Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 126

Overselling Online Education 2.0: Comment on Carey, by Bryan Caplan

First-generation fans of online education pushed a simple story: Online education is a better, cheaper way to learn, and will therefore soon do to brick-and-mortar colleges what downloading did to the record companies.  I've long argued that these fans are naive.  The status quo doesn't just have hundreds of billions of government subsidies on its side.  It also has the power of conformity signaling to shield it from disruptive innovation. 

I'm pleased to see, then, that second-generation fans of online education have arrived.  Kevin Carey's recent NYT piece explains the intellectual evolution:

Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?...

[E]nrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and
undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans
than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents
and video stores on the ash heap of history -- at least, not yet.

The
failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the
quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and
getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only
thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable
price. What they don't offer are official college degrees, the kind
that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college
students are paying for.

So far, so good.  But Carey remains imminently optimistic:

Now information technology is poised to transform college degrees. When
that happens, the economic foundations beneath the academy will truly
begin to tremble.

Carey's fandom is a big improvement over first-generation fandom, but remains naive.  Here's my point-by-point critique.  Carey's in blockquotes, I'm not.

Traditional
college degrees represent several different kinds of information. Elite
universities run admissions tournaments as a way of identifying the
best and the brightest. That, in itself, is valuable data. It's why
"Harvard dropout" and "Harvard graduate" tell the job market almost
exactly the same thing: "This person was good enough to get into
Harvard."

No, they don't.  Degrees signal an array of traits: not just intelligence, but work ethic, conformity, and more.  "Harvard dropout" tells the job market, "This person was promising enough to get into Harvard, but so lazy and/or non-conformist that he wasted this golden opportunity." 

Most
important, traditional college degrees are deeply embedded in
government regulation and standard human resources practice. It doesn't
matter how good a teacher you are -- if you don't have a bachelor's
degree, it's illegal for a public school to hire you.

A fair point, but overrated. 

Private-sector
employers often use college degrees as a cheap and easy way to select
for certain basic attributes, mostly the discipline and wherewithal
necessary to earn 120 college credits.

Apparently "Harvard dropout" doesn't say the same thing as "Harvard graduate" after all.  In any case, Carey omits a vital "basic attribute": conformity to social norms.

The
Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser,
has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges
project. Badges are electronic credentials that any organization,
collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Badges indicate specific skills and
knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why,
exactly, the badge was earned...

The
most important thing about badges is that they aren't limited to what
people learn in college. Nor are they controlled by colleges
exclusively. People learn throughout their lives, at work, at home, in
church, among their communities.

It's very hard to see what's revolutionary about these "badges." Individuals and organizations have always been free to award them.  See the Boy Scouts.  How does switching to "electronic evidence" fundamentally improve them?

The fact that colleges currently have a
near-monopoly on degrees that lead to jobs goes a long way toward
explaining how they can continue raising prices every year.

"Near-monopoly"?  Anyone is free to issue degrees.  The problem is that, outside of key niche occupations, employers take traditional academic degrees much more seriously than "badges."  Why should we expect that to change? 

Inevitably,
there will be a lag between the creation of such new credentials and
their widespread acceptance by employers and government regulators. H.R.
departments know what a bachelor's degree is. "Verified certificates"
are something new. But employers have a powerful incentive to move in
this direction: Traditional college degrees are deeply inadequate tools
for communicating information.

It depends on what information employers are looking for.  In our society, traditional college degrees remain the only dependable way to communicate, "I'm a smart person who conforms to social expectations."  We can easily imagine societies that don't work this way.  But ours does.

The
new digital credentials can solve this problem by providing
exponentially more information. Think about all the work you did in
college. Unless you're a recent college graduate, how much of it was
saved and archived in a way that you can access now?

Why should we believe that employers even want all these extra details?  If you've ever been involved in hiring, the main problem is information overload: Hundreds of applicants with diverse backgrounds and talents.  To be fair, Carey anticipates this objection:

This
does present a new challenge for employers, who will have to sift
through all this additional information. College degrees, for all of
their faults, are quick and easy to digest. Of course, processing large
amounts of information is exactly what computers are good for.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are designing open badges that
are "machine discoverable," meaning that they are designed to be found
by employers using search algorithms to locate people with specific
skills.

