A press can be one way for a smaller University to have an outsized impact. For example I read books about Spaceflight and the University of Nebraska Press has a great series called "Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight" which I have read many of:
Do I understand this correctly? Since universities pay through their nose for journal and publisher subscriptions, they don't have money to actually publish books themselves. Is that right?
Yes, and it's a death spiral since the university presses could, in theory, provide some competition. Can't/Won't invest in alternatives => lower competition for the parasites => higher subscription costs => less resources to invest in alternatives.
Academic libraries and publishing are effectively being privatized and will be dominated by ever more rent-seeking. I don't see this getting turned around unless universities dictate to their faculty where they can publish, i.e. stop subsidizing their competition.
I don't think the major universities - the ones that could have publishing houses that matter - are too broke to be able to keep the publishing house running.
You would be surprised. University of Michigan Publishing, one of the largest and wealthiest of the publics only has a staff of ~30, some of whom are shared with other departments. The university's annual contribution is well under $2 million. The entire University Library, the second largest research library in the U.S. after Harvard, has an annual budget of $64m (0.58% of the entire budget).
I think historically the larger presses were expected to be close to revenue neutral. They do well enough to limp along, but don't get the resources really needed to build new infra. As a cost center without significant tuition or grant funding, the library has little pull when provosts form their priorities.
Talking about "the budget" is meaningless in this context, you could similarly argue that Bill Gates can't afford to buy his kids bubblegum on any given day. After all his self-imposed budget for them is $10/day.
Look at the size and growth of the university's endowment.
Unfortunately talking about the "size and growth of the endowment" is similarly meaningless in this context for a number of reasons. Even if the funds were not restricted in a way that excluded funding the University Press, it's probably a poor measure of whether a University could "afford" to support a press.
Depends on what you call major. But it certainly isn't just Oxford, Harvard, and the like. Pretty much all US "University of X" (where X is a state) have their own presses.
Yeah, and see, I'm not claiming that the University of, say, Wyoming, has the money to keep their own press running. But the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and the like... they definitely do.
If we want to have more books, we need to protect the rights of the publishers—if publishers are not protected, then the market is just doing its job: publishing books is not going to be profitable if book contents are stolen without consequences. As a result, universities wouldn’t want to waste money publishing books, and for-profit journals would have to charge exorbitant subscription fees to compensate for the fact that no one except a few institutions will sub in the first place (everyone else will get the same stuff washed through an LLM).
The barrier to publishing a book is more or less non-existent. The barrier to getting a publisher’s name that is sufficient for someone to think (rightly or wrongly) that this book has a legit stamp of approval is somewhat higher if not all that high. And obviously implies that those publishers have to gatekeep to some degree.
Sure, we turn away crap, but so what? We don’t have a cap on how many books we can publish other than the time, labor, and money resources we have. Which are finite. We could publish more than we do now, and we have in the past.
This trend is generally true for print. If smaller presses don't go out of business, due to the advantage of newer facilities, they are subsidized or bought out by bigger players.
From a bugeting perspective that is not quite how it works. Journal subscriptions come out of the libraries' budgets. I am a production editor at a uni press, and our budget is a separate item that is not affected directly by the library's problems. But we do have our own budget that we are expected to make. There is some endowment money--we have a fund specifically earmarked to help offset production expenses. We use it to subsidize some titles that we want to be able to offer at something like 'trade' prices but would otherwise be too expensive. Otherwise we are expected to cover our expenses through sales and other income streams like subrights. Heck, the university even expects us to pay for maintenance on our building.
For most, that means collaborating with others. UC system and B1G academic alliance are making moves, but it's herding cats. Even within universities, it's a nightmare of competing interests. How do you convince your faculty to publish through your own press or consortium instead of the higher impact factor journal owned by Elsevier?
This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it. I imagine that it's some administrators near the top that would block anyone from saying "let's have no-one publish to Elsevier any more" because John from Elsevier takes them on such lovely days out in bespoke locations, staying in boutique hotels.
