Stinking FIshwrap: The New York Times Edition
This fishwrap is wrapping a fish--a Stanley Fish, that is--that smells well-past its sell-by date.
Felix Salmon does the intellectual garbage collection:
The rhetoric of tuition inflation: Let’s say I earn $50,000 a year, and a widget costs $1,000. Then my pay goes up 3%, while the cost of the widget goes up 10%—year after year. Would you say that the widget has been getting more affordable over time? Stanley Fish would. Fish is approvingly citing a new book from Robert Archibald and David Feldman, which he quotes saying that “for most families higher education is more affordable than it was in the past.”... I fear to think what statistical sleight-of-hand might be hidden in [Fish's] qualifier about “over long stretches of time,” especially since in recent years real college costs have continued to rise fast even as real median incomes have gone nowhere or shrunk. But in general this approach to gauging affordability is absolutely bonkers.... [A]nything can be considered “more affordable than it was in the past.” If the widget rises in cost by $100 and my annual pay goes up by $1,500, that does not in and of itself settle the question of whether the widget has become more affordable. What’s more... Fish’s take does seem to be at odds with its official blurb:
A technological trio of broad economic forces has come together in the last thirty years to cause higher education costs… A college education has become less reachable to a broad swathe of the American public.... This affordability problem has deep roots...
I’m also completely unconvinced by Fish’s explanation of the main reason behind cost inflation at colleges: "Chief among these is the change in the sophistication and cost of the technology that has at once transformed the setting of higher education and become one of the areas of knowledge higher education must impart to students."... [C]omputers are more expensive than pencils, and it’s surely true that some part of the typical college-tuition fee is spent on information technology. But we’re talking about fee inflation here: in order for Fish’s argument to hold water, IT costs at colleges would have to be rising faster than inflation year in and year out. Which strains credulity in a world where IT is getting steadily cheaper.... The fact is that technology is a way of reducing the costs of education much more than it is a factor in their growth...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
