

Texas Governor's call for $10,000 bachelor's degrees stumps educators - cwan
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/perrys-call-for-10-000-bachelors-degrees-stumps-1248814.html

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dmm
Colleges don't give a damn about tuition costs. Students don't give a damn
about tuition costs. The cause of all of this is the federal subsidies of
student loans.

If the direct result of a university raising tuition by 10% is that 5% of the
student body drops out because of costs they would damn well find a way to
make schools cheaper. As it is right now the incentives lie in making fancier
student housing and more expensive programs to compete with other schools
funded, ultimately, with federal money.

On the other hand, if the main costs are salaries it might not be so simple.
Good people are expensive.

~~~
jaysonelliot
I had to choose between MIT and the University of Iowa when I graduated high
school.

My tuition was paid by a small amount of scholarship and a combination of Pell
Grants and student loans. I could have gone to MIT and ended up with a massive
debt, but decided that I didn't want to be saddled with that.

You better believe I gave a damn about tuition costs.

~~~
kunjaan
>I had to choose between MIT and the University of Iowa

You had to choose between MIT and UofIowa? Most of the people I know who are
at MIT also got into other great schools. Did you get into anything better
than UofIowa? What is your major? Did you graduate? If so, do you regret not
going to MIT? Don't you think it would have made a difference in the long run
to have graduated from MIT? This is really really interesting.

~~~
jaysonelliot
U of Iowa is also a great school. One of the things I would say is actually
better about U of I than MIT is the diversity of programs that it is great at.

Iowa has the world famous Writer's Workshop, one of the top medical schools in
the country, the largest Dada art collection outside of Zurich, and an amazing
media school, just to name a few.

The issue was one of cost, but I'm glad I chose the school I did.

I was in Boston last weekend, and spent the day at the MIT museum. It was
inspiring, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I felt a bit of regret, looking at
all the accomplishments of MIT students.

When I was a kid, I must have read Steven Levy's "Hackers" half a dozen times.
To me, the MIT hackers spending days on end cloistered in a basement with
Chinese takeout and soldering guns was about the most exciting thing I could
imagine. That's what I wanted to be.

I started out majoring in mathematics, but I was drawn to the equipment in the
media department. I ended up with a major that I created with my advisor (Iowa
was starting to experiment with customized majors) which combined
communications with multimedia art.

In my junior year, I started a 'zine, thanks to the computer lab with its
desktop publishing software and scanners. By the end of the year, it was
making money, and my best friend and I had started a store. We both dropped
out, and I went on to publish the magazine as an actual business. It lasted
long enough to get me into web design in 1995, and my career took a completely
different turn. I'm now the national head of a UX department for a large
agency based in New York.

I wish I had been able to go to MIT. I imagine that I would have been someone
like Jeff Han or Marc Andreesen, but the reality is that going to MIT wouldn't
have been an automatic ticket to brilliance. It still would have been me, with
my lack of focus and direction at the time. Jeff Han and Marc Andreesen didn't
go to MIT, nor did Steve Jobs, or Woz, or Dean Kamen... it's all about the
person, not the school.

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bugsy
They can't think of any way how?

Maybe they could cut back on the resort like environments?

If these educators lack the ability to imagine how it's possible, maybe they
shouldn't be teaching.

Here's one idea of many. Average time to graduate is in excess of five years
now. We also read that most college students have to take remedial classes. We
also read that 1/3 of college students learn nothing before they graduate, not
because they already knew it, but because they learned nothing. OK, stop
accepting students that need remedial classes. If you can't add two fractions
together or write a 5 paragraph essay at a sixth grade level, you should not
be in college end of story. Just stop accepting these people. But do write
down the names of the schools they went to, and shut down those schools if
there are more than a certain number of these illiterate people graduating. Or
why not just return to some vocational education. It's absurd to think that
the entire public is college material and people are some sort of uniform
robots that can be programmed to do high tech work. A lot of people are not so
smart. That's just the way they are. I am tired of having to fix my own
plumbing because I can't find a good plumber because there is no vocational
education! Plumbing pays $100 an hour if you have your own truck! That's 12
times more than most PhD grad students make.

Huge amounts of resources are wasted at college dealing with people who should
not be there. No college in the US should have a class in basic arithmetic or
writing. Those classes should not exist. If you need those classes, go to an
adult education center that services the homeless and ex convicts. Not
college.

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jaysonelliot
I went to college at the University of Iowa in the 1990s. In-state tuition
came to about $2,000 per year.

Even adjusted for inflation, that would be maybe a little over $3,000 a year
today.

The costs of higher education are out of control.

~~~
amock
How much of subsidy is the state government providing? Utah also has very low
in state tuition, but only because the state income tax subsidizes it.