It's easy to believe that Big Data hiring will slowly become more important.  But why the continued assumption that employers hunger for "specific skills"?   Current hiring heuristics reveal rather different motives.  Sure, employers want workers with up-to-date practical experience.  But employers focus at least as much on workers' general competence and people skills. 

In
the long run, MOOCs will most likely be seen as a crucial step forward
in the reformation of higher education. But their true impact won't be
felt until students and learners of all kinds have access to digital
credentials that are also built for the modern world. Then they'll be
able to acquire skills and get jobs for a fraction of what colleges cost
today.

I wish Carey were right, but he's not.  Like his predecessors, he neglects my standing two-part critique.  Namely:

1. Due to conformity signaling, the status quo has a massive built-in advantage. 

2. Governments at all levels annually cement the status quo's advantage with hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies.

If Carey or anyone else disagrees, I renew my offer to bet on the future of traditional college enrollment.  Happy to update the time frame, of course.

P.S. I used to restrict my bets to people with some cyber-reputation to lose.  But now I'm happy to bet anyone, anywhere who trusts me.  The system: When the bet starts, PayPal me whatever you owe me if you lose.  If you win, I refund your money + whatever I owe you + some interest if you like.

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The Straw Man Straw Man, by Bryan Caplan

When I criticize painfully foolish positions, people occasionally accuse me of "straw manning" my opponents.  I say the shoe's on the other foot: They're straw manning me.  Consider the following:

1. Criticizing specific person X for a painfully foolish position he doesn't hold.

2. Criticizing a specific person X for a painfully foolish position he holds.

#1 is clearly straw-manning, but #2 isn't straw-manning at all.  If X actually accepts a ridiculous view, there's nothing illogical or sneaky about pointing out its absurdity.

OK, what about "collective straw manning" - questionably accusing a group for its painfully foolish positions?  Now we have:

3. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position no adherent holds.

4. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position some adherents hold.

5. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position many adherents hold.

6. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position most adherents hold.

#3 clearly qualifies as straw manning.  But #4, #5, and #6 only count if the critic claims the painfully foolish argument is more widespread than it actually is.  If you claim that most adherents of a viewpoint make a painfully foolish argument that only a minority actually holds, you're being intellectually unfair.  If you claim that most adherents of a viewpoint make a painfully
foolish argument that most actually holds, the fault is theirs for holding it, not yours for exposing it.   

To validate accusations of straw manning, then, you can't just focus on the bone-headedness of the views the critic imputes to his opponents.  No, you have to study public opinion, to compare the alleged prevalence of the bone-headed views to their measured prevalence.  And as a public opinion researcher, I can tell you that tons of bone-headed views are very popular indeed.  Indeed, bone-headed views are so ubiquitous that you can easily spend your whole life without hearing even a whisper about their inadequacy. 

Examples: I can truthfully say that until I started studying economics when I was 17, I had never heard that the minimum wage or drug safety regulation had any conceivable downside.  "Raising the minimum wage makes the poor richer, end of story" and "Stricter drug safety regulation makes everyone healthier, end of story" weren't straw men.  They were the only men in sight.

Of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.  While my conclusions are unpopular, many people who share my conclusions make painfully foolish arguments.  Like: "The drug war's a failure because there are still drugs" and "Immigrants don't hurt native wages because they only do jobs that Americans won't do."  I've heard libertarians (and more than a few non-libertarians) say them many times.  So when critics of libertarianism attribute these crummy arguments to libertarians in general, I can't fairly accuse them of straw manning, either.

So when does straw manning become a live issue?  Consider:

7. Criticizing leading adherents of a viewpoint for painfully foolish positions held by the viewpoint's rank-and-file adherents.

8. Criticizing the best adherents of a viewpoint for painfully foolish positions held by the viewpoint's rank-and-file adherents.

To quality as straw manning, of course, the leading/best adherents have to reject the rank-and-file's painfully bad positions.  Since leadership is largely a popularity contest, straw manning leading adherents remains fairly rare, too.  Few intellectual leaders rise to the top of their local pecking orders by pedantically explaining all the ways their side should amend their beloved tenets. 

