Remnant Review
"When we've got them by the balls, their epistemology will follow." -- Sun "Sunny" Tsu, Ph.D.
Libertarians a generation ago came up with an acronym, TANSTAAFL: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." I offer another, TANSTANA: "There ain't no such thing as neutral accreditation."
If you think that academic accreditation of colleges and universities is a way to protect the public from intellectual charlatans, consider this: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."
A PROPOSED M.A. PROGRAM
This appears on the website of the Mises Institute:
A long-held vision of both Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard is now a reality. Their vision? A graduate school of Austrian economics.Throughout its nearly forty-year history, the Mises Institute has been focused on providing support to students of other educational institutions. Helping students discover the economics of freedom and inspiring them to go on to teach at the university level is and has been a priority for the Institute. Excellent service that is personal, responsive, and geared towards assisting students in reaching their individual educational and career goals has been emblematic of all Mises Institute programs.
The Mises Institute’s Master of Arts in Austrian Economics is unique. It is the first graduate program in the United States dedicated exclusively to the teaching of economics as expounded in the works and great treatises of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. The goal of the program is to assist students in mastering the principles of this great body of work and putting these principles to use in their chosen endeavors.
To this end, the Institute has carefully selected an outstanding faculty, with PhDs from prestigious universities including New York University, UCLA, Columbia University, Cal-Berkeley, Rutgers University, and Virginia Tech. All are accomplished scholars who have lectured or taught at Mises Institute events and published in its journals, books, or online publications. Many were personal friends or protégés of Murray Rothbard.
Thanks to the generosity of the Mises Institute’s donors, the cost of the program is well below that of other M.A. programs in economics or the related social sciences, whether traditional or online.
The program consists of the following coursework:
Microeconomics
Monetary Economics
Quantitative Economics: Uses and Limitations
Macroeconomics
History of Economic Thought I
History of Economic Thought II
Comparative Economic Systems
History of Economic Regulation and Financial Crises
Rothbard Graduate Seminar
Thesis Requirement?
The catalogue is here.
The cost will be $160 per semester credit, which is dirt cheap.
The program is not accredited. "While the MI’s activities and seminars are well regarded (and have been for nearly forty years), the MI’s Master of Arts in Austrian Economics degree and the Certificate Program in Austrian Economics are not currently accredited. However, MI will seek formal accreditation at its earliest date of eligibility." So, anyone who enrolls is hoping that the degree will be accredited soon by an academic guild agency whose member institutions are committed to teaching non-Austrian School economics. In short, this is a crap shoot academically.
The program will be online. So, you can stay where you are.
It will begin this fall. An application form is here.
The case in favor of this program is here. But here is a problem with this list. It does not ask this crucial question: "What will you be able to achieve in life with this degree that otherwise you could not achieve?" In short, what is the benefit of earning this degree?
I will help you think through this question. Then you may be able to get a relevant answer.
THE MARKET VALUE OF AN M.A. DEGREE
What can you do academically with a Master's degree that you cannot do with a bachelor's degree? This: apply to get into a Ph.D. program. I do not think that is a wise strategy for life. I made that clear in my 2011 debate with Walter Block. You can watch it here.
Will a Master's degree from the Mises Institute impress the screening committee for any department of economics? I doubt it. It is too much on the fringe.
If all of the material were available online for free, and a student could read the material at his leisure, branching out into recommended books that interest him, why would he be worse off in terms of employment if he did not receive the degree?
What company would hire a person with a Master's degree from the Mises Institute rather than hiring somebody with a bachelor's degree in economics from some other institution? I cannot think of any. I recommend that a prospective M.A. student find out what this company is and what the job entails before he enrolls in the program. Would the company offer a job to a student without the degree?
If I were an employer, and for some reason I wanted a potential employee to have an understanding of Austrian School economics, I would certainly be willing to accept a series of computer-graded examination scores of 80 or above as an alternative to a degree that takes 18 months or two years. I would not require a piece of paper called "Master's Degree" issued by the Mises Institute. I would just want the test scores, the term papers, and the thesis. I would not read them carefully. I would just want to see that they look plausible -- footnotes and such. If the student wrote a Master's thesis and posted it online, that would be good enough for me.
