
The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb - jseliger
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-University-Is-a-Ticking/246119?key=K9RMtIzWwk9f4WCspEIEE_Y0rOusvAhZrIhvjUVuhxc3U61MR7uvjBTu-bXcFvH5UDhHSHcwblJfUTFFbVBzQmFqcmNSV2VXOVlkcHA1RWJWTDJwNHFfTWF5dw
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677442)

If a story has already had significant attention, reposts are dupes before a
year has gone by. This is in the FAQ:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

------
rossdavidh
All true, but it slides by the main issue: what are all these Ph.D.'s going to
do? In the post-WW2 era, when the percentage of high school graduates was
going up, each professor could have several Ph.D. students go on to find jobs
as professors. With no Baby Boom, and the percentage of high school graduates
having flattened (which was always guaranteed to happen eventually), many
fields don't have enough other options for people who get their Ph.D. In some
fields, sure, there are corporate R&D centers or other places to put that to
use, but in many fields, a job in academia is the only plausible place that
Ph.D. students have in mind as their eventual destination, and there's just no
way most of them can get a spot there.

The universities shouldn't be relying on 2/3 or 3/4 adjunct professors, but
they're doing it because they can, which is because the system as designed
produces way more candidates for professorships than there are positions
available.

~~~
yostrovs
Do we really need to teach French to undergraduates that won't ever use it nor
remember anything from these courses? My university also had a swimming
requirement. Seems like more than half of the courses were not terribly useful
or mind opening. Certainly since something valuable isn't being produced, the
pay for producing that will be low.

~~~
jimbob45
We don't need to dance around the fact that swimming and French courses are
just moneymakers for universities. Sure, they may hold some value to the
careers of some people, but it's hard to believe that the motivation for
foisting them upon each student was wholly altruistic.

~~~
hindsightbias
With numbers like these, we should be foisting PE and nutrition on young
adults:

[https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-
obesity/](https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/)

------
Pete-Codes
I was seriously considering doing a PHD in Politics but I always knew there
was a strong possibility of not getting a job and being pretty much
unemployable/moving back in with my parents. So I said no to that!

The problem is that colleges still regard themselves as educators and not job
trainers, which most young people think of them as. I distinctly remember my
politics lecturers telling us they weren't here to get us jobs but to teach us
about politics. Which is maybe less problematic if college is free but
obviously everyone wants a job after four years of study.

The likes of bootcamps like Holberton School are the way forward. There is no
skin in the game for universities. If a graduate doesn't get a job it doesn't
affect them one iota. (ok, it doesn't look great for their job report but they
can fudge that. )

Coding bootcamps for instance which only make money when their grads get a job
are the way forward. They have their incentives aligned with the students.

See this for an example: someone who was a broke artist did a coding bootcamp
and is now a developer. But they would never have taken on the debt of a
college degree because they weren't sure if they could get a job. The bootcamp
gets them a job and if they are unsuccessful they don't pay anything. Bingo!
[https://www.nocsdegree.com/this-holberton-school-graduate-
we...](https://www.nocsdegree.com/this-holberton-school-graduate-went-from-
being-a-dancer-to-a-developer/)

~~~
ericmay
> The problem is that colleges still regard themselves as educators and not
> job trainers

I think the issue here is that employers have outsourced hiring validation
steps to the university, and the university never has, nor should be a
platform for training people for specific jobs. Why would you need to go to a
4-year university to become a business analyst when you learn those skills in
the job?

To me it makes sense that a university and its staff sees its mission as
education and not job training, because that’s what it is.

We need to find a way to change this and stop wasting resources and time.
College for most people is a really expensive way to spend 4 years not doing a
lot. It’s mostly signaling.

~~~
WWLink
Ya know how a popular defense for ridiculous interviews is something like
"well, they have so many candidates that they will definitely have one that
can do that." What about having a 4 year computer science degree?

If you grew up in the US, getting scholarships/grants to fund a 4 year degree
is not rocket science. If you're smart enough to pass an algorithms interview
you're probably smart enough to do that.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
I get that people love the field, but if you're earning $25k a year and barely
able to support yourself, maybe you should consider other opportunities in
life than an adjunct professor. It's a shame that most of the higher education
workforce is treated as disposable, and people shouldn't accept such
employment terms and move onto areas where employees are better treated.
Academia has a lot of bright, talented people that could easily transfer their
skills to other industries.

~~~
8bitsrule
Good advice in many cases - although academia has never been much of an
'industry'.

In Vojtko's case, she was an 80+ years old French teacher. How many 'other
opportunities' would you suppose were open to her? Obviously her loyalty and
long service were being taken for granted.

------
lazyguy2
Long term the current university system is dead. I expect that some
universities will exist for another hundred years, but not in it's current
form.

Previous decades you had to go to a university to get access to resources that
simply didn't exist in the rest of the world. Large libraries, labs, lectures,
etc etc. Nowadays the internet can provide vastly superior resources then any
Library for the most part. Sure there are lots of stuff not yet on there, but
that issue that isn't going to exist forever.

