
Higher Ed: Enough Already - samspenc
https://www.profgalloway.com/higher-ed-enough-already
======
bo1024
This all makes sense to me as far as it goes, but any assessment of university
finances, the future of remote versus in-person education, etc, should have a
lot to say about the following:

Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA
today. Schools are priced accordingly and they heavily invest in and compete
on non-classroom factors. This includes facilities, support services,
activities, athletics. Then there is just the socialization, dorm experience,
meeting people, parties, on and on.

So it would be a totally reasonable and logical next step in history for
schools to say, "Hey, we believe that a lot of the value we offer is the in-
person experience. So we will offer remote classes for a lower cost, to many
more online-education students." Like Ga Tech's masters program.

But, with COVID, the universities have backed themselves into a corner because
they should probably make the next year remote, but they made all these
expensive on-campus investments and to stay afloat they need the ridiculously
high tuition money (including from out-of-state and international students as
mentioned). So all of a sudden, they can't afford to admit that remote
learning is a much less valuable product.

(One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to
teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure
administrators will ignore it too.)

~~~
davrosthedalek
> (One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors
> to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure
> administrators will ignore it too.)

One of my colleagues teaches intro physics to 1000+ students remotely. It
seems to work quite well actually. His TAs screens the questions students have
-- it's not like there are 1000 different ones, many a similar/same. He says
the large audience is actually an advantage: If he explains something
bad/wrong, at least some of them will pick up on it and ask.

~~~
bo1024
Great! One thing I've heard that at that scale, a lot of the professor's time
is taken by student logistics type issues.

------
cracker_jacks
Professor Galloway also said:

\--- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front
of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants;
we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless
shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last
night. \---

There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the
world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years.
But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.

~~~
chongli
I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human
capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities
and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping
of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the
signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s
desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those
qualities in the first place.

Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the
demand for masters and PhDs.

~~~
geofft
This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly
(re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but
no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as
much value as they thought.

What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge
or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those
(and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because
the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).

~~~
tryptophan
>This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve.

This is difficult for them to do so, due to stupid laws. If they had a hiring
exam, and it happened to show a certain race performing worse on it, they
would get sued for racism and lose. So instead, they just do the safe thing,
and let collages filter out the undesirables for them.

~~~
geofft
I believe this isn't true in the US at least for the following reasons:

\- Many employers do in fact have hiring exams: see Triplebyte, HackerRank,
etc. in our own industry, but also civil service exams etc.

\- Colleges themselves rely on exams (like the SAT) with known racial
disparities in scoring for admission.

\- Colleges completion rates vary by race.

So one would think that employers would already be sued for racism if that
were possible.

(But, perhaps the argument is that employers _want_ to filter people by race,
and they wouldn't be able to do so as easily with a hiring exam as via
indirect means like recruiting from certain colleges.)

------
rayiner
American universities don't deserve to survive in their current state. The
United States already spends a greater %-age of GDP on _public funding_ for
higher education than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. (which
together comprise 70% of the EU's population):
[https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-
highe...](https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-higher-
countries-free-college). They're incredibly inefficient and broken
institutions.

~~~
asciident
I'm confused how you arrived at that. So American Universities get 1.3%
funding, which puts them about in the middle of the chart in your source, is
at about the same level as Switzerland and the UK (who are both also 1.3%).
Yet the US comprises more top universities than the rest of the world combined
(according to pretty much university ranking site out there), and they are the
ones doing it wrong?

------
jseliger
Very true: [https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-
eliz...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-
armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/)

Too many students or "students" wind up paying for the party for years or
decades after they graduate. The incentive structures in academia are (mostly)
not good and not properly aligned.

------
DoofusOfDeath
As the parent of a college sophomore, I entirely share the article's fears and
sentiment.

As a tangential nitpick, I was distracted by this statement: "The average age
of a tenured professor is 55, meaning if you meet a 40-year-old tenured prof,
there is someone at 70 teaching..."

I think it unwittingly supports another point from the article: "A combination
of self-aggrandizement and elitism has convinced American universities that
our services are worth indebting generations of young people, and now risking
becoming agents of spread."

