
Potential Trump Science Adviser Says 90 Percent of U.S. Colleges Will Disappear - woofyman
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/potential-trump-science-adviser-9-in-10-colleges-will-fail.html
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rhapsodic
I believe he's basically correct, but not to that extent. Selling degrees in
"Gender Studies" for $200K is not a sustainable business model.

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MisterBastahrd
Then the solution is not to abolish social science degrees, but to subsidize
them.

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rhapsodic
_> Then the solution is not to abolish social science degrees, but to
subsidize them._

Quite the opposite. The reason a college education is so expensive in the US
is because, in an effort to make it more affordable, it has been so heavily
subsidized. Schools have diverted the subsidies away from students' pockets
into their own, by hiring loads of administrative staff, building new
luxurious facilities, etc.

In a free market, if Gender Studies degrees provide value greater than their
cost, and their cost is not extracted from hapless third parties (i.e.
taxpayers), then they will exist.

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MisterBastahrd
The "free market" is not free. Never has been, never will be. The promotion
and dissemination of human knowledge is not restricted to business and STEM
degrees, the value derived from them can't always be quantified as something
so childishly simplistic as dollars and cents.

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cylinder
I don't know that they will disappear; people will be even more desperate to
get into white collar professions as more jobs disappear and classes continue
to stratify. If we eliminated the ridiculous Federal credit firehose that
keeps these bloated organizations alive, then they'd disappear, or at least
scale down significantly. It doesn't take a whole lot of infrastructure to
teach liberal arts.

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gdulli
> Degrees themselves will become a thing of the past, Gelernter writes as
> they’re “gradually be replaced by certified transcripts.” Rather than a
> university conferring the degree, a “transcript” — that is, coursework
> showing that a student has successfully learned a given set of material —
> will be “vouched for” by a trusted institution like a think tank, newspaper,
> museum, or research lab.

Interesting. Would it be a travesty or a blessing for people to start
promoting themselves in the job market with credentials backed by Breitbart, a
climate change denying institution, or a creationist museum? The benefits are
obvious but pyrrhic.

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perseusprime11
O_O looks like they finally found a smart guy who is right. We now build
skyscrapers in couple of years compared to pyramids in egypt but it still
takes 14 years of professional training to be a doctor. Then we wonder why it
takes so long to find a cure for something or go to Mars. Hmmm, Imagine being
attacked in the Age of Empires game and it is taking forever to product
soldiers to defend.

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xrd
It is interesting to have read a thread on HN recently about product managers.
Lots of them came from humanities degrees. I'm not saying there is extreme
value in getting a humanities degree but I'm definitely doubtful that only
people with technology degrees should run the country.

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rhapsodic
> I'm definitely doubtful that only people with technology degrees should run
> the country.

Where has that been suggested?