Quality courses exist for free. Lots of others are available for hundreds were
at colleges they cost thousands. Access to experts is something you can pay
for. Don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on books. Can concentrate on what
is important to you and you can go at your own pace. People who want to
network and peers can still have access to one another through meetups and
online messaging. etc etc.

K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education
for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors
for subjects you are not great on.

People think you need to government to solve the cost of education, meanwhile
individuals and companies have reduced the cost of education to nearly zero in
most cases. Just won't get those special degree certificates that everybody
covets. But that won't last forever either.

~~~
api
Degrees, especially from prestigious schools, have become a kind of writ of
noble title that can be purchased. Systems like that can be very sticky.
Everyone who has one has a vested interest in preserving their value (like
taxi medallions) and HR people can easily use them as a shortcut to hiring
decisions that they'll never look dumb for making. The latter is the "nobody
ever got fired for..." effect.

The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply,
forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.

~~~
lazyguy2
> The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply,
> forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.

I don't think that is the "only thing".

Many employers look for degrees because they are seen as valuable. But they
are not necessarily valuable in the most obvious way. A lot of time people are
not really interested in what you went to school for at all. The are only
interested if you have a degree or not.

This signals to employers that they are interviewing somebody that is willing
to make major personal commitments and defer reward for years for POTENTIAL
gain. There is no guarantees that spending 10's of thousands of dollars will
result in a good job. People who pay for degrees are hoping this is true. A
employer can take advantage of these people easily.

If I needed somebody to just be a cog in a corporate machine and I know that
they are wiling to work their ass off and make huge personal commitments on
the PROMISE of future pay... then that is awesome. I know they will work their
ass off and make huge sacrifices for years and I really don't have to pay them
that much at all to do it. And I know that their debt will keep them scared
and living paycheck to paycheck so they are not going to want to risk
unemployment because of how devastating this is financially.

This is why when I am looking for jobs and employers make hard demands on
educational certificates that they are probably assholes. It's fine to want
degrees, but they are not willing to take professional experience as a
alternative then that is a huge red flag.

Yeah it's sticky, but you can't expect the current situation to last forever.

------
isthispermanent
If universities aren't spending all this insanely high tuition on the actual
educators, where exactly is it all going?

~~~
trimbo
Duquesne, which is mentioned in the article, has a $40K per year tuition for
undergrads (higher for nursing, etc). They have 9,344 students and their
operating budget of $300M, so $32K per student.

Their employee budget is $186M and 2,632 employees, which is average ~$71K per
employee.

So why was this adjunct professor teaching 8 classes and only earning $25K per
year?

BTW, the president of the university makes $1.4M.

Sources:

[1] - [https://www.duq.edu/about/departments-and-offices/finance-
an...](https://www.duq.edu/about/departments-and-offices/finance-and-
business/planning-budgeting-and-institutional-research/fast-facts)

[2] - [https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-
university...](https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-university-
president-pay-20181211-story.html)

~~~
Steuard
Don't make the mistake of believing the sticker price of college/university
tuition! It's quite routine for many colleges (private ones, at least) to
offer "scholarships" covering a substantial fraction of tuition to literally
every accepted student.

Evidently, where marketing is concerned, families are _way_ happier to say "My
kid is going to a $40K college, and got a $15K scholarship!" than to say "My
kid is going to a $25K college". Colleges that have tried to present
themselves as less expensive by listing the actual tuition cost have quite
often _lost_ enrollment as a result.

(Meanwhile, last I heard, Harvard tuition was _free_ for the vast majority of
families in the US, unless they're very wealthy. But their official listed
tuition is nearly $50K.)

~~~
alexandercrohde
To Trimbo's point though, college is the most expensive it's ever been (by
several fold factor). The math more that checks out to pay all university
professors over 200k, if you could reduce the administration figures.

I think the real question is why college expenses have grown so much

------
8bitsrule
80+-year-old woman teaching eight courses as an adjunct for $25,000/year? No
health insurance, no benefits?

Wiki says: 9000+ students, $300M + in the endowment fund. Insights into the
number of administrators and their pay are not so easy to find. NCAA Division
I – A-10, NEC

Clearly this school lost sight of its mission. Absolutely it's not alone.

------
jshaqaw
In many cases the roles of teaching and research should be split. More tenured
faculty - particularly in the humanities and social sciences - should focus
95%+ of their time and resources on teaching. There is so much overproduction
of scholarly work that even specialists in niche fields barely read each
others' papers.

------
melling
World population is going to 9 billion by 2050.

There are plenty of people in the world who need an education.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
The delta of people that can afford an education looks like it will be
negative, though.

So unless some government (or group of wealthy individuals) sets up a
philanthropic fund to educate the world, the outlook is bleak.

~~~
melling
Education used to be cheap. For some reason, it has outpaced inflation for the
past 40 years and created the current problem.

We could simply try to return the product we had in the 1960’s.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Historically, dating back to the origins of Oxford, one year's worth of
tuition cost 50% of median wage, but one year's worth of books cost 2 years
worth of wages, and one year of board cost 5 times median wage [1].

Anyone can take MIT and Harvard classes for free online. A quality education
is basically free. Community colleges cost less than 1/2 of minimum wage per
year.