Straw manning viewpoints' best adherents is much more common.  To seriously attempt it, after all, you have to actively search for the smartest, most thoughtful advocates of conclusions that rub you the wrong way.  It's far more convenient is to assume the best adherents of the viewpoints you disagree with are scarcely better than the rank-and-file.  And it is this assumption that most reliably leads to genuine commission of the straw man fallacy.

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Education's Selfish and Social Returns, by Bryan Caplan

I've created a resource page for The Case Against Education 's calculations of education's selfish and social returns.  This work is the tentatively final version of what I blogged last June.

Start with the slideshow.  If that piques your interest, the remaining resources allow you to carefully check my number crunching. 

I'm interested in all comments and criticism.  But my first priority is rooting out demonstrable errors in my formulas.  I will happily treat to lunch anyone who alerts me to one or more non-trivial demonstrable errors. 

Remember: The selfish and social value of correcting me now is far greater than it will be after publication!

P.S. I've also updated my c.v.

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The Case Against Education: What's Taking So Long, by Bryan Caplan

I started writing The Case Against Education in 2011.  I'm still not done, but I'm shooting for release in 2017.  What's taking so long?

Almost the opposite of writer's block.  The book is taking a long time because I've repeatedly realized I needed more space to do justice to the richness of the topic.  Economists, psychologists, sociologists, and education researchers have written libraries on education, and I take my time digesting their contributions.  As a result, the book has turned into an "accordion project": When I start writing a chapter, I realize what I have to say requires more than a chapter. 

The current organization:

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Magic of Education

Chapter 2: The Puzzle Is Real: The
Ubiquity of Useless Education

Chapter 3: The Puzzle Is Real: The
Handsome Rewards of Useless Education

Chapter 4: The Signs of Signaling:
In Case You're Still Not Convinced

Chapter 5: Who Cares If It's
Signaling?  The Selfish Return to
Education

Chapter 6: We Care If It's
Signaling: The Social Return to Education

Chapter 7: Nourishing Mother: Is
Education Good for the Soul?

Chapter 8: The White Elephant in
the Room: We Need Far Less Education

Chapter 9: 1>0: We Need More
Vocational Education

Chapter 10: Four Chats on Human
Capital, Signaling, and Life Well-Lived

Conclusion

Chapters 5 and 6 were originally supposed to be a single chapter.  Now I've spent 16 months writing them.  Still, I have no complaints.  The Case Against Education will be the most research-intensive book I'll ever write, and I have the good fortune to be able to toil until I'm pleased with the quality of the work.

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Fellow Travelers Welcome, by Bryan Caplan

My debate partner, Vivek Wadhwa, has made feminists so angry that he's decided to stop talking about sexism in the tech industry.  The New York Times on the conflict:

Women
in tech criticized Mr. Wadhwa for clumsily articulating their cause.
They said he was prone to outrageous gaffes, including once referring to
women at tech companies as "token floozies," a phrase Mr. Wadhwa later blamed on his poor English.

Critics
also argued that Mr. Wadhwa's message to women -- that they should
become more confident to survive in the tough world of tech -- was
outdated and could backfire on the women who followed it.

And
when he was called out on those points, Mr. Wadhwa, who conceded that
he can be "a hothead," adopted a defensive -- even wounded -- tone on
Twitter.

[...]

The
whole episode could be written off as a mere Twitter-fueled kerfuffle.
But the women who have criticized Mr. Wadhwa say the battle carries a
bigger message.

That
he became a spokesman for women in tech despite their questions about
his message is, they say, symptomatic of an industry that seems bent on
listening to men over women, even when the men aren't especially
qualified to comment.

[...]

"I
don't think that the feminist movement, as a whole, was ever that
interested in figuring out how to work with Vivek," said Elissa
Shevinsky, co-founder of a messaging company called Glimpse.

But
it is not enough, in this complex and delicate issue, to simply have
one's heart in the right place. "I think his intentions are good, but
his message and his voice are actually damaging women," said Sarah
Szalavitz...