There is hardly an employer anywhere in the world who cares one way or the other about Austrian School economics. So, of what value is a Master's degree in Austrian economics?
These people could use an accredited M.A. in anything.
Government school teacher. In America's public schools, somebody with a Master's degree is paid more than somebody with a bachelor's degree. So, if you are applying for a job, you had better have only a bachelor's degree. The school does not want to pay you much. But, once you are on the payroll, and once you have tenure, then getting a Master's degree will get you a raise. But to benefit from the degree, you have to be willing to commit the rest of your life to teaching in a government school. Is this the best use of somebody's life?Third World resident. There are probably companies in Third World nations that will pay a higher initial wage to somebody who has earned a Master's degree in an American school. This is a potential market for the program.
MBA alternative. It is possible that some businesses would assess the value of an M.A. from Mises Institute in much the same way that it would assess the value of an MBA from a lesser tier program. Anybody contemplating this should find out from his employer before enrolling.
These people are not the best and the brightest. They will not be cutting-edge scholars or writers. Why raise funds to subsidize them?
Then there is the issue of accreditation.
ACCREDITATION MEANS SUBMISSION
Getting accreditation for the program means surrendering to the academic guild establishment that is run by Keynesians, with a few Chicago School economists as second-string players. Getting accreditation means that you have bowed the knee to Caesar. Yet without accreditation, the degree is obviously close to worthless. It would turn the degree into the equivalent of a degree issued by a diploma mill.
Assume that a regional accreditation agency will grant the program some form of accreditation. The bureaucrats will insist on certain kinds of unreadable books or materials being assigned to the students. If this is the case, then the teacher is going to have to show the student, concept by concept, why the required material is nonsensical. He will have to do this in such a way that the accreditation committee does not revoke the accreditation, which is the hammer that the accreditation agency holds over all accredited institutions. From the day the program is accredited, the accrediting agency can tell the Mises Institute to jump, and the only acceptable response is this: "How high?"
To revoke accreditation is to de-platform the program. Graduates will then become graduates of a de-platformed program. It turns into a retroactive diploma mill.
On the other hand, to refuse to seek accreditation is to seek to enter a market niche that does not rely on either the state or the academic establishment's regional accreditation agency.
Basically, it comes down to this: the market value of the degree is based on government intervention. The value of the degree is therefore based on submission to the state. I do not see any advantage to the Mises Institute for doing this. It has remained consistent ever since its founding in 1982 in its dedication to opposing state intervention.
Problem: there is no obvious way that the Mises Institute can gain short-term credibility for its degree in a business world that pays above-market wages to holders of accredited degrees. People will pay to get the degree only because the Mises Institute is acting as a surrogate in submission to the state.
Is this really submission to the state? Yes. In the application form, we read:
Unfortunately, certain US states prohibit the offering of online classes to their residents absent additional licensure in their respective state. As such, residents of the following states currently cannot be admitted to our graduate program and, thus, no applications will be accepted from residents of the following jurisdictions: Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wisconsin.
If states that presently allow online education and degree-granting reverse this, the Mises Institute will lose part of its market.
It is better not to submit.
It is better not to seek handouts from the state. Accreditation is a handout.
It is better to design a marketing strategy that bypasses the state.
KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT CERTIFICATION
I offer two questions. They were raised by Austrian School economist Peter Klein. He asked them in an article posted on the Mises Institute's site. ". . . As noted above, most of the arguments I've seen simply take it as self-evident that academic research is valuable and that public policy should promote it. But do graduate programs really produce value? How can we tell?" He did not answer these two questions.
Klein was the moderator of a debate between me and Walter Block that was held at the Mises Institute in 2011. The debate question was this: "Is it smart to get a Ph.D. in economics?" I took the negative.
John Maynard Keynes earned a B.S. in mathematics. He never earned a degree in economics. His influence came from his writing.