Telling tenured professors where to publish is not going to happen. You might entice them with good contracts, but the revenue from most books and articles is very small. The satisfaction and credibility of an Oxford or MIT Press book is worth more than a few thousand bucks to many people.
Publishing in high impact factor journals is a big deal. At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.
> At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.
This honestly sounds like something that should be doable by the university.
Remember that many of the decision-makers are academics with great publishing records. They succeeded at the game and don't want to rules to be changed.
Also, just practically, the journals help a lot in assessing candidates. Even in fields just adjacent to mine, I might trust an endorsement by a good journal over my own judgments. Often I know the work of the editors there and value their judgment. Chasing after highest impact factor journal publications has its problems, but I haven't seen better proposals.
"If you don't let our faculty publish in these journals, their publication stats will suffer (fewer citations, lower impact factor) and that will translate into lower rankings for our university."
Bigwigs at universities care about rankings, even if they are basically garbage.
> This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it
If you ignore the hardest part of the problem; getting everyone to agree and coordinate, then yes it’s a simple problem to solve! You can simplify any problem like this, just ignore the hard part!
They could! They'd have to also change how faculty review and tenure work, to incentivize faculty to publish in alternative open access journals instead of the top (paywalled) journals in their field. Otherwise, faculty will continue publishing with the for-profit publishers even if there's alternatives available.
There are a for proft open access journals. In most open access journals, the payment system is just reversed. The author/s pay a huge amount of money as publication fees (usually a couple of thousands) instead of readers (or their institutions) paying for the article or the journal subscription.
Heck, even the widely hated publishing companies offer open access. It just costs thousands of dollars for an article and tens of thousands of dollars for a book.
Most of the time, it is not even up to the researchers to decide that. Open access is usually a requirement by the funding agencies. For example, in the US all federally funded research will be required to be published on open access journals and will be enforced at the end of 2025[1]
As a point of calibration, a hot melt perfect binding machine for books up to 500 pages, up to 180 books/hour, is around $7000. You know the print cost for laser copies. The “print” aspect, incremental cost and logistics, for a book is pretty modest for any niche interest publications. Speaking here of functional performance of the published content, and not the fetish/status side of the physical book.
My local university press is a hit-and-miss affair. Some books have been real classics, some books have been laughably bad. The university press probably ranks low in institutional power pecking order and so have evolved to operate as little more than a vanity press for certain academic departments. The writing and editing of content proves to be only as good as the academic department pushing its publication. And that is often wanting. In my interest area of local history, my local university press, which should by rights be the top quality publisher, is all over the map in quality, while out-of-state university press books on our local history are uniformly excellent.
TIL the difference between "divest" and "disinvest". When seeing the title I didn't think "disinvest" was a "real word" and ironically it is red squiggly underlined on my screen after typing (maybe "dis-invest" is more proper?).
Had only ever heard of universities divesting from {x}
Regardless:
> The difference between disinvestment and divestment is nominal and appears to be one of scale. Disinvestment, meaning the sale of shares, can happen in small lots at any time to raise funds without losing control of the asset. Divestment or divestiture, on the other hand, usually refers to the sale of controlling shares. [1]
I just went through my bookshelf. While there were many authors that were professors, there were few books published by a university press. Are university presses a professors' first choice when it comes to publishing?
University presses have less reach than a popular press, but the flip side of that is that they are willing to publish works only of interest to an academic audience. If you want to reach a wide audience, then, no, you don't want to publish in a university press. However if you want to publish a detailed study on a niche subject, no popular press will want to touch that. That's what the university presses are for. e.g., here's a title I came across at Princeton University Press, "A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century." Just based on the title, there's no way some place like Penguin Random House is going to even look at that manuscript.
The same author may approach different publishers depending on their intended audience. e.g. Daron Acemoglu published "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth" with Princeton but "Why Nations Fail" with Crown (a division of Penguin RandomHouse).
