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.
I went to a normal European uni as well, although it did cost money (inflation corrected tuition fees were around €700 or so, and there was a room to rent and food to buy; but many courses used a syllabus written by the teachers and printed by the uni, costing a few € each, only a few required an expensive book). Nothing that should make me feel scammed.
The networking thing is real, though. It's not everywhere, but if you join the right student society (Am. fraternity), it definitely exists. I worked a (long) while as a researcher and teacher at university, and networking via student societies only seems to have grown in that period.
It never felt to me as useless, as killing time or delaying life. It taught me skills I don't think I could have picked up by myself.
Which doesn't really address Walter's point that, in practice, people who have to pay from their own wallet (not their parents) for an education at a non-prestigious school do tend to work hard.
In my observation those who do not engage with the material are more like to just drop out, rather than waste their money.
For one of the same reasons wealthy families send children to "elite" prep schools. Some are worth it, many just social filters that introduce you to the people who will be making laws, decisions, policies, and purchases. From what I often see, that gets people further than just working hard and trying to work their way up the ladder.
With the wealth of knowledge available, and the slow improvement of online learning, I hope we stop treating college as the place to discover things and improve our knowledge. It’s sometimes an okay way to do it, but is generally one of the least efficient ways in the modern world.
With a basic foundation in a topic, Wikipedia and open journals are much more valuable learning places than a lecture hall or study group. Those basic foundations should be built much earlier in primary education.
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.
One my best friend used to run a top architecture firm and he himself was highschool dropout, he had team of architects and engineers to get his wildest imaginations passed by government's approval.
Case in point, being if you've real value to offer. Absence of that degree or paper will never come in your way.
I paid some $$$ and kind of coasted doing my Masters in Investment Fund Management. I thought the qualification would look good but the actual course content was a bit too rubbish to get very enthusiastic about it. All academic math silliness from teachers who'd never got anywhere near managing actual investment funds.
My earlier free of charge degree I worked hardish and it was taught at a much higher level.
> If you're paying the bill, it's a lot less likely you'll be coasting through.
The fact that there's a bill to pay doesn't mean that it's the students who are paying it. I think a significant number of students—most?—at expensive universities have their bills paid by family.
You are getting downvoted but this is absolutely true. In Russia, college is/used to be free and easy to get in to (I think they are limiting that now at least to some extent).
As a result,
1) Most students coast.
From my CS class over the years, straight out of college I'd hire maybe 25% of the people in any CS/IT capacity. Not for a FAANG job, any job; most people wouldn't be able to build a reasonable PHP page or manage a 5-machine LAN for a retail store (or calculate a determinant of a 2x2 matrix) with their "Masters in CS". Not because they were not capable of it if they tried - in my impression, most never wanted to learn and never bothered.
2) More importantly, college diploma in Russia is/was an equivalent of high school diploma in the US, because of the credentials inflation. If you don't have one, in most cases there must be something wrong with you (which was true enough at least when I went to college).
You could even use going to trade school as an insult - PTUshnik, with connotations anywhere from being dumb/lazy, to being a chav/petty criminal.
> You are getting downvoted but this is absolutely true.
I don't mind that, I expected it with this post. People value things based on what it costs them in blood, sweat and tears. For example, suppose the Olympic Committee started handing out the exact same gold medals to everyone who shows up at the games. What's the value of that medal going to be? Zilch. Nobody is going to train for 10 years to get one of those.
But this observation doesn't fit with popular political thought, and people react negatively to it.
If all education was free. I would be much willing to study forever.
Here are the benefits of get:
1. Cheap accommodation
2. Access to high tech cutting edge equipment on university premise
3. I'd sleep in fully air conditioned library making excuses that I fell asleep while studying in library.
Access to free internet and machinery/test equipment alone would be enough for me to join free university.
Then I'd study there untill I discover something and rise to fame or find some idea to turn into into a profitable business then exist the university and kiss it goodbye.
"If you're paying the bill, it's a lot less likely you'll be coasting through."
I would guess that the real indicator of whether or not you can coast through is if your life situation - including the college standards - allow it. If you can coast through and get decent enough grades to get a degree, is it worth spending more effort on? After all, what you are paying for is a completion certificate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My counterpoint is that I know a good amount of people who have a ton of parroted knowledge, and know nothing of how to apply it. I know far, far, fewer people who know how to apply knowledge. There are even fewer people who can start applying freshly acquired knowledge within the same day.
A mindless search engine can parrot and rattle off 50 probability distributions. Only a human can tell you the implications of a specific distribution emerging from your data. Google and DuckDuckGo are free, I don't need to hire someone who can do the same as a search engine.
