

The University Has No Clothes - joubert
http://nymag.com/news/features/college-education-2011-5/

======
impendia
According to my calculations, assuming a normal course load and no financial
aid, the students in my Stanford combinatorics class were paying $129.00 an
hour, each, to listen to me lecture. And I'm not senior faculty -- I'm a
postdoc a couple years out of grad school. Moreover, I'm not even properly an
expert on the particular subject, I had to spend some time before lectures
reviewing it and learning new material to lecture on.

No question, I'm the beneficiary of all this. I make good money to carry out
independent research, and my department apologizes for those semesters where I
am "burdened" with six classroom hours a week of teaching.

Good or bad, the purpose of elite universities is research, not teaching.
There is certainly room to criticize this, but that's the career path the
senior profs aim for. Elite universities hire the best researchers, and there
is a trickle-down effect -- that is what you are paying for with a Stanford
education.

Worth it? Dunno. Seems implausible from the perspective of just thinking about
it, but looking around, the evidence seems to be that it is.

~~~
nagrom
I cannot find it online, but I remember reading an essay by an ex-faculty
member in CS who eventually went to work for Sun. He thought that academia was
a rip-off, training-wise, when compared to Sun. At his job in Sun, when he
trains people he spends 40 hours preparing every hour of material. In
academia, we spend two, perhaps three, hours per hour of training material.

I think it's probably fair to say that people overpay to be taught material by
faculty who really view the lecturing as an imposition on their time.

~~~
impendia
I think it's important to remember that students are getting what they in fact
paid for.

There _are_ colleges which de-emphasize research and prioritize outstanding
teaching. Harvey Mudd comes to mind as an outstanding example. But for
whatever reason, top research universities have much higher clout.

I think perhaps because being at a top research university is ideal for
exceptionally strong students; being around exceptionally strong students is
very good for above-average students; and so on.

~~~
scott_s
We always called them "teaching colleges," which is a name so accurate it
hurts.

~~~
lurker19
Hurts why? Because research universities do not teach much?

Teaching was definitely hit and miss at the research university I attended. I
was lucky that's my freshman math and CS teachers were among the best the
university bad.

I assumed that it was the same elsewhere, as it was in high school. Do Harvey
Mudd, et al, have excellent teachers across the whole department and school?

Also, at good non-research schools, do students have a chance to learn
research? Can students go on to try a Ph.D.?

For industry-bound future engineer/inventors, is publication -quality research
important anyway, or does lab/practical work suffice?

~~~
scott_s
Research universities do lots of teaching. But teaching is a secondary task
for most of the faculty. That we could say "teaching college" with a straight
face is what hurts. It _should_ be redundant - after all, college is a place
people go to _learn_ so it should follow that teaching is a focus, but it was
not.

Teaching was hit-or-miss at my undergrad university as well. That may also be
true at teaching colleges, but professors at teaching colleges are hired
primarily to _teach_. They are expected to spend most of their time teaching
or preparing for it.

I really don't have enough experience with teaching colleges to say what
opportunities the students have.

------
tokenadult
A quotation inside the article points to the public policy issues connected to
the value of college: "This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s
resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the
country’s resources more productively. 'Let’s take a step back,' Altucher
says. 'What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.' For years, the
government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. 'So we got more and
more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea,
the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a
national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen
here.'"

Indeed, if government subsidies for college attendance (government allocations
of funds to colleges, individual grants for college attendance, and below-
market-rate-terms loans for college attendance) change individuals' estimate
of the cost:benefit ratio of college, without increasing the actual societal
value of college attendance, then current college funding policy might end up
being as harmful to the national economy as previous decade housing policy
was.

P.S. This article had a previous submission (no discussion that time, perhaps
because of the title change):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135>

------
DanI-S
I'd like to know _why_ American university courses cost so much. The UK
punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum
fee universities can charge is around $14k per year. The majority charge
substantially less than this. Whilst government subsidy explains some of the
mismatch, it's still very significant. In addition, the cost of buying books,
which seems to make up a gigantic portion of college costs in the US, is not
even remotely as large.

I can think of the following theories:

\- In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students
with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more.

\- US faculty receive massively higher salaries.

\- In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social
status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay.

\- There is limited public understanding of the drawbacks of debt, so people
are more willing to incur it by paying extreme fees.

\- It's a big bloody racket.

Do any of these hold any truth?

