
Modern universities are an exercise in insanity (2018) - elsewhen
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/01/modern-universities-are-exercise-in.html
======
laurentdc
I paid zero for my university since EU, but I still kind of feel scammed out
of five years of my life. I got a degree only because I was young and
family/friends pushed me into it since "that's what everyone does".

The networking thing, meh. Maybe if you attend the top 1% of universities that
have some barrier of entry for people who're actually talented/determined to
achieve a goal and care about what they do. Or expensive private ones with
industry connections. Which feels a bit like "easy mode" but whatever :)

But in the average public university most students you meet are just coasting
through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real life.
Professors just don't care and they never have time. Even the job placement
events, it's all a bullshit perpetuating machine.

~~~
WalterBright
> But in the average public university most students you meet are just
> coasting through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real
> life.

Perhaps that's an unintended consequence of it being free, just like high
school.

If you're paying the bill, it's a lot less likely you'll be coasting through.

~~~
xyzzyz
European countries with free public universities also usually have private,
paid colleges. In practice, those are where you _really_ coast through.

~~~
WalterBright
Why would you pay $$$ just to coast? Just go rent a resort on the
Mediterranean if that's what you want to do.

~~~
xyzzyz
To get a piece of paper saying “bachelor” on it. Some people think it’s
useful, and for some, it might even be.

~~~
sandworm101
Because you need that word for the next steps: words like "master" and
"doctor" or even "engineer" that have real dollar values.

~~~
thu2111
Do they though? In most parts of the world academics are not well paid
relative to what they can get in the private sector. Even for most liberal
arts subjects you can get paid more to produce good entertainment or good
books than you'd get in the academy.

You can become a master programmer with no degree at all. Look at all the
successful CEOs who dropped out.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
"There are dozens of us, dozens!" Bill Gates.

------
zamalek
The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went
to one, and believes it is necessary.

That's a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with
success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other
hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college -
which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so
forth). There is no justification for the cost, it's a very expensive printing
press.

While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash
grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive
it as a scam.

~~~
KingOfCoders
I have studied computer science as master in Germany (Diplom) with the best
possible final exam score (1,0) in databases, distributed systems, etc. That
didn't help me very much with my career. I've worked on the side in startups.
That experience helped me found my first VC funded startup and helped my
career later on as CTO in several companies. I'm now working as a CTO coach
and looking back, my university days didn't have much impact, if any at all.

Have I've learned anything useful? Yes. Was the outcome worth 6 years? No. I
would have learned the same things watching excellent Youtube (Standford, MIT,
...) videos for one year.

EY [1] has shown several years ago that university had no impact on the career
of their employees and dropped that requirement.

As someone who hired and managed many people I never looked at university
degrees. And I never saw a difference.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-
ditche...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-
need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees)

~~~
YZF
How many people do you know who know things like statistics, analysis of
algorithms, discrete math, calculus, to the same level as someone with a
Master's degree in math or comp. sci. and just learnt that by watching YouTube
videos from Stanford or MIT? I know some people (including myself) who got
some exposure to some of this without getting a degree (I got one eventually)
but finding someone as well rounded as a good curriculum is very rare.

Watching videos is more like thinking you're learning. In order to learn you
need to practice and internalize.

Now you might argue all this stuff doesn't matter. And if you're just cranking
out some mundane code maybe it doesn't. But sometimes it does. I'd imagine
it'd be hard being a CTO of in a deeply technical business without having the
in-depth theoretical knowledge but CTO can mean lots of different things in
different companies.

All that said universities are far from perfect and their curriculum is a
mixture of practical and theoretical trying to balance preparing future
researchers and scientists and preparing the future workforce. Software
development also tends to be very diverse. I do think software developers need
some of this background and unfortunately it's much harder to get it without
going to university...

