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==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.==

I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training:

"Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personally and intellectually."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/06/02/purpose-of-c...




> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

When college cost in the US what it did in the 1960s this sort of little bit false-dichotomy, little bit navel gazing question was at least fairly harmless. Now it's just fucking ridiculous even for most public schools.


The state school school is the interesting issue. California has the CSU system that offers education for about 280 a unit or about 3000 before financial aid with over a dozens campuses throughout most of the state in both rural and urban areas. The Cal States have become the primary options for any California residence below upper income. Most states don't have a system similar to this set up with at most 1 or 2 major state schools per state. The cheaper state schools often are key to bringing the price down.


This. For what is costs in 2019 college had better be opening a door to a lucrative career path.


Or it is a luxury good for those who can afford it for their children, like in the old days.


The American college question is always a jobs question dressed up.

There’s no jobs for people.

Therefore people try to get college degrees, even if they aren’t suited for it or going to be happy with it.

This drives up the demand for college, and specifically for degrees that lead to jobs.

This degrades the image and purpose of college (students aren’t here to expand their mind. They’re here so that recruiters won’t ding them.)

All of which leads invariably to Downstream issues, like credential inflation and growing student debt.

Eventually, college = jobs, and one of the greatest achievements of America, its liberals arts education, will tarnish and crumble.


To be clearer, the issue is the hollowing out of the job ecosystem in America.

Economic value now comes from fewer roles, which require specific skill sets to perform.

With more lopsided reward structures (few people corner most of the gains), there is increasing pressure for people to move into the few places where rewards collect.

This ties into the issues like " History majors can't get a job that will help them hold down a house or family".

The societal cost of it is that society becomes a monoculture of a few degrees and sources of information.

The greater advantages of a modern first world society in terms of societal achievement, art, culture and so on weaken.


Wasn't "education and intellectual curiosity" a way to increase people's productivity? (Not even a way, wans't it supposed to be the best way?) Because that's the reason colleges are funded by the government.

There's something very broken with our modern society.


I always thought that college was not to increase your typical office worker's productivity by X% but instead to be a long term bet on massive gains for society through academic research.


If that's the true, we should make colleges more intellectually elitist and put most of the funding on places that provide that better worker's productivity, or simply cut funding if there is no better option.

We also should make it easier for those academics to bring those massive gains, because academia isn't organized for that.

I still think this is not the real goal, but maybe it was at some time. (Is there more than one goal? The system appears to not be optimized for any reasonable goal.)


That's probably not the (only) way to do it. There are two interrelated but distinct types of breakthroughs that happen in research: the kind that occurs well within expectation, the next step in a well-understood plan; and the kind that is serendipitous, usually by way of uncommon or novel interpersonal or intellectual communication. For the latter, you need... diversity. Expertise, too, of course, and some amount of common ground. However, the most interesting and creativity-enabling interactions require people who aren't all aiming at the same thing before they initially interact.

On top of that, it can be difficult to separate the people who are actually intellectual elites and the people who are good self-marketers.

I kind of think we should just be committing a lot more funding to those interested, who meet some reasonable, objective level of expertise.


It'd be hard to justify the costs - both actual college costs and opportunity costs if it was purely for intellectual curiosity.


What if increased intellectual curiosity has a high enough ROI over someone's lifetime to cover the costs? What if the higher education allows them to enjoy life more and thus increase quality of life over the long-run?

I'm not saying either of these are the case, but it is worth exploring before we outright dismiss.


Especially since intellectual curiosity can be easily satisfied in other ways these days.


This is because college majors people do can be broken down into half as being generally viewed as practical or career focused such as STEM, business, education, agriculture, communications, ect. Where as the other half tend to be more enriching fields, Psychology, Visual and Performing arts, Humanities and other social sciences. (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_322.10.a...)

The other point I think worth adding isn't that many of these humanities and arts fields are unemployable, but largely that they are some of the most popular majors and in turn their economic value is diminished as such. If there were twice or three times as many graduates per year in Computer Science, I'd expect the perceived economic value of a CS degree to decline as well.


> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

I don't really think the teaching part at most universities oriented toward training workers. If they were oriented toward training workers, then the administration would be worried about what skills are in demand by employers...probably training students on particular software, computer languages, jargon and techniques that are common. There would be more emphasis on getting various certifications while still in undergrad. I can't speak to promoting "intellectual curiosity" because it seems hard to define and if you did I bet it would depend mainly on the nature of the student...probably his/her genes, peer group and childhood role models...not on the actions of someone the student sees three hours per week during adulthood.

As it is, a professor can (very often, though not always) be totally incomprehensible and irrelevant to work, as long as they are not offensive, without any repercussions nor even any gentle communication that he/she explain things clearly. Humans tend to craft stories favorable to themselves, so even if the student evaluations are negative, the professor can just blame e.g., short attention spans in the era of marijuana and fortnite...or the professor just might not look at the student evaluations if they don't want to. Over time, some professors even develop a sort of perverse joy at confusing students...their confusion being the sign that the professor is very smart and that he is "challenging" them, when in all likelihood he is just asking them things he never explained clearly in the first place. In my undergrad, an EE professor bragged that the class average was a 23%; he also used his TA as a translator because he could not speak english.

It is expected most everywhere that students will learn work skills on the job and in internships...not at school. Professors at research universities spend all their time thinking about hard frontiers of a topic, and that frontier might have little to do with what you do on the job.


The higher cost, the more college has to directly justify itself in terms of better prospective earnings.


Does it matter in practice? College is ridiculously expensive, forcing many (most?) people to go into massive debt in order to get a degree. If you come out with a master's in art history you're going to be feeling the economic pain for quite some time, and that's not good for society. Until costs come down, college needs to be about job training (which is a shame; I think many aspects of the system need to change.)


Well, the plebes can't afford to take classes to further ones academic horizons. When a class at a community college (read:too poor to go to a proper uni) is $900 and 30 students and no equipment needed, that class had better have strong income assurances. Else its a waste of money and further burdening of student loans.

And taking classes also means giving up time wise something else. Opportunity cost is also a thing.

So yes, liberal arts are the higher forms of education, which are also further from the rest of us who need a credential because of credentialism so we can merely live. (Food, water, electricity, housing, medical, internet are effectively all required to live these days. )


What community college is charging $900 for a single class? That really is highway robbery. I just looked up costs at the community college classes I took, and its $76 per credit hour for in-state tuition.

Also your characterization of community colleges only being for those too poor to attend a 4 year school is totally out of touch and frankly a little stigmatizing towards an important pieces of public education.

I know many people who graduated with 4 year degrees after getting an AS at community college, which requires the exact same core liberal arts + math and science course requirements that state schools require. These people didn't do it because they were poor, they went because their high school GPA didn't let them get admitted to the schools they wanted right away. The fact that they got to save a ton of money, pick schedules conducive to part time work, amd get a real credential after 2 years (I know many employers who prefer an AS degree holder to someone who dropped out of a 4 year degree 2 or 3 years in) is just icing on the cake. And it didn't hurt long term prospects for career or education either, one of them even has a graduate degree from a school that is extremely respected in the field he studied.

Community colleges are awesome things, both for people studying specific trades and careers and for eventual 4 year school attendees. The more we can destigmatize them, invest in them, and keep them affordable and accessible to working people - the more we'll all share in the benefits.


My wife and kids are all taking one class at the local community college. Tuition was nearly $400/student, plus a $200 book and a mandatory $200 online program. You can find the book used, and we economized by only buying 2 books for 4 people.


You can usually google the book and find a pdf on the first page of results. The online codes some of the professor's require is highway robbery.


WaMAP and similar open source offerings are finally starting to eat into this market, and they work significantly better than Pearson's MyLab & ilk.


I wholeheartedly agree. I went to a community college for 1 year before transferring to a top regional technical university. The upshot was I obtained a $14k/year scholarship for transfer students just for getting a 3.7 GPA. I would not have been accepted right out high school, and I had the privilege of avoiding dorms.




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