Ludwig von Mises earned a law degree in 1906. He did not get a professor's job until 1934. His disciple Wilhelm Roepke got him a job at the Graduate Institute International Studies at the University of Geneva when Mises fled Austria in expectation (correct) that Hitler would one day invade. He left Europe in 1940, literally hours before the Nazis captured all of France. He lived on part-time income in the United States until 1949, when he got a teaching job at the Graduate School of Business at New York University. He got this job only because his salary was paid by donors. The university listed him as a visiting professor from 1949 until his retirement at age 86 in 1967. The other faculty members had no respect for him. They steered students away from his courses. His influence came from his writing.
Murray Rothbard got a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1956. Because he chose to stay in New York City, he could not get a job teaching from 1956 to 1966. Then he got a part-time job at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where he taught engineering students. There was no economics major. He was there for 20 years. Only late in his career did he get a job teaching graduate students at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. His influence came from his writing.
Henry Hazlitt never went to college. His influence came from his writing.
It is what you know that matters most. But formal education is about certification, not knowledge. Max Weber [Mawx VAYber] was the most influential social thinker in the early 20th century. He died in 1920 at age 56. In his posthumously published book, Economy and Society (1924), he wrote this about academia.
The development of the diploma from universities, and business and engineering colleges, and the universal clamor for the creation of educational certificates in all fields make for the formation of a privileged stratum in bureaus and in offices. Such certificates support their holders' claims for intermarriages with notable families (in business offices people naturally hope for preferment with regard to the chief's daughter), claims to be admitted into the circles that adhere to 'codes of honor,' claims for a 'respectable' remuneration rather than remuneration for work done, claims for assured advancement and old-age insurance, and, above all, claims to monopolize socially and economically advantageous positions. When we hear from all sides the demand for an introduction of regular curricula and special examinations, the reason behind it is, of course, not a suddenly awakened 'thirst for education' but the desire for restricting the supply for those positions and their monopolization by the owners of educational certificates. Today, the 'examination' is the universal means of this monopolization, and therefore examinations irresistibly advance. (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946] pp. 241-42.)
In short, getting a degree is all about getting employment. Job offers are based on formal criteria: taking exams. The main barrier to entry is the students' parents' ability to pay for programs that administer exams.
Everyone knows this in academia, but the system never changes. It has not changed since about the year 1100.
America's finest universities over the last decade have put their courses online for anybody to view free of charge or for minimal payments. Online education is a reality. Students from anywhere in the world can get the best lectures from the best professors in the best universities. It does not cost them any money. This is true education. It is mass education. It does not cost the universities anything to post these lectures online. It does not cost the viewers anything to watch them. This is true education.
Online students do not get degrees from these institutions. To earn a degree, you have to spend at least four years on campus, and your parents will have to pay something in the range of $60,000 a year: room, board, tuition, and books. The degree, not the knowledge needed to earn it, is what is valuable in the marketplace.
What if you have the knowledge that you could have received online from one of these universities, but you do not have a degree? Can you market yourself as an expert? Probably not. You will have to do something in addition to walking in the door and asserting the fact that you watched all the videos. You cannot prove this. Even if you could, you cannot prove that you understand them. Even if you can prove that you understand them, the company will pay a wage considerably less than it would pay a graduate from the university.
The question you have to ask yourself is this: "How much less?" Would it pay you to take four years of your life and $240,000 after taxes to earn the degree? You probably would not do this. That is the whole point. That is the barrier to entry.
Can you write your way into success? Here are the people who did: John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard.
I have also done pretty well.
SAME OUTPUT, DIFFERENT BRANDING
The Mises Institute has an excellent reputation among those people who understand the meaning of Austrian economics. The Institute should therefore structure its marketing of this program in terms of its name, not in terms of the government-regulated phrase "degree granted by an institution of higher learning."
Instead of offering a Master's degree in Austrian economics, for which there is no known free market demand, it should offer this certificate of performance: Graduate Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The word "fellow" is not government regulated.
Through a rigorous program of professor-supervised online education, which the Institute plans to offer, the best and the brightest students from around the world who want to master Austrian School economics will be able to earn such distinction.