Just because people are spending more on education doesn't mean education is
more expensive.

[1]
[http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html](http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html)

------
sys_64738
The 3-4 years you do a PhD are also years out of the workforce for making a
good salary. If you do a PhD then you really want to consider its impact to
your working life.

------
adamnemecek
A big part of the problem is "infinite growth" assumption.

------
dr_dshiv
I'd be a big fan of giving anyone with a PhD a small social stipend and means-
tested health insurance.

It's much cheaper than other universal basic income proposals.

~~~
fennecfoxen
What makes this a good idea?

~~~
imgabe
I don't know that I would advocate this necessarily, but I can see the logic.
If you have a PhD you've at least demonstrated that you have a passion for a
particular field and you've been trained to conduct research in that field.

Many PhDs would just want to do research in their field and would continue
doing so as long as they can feed and house themselves. Societally, maybe many
of these wouldn't produce anything "useful", but some percentage might develop
some breakthrough in their field that would more than make up for paying for
all the rest.

Would it be better to have some PhD educated math prodigy working an unrelated
job paying a median salary because there's nothing available in academia or if
we just let that person work on their research all day, might they develop
something that would be more useful?

You could make the same argument for providing a universal basic income for
everyone, but in the general population you're going to have a higher
percentage of people who will just watch Netflix all day or whatever you
consider to be a useless activity.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> Would it be better to have some PhD educated math prodigy working an
> unrelated job paying a median salary because there's nothing available in
> academia or if we just let that person work on their research all day, might
> they develop something that would be more useful?

I think if we want the government to pay PhDs to promote research and the
advance of knowledge, the PhDBI proposal has some limitations as a means to
that end. Many PhDs are gainfully employed, and often have much higher incomes
than those without PhDs; they are hardly in need of this stipend. Aside from
these cases, it is not clear that the PhDs thus supported are in fact
productive, or that the stipend will actually effect the advancement of
knowledge, and it seems that it would be very hard to assess the success of
this initiative given its structure, or impose any sort of accountability.

You identify "some PhD math prodigy," but there are twice as many doctorates
in philosophy as there are in math, and while I am in favor of _some_ PhDs in
philosophy, it is not clear the extent to which this specific achievement is
something the government needs to be subsidizing. It may be the case that this
PhDBI structure would incentivize the pursuit of low-quality PhDs, in the
hopes of obtaining the stipend and then ceasing productive work.

(Source: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/185353/number-of-
doctora...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/185353/number-of-doctoral-
degrees-by-field-of-research/) )

The government has a variety of avenues to promote research in specific
fields: by employing those researchers directly, by funding research
universities, by issuing grants to researchers engaged in research. I feel
these might be better at obtaining public policy goals, while being much less
susceptible to rent-seeking.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Not sure where statistia gets its sources, but there are roughly 500
philosophy phds awarded a year [http://dailynous.com/2017/08/28/slight-
increase-philosophy-p...](http://dailynous.com/2017/08/28/slight-increase-
philosophy-phds-awarded-humanities-data/)

And roughly 2000 in math. [http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-
survey/phds-awarde...](http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/phds-
awarded)

>The government has a variety of avenues to promote research in specific
fields: by employing those researchers directly, by funding research
universities, by issuing grants to researchers engaged in research. I feel
these might be better at obtaining public policy goals, while being much less
susceptible to rent-seeking.

It's surprisingly difficult to engage in pure research with government grants,
believe it or not. In certain fields, like philosophy and math, just covering
health insurance and providing lunch money might be much more effective.

------
RickJWagner
I have very mixed opinions about American college at this time.

I find the system antiquated and full of butt-kissery, especially post-grad.
Book sales are plainly a racket.

I'm not sure how real the political hyperbole is, but it's concerning too. I'm
all in favor of college campuses being a place of political passion and
ideology, but it seems like it's completely one-sided, and that's bad if it's
true.

I hope MOOCs take firm footing and start to bring reform. I think it's
overdue.

------
WhompingWindows
In the age of free and quick information via search, the value of PhDs with
extreme amounts of knowledge in niche academic fields has been nullified. If
99.999% of people will never need your dissertation, and your domain-specific
knowledge facts are gained for free via 2 minutes of google-fu, why on Earth
would you spend 7 years of your most productive years of life getting a PhD?

PhD's may make sense in STEM fields, where you can parlay them into lucrative
coding/analysis/strategic thinking jobs. But the vast majority of PhDs are
text-based, humanities-adjacent...they are people "following their passion"
and it's a colossal mistake.

I'd 100 times over rather be a pianist or painter than an expert in medieval
lore or obscure literature, at least my family and friends can appreciate a
great painting or a wonderful piano piece. That's the kind of passion we
should be following, not chasing obscure tomes in an ivory tower.

~~~
carapace
There are ~7,000,000,000 humans but only ~100,000,000 are performing actually
necessary work (farming, mining, teaching, mathematics, maintenance.)

That leaves ~6,900,000,000 people with nothing crucial to do.

Given that premise, I think it fine, just fine, if they want to e.g. study
"medieval lore or obscure literature".

