3 Why Most Academic Advertising Is Immoral Bullshit
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Wharton, Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business,
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EMBA programs are highly profitable. They’re expensive, but the students’ employers often pay their tuition.
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Many universities advertise to enhance their prestige. As an analogy, you might be surprised to see BMW, Mercedes Benz, or Rolex advertise to audiences that cannot afford their products.
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All things equal, the lower a university’s acceptance rate, the more prestigious it is.
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They want to trick the students into applying, so they can reject them, thus ensuring that the schools maintain a lower acceptance rate.
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we’ll examine how they promise (or at least strongly insinuate) that they will transform students, teach them to think, and turn them into leaders.
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They are not exactly lying, but selling snake oil.
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Transformative Experience!
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Harvard University offers a “transformative education.”
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“helping students grow intellectually, spiritually and emotionally
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“develops principled leaders committed to serving both business and society.”
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is committed to the idea of a liberal arts education through which students think and learn across disciplines, literally liberating or freeing the mind to its fullest potential.
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you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly.
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You’ll be ready to live, work, and lead across global borders.”
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At Northwood University, leadership isn’t simply taught, it’s instilled.
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at the “edge of possible . . . also known as the University of New Hampshire . . . there’s a new opportunity around every corner,
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George Mason University offers “a college experience like no other.” Their “top priority is to provide students with a transformational learning experience
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Two hours away, competitor James Madison University offers “A Better You.”
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Southern Methodist University proclaims, “World Changers Shaped Here.”
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Hillsdale College “offers an education designed to equip human beings for self-government.
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US college spends about $472,000 a year on marketing advertisements.
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a growing minority have started outsourcing their marketing to public relations firms,
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While some marketing may be necessary to sustain recruitment, every dollar spent on marketing has any number of other potential uses:
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The Wonder of the Liberal Arts!
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Even engineering and business schools require students to spend far more time learning theory and abstract concepts
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focus on the liberal arts.
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Why study the liberal arts?
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the intellectual skills of critical thinking, analysis of information, and effective expression of ideas.
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how to think.
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how to learn.
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see things whole.
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enhances students’ wisdom
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contributes to the students’ happiness.
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To be liberally educated is to be transformed.
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frees your mind and helps you connect dots
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how to communicate your ideas; find and analyze information and data; adapt to new technology and professional trends; work with others to solve problems; and make confident, knowledgeable decisions.
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appreciation for critical inquiry and independent thought and reasoning.
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help students write and communicate clearly; assist students in thinking through hard problems; and make students morally better and more aware, with a wider perspective. The word “transform” appears again and again.
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Why Study Philosophy?
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To parents, philosophy may sound useless:
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Studying philosophy improves your writing, communication, thinking, finding connections, evaluating ideas, and so on. It prepares you for everything.
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philosophy itself brings unique benefits, especially in terms of standardized test preparation.
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Philosophy majors have the fourth highest overall GMAT scores of any major,
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Philosophy majors have the highest average LSAT
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Philosophy majors have the highest average GRE verbal and analytic writing scores
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Philosophy majors have the highest midcareer salaries of all non-STEM majors,
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Philosophy students learn how to write clearly, and to read closely, with a critical eye; they are taught to spot bad reasoning, and how to avoid it in their writing and in their work.
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Studying philosophy can also help you get into graduate school. Philosophy majors excel on standardized tests like the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT.
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The study of philosophy develops one’s abilities to read and understand difficult material,
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they claim that studying philosophy makes you not only better at, well, doing philosophy, but also it trains you to be good at critical thinking in any and every walk of life. They do not just claim that the skills could be transferred to any area, but that studying philosophy, in fact, will induce you to transfer and apply those skills elsewhere.
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Selection versus Treatment Effects
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“Drink this tea concoction every day for seven to ten days, and the cold is certain to go away.”
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colds generally disappear after seven to ten days anyway.
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Aiden’s teacher said, “We know we’re doing great work when we see them like this. They’re so much more mature now than they were three years ago.” Once again, Jason bit his tongue, but later said to his wife: “Yes, of course, they’re more mature. They started the program at age 3, and now they’re 6.”
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People with bachelor’s degrees are generally smarter and more successful than people without bachelor’s degrees.
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we would need to determine if A) philosophy makes people smarter, B) the people who study philosophy are, on average, smarter, or C) both statements are true.
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When laypeople see graphs showing that philosophy majors have high GRE and LSAT scores, they tend to assume, “Wow, philosophy must make you smart, or at least teach you how to do well on such tests.”
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Treatment Effect: People who study philosophy become smarter
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Selection Effect: The people who choose to major in philosophy and who obtain a degree in philosophy are already smarter
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Obviously, a great deal of it is selection. After all, Harvard is exceptionally selective.
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classics are hard and require a lot of work and effort.
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Universities, liberal arts divisions, and philosophy departments generally aren’t in a position to justifiably make such claims. They don’t know if these claims are true. Thus, we’ll argue, they’re engaging in what we’ll call “negligent advertising.”