~~~
joubert
Perhaps because they are the best in the world and there is a huge demand
(from across the globe) to get in? <http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp>

~~~
DanI-S
That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be
the best in the world _because_ they are able to charge so much.

~~~
Locke1689
That's not always true historically, though. It seems more like a relatively
recent phenomenon, but US schools were still the best in the world a century
ago. Perhaps it's more accurate that they are able to continue cementing their
lead by charging so much.

------
ams6110
I've been wondering lately if the time might be right for the re-emergence of
"guilds" i.e. organizations that promote the mastering of a craft. Not really
"unions" in that the primary motivation would be teaching and improving, not
bargaining with employers (though I realize that many modern unions do both).

A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer
structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also
pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never
applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
a 'programmers guild' would be awesome. imagine learning to code at 14 instead
of going to some worthless high school. you would start as an apprentice,
watching an experienced programmer write code, helping fix syntax errors and
spelling mistakes, while learning through osmosis. as a journeyman, you'd
write simple unit tests, then more advanced functional tests, and then
graduate by releasing your first app into production. by age 18 you could have
four years of real world coding experience, while having earned a salary
(albeit a small one) from age 14.

~~~
nprincigalli
That's how it works with many opensource projects. You get around, contribute
with docfixes, learn a little, then send a patch here and there, and sooner
than you realize you can be doing contract or employed work related to the
tools being used by the project, or to the project itself. IMHO, there's no
shortage of well-paid work for those known to be talented by their peers.

------
nazgulnarsil
Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an
order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll
have to subsidize brilliant students who can't.

"normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our
egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as
everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite
institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke.

You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners
to hide in.

~~~
dgordon
"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an
order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them."

However, people who apply to universities in this class normally apply to many
of them. Granted, some of them also get into many of them, but usually not all
or most.

~~~
jimbokun
Same as getting 100s of resumes for a job posting. Just because you only hire
1 person for the position does not necessarily mean that you hire only from
the best 1 percent.

------
scott_s
Quoth Altucher, _"When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them
$200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do
that?"_

I was in undergrad at Virginia Tech from the fall of 1999 to the spring of
2003. The total cost was less than $30,000 for all four years. Of course,
keeping me fed and housed all four years cost more. I find his argument
disingenuous, because only the elite private schools cost that much. Of
course, it would be equally disingenuous for me to imply that everyone has
access to a decent state school with relatively low in-state tuition. But
surely that should be a part of the discussion.

------
zwieback
These articles always focus on liberal arts and private universities, which is
completely uninteresting to me. I'd like to know the historic development of
public school tuition for actually useful degrees like engineering and
business, which don't have the steep salary curves of doctors and lawyers.

~~~
scott_s
This is my common complaint when the issue comes up. From the article, _In a
typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their
recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more
than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course
that required more than twenty pages of writing.”_

I had semesters that were nothing but math, physics and computer science and
they fall into the above category. There was reading in those courses, but it
was mainly in a textbook, and 40 pages out of a physics textbook is _a lot_ of
material. Likewise, I didn't turn in any writing assignments for these
classes, but I turned in problem sets and programming projects on a regular
basis.

------
greencircle
I like the approach that Summerhill and Sudbury students tend to follow: after
finishing "high school", they work in the world, thus earning money and
gaining experience, and then they attend college if they think it is right for
them. They work for their tuition, and they don't party away their school
life.

