

Academia is not Broken.  We are. - baguasquirrel
http://curryhoward.blogspot.com/2010/05/academia-isnt-broken-we-are.html

======
ihodes
This totally makes sense: education isn't job training.

So maybe it's not for everyone, but for me it's a short time in my life where
I can study Elementary Theory of Numbers alongside Cognitive Neuroscience and
Computational Genetics and Life Forms without worrying about paying the bills.

Learning how to do a job isn't too hard. You learn on the job, anyway. This is
true for computer scientists as much as it is for neurosurgeons (residencies).

School builds a foundation, and hopefully increases your interest in learning.
It has mine.

~~~
bbgm
And how do you decide what job? I've changed jobs and fields so often, there
is no way you can prepare for that. Yet all the education I got has been
instrumental in being able to adjust, evolve and assimilate new knowledge.

~~~
jseliger
"I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for
that."

I'm a grad student in English lit, and I tell my students that their wisest
course of action is to study math and reading/writing. Those two skills are
applicable to almost any other domain, make picking up other skills easier,
and relatively few people really understand either.

~~~
alnayyir
3 Rs, reading (w)riting and (a)rithmetic.

I've been a proponent of teaching that and rhetoric for a long time.

~~~
ez77
This sounds very much like the medieval trivium:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium_(education)>

~~~
alnayyir
That would be the point, yes.

------
alttab
This!

 _The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is
what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for
that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an
unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite
unacademic._

Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we
face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters.
Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.

~~~
nagrom
"From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop
hiring bullshitters."

If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-)
Bullshitters are, as a class, the _most_ successful people in history, I would
guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would
mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it
started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever
seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...

~~~
apsec112
"The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen,"

Not true. Society nowadays in the US is actually relatively immobile, compared
to the 19th century.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures#New_World)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor>

All five were from poor/middle class backgrounds. Compare to Bill Gates, whose
father was a name partner in the largest law firm in Seattle, Preston, Gates &
Ellis, and whose mother knew the CEO of IBM.

~~~
mbergins
Those appear to be a list of anecdotes as opposed to a real analysis of who
becomes wealthy and the means of their families in America. Unfortunately, I'm
not familiar enough with the social science literature to fix the reference
problem, but at least from the survey work presented in "The Millionaire Next
Door", many of the wealthy American surveyed there did not appear to be from
family money.

------
yequalsx
The truly great innovations are done by people who are interested in a problem
and want to solve it. Rarely is it done for money. It is in the best interest
of society that the people who are creative and smart have an avenue to
explore that creativity without too much risk. This means lowering the cost to
higher education and constricting the amount of people who go to college. The
best math grad students want to go to MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc. because
that's where the other smart people are and the environment fosters
development. If we lose this then it will be a long term disaster for the
nation.

The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers
solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.

------
fnid2
There was a frontline episode last night on Education, Inc. (i think it was
called) and I think it presents a dangerous trend -- though not for the reason
Frontline said.

Our _country_ is broken.

Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being
sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though
they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars
in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt.
Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their
institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay
off the loans. How could they decide something like that??

Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate
can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student.
There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we
are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing
responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on
corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans
people took out, but can't repay.

People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make
good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for
those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they
default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being
rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make _good_ decisions??

Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing.
Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the
schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent
for people like this?

In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to
teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud
Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me
anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach
kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years
ago.

Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the
responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual
freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual
accountability -- you lose individual freedom.

------
radioactive21
Here is what I dont get. In the US we complain about higher education Academia
yet millions of foreigners go to our schools. I saw a stat where the majority
of Engineer graduates are foreigners in the US.

They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and
their country.

~~~
patio11
This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's
Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology. They come to major in things which will
reward, with nearly 100% certainty, a career immediately after leaving school
which pays excellent wages by Chinese standards.

(A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which
formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing
pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the
case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of
degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do
anything else.)

(Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in
making things up.)

~~~
jacoblyles
That's a very unprogressive thing for you to say.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
I have a degree in both CS (making things) and Philosophy (making things up)
and I _completely_ agree with patio11's comment. Progressivism has nothing to
do with it. Majoring in Art History (where there are 12 job openings a year)
and then getting a job as a barista at the local coffee shop doesn't make you
the bastion of progressivism.

~~~
jacoblyles
There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this
reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be
measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by
providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of
society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.

Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they
are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I
wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution
to society can be measured by their salary._

If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them
more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some
greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.

 _If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of
the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them._

This isn't a question of differing philosophies and values. This is just
objectively wrong. In the degenerate case, if we all decide to become poets,
then who is going to farm the food to feed us all? This should clue you in to
the fallacy of your statement above. The _marginal_ value of an additional
poet is lower than the marginal value of another farmer, or another assembly
line worker, or another programmer.

Moreover, there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more
to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect
to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a
decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two
examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we
necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be
versus what we expect to derive from them. And _that_ is what the study of
economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.

 _I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all
dominated by men. We praise male fields..._

Holy mackerel, what a mouthful. You've got to be trolling, but I'll bite
anyway.

Let's start with the fact that YOU are the one that's characterizing things as
"male" or "female"; I don't see anyone else doing so. Of the three cubicles
bordering on mine, two of them are occupied by females; shall I call software
development a "female" field? If not, then why would I ever praise it?

But your statement is its own dis-proof. You (and the rest of the
"progressives") are praising what you label "female fields", and implicitly
condemning the "male" ones. Doesn't this show _a priori_ that we don't
universally favor one or the other, but rather have, as a society, a diverse
set of opinions?

Finally, I'd like to retell an old joke from my (engineering) college:

 _Scientists learn to ask "why does that work?". Engineers are taught to ask
"how does that work?". Accountants learn to ask "how much will it cost?".
Liberal arts majors are trained to ask "do you want fries with that?"_

It's a little cruel, but still funny, I think.