While reading this piece, I had an epiphany.  There are three main kinds of social movements:

1. Those that don't get angry.

2. Those that get angry at their enemies.

3. Those that even get angry at their friends.

Yes, there's an undeniable continuum.  But most social movements are easy to pigeonhole because they're far from the cutoffs.  Most fit in the #2 category.  They have classic myside bias: us-versus-them, have your buddies' backs, go Team Blue/Team Red.  Movements in category #2 are worthy of condemnation for their shortages of common sense and common decency. 

But such movements are innocent compared to those in category #3.  There's no point naming names; you know the leading examples.  These movements care so little about truth that they construct a system where members fear to speak until they know with confidence what the other members want to hear.  Normal movements tune out serious criticism from their enemies; category #3 movements turn off mild criticism from their friends.  With predictable results.

Category #1 is, of course, the most sparsely inhabited.  But instances do exist, and they meritoriously tower over the competition.  All truths come from people.  Category #1 movements foster truth by putting people at ease to candidly speak their minds.  This hardly guarantees the attainment of truth; but then again, nothing does.  Refusing to be angry at your enemies helps you avoid totally wrong ideas.  Refusing to be angry at your friends helps you make roughly right ideas righter.

It would be suspiciously convenient if I thought that the main social movements with which I affiliate all fall into Category #1.  But alas, they don't.  Libertarianism is a standard category #2 movement.  Its members express anger every day, but overwhelmingly against liberals, conservatives, and socialists.  While there's in-fighting, few libertarians worry about offending their teammates.  In my youth, I even got to witness old-school Objectivism first-hand, a category #3 movement par excellence.

But happily, I have managed to locate and join some category #1 movements.  I see no reason why George Mason economics bloggers shouldn't count as a movement.  I've been part of it for over a decade.  And I can honestly say we eschew anger against out-group and in-group alike.  If that's too tightly-knit for you, I'll also name the open borders movement.  What you see on Open Borders: The Case is what you get face-to-face: An admirably calm community of thinkers.

None of this means that well-functioning movements will be moderate or compromising.  Sometimes the truth is extreme and uncompromising - and when it is, well-functioning movements will be extreme and uncompromising.  But it does mean that well-functioning movements greet fellow travelers with open arms.  They search for intellectual value, not intellectual transgressions.  And they look upon even self-styled enemies as potential fellow travelers.

P.S. Open Borders Day is March 16.  I trust the supporters and fellow travelers of open borders to stay classy and show the world what a category #1 movement looks like. 

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Scoring Your Ukraine Predictions, by Bryan Caplan

I just reviewed all 50 responses to my original Ukraine prediction challenge.  Seven comments did not make unconditional predictions, and two were obvious jokes.  Here's how I scored the remaining 41 sets of predictions:

1. My last post named six major facts about what happened during the last year:

About 6,000 have been killed.Russia has formally annexed Crimea, but not officially declared war on Ukraine.Russia has covertly sent thousands of Russian soldiers into Ukraine, but less than ten thousand.Real GDP growth was slightly over 0% in Russia and under -5% in Ukraine.So few NATO troops have been killed that no statistics for NATO fatalities in Ukraine google.Despite several peace deals, fighting continues.
2. Responses got one point for correctly predicting each of these facts.

3. Response lost one point for predicting anything contradictory to each of these facts.

4. Responses were neither rewarded nor penalized for failing to address these six points, or for making other predictions.  My apologies to everyone who made correct predictions I didn't score; many made good points, but I wanted to keep scoring simple and consistent.

5. I tried to grade the responses blind, but only via deliberate inattention rather than a serious blinding protocol.

The resulting histogram has a mean of -.29 and a standard deviation of 1.08, with a maximum of +2 and a minimum of -4.


The winner of the Ukraine Prediction Challenge was Hansjörg Walther, with a score of +2 out of a possible +6.  His original forecast:

My prediction is very similar to David Friedman's:



- Russia will secure control of the Crimea (or already has).

- There are protests from Western governments, but nothing serious.

- Then a deal is brokered to let people in the Crimea vote on staying
within Ukraine or joining Russia, which is easy to sell as
self-determination.

- And the probable outcome would be that the Crimea accedes to Russia.