My opinion of what you refer to as learning, is that it is the absence of learning. It is one of the longest held misconceptions, spanning hundreds of years. It is why we need to retrain everyone fresh out of college. It is why junior vs. senior roles exist. Juniors have all of the rote knowledge and no practical experience. Seniors have immense practical experience and have probably long forgotten all the rote knowledge. The latter gets paid vastly more, the latter is far rarer.
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.
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.
> Watching videos is more like thinking you're learning. In order to learn you need to practice and internalize.
And this is key, I think. It's hard to really understand without practice. You feel you might understand but it's fleeting.
And, the reason many say their didn't get any use out of heir college is because... Well, they now know stuff. Since they know it it's not hard (for them, because they are already used to it) and they don't even realize how involved the learning process was.
I've seen many CS graduates who after in a few years after graduation don't remember even the most basic CS stuff. It looks like most students learn just enough to pass an exam and then forgot everything.
On other hand I don't have a degree but I wish I had. All I know I learned bit by bit over the years and somebody who graduated at the top of their class definitely knows listed topics better than me.
I work in hiring and people/performance management. In my experience, people with a formal education in average outperform the ones without. There are outliers on either side of course.
We investigate the reasons for this but so far couldn't pin point it to anything specific.
We too don't look at degrees when hiring, but we do see a correlation of education and promotions.
It's the reading and writing. Highschool doesn't teach reading like it used to. They are getting promoted because they are better at learning and then expressing themselves on paper, something all proper university programs still teach. Ask the average highschool grad to read a 100-page manual and thier eyes glaze over. But a BA history major could probably do it over lunch.
It's not that simple, but it could be a factor, in my experience. It's probably not one single thing.
Overly generalized, formal education seems to give one more self awareness. Lesser educated peers overestimate their abilities which helps them getting hired and be successful through the first few years. Then a promotion would require a different skill set and they cannot appreciate the complexity of learning it, so they fail.
Peers with a degree often are not confident enough, and overthink. But they can adapt quicker.
>> after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.
Then you either didn't go to a proper school, or you didn't properly take advantage of the time. I went to an oldschool university (in canada) followed by a US law school. I could have slacked off an not learned much, just enough to pass, but I leveraged the resources and learned a huge amount. I used this knowledge every day, and in fields totally unrelated to my degrees. I had to recently read up on some radio frequency stuff for work. I was channeling my astronomy 202 lectures. That class was an outside elective taught by a PHD in a huge classroom, what some people would call a waste of my time. But 20+ years later I still have the knowledge and it makes me a better employee today.
In many industries, a college degree (especially from a "name" school) is essentially used as an outsourced HR screening. It's not about specific knowledge, but being able to start the process knowing that this person has certain attributes that impressed the admissions department of a selective school enough to let them in. Therefore, the HR department of company X can start with a base level of vetting already done.
At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that).
If you're talking about expertise, I've got two teams with 80% degrees. I spend far more time mentoring people with degrees. People without degrees tend to spend a few minutes asking questions, after which they become autonomous and possibly come back with really meaty questions. People with degrees tend to require pair programming. Definitely not a rule, but a trend.
Degrees are a valuable signal, but they are treated as a rule.
At one point the idea was universities were supposed to produce well-rounded citizens, exposing them to liberal arts, different points of view and what not. But now it seems more to get a good job, which calls into question the entire setup. Wouldn't trade and tech schools or internships be better preparation for a career if that's all society cares about now?
Can I ask where you attended? Honest question. I attended a large well known public university and even though most of it was wasteful, I did learn plenty I wasn’t aware of before.
I went to the University of Pretoria. More than happy to name and shame. At the time, both their IT department and administrative systems were in shambles.
We had to calculate our own class schedules (which is all good and well), but we found that an easy class (that most had already completed in high school) conflicted with the only (I really do mean only) hard and interesting class. The easy class lecturer demanded attendance, the dean did nothing, and we were told to "fail it and retake it the following year." A hostile business; not an institution of learning.
To make matters worse, the degree was supposed to be game development. On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). On the other hand, having already written games, I miraculously identified that designing websites wasn't exactly what you'd expect from a game development degree.
>>On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios).
Just wanted to throw in my two cents - I know it's uncommon, but not impossible. Where I work(Ubisoft) the anti-crunch culture is incredibly strong, to a point where we're told that if you see someone doing overtime make sure it gets reported higher up as no one should be doing it and if anyone is then there are problems elsewhere(after all we have tonnes of producers specifically to make sure it doesn't happen). I personally feel like I have a great work life balance, work from 8-4 every day, never on the weekends, and I'm a lead programmer.
