The Secret to College Tuition is Marketing Fraud

Students are Negative Information Consumers

In the midst of Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, one question must be asked:

Why do colleges succeed while their students fail?

Certainly, this isn’t true for all colleges or degrees but we can look at the marginal student and the marginal college and see that this is clearly true. The trends driving the ballooning of college debt, particularly college debt that can’t be paid back, are far from the story of education as a need.

http://freedomandprosperity.org/2015/blog/government-subsidies-are-causing-higher-tuition-and-administrative-bloat-in-higher-education/

https://thereformedmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/college-tuition-is-skyrocketing-why-administrative-costs-we-know-about-but-what-of-federal-aid-itself/

https://www.statista.com/chart/24477/outstanding-value-of-us-student-loans/

In comes my Golden Rule of Institutions:

• If an institution consistently fails at what you think is its purpose, its purpose is something very different.

Ask yourself another, more basic question: “What is the primary advantage of colleges versus other education businesses?”

Some wrong answers:

• Product - The colleges disproved this themselves by putting out free online courses.

• Legacy - This is an advantage, but not the primary one. Plenty of long standing companies outlast most colleges, particularly the marginal ones. My favorite is the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was the company that drove the fur trade at the beginning of North American colonization and is still successful in Canada. It’s safe to say its prices, while inflating, look nothing close to college tuition.

• Guaranteed Loans - While this is once again an advantage, it is not the primary one. There are de-facto guaranteed loans for medicine in each state, and medical inflation has not surpassed tuition, despite providing an actually productive, useful service.

Instead, the explanation is simple:

• The primary advantage of colleges is that they do the most propagandistic marketing to the most vulnerable population (students) for practically their entire lives. 

The severity of the words in this sentence are intentional and correct. I will rely on the experiences of myself and dozens of students I know, since most ways of measuring the “propagandistic-ness” of messaging is dubious, at the very least. Moreover that this level of fraud is allowed to exist is absurd even if it is infrequent. We have laws on drug marketing, multi-level marketing schemes, et cetera that continue to be applied even if there is a low number of perpetrators and I don’t see why this should be an exception.

I, my class, and their parents were told sternly — commanded is a fair word here — several times throughout every year that the goal of schooling is to send children to universities. Every parent-teacher meeting, discussion, and event. Anything else was considered a failure, explicitly, and a rationale or argument was rarely provided. When it was, the argument was often a fallacious one — that your child should go to college because the average child benefitted. This is absurd on its face and I respect my readers enough not to explain the multiple fallacies this falls into. This was true for myself and more than ninety percent of Zoomers I have asked the question to in both the United States and Canada. 

Let’s consider even the most simple parallel. A company funds a hospital and directs the doctors to advocate unequivocally for a drug with absolute confidence and fallacious arguments. How long would it take for a fraud sentence to be handed down? How enormous of a scandal would erupt? Yet this is the norm for college marketing. 

As a consequence, students are not only low-information consumers, but negative information consumers. A low-information consumer (or more often, low-information voter) is a person who makes a decision based on little or no information. He may know little about a product’s reliability, history, specific function, use, competitors, or side effects before buying. As costly as being a low-information consumer might be, it is possible for one to become a high-information consumer by research. It is possible to increase the number of high-information consumers by journalism, marketing, and policy. The same cannot be said for high school students on the issue of college, at least not in the present moment.

Students are not just low-information voters, but negative information voters. Every event and news story is filtered through an environment in which they spend the majority of their waking life that is completely toxic to the truth. When Biden signs student debt cancellation, the implications of this information, that college degrees are not worth their cost or that what they’ve been told has been a de-facto fraudulent marketing scheme, does not reach them. If at all, it is spun into a message that is only more pro-college and pro-tuition-increase. 

It is not possible to break this destructive and fraudulent marketing advantage in the current political environment. If the fight over Critical Race Theory has taught us anything it is that moving any school policy is a difficult task, especially if it opposes entrenched teachers unions and ed schools. 

I don’t have a white pill this time. Banning this obvious fraud is what Curtis Yarvin calls a “regime-complete” problem, which requires a fundamental reorganization of power. Good luck, friends and sane people.