~~~
dgabriel
_If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them
more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some
greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it._

You should ask a postdoc making ~30k a year to do cutting edge science the
same question. They could triple that tending bar.

~~~
CWuestefeld
There's no mystery here, I already gave the answer in my previous post.
Quoting myself:

 _there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the
market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use
our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision
about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples,
but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make
those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we
expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about
-- money is only the smallest part of it._

Those postdocs derive greater satisfaction from doing their science than they
would by tending bar. In their own internal calculus, the rewards of their
career are greater than the simple money equation.

Progressives like to think they're being deep and insightful when they observe
that there's more to the world than just money. But it's not news to anyone,
least of all to economists. This is embodied in the concept of _utility_. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility> :

 _Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the
indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an
individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of
satisfaction. ... [Quoting Paul Samuelson] "Utility is taken to be correlative
to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured
directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give
rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the
measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the
fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire."_

Thus, in the case of your hypothetical postdoc, the opportunity to do his (or
her) science is worth $60K. (I oversimplify due to things like _marginal
utility_ , but that's the gist)

~~~
timtadh
Good job regurgitating micro econ 101. /sarcasm off/ In all seriousness trying
to discuss utility of a general group of people (or even a specific person) is
doomed to failure. Utility is a nice round theoretical construct for trying to
talk about why consumers make the decisions they do.

However, there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely
rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for
a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty
determine your own utility function. I know I can't.

Now lets pretend a consumer does in fact only make rational choices, and their
utility function for every conceivable situation is known. I have distinct,
although unproven, suspicion that determining what choices the person would
make through their day would be NP-complete as their present choices would
effect their future choices. Thus all possible outcomes would have to be
considered far into the future if one truly wanted to maximize utility.

Therefore, assuming what I have just said is fairly logical, it is impossible
for a rational consumer to exist even if their utility function is known,
since it would be impossible to for them to compute any given choice in a
finite amount of time.

In conclusion any discussion that touches on "utility" or assuming a group of
people is making "rational" choices is doomed to failure. The truth is we
don't know why any given person make any given choice.

Also you seem to ignore the important of positive externalities in your
arguments. I believe this is where you disagree with other posters.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational
choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a
consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine
your own utility function._

Of course; I never claimed otherwise. It's certainly true that any person's
utility function is at least partly unknown to them, and in any case changes
over time. As a result it has little value as a _predictive_ tool. But that
doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Ludwig von Mises attacks this head-on in
_Human Action_ (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action> ).

It's undeniable that at any juncture, the action that a person takes is based
on some judgment, conscious or not (and quite possibly mistaken), that the
chosen action delivers a greater utility than its alternatives.

Thus, the hypothetical postdoc-cum-bartender is deciding -- for reasons that
we don't know, but real all the same -- that he would prefer to do his
research over bartending, even to the extent of giving up $60K to do so.

Who are we to second guess his decision? Precisely _because_ , and not in
spite of, the fact that his reasons are inscrutable, we can only assume that
he's making the best call he can. By what right can we override it? And more
to the point, if his/her university is providing such a valuable career for
him, who are we to say that they must sweeten the pot and throw in even more
money?

------
madmaze
I agree 100 percent. The reason one gets an education is because you want to
find out what interesting things there are. If everyone had the same education
there would be no job competition. The problem with most of today's education
systems is that everyone gets treated the same. I have found this out first
hand, but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics
teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. To make
this possible we had to pretend that it was a regularly scheduled class,
otherwise the administration of the school would have never let me build
robots, program IRC clients or play with rapid prototyping. I learned more
about research and the way things worked in the two semesters i was with this
teacher than i did in all of my other schooling.

~~~
jgg
>but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher
that let me explore things i found interesting for credit.

You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high
school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages
and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all
the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports
sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs
dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some
terrible fiction books.

But I'm not bitter. (;

------
JustinSeriously
I went to college because I loved computer science, but while there I was in
class alongside many students (at least in the required courses) who were just
there for a good job, and I never had a problem with any of them. In fact,
college did pretty well for most of them.

I've never been dissuaded from thinking that there is a place for people-who-
just-want-good-jobs in colleges. There are plenty of opportunities for people
who wanted to go further in computer science, I don't know of any college with
a good computer science programs that's lacking in high level math and AI
courses.

That said, I absolutely agree with "The entitlement of success that seems to
follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will
get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken." People need
to decide up front if their priority _is_ a 9-5 job and plan accordingly.

------
hga
I'm not too impressed.

For now I'll leave it by just point out that there are only 4 top US CS
schools, not 5 (in west to east order, Stanford, UCB, CMU, MIT).

~~~
brent
What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries.

Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.

~~~
kenjackson
UIUC and Cornell are both historically strong. UW (Washington) and UCSD (San
Diego) both seem like exceptional up and comers that are probably much better
schools than historically ranked.

With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.

~~~
hga
" _[...] there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5._ "

And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5
probably proves it.

Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5
list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It
only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or
so.

My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make
good judgments on the topic of this essay.

~~~
pw0ncakes
For law students and lawyers, there's a "top 14". This is because the USN&WR
top 10 has varied over the years, but the USN&WR top 14 has been stable for
practically forever. The same is true of 17, 18, and maybe a couple of other
integers.

So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14
in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self-
perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law
as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending
#14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for
you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school.

I wish I were making this up. I'm not.

~~~
hga
Hmmmm, all the talk about the I-95 Supreme Court would support what you're
saying.

