
That Old College Lie - robg
http://www.democracyjournal.org/that_old_college_lie.html#
======
jackfoxy
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future.
Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are
also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current
education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon.
Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be
education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.

~~~
ubernostrum
_At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future._

I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher
education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not
to be personalized. The purpose is twofold:

* Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture.

* Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information.

In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them
up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.

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yequalsx
In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to
higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like
the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc.
when thinking about higher education.

Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The
typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a
research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of
universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large
division I teams do no pay for themselves.

Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the
general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed
expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are
required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for
'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it
shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding
university sports.

Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct
labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the
typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.

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mkramlich
I too think there's a problem with higher education but I am doing something
about. More details here on HN when ready.

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jgg
Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding
schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the
funding for sports at major Universities come from?

~~~
yequalsx
Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large
part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly
corrupting influence on the university.

EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because
it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending
x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research
facility.

~~~
anamax
> Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in
> large part, from student fees and the general academic fund.

Citation or definitions needed.

For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school.
However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and
possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and
tickets.

The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports.

Yes, including the newish football stadium.

~~~
yequalsx
Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money.
Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful
of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research
because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports
expenditures.

Your perception is almost entirely wrong.

~~~
anamax
I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The
lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If
Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost
more than the profit from the big ticket sports.

And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.

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pw0ncakes
Some thoughts:

1\. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your
own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a
20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the
time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you
take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet
and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass
through higher education.

2\. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's
education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college
"correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the
real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a
very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some
students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an
excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially
acceptable.

3\. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in
culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that
is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a
"high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships
aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although
universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is _not_ the
source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is
that the universities are raising tuitions _while_ slashing academic jobs: one
or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising
costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable.

We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it
otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists,
writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors
are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work.

4\. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based
support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant
since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college
will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which
hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party)
believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic
equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher
education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are
paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three
"parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they
wanted out of it.

Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this
movement was mistaken.

~~~
stcredzero
_College is different. You’re paying up-front for professors you’ve never met
and degree programs you probably haven’t even chosen yet_

A little initiative, and this doesn't have to be the case.

~~~
tibbon
College is also a great time to figure out what you don't want to do. While
some people already know that they want to be a Pediatrist at 16-17 when they
are researching college, others might _think_ they want to be a (insert
career) but they have limited experience actually interacting with that field.

Some of the smartest people I've known going to the Ivy league schools seemed
to change what they wanted to do while there, or got their degree and then did
something completely different- realizing that they enjoyed learning about the
subject but didn't want to work in the field. It isn't that they didn't have
initiative, but figuring out your entire life at 17 and researching/meeting
every professor for every college that you're applying to is both time
consuming and expensive.

~~~
stcredzero
I'm not sure it's so productive to get caught up into the rat-race to get into
a good school. After all, there is a tremendous amount of emotional energy and
effort expended by a great many people to this end. What if the lion's share
of that energy could be devoted to substantive work? Ok, so many will claim
that a lot of the things that they did in High School to pad their resumes
were also "substantive work." Let's be real about this, though. By
"substantive work" I don't mean educational opportunities, or some sort of
scale model preparation or role-playing for what you might do in the future, I
mean actual value-added, getting paid for it in the market work. What if even
half of that which is just "preparation" could be harvested as real work?

I'm sure that this would result not only in increased productivity of the
economy as a whole, but it would also result in _superior educational
experiences_.

Also, there is no reason at all why this has to be structured in a way that
gets in the way of "figuring out what I want to do." In fact, I'll bet that
actually doing work will provide better information on which to make those
decisions.

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rick_2047
"If everyone knows that what is happening is wrong, then why doesn't anyone
fix it?"

This question is hogging me for the past couple of years or so. I find it
impossible to answer.

~~~
pmichaud
You just need to step back and look at the incentives. The vast majority of
college students are there to be "certified impressive", and socialized to
cooperate in the workforce, NOT to learn. If learning were the goal, the
system would look radically different. As it stands, students get their
certification, employers get their pre-socialized workforce.

The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average
student makes them untenable to hire. Unfortunately for those of us who would
like to see the system improve, the required level seems to be dropping as
technology allows corporations to automate a lot of tasks, and make other
tasks nearly fool proof (think customer service flow charts).

For those roles that require actual acumen and responsibility, training for
those will continue as it has since time immemorial: passed directly from
family member or family friend to eager young adults, which is a primary force
creating and maintaining class boundaries.

~~~
epochwolf
The one problem is the professors think that college is for learning.

I'm one of those in college solely to get "certified impressive".

~~~
snth
In my experience most professors think that college is for funding their
research.

~~~
alexgartrell
Professors don't collect money from undergrads to pay for research; they
collect grants to fund themselves, their students, their labs, etc. They spend
a tremendous amount of time and energy writing these grant proposals and
submitting them to all the right people.

The reality is that most Research Professors (not all professors are on the
tenure track, after all) are more motivated by research than by education,
because they have to be. Nearly everything is stapled to #/quality of
publications. If you don't like that, you'll have to revamp the whole system.

Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the
bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real
interest in the topics at hand. Add on to that that the professor has likely
been researching an offshoot of this topic for years or even decades and you
don't exactly have any motivation for the professor to put himself out there
for the student.

If you want a professor to really care about you and make an active investment
in you, you have to engage with him or her somewhere outside of class. The
best way to do this is through research. If you want to put in your minimum to
get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well.

~~~
rwl
"Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the
bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real
interest in the topics at hand."

Teaching students sucks _when students aren't engaged_. It sucks to teach
students who don't actually want to learn something; they just want to fulfill
a requirement, or put the class on their CV. You're exactly right to say that
"If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get
that professor's minimum as well."

That is, when teaching sucks, it sucks because students are participating in
the exact same behavior that colleges are: bolstering their perceived
reputations. Students do this because they have been taught (by colleges and
the schools that prepare them for college) that reputation is what counts. So,
if you fix the reputation-seeking system, student and professorial engagement
in learning should increase, too.

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epochwolf
> A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31
> percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in "prose
> literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for
> example.

Well shock and awe, people can't do a college compare and contrast assignment
after they leave college. Just ask them what's different in the articles.

> More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the
> cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.

A skill that isn't strictly needed if those people can use a calculator, it's
good enough. Stop measuring how effective school is by having people retake
tests they took in school.

~~~
nkohari
I think you're missing the point by a wide margin. Determining the difference
between two articles and ordering supplies are two very common tasks -- if
people with a college degree lack the ability to do them, we really are in
trouble.

If they were testing something that was obviously very college-centric but not
a commonplace in a regular job -- say, integral calculus -- I would agree with
you. However, if someone graduated with a degree in physics and they couldn't
do calculus, I would say there was a problem also. It sounds like they just
tested the bare minimum of skills.

~~~
electromagnetic
I work in construction and I work with guys who haven't graduated high school,
but they can easily perform the basic arithmetic required for the latter of
the tasks, and they're frequently doing the former when discussing everything
from radio stations to movies and video games.

For anyone who graduated college and can't accomplish these thoughtless tasks,
all I can say is that they wasted way too much money to essentially get dumber
than your average high school dropout. Similar procedures can be performed for
a much more reasonable price and involves taking a hammer to the flattest part
of a persons skull . . . although I'm unsure even a major concussion and
amnesia could make someone dumb enough to forgot how to do 1 + 1 + 1