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.
Somewhat. At least in our company, my friends in HR say that it's not as really a hard requirement to be successful at the job itself. Customer help desk doesn't need a bachelors. But it might cut down the number of resumes they get from hundreds to manageable number that that they can actually review in a reasonable time frame. It's also why it's an easily waived requirement if you get referred by a current employee (it's also how I got the interview at my current job).
Wouldn't surprise me if there's others using the same strategy.
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.
I didn't think colleges are necessary, then a met a person who after a high school really didn't reach his potential. So I concluded colleges would ensure almost everybody "woke up" to looking into world. Then I met another person, who decided to skip college, for material reasons; but who's comfortably at an undergraduate level of knowledge, if not more.
Now I'm not sure. Seems like there is risk... both ways...
I feel sorry for you. I got a great deal out of my college experience. It was time and money very well spent. I never would have learned that stuff otherwise, or even have known what to learn.
This is an illusion. There are of course people in charge with a degree, but most people I know who have a successful business don't have a degree. They even often dropped out of school because they were too ambitious for wasting their time there.
I do see heaps of people with a degree applying for shit jobs though. But that's what most people and parents don't want to hear of.
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.
Not exactly. I can think of a certain executive working on products at the the Intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology that never graduated from college.
But let me share with you the dirty secret of recruiting in America: the college degree is used as a substitute for the IQ test, which is widely believed to be illegal. Which is why college dropout income looks much closer to college grads than those who graduated high school but never went to college -- passing the entrance exams demonstrates something about a person all on its own, regardless of classes taken after.
Not that I think something like a CS degree is worthless; there's a ton of useful stuff in there I use on a daily basis. The case is less clear for say, all of business school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well.
The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc.
So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.
> Universities are and always have been expensive.
Per-student spending seems to have outpaced inflation for 40 years or more (and tuition and fees along with it.)
Where is the money going? Universities definitely seem to have more luxurious facilities as well as more non-teaching staff, but I'm not sure where the bulk of the spending increases actually come from.
Hard to generalize, each school will have their own struggles and money pits.
I went to a large school in Virginia. They had things like...
* Campus Police / security
* International Student office
* Welcome office
* Student Newspaper
* Student radio station (multiple stations, I believe)
* Art installations, fountains, and general beautification
* Campus religious facilities
* Plenty of on-campus housing, but also a huge quantity of parking lots and garages, and even shuttle buses to remote lots.
* Multiple gyms and fitness centers, ranging from what was essentially a storage warehouse for old athletic team equipment that they'd let students workout with, to brand-spankin-new "fitness centers" that had multiple pools (so that the swim team and water polo team can practice at the same time). They allowed locals to buy memberships as well, and there were a number of kiddie swim teams that used the facilities too.
* Multiple student union buildings, with lots of new, fancy furnishings. It was easy to identify and contrast the older buildings from the 60-80s to the ones that were built in the 90s-2000s -- much larger, more light, more windows and much more furniture. Made them nice to hangout and read a book in, though.
* Road work and even a tunnel under a major 2-lane road. I'd heard they lobbied the city for years to no avail but eventually got traction by offering to subsidize some of the work.
* Lots of street lights, call boxes, and other steps to make the campus less freaky to walk around at night.
* A small child/daycare location on campus as well, mostly for the faculty, though I believe they let anyone (students, locals) enroll their kids there. The Uni was founded as a place to train teachers and nurses, and all of the teaching / psych / early child development students ran it
Why are they any more expensive than High School? In fact, in Australia until the 80s University was free in the same way High School is free. Many people are angry that it still isn't.
And of course it's still free in that way in more than a few developed countries.
Free in the sense that the costs were borne by the government and not by the student.
I'm totally ok with that. However, now that countries are shifting higher education costs off of their books and people are finding out that universities are, in fact, very expensive to run, it's not fair to blame the university.
In some cases, supply and demand. In the early 2000s, One of my professors in my MBA program made ~$250,000 USD per year for teaching 3 classes per yer, plus whatever else he did. My understanding is that if you want to attract & retain talent of his caliber, you have to compete with they salary that person can make in the business world, too.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> the political class, who don't need to understand STEM because they use rhetoric, persuasion, and political manipulation to get what they want.
And right now, we are witnessing this line of thinking crashing and burning up, as you can't persuade a virus. You _have to_ understand the underlying science, and not make this category error. There's no away around it.
