Ivory Tower

"Ivory Tower" is an informative documentary of how higher education has been robbing students and their parents with the rising cost of tuition and fees over the years. This documentary is going to show how colleges are leaving students with debt they can barely afford for an education that might not land them the perfect high paying job they wanted as well. It's amazing how some of these big colleges are becoming more like resorts than places of education and that's some of the extra things the students are paying for. What makes this worse is the fact the students will be more interested in socializing and partying than getting the education they're blowing their parents money on. They're actually paying for things that really have nothing to do with a good education. After seeing this film you'll be wondering is it worth it to go to or send your kids to college now. This documentary does have a flaw or two but cinematic perfection isn't really the main point of this film. This film is to let people know what they are going to be dealing with before they enter college themselves or send someone to college.

90 minutes of children whining "SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD PAY FOR MY LIFE". A pathetic, disjointed, chaotic mess. An 8th grader with an iPhone could make a better movie. Watching students stage a sit-in because the college threatens to make them pay tuition for the first time (EGAD THE HORROR) is the essence of first-world infantilized narcissism. There is no narrative to the film, no beginning-middle-end. It's as if the director passed around a camera and asked everybody to "talk about education stuff for 5 minutes". At best, it's a (horrible) campaign commercial for Elizabeth Warren, as is the website. There is no 'there' there. A convoluted and inept political hack job. Save your $15.

I know a lot about this subject because I've written a few papers on the issue of student loan debt... this movie taught me absolutely nothing I didn't already know, and like others have stated, offers no solutions for solving this problem (which are pretty clear-cut, by the way). This documentary had very little direction, wasn't particularly engaging, and didn't really serve much of a purpose. And it also made no mention of the model other countries use to fund higher education, which was pretty surprising. My advice: skip the documentary and do your own research. You'll learn a lot more that way, and probably in less than 90 minutes.

When I was a high school teacher, one of the more controversial things I did was to encourage my students NOT to go to college like so many of their peers. Instead, I encouraged them to work or go to trade school. Why? Because college, for most young people, is not a great investment any more. You often don't get more out of college than life without it...particularly in regard to prospective job earnings and college. For example, if a student takes on $100,000-200,000 in debt, they might never be able to pay it off...whereas a student learning welding or plumbing or accounting might live a very happy life with little, if any, debt. And, many kids who could barely complete high school were being pushed straight into college...and they almost always failed. Needless to say, many parents weren't happy with me telling their kids that there were alternatives to college. When I and other parents were undergraduates, college was affordable...you could work summers to pay for upcoming two semesters. However, today this simply isn't possible for most kids...and this film dares to say it.

"Ivory Tower" is a very good documentary. It shows many different sides and allows the people to talk. A few seemed completely off-base, such as those who insanely think the system is not broken or those who demand free university education...as someone must pay for it. But many didn't seem weird and offered alternatives...such as non-traditional colleges and the students in the commune, of sorts, in San Francisco where prospective students don't do college but live together and teach each other how to be entrepreneurs. I liked these alternative voices and think the film would be fantastic for teens and their parents to watch together. After all, they'll soon have to make a decision...one which can be very costly./

"Opportunity means making college more affordable." Barack Obama

If you want to know why the cost of higher education has spiraled out of control (over 1000% since the late '70's), then watch the informative but flawed documentary Ivory Tower because director Andrew Rossi doesn't have a clue either. Or rather, he has not yet put together cogent reasons (administrator salaries? faculty salaries? loans for new buildings?) or new solutions—he presents elements of each with no conclusions. The cost just is.

Rossi does show the costs are getting higher yet offers no solutions except the ones we already know: Deep Springs College in Death Valley is a free, all-male work-study institution and Spelman College for black women guarantees them a degree. However, the other 4000 institutions in our country are so diverse and complex that none of them is able to avoid the huge cost to students, even with generous financial aid.

Because the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates famously dropped out to form their colossal businesses, support organizations like Palo Alto's Thiel Fellowship will pay students the likes of $100K to "uncollege" and become entrepreneurs. All very good, but most of us do not have the genius of those great drop outs, or anywhere near it, to form significant businesses.

These are the strategies Rossi offers indirectly as his thesis for the future. Yet, the learning rate of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is disappointingly low, and sizeable budgets at a variety of campuses have disappointed even progressives with lower than desired graduation levels.

The use of online technology promises relief from costs and a wider effect on the population. What Rossi fails to focus in on is the richness of the face to face experience, which to this former university professor and administrator is a major reason to get in debt: Never at any other time in most lives can students meet such diverse people and engage in such heady dialogue to introduce new ways of thinking and expression.

In that experience, we come down from our ivory towers to engage the real world. We can't achieve that by staying away:

"There are a lot of ideas being floated to get these problems under control: value report cards for universities; pay-it-forward tuition plans; a renewed focus on non-collegiate higher education. For now, however, tuitions continue to rise and students continue to take on back-breaking debt to cover the bills." Bruce Watson