Putin will not try to gobble up Eastern Ukraine or even Ukraine as a
whole. That would be a precedent where Western governments would get
nervous (although even in this case my guess is that it would be just
talk, but a higher risk something goes wrong).

And then there is no clear-cut line where to cut up Ukraine. For the
Crimea there are rather recent borders you can refer to. With many
people in Ukraine who are favorable to Russia, Putin has much more
leverage than otherwise. And he would have a chance to influence
Ukrainian politics again. With a split, he would create a second Poland
that is headed for the EU and hostile to Russia.

I gave Walther one point for calling the formal annexation of Crimea, and another point for predicting no action by Western governments serious enough to lead to NATO fatalities, with zero lost points for contradicting any of the the other four major facts. 

I suspect that Tetlock will not be surprised by the results.  If he'd like to comment, you'll be the first to know.

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What Happened in Ukraine, by Bryan Caplan

A year ago I challenged EconLog readers to make unconditional predictions about the Ukraine conflict:

Challenge: In the comments, go on the record and predict what will
actually come of the emerging Ukrainian-Russian conflict.  Only
unconditional, falsifiable predictions count.  No claims like: "Unless
the EU acts..." "If Russia comes to its senses..." or "This will be a
very different world."  Make specific claims about what will actually
happen by a specific date.

In a year I'll revisit your comments and rank their accuracy with the benefit of hindsight.

Before I carry out the promised ranking, this is what's actually seems to have happened:
About 6,000 have been killed.Russia has formally annexed Crimea, but not officially declared war on Ukraine.Russia has covertly sent thousands of Russian soldiers into Ukraine, but less than ten thousand.Real GDP growth was slightly over 0% in Russia and under -5% in Ukraine.So few NATO troops have been killed that no statistics for NATO fatalities in Ukraine google.Despite several peace deals, fighting continues.

Anyone seriously dispute any of these facts?  Any major facts I'm omitting?

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The Taboo Trade-Offs of Tracking, by Bryan Caplan

Most Americans are okay with educational "tracking" - measuring potential, then tailoring each student's education to his measured potential.  But if you advocate extending or expanding the role of tracking, most Americans resist.  Suppose you propose, for example, that the bottom third of high school students get vocational education instead of college prep.  Americans suddenly rally behind feel-good egalitarian slogans like, "We have to make sure that every student has the opportunity to live up to his full potential."

Taken literally, such slogans damn not only the extra tracking we could have, but the tracking we've already got.  All tracking is a trade-off between two evils.  Classicists call them Scylla and Charybdis, statisticians call them Type 1 and Type 2 error.  But let's just call them Overlooked Potential and Wasted Resources. 

The evil of Overlooked Potential: The tougher your tracking, the more qualified students you fail to teach.  The evil of Wasted Resources: The laxer your tracking, the more unqualified students you teach to fail.  Accept no one, and you won't waste a penny, but you'll also miss every opportunity to do good.  Accept everyone, and you'll miss no one - but you'll burn a fortune of time and money on Hail Mary passes. 

Every system - the status quo included - strikes a balance between Overlooked Potential and Wasted Resources.  But almost no one explicitly argues that what we currently do strikes the optimal balance.  Why not?  Probably because accepting Overlooked Potential for the greater good is, in Philip Tetlock's phrase, a taboo trade-off.  Saying, "Sure, I don't like overlooking potential; but I'm even more opposed to wasting resources" sounds terrible - no matter how trivial the Overlooked Potential and how massive the Wasted Resources. 

How do Americans cope with their silly scruples?  They salve their consciences by pretending that the problem of Overlooked Potential only emerges if tracking extends or expands.  This preserves a modicum of common sense; at least we won't abandon tracking altogether.  But if tracking is currently underused, Americans' taboo trade-off blockades any further progress.  Is it possible that more robust tracking might deprive someone somewhere of a valuable opportunity?  Uh... yes; it is a big world.  Then robust tracking gets vetoed, regardless of its upside.