The other thing is IMO universities can't make someone who has no aptitude to
software a good software developer.

~~~
KingOfCoders
I've learned much more from watching statistics videos from top notch YouTube
lectures (I like the Harvard ones) than from statistics at university,
although there was a lot of it. That said I regularly need to look up
statistics, probabilitiy distributions and hypothesis tests in books when I
need them twice a year.

The main problem I see in startups I coach is they think they are "data
driven" but marketing, sales and top management lacks the proper statistical
understanding to make useful decisions. They forgot what they have learned at
university and feel no need to relearn statistics for their job. They make all
the rookie mistakes.

~~~
theshadowknows
If you have to look them up then you haven’t learned them. You learned about
them and know what to look for. But you didn’t really learn them.

~~~
KingOfCoders
With 50 I can't remember things I've learned with 20 and need to look up many
things from my youth, so I guess I've never learned a thing. Thanks for that
cherry blossom thought.

~~~
jldugger
The point here is that it's easy to mistake understanding in the moment for
durable learning. It's not ideal, and I won't say it's intentional, but I
expect the repeated, spaced exposure process of reading, lecture, homework,
exams and finals to yield a little more durable result than a focused video
only curriculum with zero testing for retention. Students are notoriously bad
at self-evaluation, conflating mastery in the moment with learning.

However, I think if someone tried to partner video lectures with a spaced
repetition tool like Anki they _might_ be able to outperform the college
treatment group. It's a tool I've been exploring, both personally and
professionally. In my youth, I had learned the US state capitals (as many do)
and Anki proved pretty quickly I had forgotten that; the same goes for say,
bone names, constellations, reading music, foreign languages studied, etc.

------
dorkwood
My bachelor's degree was basically a scam. It was from a well-known university
in Australia, too. Teachers who barely knew anything about what they were
teaching, outdated course material, the lowest bar imaginable to get a passing
grade. At a guess, I'd say that 99% of the graduates would not have had the
skills to be employed in their chosen field upon completing the degree. I only
stuck it out through the whole thing because I was a dumb kid who didn't know
any better. Now I'll be paying off the debt for the rest of my life.

~~~
isubasinghe
Out of curiosity, what university did you go to?

~~~
slantaclaus
Let me guess for him: James Cook University perhaps?

------
zhdc1
Universities are and always have been expensive.

This cost was hidden in the US and a lot of Western European countries by
extremely generous government support. Now that this is going away, more so in
some places than others, it sounds like people are suffering from sticker
shock.

Is this a fair indictment of the modern university? There are definitely ways
to lower the total cost of higher education, but how much I don't know.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that there's anything ok with 50k-70K
annual tuition. However, there is a spending floor that has to be met to fund
an "ok" no-thrills research university.

Examples: KIT, a very good research university in Germany, spends about 35K
EUR per student. I wasn't able to find a source, but I remember reading that
the University of Maryland in the states spends about 20-25K USD per student.
Fu et al., 2019 quotes about 390K NTD (~13K USD) as the average per student
spending in Taiwan.

~~~
lumost
The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures
are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The
university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority
of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history.

Given that the professors/assistants are certainly not getting paid within 2
orders of magnitude of 25k per student . There must either be irrationally
high Capex expenditure, irrationally high administrative overhead, or
universities are spending _large_ fractions of tuition on other activities.

~~~
zhdc1
You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be
counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable
teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half
of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries,
overhead, and administration).

Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured
salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along
with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a
bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as
social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations).

The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe,
which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average
student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that
KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal
halls.

------
glangdale
I'm not sure I buy the idea that a no-name setup can get away with paying
adjuncts to tutor the same as universities can pay them to teach. Even though
the prospect of jumping to tenure-track is increasingly remote, I think there
is an element of wishful thinking with a lot of adjuncts hanging around the
university semester after semester. I'm not sure the magic applies to No Name
Brand Tutoring School.

That being said, universities are preposterously top-heavy and loaded with
insane numbers of overheads - academic superstars who don't teach, layer upon
layer of admin (Australian universities are stuffed to the gills with managers
and marketers and social media consultants and Deputy Vice Chancellors In
Charge of Being Someone's Mate, etc), and lifestyle stuff for the students.

