Two interesting articles in the education press this morning (9/11/15), both related although they may not seem so. The first reports on a new Brookings study on student debt. The authors, Adam Looney (ok, no chuckles allowed) of the US Department of Treasury, and Constantine Yannelis of Stanford. What they found is that the student-loan default issue is largely driven by two sectors: those who go to for-profit institutions, and community college borrowers. While they represent a bit less than 50% of all federal loan borrowers leaving school and starting to repay their loans, they accounted for 70% of defaults. In particular, 47% of those who were students at for-profit colleges defaulted within five years of leaving college. (By way of comparison, 10% of students who attended selective 4-year institutions were in default.) This doesn't report on the burden of these loans over all, just that the for-profits seem exceptionally bad at helping their students make their way in life (at least not economically speaking).
The second, appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed is a quite nice piece by Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, on "Why College Is Not a Commodity," which suggests that "Given the role and the nature of its faculty, the only plausible raison d'etre of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture: a world of ideas dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically...Support for our current system of higher education makes sense, therefore, only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential."
Are these two articles about the same topic?
The second, appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed is a quite nice piece by Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, on "Why College Is Not a Commodity," which suggests that "Given the role and the nature of its faculty, the only plausible raison d'etre of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture: a world of ideas dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically...Support for our current system of higher education makes sense, therefore, only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential."
Are these two articles about the same topic?