Is there any evidence that tracking is currently underused?  Sure.  Partly under the influence of the No Child Left Behind Act, high schools today teach as if every student is a future college graduate.  But most aren't; indeed, over 20% of high school freshmen don't even earn a normal high school diploma.  Furthermore, many college grads don't get college-type jobs.  I submit that these disparities between aspiration and results are, in themselves,  strong signs that tracking is underused.  Stricter tracking wouldn't magically turn more students into successful college graduates.  But it would prepare the majority of students who won't get college-type jobs for the careers they're actually going to have.  

Perhaps I'm wrong about this; maybe the status quo is wise beyond my ken.  But I'm not wrong to think that the trade-off between Overlooked Potential and Wasted Resources is socially taboo.  And as long as this trade-off is socially taboo, we should assume that the case for stricter tracking is intellectually stronger than it looks. 

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Totally Conventional Views Which I Hold, by Bryan Caplan

As soon as Tyler posted his "Totally Conventional Views Which I Hold," I felt the urge to do the same.  In no particular order:

1. Most academics are out of touch with the real world and have little useful to say about it.

2. American democracy is dysfunctional and will not noticeably improve.

3. A U.S. fiscal crisis is coming in a couple of decades due to aging, but we'll muddle through.

4. The E.U. will muddle through its current and impending problems, too.

5. Most old movies, poetry, and classic literature are boring.

6. Amazon and Netflix are awesome.

7. 80% of the bad stuff Democrats say about Republicans is true.

8. 80% of the bad stuff Republicans say about Democrats is true.

9. Unemployment of 5% or higher is extremely inefficient and socially dangerous.

10. You should marry someone who agrees with you on all important issues.  Life will provide you with all the conflict you need to keep things interesting.

11. You should marry for true love.

12. You should not travel to countries with murder rates over 1-in-10,000.

13. Work hard, avoid conflict, and you will be rewarded in the long-run.

14. Teens should be actively discouraged from pursuing long-shot careers in sports, art, music, literature, and space exploration.

15. Raising kids is the most meaningful thing most people will ever do with their lives.

16. Teenage boys should stop taking stupid risks, and teenage girls should stop associating with teenage boys who take stupid risks.

17. Most kids, no matter how rebellious, eventually turn into their parents.

18. You should buy a lot of stuff at CostCo.

19. With low interest rates and the mortgage interest deduction, buying a house that costs at least three years' of pretax income is a great deal.

20. Bourgeois is best.

For contrast, here, here, and here are some of my less conventional views.

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Imprisoning Immigrants: What the ACLU's Doing About It, by Bryan Caplan

The once-true stereotype that illegal immigrants get deported, not imprisoned, is fast becoming obsolete.  But there is a glimmer of hope.  Open borders activists aren't the only people who care about this issue.  The ACLU in particular is taking a serious interest:

Dozens of tired, bedraggled men line up in shackles to plead guilty en masse. A judge claims his personal best is sentencing 70 people in 30 minutes: an average of twenty-five seconds per person to review the charges, hear his or her plea, and hand down a sentence.

No, this is not Egypt or Russia. It's the United States, in federal courthouses along the Southwest border.

What's driven our courts to adopt such assembly-line justice? Operation Streamline, a "zero tolerance" program that began under Bush and expanded under Obama.

Traditionally, federal authorities handled illegal immigration
through the comprehensive enforcement scheme available under civil
immigration laws. That enforcement scheme--which has deported about 2 million people
over the past five years--already results in significant unfairness. But
under Operation Streamline, authorities both process apprehended
migrants for deportation and refer them for criminal prosecution for crossing the border.

[...]

Together, misdemeanor and felony border-crossing prosecutions now
dominate federal dockets. In 2013, 80% of the federal criminal cases
filed in Arizona and New Mexico, 83% of the cases filed in western
Texas, and 88% of the cases filed in southern Texas were for illegal
border-crossing. Nationwide, one out of every two cases filed by federal
prosecutors was for border-crossing.

The latest from the ACLU's Carl Takei:

No one who has been to Willacy County Correctional Center or the
other dozen private, for-profit "criminal alien requirement" prisons
around the country could have been surprised by this weekend's riot. As
many as two-thirds of the men incarcerated at Willacy refused to
participate in work details and then set fire to three of the ten
housing tents, apparently in protest of poor conditions.