Unfortunately, persuasive but ignorant leaders have convinced many people otherwise, so it's not until there's a real issue that this lack becomes apparent by example.
I'm sure that "rhetoric, persuasion, and political manipulation" have their usages, but to think that they're "all that you need" is what's causing issues in the countries that are handing COVID badly.
There will be more examples of this kind of problem before the 21st century is over.
Barista jokes aside, in my experience people studying English, etc. are doing something they enjoy. Their expectation is that their BA is merely a credential to get by the gatekeepers for the millions of jobs that require a college degree but really have no specific use for one.
The key with a generic degree is that it admits you to specialized training afterwards, or careers with on-the-job training like civil servants. In the US there are this many people in these jobs that have any 4-year-degree as their entrance qualification to vocational training:
3.2 million teachers.
2.8 million civil servants
1.35 million lawyers.
0.25 million military officers.
Those four alone are around 5% of all the jobs in the US (7.6/155 million).
I think there's quite a lot, when you count the jobs where there's no specific degree requirement but HR/recruiting/middle managers will express a strong preference for candidates with degrees. Maybe not explicitly but their choices aren't usually rigorous to begin with, so such biases can easily creep in.
> I think the root of the problem is the student loan system.
I think if you'd solve this problem, you find there are other problems. I don't think loans are the root of the problems, but just one of them. One can try solving problems one by one, or approach them together; I think a more complex review is helpful.
If you based student loan lending on the “creditworthiness” of the degree the loan was going to pay for, then you’d at least get rid of a lot of the problems that are caused by the student loan system. I guess my hypothesis is that the problems with the very expensive and economically worthless degrees are in fact created by that system. I have a lot of issues with the more economically valuable degrees too, but they do at least leave their victims with a highly increased earning potential. So I’d say the system is still mostly working as intended in that case.
> but they do at least leave their victims with a highly increased earning potential. So I’d say the system is still mostly working as intended in that case.
Do you think increasing earning potential is the goal of education?
I think it’s the goal of the student loan system, which, as stated above, I have always understood to be a mechanism intended to improve social mobility.
I think I can see what you’re getting at, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to my points on student loans. But I’ll ask you a couple of questions. Do you think the study of humanities topics requires the modern university humanities departments? Do you think it requires student loans? Do you think our society even derives any cultural benefit at all from churning out thousands of highly indebted humanities graduates every year, most of which never go on to put their education to any form of productive use?
Earning potential is a proxy for usefulness, which is in turn a guide for resource allocation. If you rule it out as a criteria then you're basically arguing to fund lots of useless stuff, which is a pretty common academic argument, but hard to justify when people have to get into life-long debt to fund it.
No, it basically is: "can we get rid of prices and still have a great economy" was the 20th century's fight. It was resolved conclusively in favour of no - not even the Chinese try to argue for non-market economies these days.
The only people who still argue about whether prices and earning potential is a good proxy for usefulness are people who are ideologically blinded to the lessons of history. Warren Buffet is in fact a lot more useful than a handful of nurses: not in the same context obviously. If you need a nurse you need a nurse. But measured coldly and rationally, in terms of number of lives affected and amount of value created for sheer number of people, it's hard to beat the Sage. If a random nurse quits their job tomorrow nobody will notice. If Buffet dies, the world will notice.
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!
> 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.
We are living at the end of the era of labor. It is difficult to understand what comes next. After all, this era lasted for more than two centuries. It is easy to confuse having a job with having needs covered.
If someone has an at least adequately paid job and is lucky to find meaning in their work, then the work not only covers basic material needs, but also what I called meaning of life. When we talk about jobs we often have this positive image in our minds. There's the danger that we confuse our needs with what is covered by this kind of work.
Labor is disappearing and it doesn't make sense to artificially create labor. Ask parents whether they are unsure about the future careers of their children. Ask them whether they feel some pressure to give their children something like a head start in the labor market.
So, I think, we should not fight for labor, but for having ways to cover all our needs, basic material ones but also higher ones like meaning and self-actualization.
Schemes like UBI tend to neglect meaning and self-actualization.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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))
Not to sound callous... but you took out the loan on those terms. Are they unfair terms? Sure. Were you ignorant and naive to agree to them? Absolutely. But should you also take some responsibility for the situation you now find yourself in? Yes, you spent $40k.
It sounds like you had to fight to get SSDI, not sure what that means, but at this point if you're making $1300/m you could start to pay off a loan that you took out and have a responsibility towards.
Again I don't know you or your situation at all but it sounds like you don't wanna recognise that at least a little bit of the problem is you.
> 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.
>> 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.)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.