------
cashsterling
I agree... the tuition cost of modern colleges is insane.

I went to Cal St. back in the 90's... total cost was under 10k USD including
books. I paid for a lot of it working construction and summer internships.

I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same
degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used
the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not
"10x the tuition cost" better.

I went to Carnegie Mellon for grad school... no tuition plus a livable
stipend. Pittsburgh was an inexpensive and fun city to live in as a student.
It was a great experience. Nobody cared where I got my BS after I finished
grad school.

Thing is... now even Cal State in-state tuition is so much more expensive than
it used to be. The situation really sucks.

~~~
WalterBright
> I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same
> degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses
> used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did...
> but not "10x the tuition cost" better.

I went to Caltech in the 70's. I compared course catalogs with Arizona State
U. Required undergrad class at CIT were grad level classes at ASU. When I
worked at Boeing I found my BS math abilities were at the same level as those
with a Masters.

As for books, at CIT many of the textbooks required for a class were not
actually used. The prof would present his own curriculum, with the class
textbook there just for background.

To be fair, I didn't take the actual courses at ASU, I just compared the
course catalog for topics covered.

~~~
cashsterling
Yeah... no dig intended against Caltech or MIT. They definitely push their
student a lot harder and more consistently than I was pushed in many of my
classes in undergrad. I wanted to go to Caltech or Harvey Mudd College out of
HS but didn't have the means.

I had the privilege to work at JPL for about 3 years and worked with a lot of
folks from Caltech and MIT in that time... all brilliant and wonderful people.

------
peter_d_sherman
Modern Universities do not teach how to spot equal-but-opposite thoughts,
concepts, arguments, and ideas.

In other words, they teach students _what_ to think, not _how_ to think...

Upon graduation, the new graduate (in addition to their college loans and
degree!) has, by virtue of their education, been given a virtual "grab bag" of
many small, relative, _convenient_ truths which only relate to special
circumstances and corner cases, which all have intelligent and impressive
sounding lingo/jargon/buzzwords/"$2 names" attached to them, such that the
graduate may then, later on in life, pick and choose from this "grab bag" and
_selectively apply_ those small relative truths to any problem (and sound very
intelligent in the process!) that they or someone else may be having...

...All _while missing the big picture_ , and/or _conveniently ignoring one or
more other larger, more important truths that may be present as well_. (Error
of Omission).

When I hear minor truths, by a so-called "Academic", selectively applied to a
problem or problems, I think to myself, with respect to what the
speaker/writer said:

 _" Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it."_ (With my
apologies to the Principal in Billy Madison!)

Yes, it is actually possible to _dumb things down while appearing smart_ , and
the way this is done is through selective (minor) truth observation, AKA
"Error Of Omission".

Otherwise known as missing the big picture, putting too much attention on
minutiae, making mountains out of molehills, presenting the weaker argument as
the stronger, etc., etc.

It happens in academic papers, it happens in the news media...

"Grab Bags" of small, relative truths, but small relative truths with
_impressive sounding languaging_ around them...

And yet, there are a lot of good academic papers, and education (the right
education!) is valuable from many other perspectives...

------
econcon
People often forget that one of the biggest value of having degree is the
optics that comes with it.

Basically if a person has spent time getting a degree this shows a important
value - risk averseness.

Another value it shows is - being subservient. You are allowing some professor
or institution to have significant control over you well past age 18 as an
adult.

Risk averseness shows that you'll not be duping the company or stealing their
secrets and starting a new company as a competitor and you prefer having a
stable salary than mega payoff by selling the tech of the company where you
work.