The Management & Training Corporation -- the nation's
third-largest private prison company -- houses most of the roughly 2,800
men at Willacy not in buildings, but in ten Kevlar tents that contain
all but a few hundred of the prison's approximately 3,000 beds. You get a
cell only if you're sent to solitary, which can happen for no reason
other than that there are too many prisoners to fit in the tents (each
tent is filled with about 200 closely-spaced bunks).

The CAR detention center, outsourced by the federal Bureau of
Prisons, house low-custody (i.e., those whom the authorities consider
generally well-behaved), non-U.S. citizens who are serving sentences for
federal crimes. They essentially fall into two groups of people:
immigrants serving time for drug offenses, and immigrants serving time
for the felony of reentering the United States after they had previously
been deported.

There are thirteen CAR prisons holding around 25,000 people
nationwide, spread across Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, North
Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The amount of time people
spend in the facilities varies widely depending on why they landed
there. Sentences for illegally reentering the United States average
around 18 months. Thanks to mandatory minimums, prisoners serving
sentences for drug offenses can spend decades in a CAR prison.

The ACLU doesn't merely publicize these horrors; they document them first-hand.  Takei:

In 2013, I visited Willacy to interview prisoners as a part of the ACLU's report
on the five CAR prisons in Texas. The 2014 report was based on nearly
five years of interviews and document review. We found that men held in
these private prisons are subjected to shocking abuse and mistreatment,
including getting thrown into isolation cells for complaining about bad
food and poor medical care, being denied both urgent and routine medical
care, and being cut off from contact with their families. Bureau of
Prisons policies also exclude immigrants from many types of
rehabilitative programs -- schooling, vocational training, and the like.

At Willacy, the men we spoke to described squalid and overcrowded
conditions in the prison's tents, with insects crawling into their bunks
and malfunctioning toilets constantly backing sewage water into the
living areas. When people protested to get the toilets fixed, the
protest leaders were locked in isolation cells.

More:

If ICE's civil detention system is closed to outsiders and too often
evades sunlight, then the CAR prisons exist entirely in the shadows.
Although the isolated locations of ICE detention facilities often make
it difficult for attorneys and family members to meet with detainees,
the situation is far worse at CAR prisons. At one, the warden denied the
ACLU's request for attorney visitation with a curt letter demanding to
know why our meetings with prisoners "might be appropriate" and
asserting that the Bureau of Prisons' policies allowing confidential
attorney visits "do not apply at this facility." (His intransigence was
rewarded; later that year, the warden was promoted to a managing
director position at his private prison company.)

When we were able to interview prisoners, they described not only
abuse and mistreatment, but a system that made it difficult or
impossible for them to even complain about their mistreatment. Grievance
systems often allowed no appeals above the private prison warden. Some
staff refused to accept grievance forms written in Spanish -- a
particularly effective way of quashing grievances for a population of
largely Latino immigrants. Many prisoners reported that they were
threatened with solitary confinement -- and in some cases, actually
thrown in isolation cells--for assisting others with drafting grievances
or filing lawsuits.

And the Bureau of Prisons' oversight mechanisms offer little
protection. In one case, the agency renewed a private prison contract
even after its own monitors noted that the prison was "unable to
successfully achieve their own plans of action to correct deficient
areas." The conclusion: "Lack of healthcare has greatly impacted inmate
health and wellbeing." Since then, the ACLU has continued to receive
reports of medical understaffing, the spread of contagious diseases,
policies that obstruct access to medical care, and even deaths at this
prison.

It's easy to believe that private prisons are part of the problem.  The government is the customer, and one of the main services the government is buying is (im)plausible deniability.  If government prisons abuse immigrants, government officials might get in trouble.  If companies hired by the government abuse immigrants, government officials can feign shock, cancel the contract, hire a different company, and resume oppression as usual.  Farcical, but it works.

In any case, though, poor prison conditions are not the fundamental problem.  The abuse that overshadows all others is imprisonment for breaking unjust laws.  Preventing foreigners from coming here to better their lives through honest toil is wrong.  Imprisoning them for coming here to better their lives through honest toil is a travesty.

HT: Zoe Carpenter in The Nation

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