~~~
davrosthedalek
I think tenure at 40 is actually really early.

~~~
s0rce
Seems about right for North America, 12th grade education (18 years old), 4
year college degree (22 years old), 6 year PhD (28 years old), ~5 (3-7) years
postdoc (33 years old), 7 year tenure track (=40 yrs old). If I didn't run
away to a biotech startup after my postdoc it probably would be roughly this
timeline.

Pretty insane really.

------
davrosthedalek
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem of online courses is cheating
on tests. And yes, students cheat.

I'm talking here about Physics, but I assume it's similar in other disciplines
of the hard sciences.

This is less so a problem for higher classes -- you can write take-home
problems which are hard and uncommon enough that you can't google-solve them.
But even then, students will solve them in a team. Or in other words: The best
students will solve it, and everybody will have the solution.

For lower classes, almost by definition, the problems are all textbook. Yes,
you can change numbers around, and formulations, but with some google-fu, most
problems are shallow :)

The situation gets even harder if you want to be fair to the students who are
not on campus. How good is their internet? How do you handle "my internet went
down"? Or: I'm in this other timezone, your test is in the middle of the
night! What I did in the last semester is allow the students to take the test
at any time of the day, and give ample time for the test itself. But of
course, that gives them more chance to communicate, and help each other. Even
randomized tests (i.e. with changing numbers) do not help here, because often
the complication is finding the right formula. Putting in other numbers is
then trivial.

There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down
browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students
computers. _AND_ they are pretty easy to fool anyway.

The only way around that are taking tests in testing centers. But there is an
issue of scale here, especially in COVID times.

The second problem is lab classes. It's very hard to teach experimental setup
techniques online. How do you use a scope? Can you find a bad connection? Why
did this resistor just blow up? You let the students play with sometimes quite
expensive equipment, you can not expect them to just have that at home.

Third, online teaching is a very bad experience for many students. Not so much
of the class itself -- I think this can often be remedied. But things like the
exchange with other students, the opportunity to ask the professor face to
face, but also so basic things like having to get up and out of your room for
class instead of watching it (or a recording) from your bed. Not all, but many
students struggled hard to motivate themselves to study sitting at home.

I do believe that it's better to have no in-person classes, or maybe a bare
minimum. Teachers will try to teach the students as best as possible, but make
no mistake, the education of many students will suffer.

~~~
throwaway6734
>There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down
browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students
computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway.

Couldn't they also just use a second computer?

~~~
nocman
All of the proctored exams I've ever been aware of have either a human
supervisor in the room at all times, and/or a video camera pointed at the
student the whole time.

If you open a second computer they should know about it.

~~~
nitrogen
KVM switch with PIP?

------
throwawaysea
Do universities actually make sense anymore? For me, I felt the majority of
the benefit of college was not the classes but the social experience. But that
is a hell of a price to pay for social experience. Most subjects also do not
need expensive facilities or specialized equipment. More typically, the
knowledge gained over the course of four years can be learned in a self-guided
way. In fact I would say that most subjects are _better_ learned elsewhere,
because you can pace yourself, you can choose to go deep or broad selectively,
you can seek out multiple sources/perspectives, and so forth. I definitely am
concerned that US universities are turning into a monoculture, and an
especially dangerous one that is hostile (at times, physically!) to different
viewpoints. Self-learning will lead to a diversification of admissible ideas.
I also should mention that in big universities, professors are by and large
not interested in teaching as much as their own research. The lectures can
largely be replaced with a video that is recorded once and viewed by many.

The only real value a university confers is certification. Grades are really
the result of a couple exams per class. The value of top universities' name on
a degree is also largely built on the selectivity of their admissions process.
But those students that they admit are not valuable because of the university
- they're valuable regardless. So why not pivot to a world where companies
administer certification tests for different subjects, at different degrees of
difficulty/proficiency, at a low cost?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized
> equipment._ "

The sciences, medicine, and engineering disciplines do. Computer science is a
rarity in being a high-paying field that doesn't.