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mschwar99
While this seems to be mainly a headline grabbing talking point that is
lacking any path to implementation, Rick Perry (or at least one of his speech
writing advisors) seems to have some interestingly disruptive ideas about
using technology to make education both better and cheaper. The call for a
$10,000 bachelors seems to hinge mainly on utilizing web based technologies
and distance learning.

During the recent election he also advocated replacing elementary school
textbooks with laptops. The laptops could be used to provide students with
electronic copies of textbooks that were more up to date, cheaper, and able to
be supplemented with educational games and multimedia.
(<http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EUFAVG0.htm>)

Then again if they come from Rick Perry those laptops might have several
gigabytes of creationism along for the
ride.([http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=1312...](http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=13125)).

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ZachPruckowski
This whole idea of "let's move to online learning and AP classes as a
substitute for learning at an actual college" is going to seriously
shortchange students. AP classes are nowhere near as educational as taking a
college level class (even if you ultimately 5'd the exam), and I'm skeptical
about online learning because I feel like a lot of what I learned in college I
learned outside the classroom.

~~~
bugsy
Well, maybe it is useful for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went to one
of the best universities (famous west coast one) and was really looking
forward to it. I had dropped out of high school to go to community college
where I did learn many good things like calculus and physics.

At the big name university though, I learned almost nothing in the classes.

Partly this was because I had been programming and designing and inventing for
years, reading journal articles, participating in conferences, selling my
software, freelancing, etc. The classes were really backwards and a waste of
time.

But it was also because the professors at research universities are really
lousy at teaching and don't give one whit whether they are effective, assuming
they can even be bothered to show up for lecture rather than send their pet
grad student/slave boy.

Did I learn things outside of classes, like you mention? Absolutely! And I
would have learned those things outside of classes by not enrolling in the
first place at all.

All in all I wasted a bunch of money and a few years of my life that I should
have spent starting my next business earlier rather than stalling out while my
competitors advanced.

Now I am not saying it is useless for everyone.

But something like engineering, come on, that stuff can all be learned faster
and deeper from practicing it rather than listening to BS from guys that have
never released a single finished product in a usable state in their entire
lives. What the hell do they know.

Medicine, sure, people should go to medical school.

Languages? Move to that country. History? Library. Engineering? Build and
invent things; then try to manufacture, market and sell them. It goes on and
on.

When books cost more than a years salary in the middle ages, university made
sense.

Now I can buy books for $10 on the net that have more info in them than the
$200 college textbooks, and I can participate in discussion groups and mailing
lists with professionals to learn more of any craft, and I can send emails to
the greatest experts in the world and get a response back within hours.

The internet community has replaced college. Universities are obsolete. Going
into debt for that stuff is just for dumb people.

OK, I got a bit off topic there. Let me get back to the post I started with. I
absolutely 100% agree that any sort of online learning community that you have
to pay for or that is associated with these obsolete institutions called
universities will be a substandard way to learn things and should be avoided.
I totally agree with that. However, that doesn't mean that online access to
community doesn't work. It does! It's just that so-called educators nowadays
can't possibly succeed at educating on line when they can't even do it in
person. Non-organized independent learning communities, whether they are
called that or not (they aren't called that) are in fact a fantastic way to
learn and far superior to modern institutions. As learning communities of
equals, they are closer to the universities of ancient times when people
actually became educated.

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us
I think that rather than just throwing out numbers, what they should do is
evaluate what the actual cost of education would be and remove all the useless
excess courses added to the curriculum unnecessarily.

Blindly raising tuition and charging more than necessary isn't good nor is it
smart to just slap a blind number like $10,000 and ignore all the economics at
play. While I think the four year rule is somewhat good for commitment, I also
strongly believe the education system needs a major makeover instead. Not all
degrees are the same and should not all fall under the same timeline as each
other. Everything should be restructured to make the best of each person's
education instead.

~~~
sharadgopal
"what the actual cost of education would be and remove all the useless excess
courses added to the curriculum unnecessarily."

couldn't agree more.

i am currently in college, and i have to take 3 engineering electives
(classes, outside of my engineering major), 2 social science electives, and i
get to take 3 "any/free" electives.

one could make an argument that it broadens the educational experience or
whatever, but from experience, half these classes are BS, and almost all of
these just suck up a lot of time, which could be better spent focusing on
one's chosen field of study/ or other interests.

~~~
kurige

      one could make an argument that it broadens the educational experience or whatever
    

While I tend to agree with your point, the truth is that undergraduate study
is not about specialization. There is a trend in that direction, but in my
mind it's a bad thing, not a good thing.

In a perfect world you would take comprehensive classes specific to your
chosen field, but those classes would take a more holistic approach, and would
draw course material from a multitude of sources.

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thrill
Remove the non-profit status (i.e. make 'em for-profit) of all educational
institutions and the problem will sort itself out within a generation.