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Negligent Advertising: The Pfizer Analogy
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Introducing Collegra! Collegra is a drug unlike any other. If you take Collegra 256 times a year for four years, Collegra will improve your critical reasoning, moral reasoning, analytic, and quantitative skills. It will transform you into a better person with a global mindset. It will make you able to face any challenge. It will prepare you for any job. It will dramatically improve your cognitive skills. It will make you score higher on standardized tests, such as the LSAT or GMAT. Furthermore, it will help you make more money! Indeed, Collegra users, on average, earn an extra million dollars of lifetime income compared to nonusers. The cost of Collegra varies from person to person. Collegra is not covered by your insurance.
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Warning: Taking Collegra is more like undergoing chemotherapy than taking a pill. Users need to spend at least thirty hours a week for thirty weeks a year over four years for it to be effective. Most users will be unable to work at a job while taking Collegra. Side effects include increased tendency to engage in binge drinking and to acquire tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If
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Now imagine that Pfizer sincerely believes everything it says. But suppose Pfizer has not engaged in any of the standard testing that drug companies must conduct in order to sell drugs in the US or Europe. They have conducted no clinical trials. They have done no randomized controlled experiments.
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All they have, at most, are various statistics showing that drug users outperform nondrug users. Suppose, also, that they have good reason to suspect that their “findings” are the result of a selection effect, because Pfizer itself has explicitly chosen to only administer their drug to smart, conscientious, perseverant, and already successful people.
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would Pfizer’s advertisement be unethical?
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Negligent advertising: Selling a product based on the claim that the product delivers certain benefits, despite lacking evidence that the product, in fact, delivers those benefits.
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Negligent advertising is bad, but just how bad depends, in part, on the cost of the product.
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If Pfizer engaged in any of this behavior, our academic colleagues would be up in arms.
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But, perhaps not surprisingly, we college professors hold ourselves and our employers to far lower moral standards than we hold others.
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Problem 1: Universities Do Not Test Their Products
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Problem 2: Evidence of Selection Effects
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fact, we already have strong evidence of a selection effect. High school students who say they intend to major in philosophy have significantly higher than average SAT scores.
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In general, studies on the positive benefits of philosophy are inconclusive; some show no effect, some show a negative effect, and some find a weak positive effect.
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writing skills, lifetime income, employment rates, marital satisfaction, health, and whatnot.
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“If 1,000 people with an IQ of 130, identical socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., go to Harvard, and 1,000 otherwise identical people go to a no-name school, how much better, on average, will the Harvard graduates do in life, if at all?”
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Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger
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Bill Easterly
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Krueger and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy, “moderately selective” school. It turned out that such students had, on average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges.
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Problem 3: Evidence of Signaling
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The “Harvard” name adds a little in the short run, but not much in the long run.
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why, in general, college students make more money than others? There are two basic theories that could explain this: •Human capital theory: Wages are determined by productivity, and productivity is determined by skills.
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Signaling theory: It’s difficult and costly for employers to sort good potential employees from bad ones. However, to complete a college degree, especially from an “elite” school or with a “difficult” major, requires students to pass a lengthy and difficult admission process, and then survive four years of jumping through hoops, pass mentally difficult (even if useless) classes, and so on.
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Academic marketing pushes the human capital theory. But it’s possible that the signaling theory explains some, most, or even all of the gains college graduates receive.
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Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education
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Problem 4: Evidence Most Students Don’t Learn Soft Skills
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nonrandom selection is at play
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In principle, we could test majors by testing students’ skills before college, randomly assigning thousands of students to different majors, and then test them again after they complete their majors.
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However, it’s easier to measure whether college as a whole adds value.
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it’s possible these skills fade away after students leave college.
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Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.
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depressing statistics.
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critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing.”
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the CLA tests the soft skills that liberal arts curricula are supposed to “instill,”
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our best available long-term, comprehensive study found no evidence that most students learn much.
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Problem 5: Students Don’t Seem to Transfer Soft Skills
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these classes teach students how to think.
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logic, analysis, conceptual clarification, and interpretation.
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isolate cause and effect, to assess reasons, and to evaluate arguments.
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A liberal arts major can learn “hard skills” specific to this or that job in a few weeks,
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Most professors continue to take it for granted;
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Liberal arts schools do not merely claim that their students will be interpreting Shakespeare, reading difficult historical texts, or finding holes in philosophical arguments. They assert that students can and will use those “skills” to interpret the stock market, devise better marketing methods, read difficult corporate memos, or find holes in a strategic business plan.
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As Caplan summarizes: Can believers in the power of learning-how-to-think back up teachers’ boasts with hard evidence? For the most part, no.
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As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them
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Richard Haskell
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research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level.
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Douglas Detterman
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there is very little empirical evidence showing meaningful transfer to occur
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Terry Hyland and Steve Johnson
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we believe that the pursuit of [general transferable] skills is a chimera-hunt,
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How do educational psychologists know? One way is to run experiments.
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Another investigative strategy is to ask students to apply their classroom skills outside the classroom, and then see if they’re any good at it. In general, they’re not.
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Barry Leshowitz
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Leshowitz gave students an easy question. These students had spent years training to answer questions like this, but couldn’t do it.
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Summary
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What Should We Do about It?
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While drug companies are subject to FDA regulations and can be sued
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Regulate academic marketing the way we regulate other forms of marketing,
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Launch and succeed in a class-action lawsuit
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Face competition from alternative forms of education
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