Another example of a niche collection of books from a university is Duke press' Latin America collection. Someone recommended looking there for information on a question that came up in a discussion, I had no idea it existed as an outsider.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/latin-american-studies
It really depends on the nature of the book. If it's a first-year undergrad text that is likely to be purchased by thousands of students, a publisher like Addison-Wesley will be interested. If it's solidly mass market applied tech, like "Master Javascript in 32 Seconds" or something, someone like O'Reilly or Manning will probably take it. If it's more niche and technical it's likely to be a University press.
University presses do publish some absolute bangers. Creating Symmetry, for example, is an absolutely beautiful book combining maths and art. MIT has a great series on game design. Cambridge is very strong in machine learning and maths.
Wow, that's interesting because some of my favorite books are from university presses, often smaller ones (but MIT Press, Cambridge and Princeton are pretty well represented).
I do find that my philosophy and critical theory books are the ones that more heavily come from university presses. In general the humanities tend to have stronger presence in the university presses (largely because books, not papers, are the publication format of choice for those areas).
Well, if you go to grad school in humanities, or otherwise have more professional academic pursuits, you slowly end up submitting your home bookshelf to a huge takeover of very plain spines with small font.
They play a critical role in publishing regional authors and documenting folk cultures. Plenty of regional University presses will publish contemporary fiction, poetry, local history, etc.
It really depends on the field. On my shelf, things are pretty much just Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge or De Gruyters. Oxford is very prestigious in the field of these books, and a professor seeking to publish a book would likely prefer Oxford.
Yeah, OUP and Harvard are all over my shelves, among others.
It’s a lot easier than many folks suppose to reach the bottom of what the Internet has on a lot of topics—people toss around phrases like “all the world’s knowledge” and, oh boy, is that ever not true—and IME the next step is very often a few books from university presses.
They also do academic reviews in ways that popular presses don't. If you are a history professor, a book published by Penguin isn't going to look as good in your tenure packet as a book published by Oxford.
You can get it printed and bound yourself for your bookshelf, plus one for your mom and one for your advisor if they are interested. At my grad school we had to arrange that ourselves using the prescribed service, and deliver the finished books to the university. I don't recall it being super expensive.
Do they put the dissertations online? At the university where I teach, all dissertations are posted as PDFs to a permanent public repository hosted by the university library. (Authors can choose to delay that posting for a few years if they plan to publish the thesis.)
Paper copies of theses are still put in the library as well, with the cost of printing and binding borne the authors.
That's too bad. While I said that our online archive is "permanent," digital preservation can be fragile, as we all know. Additional archival in physical form would increase the chance that the knowledge you and other thesis writers are creating will remain for future generations.
In modern America... `sed 's/production of scholarship is table stakes/production of passably-competitive NCAA football and basketball teams is table stakes/'`
It is so strange that donors and alumni can put pressure on schools to fire coaching staff in athletics programs to make schools perform better. Yet when it comes to the administrative bloat and waste alumni don’t hold their schools to the same standard. Like academic degradation is something no one cares about.
When you're working as a donor, administrative bloat is who you're working with.
But many big donors only care about how the school does athletically. They don't care about the education side - and in fact, if they could figure a way to ditch that "cost center" they would.
A lot of people misinterpret the term "cost center" mean an area of a business that only spends money (e.g. marketing department) but that isn't what it is at all. Probably because it has the word "cost" in it.
A cost center is simply a vessel through which money moves. Revenue, expenses, inventory, etc. all go through cost centers. Sure, the professors' salaries go through a cost center. So does tuition and royalties from TV networks.
This is true in an accounting sense, but generally speaking most people are referring to the definition of "cost-center" as a business unit that does not generate revenue directly, in contrast to a "profit-center" which does.
This isn't a misinterpretation, it's just a different definition of the term based on context.