And being subservient means, you'll listen to all the BS magement wants and
also you'll not question the authority or go against them.

~~~
wurst_case
When I'm hiring, these are no the qualities I'm looking for.

------
tkgally
The coronavirus crisis and the enforced shift to online teaching might very
well lead to major changes in higher education.

At the university where I work in Japan, we began teaching all of our classes
online a month and a half ago using Zoom. I don't know anyone, teacher or
student, who thought that they would prefer online classes, but now that we
have been doing it for a while it's clear there are advantages.

Perhaps most significant is the fact that teachers and students do not need to
live near campus. The students in my undergraduate classes are scattered
throughout Japan, and my graduate seminar includes students in Thailand and
Indonesia who were unable to enter Japan when travel was shut down in early
April. Some of our teachers are also stuck outside the country and are
conducting their classes from overseas. Overall, classes seem to be going
surprisingly smoothly, and students are able to participate equally in class
discussions regardless of their location.

What the author of this post presented as a cost-comparison exercise—get a
group of people who want to study the same thing and hire a teacher—is much
more feasible when the students and teacher do not have to be in the same
geographic area. It will be interesting to see how such possibilities change
higher education in the years ahead.

------
AmericanChopper
I think the root of the problem is the student loan system. You can get a
student loan without any consideration for your creditworthiness, with the
general compromise that the debt is rather hard to discharge. This system
makes sense because the loan is supposed to provide for an investment in your
future. But for any course of study that does not measurably improve your
future earning potential, this premise completely falls over.

Young students know this, but it seems not to deter them, and nobody ends up
winning except the universities that collect their tuition. As far as I’ve
ever known, the primary objective of the student loan system was to facilitate
social mobility, not subsidize the existence of humanities departments.
Because it’s really hard to argue that it’s achieving the former in its
current state.

I also question how seriously a lot of young students take the obligations of
having a student loan. I think it would be condescending to write it off
entirely to a lack of maturity, but I really don’t get the impression that
most of them are fully considering what the costs actually are. If you cut of
the never ending supply of free money, I’m sure the universities would have to
put more consideration into delivering value.

~~~
ALittleLight
When I was in school I would frequently run into people who would say things
like "I'm studying English... So that means I'll be working in a coffee shop
after I graduate, Ha ha". I always wanted to tell people to stop joking about
that, because it was true. I wanted to say something like "Don't you get it?
That is really going to happen, but you could change that now by studying
something more employable." Though I never did because it seemed rude.

I tend to think that most people will do what they feel they are supposed to
do without really thinking things through for themselves. They feel they are
supposed to go to college, so they do. People tell them to pick a major they
are interested in, so they do. Lots of people don't seem to actually stop,
think, and plan out major life courses.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
STEM people really struggle with the idea that the humanities are not
vocational training - because they _are_ vocational training for the political
class, who don't need to understand STEM because they use rhetoric,
persuasion, and political manipulation to get what they want.

For these people, scientists and technologists are the hired help. While
you're telling yourself that knowing how to compile Linux from source gives
you god-like superpowers, they're running astroturfing and media campaigns
that win elections and define national policy.

Some of those people have English degrees. Because - why not? (In the UK
they're more likely to have a PPE from Oxford, but if they have the
connections English or some other non-technical subject is fine too.)

In the same way that you won't understand what high school math is really for
unless you put it in context with a STEM degree, you can't understand what the
humanities are really for unless you put them in a political context.

~~~
AmericanChopper
You've just described why the most common qualifications held in the Senate
and in the House are law degrees first, and MBAs second. The humanities is not
the educational background of our political class, it's mostly Law, Business
and Medicine.

------
_nalply
Labor has changed and is still changing. It's getting more and more difficult
to get a job that pays. Meritocracy? Meh. It's bullshit being peddled to shut
us up. It's just connections and luck. Even the able ones have to be in the
right place at the right time and need to jump through a million hoops. It
feels like a never-ending captcha session.

Bullshit at universities is backpressure from the labor market. Backed up
bullshit spills over to education at all levels. Perhaps it is one of the
symptoms of the end of the labor era.

And now that we can see this laid bare clearer and clearer: What can parents
do today for their children?

Education doesn't have the primary goal to procure a job. This was never
really the thing. And even at this education is failing more and more. So what
needs to be done for children and young adults? What is the goal of education?

As a father I have been thinking about this for years. I don't have an answer
for the material needs of the generation of my descendants. However I know
that people need a meaning of life especially if they are poor. I am trying to
teach my children to look out for their own meaning of life and to work hard
to attain it by themselves.

I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the
people when there's not enough labor for everybody. And then? What can they do
if they don't have a job? That's what I am trying to find out with my children
growing up. Humanities are important to create meaning.

However one thing is sure: If I detect bullshit permeating an university I am
not going to suggest an expensive course to my children!