To earn it, students must jump through the traditional academic hoops: term papers, computer-graded exams, written exams, and a Master's thesis. I would add this: mastering digital media. This would include a blog site and a YouTube channel as minimum performance. (The Mises Institute employs Chad Parish, a virtuoso of low-budget video media. He would be an ideal instructor.)
There is no known market value for this certification, but neither is there known market value for a state-authorized degree granted by the Mises Institute.
The degree will derive value from coercive authority of the state. The term "Graduate Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute" will derive value from the reputation of the Mises Institute.
Depending on the quality of the program, and depending on the quality of the published M.A. theses of the fellows, employers will impute value to the certificate.
The Mises Institute should create a program that derives its economic value from the free market. The program should derive its academic value from the quality of the fellows' publications. The best of them each year will be published by the Mises Institute. These graduates will be designated as Distinguished Graduate Fellows. There should be a special book series published by the Mises Institute: Distinguished Graduate Fellows Series.
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, WORLDWIDE
What if the Mises Institute did this? It posts all of the lectures on YouTube. Anyone can get the information. Most of the reading materials are already online in PDF format. You can download them from the Mises Institute's site.
There may be a few textbooks that you have to pay for. But textbooks are mostly for undergraduates. There are monographs for graduate students to buy and read. But these are usually less expensive than textbooks. In any case, if the program is really top-notch, the professors can be paid by the Mises Institute to produce textbooks or other materials for the Mises Institute. Then they can be posted online free of charge. The Mises Institute can afford this. It has over $20 million in its endowment.
Any student anywhere in the world could then get the 95% knowledge available to any student enrolled in the program. He would not get feedback from professors. But he would learn which questions to ask. He would learn where to get the materials he needs to master the field. He can simply follow the footnotes.
I did this. I began doing it in 1958 at the age of 16, and I am still doing it.
Why does anyone need a degree? It has little to do with knowledge as such. It has a lot to do with benefitting from a job market protected by a barrier to entry: formal certification. It limits the supply of competitors.
What if the Mises Institute had an online examination in each course that was graded by a computer? What if the Institute retained records of a person's score in the class? This would entail little extra paper/digital work. No professor has to read the examinations. Why wouldn't a high score from a computer-graded exam be almost as valuable as an official degree issued by the Mises Institute?
What about cheating? Could a student cheat the computer? There is software that secures identities. The Mises Institute could buy it or lease it. When a student is ready to take a test, he could schedule this for a small fee. The world of education is moving online. This includes examinations.
The final stage of the program will produce highly trained young people who have performed on their own without enrolling. The final stage is mostly polishing a diamond in the rough.
The online program will attract these self-selected rough diamonds. If it doesn't, scrap the program. Develop a program that attracts such students.
Consider a student in Asia. He has read all of the online assignments. He has taken all of the digitally graded exams. He has received an average of 90% or higher on these exams.
He has set up a blog site. He has reviewed the books assigned to him. He has published all of the term papers on his blog.
This is what the Ron Paul Curriculum does, beginning in grade 4. Each student posts 800 essays on his blog. This program produces highly competent students. I designed it in 2013, and it works. This is not an educational theory devoid of application.
A Mises Graduate Fellow learns how to produce screencasts and other forms of video-based education. He posts regularly on his YouTube channel.
He has used the program to train himself in the basics of academics. But he is way beyond the standard Master's degree student. He is publicly identifying himself with the Austrian School perspective, and he is providing high quality written and spoken materials to defend the position.
This is exactly the kind of young person that the Mises Institute wants to attract -- I hope.
After he has taken all of the courses online and has scored at least 90% on all of the examinations, and after he has posted the assigned term papers on his blog site, he then applies for the final course, which is thesis writing. This is where the academic rubber meets the road.
He has to pay a fee to get supervision for the thesis. This assumes that nobody wants to put up money so that the Institute can offer him a scholarship. But if the Mises Institute has someone like this waiting in the wings, ready to produce a Master's-level thesis on some aspect of Austrian economics, the Institute will easily find a donor who will pay for this final training module.
The thesis supervisor will then assess just how good this student really is. He will work with the student to guide him in producing a first-rate piece of scholarship.