(Although, given that the average developer doesn't really require a CS
education, as many on HN say, I wouldn't count on CS remaining a high-paying
field.)

~~~
throwawaysea
Aren’t these facilities replicable at a much lower cost? My university had
meager equipment for physics and mechanical engineering for example. I’m less
familiar with the chemical and biology side of things though.

------
gfodor
Remote learning is a ridiculously solvable problem with modern technology -
the fact we seem likely to fail implementing it (due to the inability to
imagine trying tools better than zoom) is both baffling and depressing. Send
the kids VR headsets, get them in rooms on their PCs, phones, and laptops as
avatars using screens and headsets as needed and start experimenting.

------
MattGaiser
The admissions year for the class of 2025 is going to be extremely competitive
between deferrals and closed schools.

------
andrew_eit
Let me see if I understand this correctly (feel free to provide other
perspectives):

Universities are afraid that by charging students $20,000 per year in tuition
for an online degree, people will begin to question its value and possibly
turn to other alternatives (perhaps, maybe also enrol in universities abroad
that have low or no fees). Thereby pulling the curtains on the whole tuition
fee charade, which is that the lion's share is used to find non-academic
related expenses (I'm guessing: administration, outreach, marketing, a nice
website) [1]

Universities that rely heavily on large sums of money from student fees are
now faced with 2 choices: 1) Charge close to the same amount of tuition fees
for an "online" university experience 2) Re-open and continue with business as
usual, hoping the risks of Covid-19 transmission can be mitigated

Option 2 apparently seems like the more attractive version to maintain the
status quo, which leads to attempts at convincing people that restarting face-
to-face teaching is a reasonable way to go forward.

If this is what is going on, then this is yet another issue with universities
that rely too heavily on income from tuition fees to survive.

The primary functions of (public) universities is to educate the population
and conduct research. The ability to perform those functions must be
prioritised and subsidised via public funds to guard against the influence of
financial stability creeping into the decision making process on how to
conduct activities for these primary functions.

I have studied in both the UK (9,000GBP/Year) and Germany (<€500 per year) and
noticed a massive difference in the way both were run and my life as a student
in each.

[1][https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-
than-...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-half-of-
tuition-fees-spent-on-teaching-at-english-universities)

~~~
claudeganon
Given the infection curve in the US, scenario 2 defies the laws of nature, so
I hope universities don’t try it. I don’t doubt that some will, but under no
circumstances should it be considered a reasonable option.

~~~
Miner49er
From my understanding most Universities are currently planning on 2, but with
going online after Thanksgiving.

~~~
claudeganon
Sure, but they'll either be forced to change course by states, insurance-
related concerns, or when people start dying on their campuses. The reality of
the pandemic has little to do with their performances of safety or viability.

------
empath75
The problem is that have a college degree is the pre-requisite for getting a
professional job, rather than having the knowledge that a college degree is
supposed to represent.

~~~
kube-system
It is not uncommon for employers to accept equivalent experience in lieu of a
formal degree.

~~~
empath75
True and I have a manager level IC job where people above me have repeatedly
asked how I got the job when I don’t have a degree and have to get people to
rewrite job requirements every time I do a transfer here.

------
rafaelturk
I wish I could have Professor Galloway as a board member, however I'm afraid
that I would to often hear undeniable truths about my management tough to
digest

------
9214
Title convinced me that this has something to do with a modern reincarnation
of Unix ed editor.

------
MintelIE
Farming foreigners doesn't work well when global travel is shut down. And
Universities get so much more money from foreign students that they've become
focused on bringing in these folks over the people from the states who started
them for the benefit primarily of the state's residents.

This really ramped up in the mid to late 1990s when we were told that
Universities should be run more like businesses.

------
bobthechef
The modern university is not a true university. It’s a scam that breeds
savages that, at best, leave with some technical savvy and at worst inculcates
in them toxic ideology.

“The Idea of a University” by John Henry Newman

[http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html](http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html)

------
verdverm
For a professor, the author does a terrible job presenting the complete
picture, and like most in academia, select those data points which "support"
their claims. You should not trust their opinions.

If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those
under 30. Time to stop destroying the youth by de-educating them. Stop being
so scared. Let locals decided how to handle things. Stop picking isolated
stories and applying blanket rules.

~~~
yardie
That’s a serious assertion you are making. COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than
the flu across the population. Dropping to almost 0 for babies. But we can’t
let infants run the country while everyone > 30 stays home.

~~~
claudeganon
We initially thought it might be true for the young, but the deaths of infants
and severe complications in children now suggests otherwise.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.htm)