~~~
tsimionescu
> I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of
> the people when there's not enough labor for everybody.

There is a very clear answer to this, it's just that people who are not labour
are trying very hard to avoid giving it. We should all be working far less for
the same money we are getting today. As the productivity of work increases,
hours worked should be going down, without affecting wages. Right now, the
benefits of increased productivity are all going into profits, that is, into
the hands of the very few.

We have been here before, and our great-grandfathers and great-grand-
grandmothers have fought for reducing the wrok week many times before,
successfully. We will probably soon have to fight this fight again.

~~~
bnjms
This solution will not work for many jobs. There are some jobs where it
doesn’t make sense to work less time during a day. And where you more than
less need to work often so you don’t go dull.

Medicine in hospitals are one. Drs in threads like this will acknowledge the
long hours are bad but required to minimize handoffs.

In IT project work is naturally optimized to minimize the number of people
required to put in new systems. And I’m going to offer to work more for more
money most of the time.

I think some form of UBI would be better but I can’t yet imagine the required
changes to society required to keep it from a dystopia. Maybe the two ideas
work better together. Since to me only a poverty level UBI makes sense. But
lowering the base hours to 30-35 before overtime kicks in with a low UBI might
have an interesting outcome where people still need to work but don’t have to
work, and more employees are required.

~~~
tsimionescu
I see no reason to imagine 40 hours a week is some special number. If we could
go from 60h weeks to 40h weeks, why stop there even as productivity increases?

Note that overtime is still possible, but needs to be paid. But as a general
rule, the increased benefits from automation should be felt by workers too,
not just owners.

Of course, once you get to 100% automation this simple reduction in hours
worked for the same pay breaks down, but few industries are even remotely
close to that.

Edit: doctors in hospitals are a very special case, I think. It is one of the
only jobs where the increased strain on the worker can be accepted, as it
doesn't simply produce profit, it produces much more important human good.
Even more, the problem in Healthcare is definitely not lack of jobs, on the
contrary - there are generally either not enough doctors or not enough
resources to pay for more doctors (and nurses, and other medical personnel).

------
ars
Universities waste way too much money on fancy food, extravagant halls,
amazing experiences.

It's like an amusement park for adults.

Go walk into one and look at all the things that have nothing to do with
learning. Go count how many fancy restaurants they have.

People go there for the experience, and it costs.

They should instead be about learning. Have your experiences later in life, or
just independently instead of expecting the university to do it for you.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
But for a certain kind of person the fancy food etc _is_ the learning. It's a
social environment for making social and professional connections and (often)
a life partner.

Sometimes there's some academic work too.

In reality there's no such thing as "university." There are different
experiences and different goals for different demographics.

They all happen in the same environment, but there will always be [double
figured number] of social, economic, and political games going on at the same
time - sometimes in the same classes - and the demographics involved in each
will often be barely aware of each other.

------
notaphilosopher
I went bankrupt around 2016 and am homeless (vehicle dwelling), yet have
~$9000 USD in student loan debt that wasn't dischargeable or forgivable. I
spent over $40k on a degree I cannot use as I am now considered disabled
(SSDI). Navient is still after me and checks my credit every few months
looking to pounce. I bet they'll reach into my online-only bank account and
take the little money that I need to eat, buy gas, medications, and pay
copays. It took me over 7 years and a lawyer to get SSDI ($1300), and it can
be taken away every 2 years. If you're poor or disabled in America, you're
automatically a criminal trying to steal and so austerity crumbs are
justified.. and delay, hoping you'll just give up or die. For 9 years, I lived
on $199/month for food and $149 in cash.