This is the kind of graduate student that the Institute ought to be targeting. He does not have any money for advanced education, but he has time. He has a burning desire to master Austrian School economics. He just wants the opportunity. He wants access to the information. The Mises Institute can provide him with these tools free of charge online.
The not-so-bright students will need hand-holding. They will need to talk with professors. They will need to be guided in Zoom sessions. So, they will pay money for this service. These are not the best and the brightest.
The best and the brightest are self-motivated people who cannot be dissuaded from investing time, energy, and emotional commitment to the task of mastering Austrian School economics. There are never many of them, but there will be some.
Think of this student as the intellectual equivalent of Murray Rothbard. He has access to a high-speed Internet connection and a smart phone. That is all he needs.
The program should be designed to attract this kind of student. It should be primarily online. It should be free of charge. It should not require intervention by a professor except in the final stage: writing the thesis.
The student wants certification, not from the state, but from the Mises Institute. He wants a respected institution to tell a prospective employer that he has performed at an above-average level. He will have a blog site to prove that he did the work. No other applicant for the job will have this. He will have a YouTube channel that proves this. No other applicant will have this, either. He will have some kind of formal certification that says that he is a graduate fellow of the Mises Institute. If he is really good, he will have his thesis published by the Mises Institute.
This is low-cost, highly efficient formal education in today's world of digital communications. It is cheap to produce. It is free for the asking. It targets self-motivated students. It shows these students how to become master educators.
It is time to escape from a university system that has barely changed structurally since the year 1100. This means escaping from the accreditation system.
THINKIFIC
Technologically, Thinkific is ready to implement.
For about $6,000 a year, the Mises Institute can set up a free version of the educational program. It can post all of the YouTube lectures. It can post the reading assignments. Professors can create the quizzes. The program grades them and saves scores. It is perfect for a curriculum. There will be no live teaching or interaction. There can be student forums.
For another $6,000 a year, the Institute sets up a clone site. It saves grades of quizzes. It has student forums. Teachers can interact with students. The system accepts credit card payments. This is the mentors' site.
This is "off the shelf" technology. It works fine. It is ready to go.
CONCLUSIONS
First, the market value of the M.A. degree will be minimal. Companies do not pay extra to people holding M.A. degrees in the social sciences. So, it will not matter whether the program is accredited or not. There is very little that someone will be able to do with the degree that he cannot do without the degree. The degree will convey little extra information to an employer, at least not in comparison to what computer-graded courses could convey equally well. It does not take accreditation to have the computers grade the exams. It also does not take a professor to do it. It can be done cheap, fast, and cleanly without human intervention.
Second, the Mises Institute has distinguished itself by placing all of its materials online free of charge. That is part of its unique service proposition. There have been a few exceptions, but only when active intervention by teachers is required. The Institute has to pay for teachers. The value of the Master's degree program should be based on the content of the teaching, but not the active intervention of graders. Grading can be done by computers.
Third, the entire program should be made available free of charge online. This is obvious. If it is good enough for Harvard and MIT to do this, it is good enough for the Mises Institute to do it.
Fourth, I see the logic of a mentoring program. If a bright young person is able to interact with a senior professor who is on the payroll of some university, the arrangement makes sense. But that does not require accreditation. If students are after mentoring, the Institute should set up a program to provide it. But if a student is primarily after a degree that is gained through state coercion, then that is the wrong student to bring into the program.
Fifth, I recommend that the Institute pursue the program, but not seek accreditation. If the value of the program is mainly dependent on accreditation, then it is dependent on submission to the establishment that the Mises Institute is dedicated to defying in principle. That seems schizophrenic to me. "Using the state to advance our program" is not consistent with the Mises Institute's unique service proposition.
What is its unique service proposition? This: To publish, promote, explain, and demonstrate the continuing relevance of the economic insights of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Anyway, that is the impression that I get after 39 years. If I am incorrect, I hope the Institute will publish a different one that clarifies the issue.
To sum up this essay, the free market will answer Klein's question: "Do graduate programs really produce value?" This is exactly the institution that should possess this authority.
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