------
ctdonath
<http://ocw.mit.edu> among others:

Education is free. Certification is expensive.

~~~
billswift
Education is always expensive, even if not in direct monetary terms. Learning
anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Time and effort that you can't
apply to other things - aka _opportunity costs_. I mostly read and study in my
"spare time", but even that means I can't do _other_ things.

------
stcredzero
College is just an avenue to _doing substantive work_ \-- which is when the
real learning happens.

~~~
GaryOlson
So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I
agree. Too many job postings minimum requirements include a college degree
even if the actual work -- substantive or not -- do not need a college
education. So, a person cannot start in industry in a less substantive
position and move into a position which includes more substantive work.

~~~
stcredzero
_So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work?
I agree._

Wow, is putting words into another's mouth a standard HN move now?

Getting into college is not an insurmountable barrier. Find a professor who is
genuinely interested in the work you're interested in. Start learning the
background information required to do the work. Between the two of you, you
should be able to figure out a way to work together. This works for both
financial and admissions barriers.

There are also many kinds of substantive work one can do without a college
degree.

------
antihero
Honestly I've learned more playing around on my own than I did at university.
Lectures really aren't for everyone, it's a really old-fashioned, outdated
learning style. Whilst secondary schools have progressed hugely, university's
have stayed with the sit their and suck up knowledge approach. Which sucks for
me, because I learn by doing things. I guess I learned a lot from labs, and
doing projects, which were awesome. But sitting there in a lecture just felt
so removed from what I was actually supposed to be learning about. Combine
that with ADHD and I don't think I'll be graduating in the next few months :(
A lot is my fault, but I really can't stand lectures, unless the lecturer is
exceptionally engaging.

------
lr
I have no data to back this up, but perhaps the reason college tuition has
increased tenfold in the past 30 years is that the government (especially US
state governments) is subsidizing it less and less... I work for a university
(two different ones in the past 12 years), and there is less and less money
from the state going into education.

I also think we need to start looking at the $40K college education vs. the
$160K college education. Unless you want to be a corporate executive, do you
really need to go to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc? I think PG once wrote that
there is no correlation between going to a very expensive school and being a
successful startup founder...

~~~
redsymbol
While I don't have data to cite right now either, a decrease in government
subsidies is more likely to push prices DOWN, all else being equal. Increasing
loan disbursements will, effectively, increase the available money supply in
that market (of young adults entering college); and significant increases in
money supply are by themselves inflationary, i.e. tend to push prices up.

To help see why, imagine you have one apple to sell. Alice and Bill are quite
hungry, and both have $5 to spend. The maximum you can get from selling your
apple is $5, because that's all either has to offer.

Suppose I come along and loan $20 each to Alice and Bill. Now if one offers
$5, the other has the power to outbid. This new situation certainly won't
DECREASE the amount of money you'll finally get for the apple, and could in
fact end up dramatically increasing your profits.

This is oversimplified, but illustrates the legitimate macroeconomic essence,
I think.

Of course, we have to qualify this with "all else being equal", which the real
world is too messy for. I thought total student loan payouts in the USA had
been increasing on average the past few decades, but don't know for sure: can
anyone verify one way or another? The best I could quickly find is the
"Average Debt Over Time" chart here:

[http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_So...](http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_Sources.pdf)

~~~
redsymbol
Update: while government-sponsored student loans can be considered a form of
subsidy, I realize now you were referring to something else, lr. So, my
comment is kind of tangential to your point :)

------
daniel-cussen
> [Peter Thiel's Stanford education got him] a job trading derivatives at
> Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush.

Thiel got this job by taking a math test and getting all the answers right.

------
earl
While the article has it's points, Altucher complaining about $200k for a
college education is stupid. For every Stanford or Harvard out there, there's
a Berkeley, UW Madison, U Washington, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Ann Arbor,
etc.

~~~
rayiner
My GT degree cost ~$60k in the early 2000s. If you started today, it'd be
north of $100k.

