pocket costs as a student in Sweden.
Usher, who is based in Toronto, is one of the few researchers to have looked carefully at the costs of higher education globally. And much of what he finds is surprising. In 2010, he and his colleague Jon Medow created a clever ranking of 15 countries’ higher-education systems — using a variety of ways to assess affordability and access. Reading the report is like peeling an onion. The first layer focuses on the most obvious question: the affordability of college based on the cost of tuition, books, and living expenses divided by the median income in a given country. By this metric, the U.S. does very poorly, ranking third from the bottom. Only Mexico and Japan do worse.
But the U.S. moves up one place when grants and tax credits are included. “Your grants are actually really generous compared to everybody else,” Usher says. Tuition is higher in the U.S., so the grants don’t fully cover the price, but 70 percent of full-time students do receive some kind of grant aid, according to the College Board. From this perspective, sometimes called “net cost,” Australia is more expensive than the U.S.
Next, looking only at our public colleges, the U.S. rises higher still, ranking in the middle of the pack in Usher’s analysis, above Canada and New Zealand. This data is from 2010, and things may look less rosy if he were to redo the study now, Usher cautions. But still, he sounds weirdly hopeful. “The public system in the U.S. is working as well as most systems,” he says. “Parts of the U.S. look like France.”
The problem, of course, is that other parts of the U.S. look more like a Louis Vuitton store. America basically contains 50 different higher-education systems, one per state, each with public, private, and for-profit institutions, making generalizations all but impossible. The U.S. does relatively well on measures of access to college, but the price varies wildly depending on the place and the person. Somehow, students have to find their way through this thicket of competition and choose wisely, or suffer the consequences.
The more I studied America’s baffling higher-education system, the more it reminded me of health care. In both spaces, Americans pay twice as much as people in other developed countries—and get very uneven results. The U.S. spends nearly $10,000 a person on health care each year (25 percent more than Switzerland, the next biggest spender), according to the OECD’s 2017 Health at a Glance report, but our life expectancy is now almost two years below the average for the developed world.
“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.
Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative — but also less coherent and more exploitive. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, rendering both systems bewilderingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very hard for regular people to make informed decisions about either, and yet few decisions could be more important.
In both cases, the most vulnerable people tend to make less-than-ideal decisions. For example, among high-achieving, low-income students (who have grades and test scores that put them in the top 4 percent of U.S. students and would be eligible for generous financial aid at elite colleges), the vast majority apply to no selective colleges at all, according to research by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. “Ironically, these students are often paying more to go to a nonselective four-year college or even a community college than they would pay to go to the most selective, most resource-rich institutions in the United States,” as Hoxby told NPR.
Meanwhile, when it comes to health care, low-income Americans tend to be less familiar with the concepts of deductibles, coinsurance rates, and provider networks, according to a variety of studies, which makes it extremely difficult to choose a health-care plan. “These are both sectors where consumers are too poorly informed and societal costs and benefits too great to leave decision-making entirely in the hands of individuals,” as Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution has written.
Ultimately, college is expensive in the U.S. for the same reason MRIs are expensive: There is no central mechanism to control price increases. “Universities extract money from students because they can,” says Schleicher at the OECD. “It’s the inevitable outcome of an unregulated fee structure.” In places like the United Kingdom, the government limits how much universities can extract by capping tuition. The same is true when it comes to health care in most developed countries, where a centralized government authority contains the prices.
The U.S. federal government has historically been unwilling to perform this role. So Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals — and for college classes. Meanwhile, more and more of the risk gets shifted from government onto families, in both sectors.
At the very least, the American government could do a better job sharing information about the quality of colleges in ways everyone can understand, Schleicher says. “You can’t force people to buy good things or bad things, but they should be able to see what the value is.”
Spending a lot of money can be worth it, if you get something awesome in exchange. “America has the best colleges and universities in the world!” President Donald Trump exclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. Former President Barack Obama said the same thing before him.
But is it actually true? No meaningful data exist on the quality of universities globally. America does have a disproportionate number of elite colleges, which accept fewer than 10 percent of applicants, and these places do employ some brilliant scholars who do groundbreaking research. But fewer than 1 percent of American students attend highly selective colleges like those.
Instead, more than three-quarters of students attend nonselective colleges, which admit at least half of their applicants. No one knows for sure how good these colleges are at their core job of educating students. But in one of the only careful, recent studies on adult skills, the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, Americans under age 35 with a bachelor’s degree performed below their similarly educated peers in 14 other countries on the test of practical math skills. In other words, they did only slightly better than high-school graduates in Finland. America’s college grads did better in reading, performing below just six other countries, but dropped off again in another test, scoring below 13 other countries in their ability to solve problems using digital technology.
If American colleges are not adding obvious and consistent academic value, they are adding financial value. Americans with college degrees earn 75 percent more than those who only completed high school. Over a lifetime, people with bachelor’s degrees earn more than half a million dollars more than people with no college degree in the U.S. In fact, no other country rewards a college degree as richly as the United States, and few other countries punish people so relentlessly for not having one. It’s a diabolical cycle: Colleges are very expensive to run, partly because of the high salaries earned by their skilled workers. But those higher salaries make college degrees extremely valuable, which means Americans will pay a lot to get them. And so colleges can charge more. As Carey, the End of College author, summarizes: “Students are over a barrel.”
Still, the return varies wildly depending on the college one attends. One in four college grads earns no more than the average high-school graduate. Associate’s degrees from for-profit universities lead to smaller salary bumps than associate’s degrees from community colleges, which are cheaper. And two-thirds of students at for-profits drop out before earning their degree anyway, meaning many will spend years struggling with debt they cannot afford to pay off — and cannot, under U.S. law, off-load through bankruptcy.
This convoluted, complicated, inconsistent system continues to exist, and continues to be so expensive because college in America is still worth the price. At certain colleges, for certain people. Especially if they finish. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and almost everywhere else, it isn’t.
Plusieurs blessés étudiants et gendarmes lors des heurts à 
En todo el país, se contesta mucho la Reforma de la Educación Superior y de Universidades Estatales llevada por el Mineduc (Ministerio de Educación). 
Contre la 
On May 29, New Zealand 
One reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”