There is no out for me because 99.99999% of Americans are either too
comfortable, learned helpless cowards, and/or too ignorant to understand how
bad we have it and how much we're being screwed. There will be no rebellion
even though a calm but determined march of 5 million people to the seats of
power could overwhelm any resistance and remove the corruption. The key
problem is endurance by separating church and wealth and mass-media and state
for the future. Without fixing corruption driven by the elites above the
system, nothing can change.. and not preventing them from stealing power some
other way again is only a temporary, pyrrhic victory.

Work stoppages are reactionary temper-tantrums seeking a few more crumbs from
the master. Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are all pointless virtue-
signaling onanisms. Why pick rapist 1 or rapist 2.. presently, voting is
accenting sheepishly to an inverted totalitarian, pluto-kleptocratic empire,
not republican psephocracy. Be like George Carlin and not so.. maybe let's
(assuming you're American) dent the universe and fix this bitch.

~~~
TuringNYC
Firstly, i'm sorry to hear about your situation. I have met so many people
with similar stories about struggles when I lived in the city. I am curious
though -- why aren't more people more angry given how desperately so many
people have their backs against a en economic wall?

Do you think the Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are just appeasement
campaigns to make people think they have a choice? How is it people do not see
through it eventually? (side note: i've been voting in the US for 21yrs and
have only once found a candidate i truly felt inspired to vote for (Bernie))

------
avmich
> This conversation would improve greatly if less folks wrote long lists of
> their complaints about universities and more folks wrote long lists of ideas
> on how to improve them.

It's not a questions of "where we want to be" \- there are examples of good
education systems which can be used. It's rather a question of "how to get
there" \- and here America has to figure out the path from here to there,
which isn't obvious to some, before it can improve things.

~~~
TuringNYC
>> America has to figure out the path from here to there, which isn't obvious
to some, before it can improve things.

Much like healthcare, there are incumbents who are winning big along the way.
I think a lot of the solutions are quite obvious -- it is just there are
people who would come out on the losing end and they fight it. And from what I
can see, the American people are not sufficiently angry about it to really
make it happen (e.g., as they do for more charged wedge issues.)

------
withinboredom
I transferred from a mid-west university to an east coast university in the
US. When I got there and was scheduling I couldn't take any of the advanced
classes I was supposed to for my major, why? I'd never taken College Algebra,
despite taking three semesters of Calculus, Computer Science. At this new
school, College Algebra was a requirement that could not be skipped. I wasted
an entire semester taking electives and Algebra. I was pretty pissed.

------
akater
There's a fairly well-known 2018 book on why education (higher and lower) is
the way it is now:

Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste
of Time and Money”

------
symplee
Does anyone have an actual cost breakdown of every expense that goes into
running a university? It would be great to see this for any major private
college, and/or a public university.

In most of these comment sections I see speculation about why universities are
so expensive. But have never seen the hard data to back it up. Is it really
the luxury dorms? The bloated administration? etc... Anyone have the real
numbers? And how has the budget breakdown changed over time?

------
PeterStuer
In the EU I paid 250 Euro per year, so 1.000 Euro total for my graduate
degree. The US system is insane. Why do you tolerate such obvious
racketeering?

~~~
flowerbeater
Just curious, do you think what you paid is the actual cost to provide you
that education?

~~~
PeterStuer
No. Tuition fees is just one of 5 money streams that the university relies on.
Te others being Research grants, Service provisioning (contract research
mostly), subsidies and Assets & Investments.

------
jerome-jh
With the low interest rates, everything that requires a loan sees over-
inflation. I think this is what is happening with university tuition.