Profit centers directly produce profit. Cost centers may indirectly produce profit but the administration has a fundamentally different view of the assets. To wit: the leadership of a profit center could molest children and the administration would not notice (this is literally the source of countless headlines), while the leadership of a cost center could get staffing slashed if they use too many post-it notes (this is the source of no headlines ever).
> I feel like the whole point of marketing is to generate revenue for the business, albeit indirectly
if there is anything that doesnt "indirectly" make money for a company, then it should be cut immediately...
The whole cost center vs profit center is a highly political game anyways. Thats why engineering and IT is often thought of as a cost center (because they often care more about the product) wheras marketing, sales etc are usually profit centers because they are able to direct their skills inwards to make a case for their own existance.
Its a persuasion game about where resources will be spent to achieve most impact and for different companies the true answer will often be different. You need less marketing (but not none) if your product is premium. You need less product development (but not none) if your plan is to ship as much low quality garbage as possible. In between these the persuasion game is a distributed way of deciding strategy.
There is a sort of almost-idea of risk vs quality, where some areas exist soley to prevent future risk to the company (IT meltdown, no roof over head, legal liability etc) where the rest work on the buisness. But under that thought the vast majority of operations are profit
> the whole point of marketing is to generate revenue for the business, albeit indirectly
With varying levels of indirection that's true of nearly all things a company does, though. When IT fixes some sale person's laptop that will have a direct positive impact on that person's sales, and thus on revenue. Spending too little on those IT people would have lost you revenue, conversely spending more might lead to more revenue.
In the end it's all a framework any company can apply as they want. You are right that a marketing department is much more likely to be judged by the company's revenue (attributed by department as much as possible), while maintenance or IT support is unlikely to be judged by that criteria. But imho that's mostly because it's really difficult to judge building maintenance by their contribution to revenue, not because it doesn't make sense to do so if you had the data.
I applied pressure by refusing to donate, and citing administrative bloat as the reason. I know I’m not alone. I doubt they’ll listen because the absence of dollars is hard to quantify.
Automatic comment whenever univerity athletic programs are brought up. "It makes money", with the implication "..therefore it is all good" not even spelled out.
The original intent was to offer a well-rounded education that includes physical activity. Healthy body healthy mind. Nerds who are also in shape. This concept is lost by creating a pro athlete caste within a school, students more respected for their success on the field than in the classroom. Maybe sports is truly subsidizing academics, but then again if 280 Million are spent on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIGwxsVv1E, is there enough institutional focus on academics?
Ok correct me if I'm ignorant on this topic but give me more than that oneliner that I've read a couple times before.
Serious, directly measurable money for the school. If I graduate with a degree and that degree gets me a career that goes exceedingly well and I become a 10 or 100-millionaire, and donate money for a lab to the university, that's not exactly trackable to that one really good professor. Meanwhile, the coach who won the big game is well known.
This is so silly. We make our educators beholden to businesspeople who run sporting arenas so we can still charge our kids tens of thousands of dollars to spend 4+ years of their life on something that has maybe a 50% chance of paying itself back over time.
Meanwhile other countries just fund public education and subsidize tuition. shrug
We see that across the world; countries gutting governmental services which enriches their cronys and ultimately hurts the users of the service. The NHS, programs for addicts in Portugal, I'm sure there are others.
I don't think it's fair to say they've disinvested from libraries.
Most of the information is digitized, which has better reach. Books that cannot be digitized yet due to copyright are held in storage until they enter public domain, and you can request chapter scans in the meantime or even check out the physical book. Separate special collections are kept for items whose physical existence is significant. Libraries are being repurposed as study spaces, which campuses otherwise tend to lack. Reference librarians are available online with extended hours.
The overall trend seems positive.
Similar arguments about presses. Mixed media is the future. Some schools invest in various learning platforms and knowledge hubs, sometimes collaboratively. A building doesn't facilitate such variety very well.
University expenditures on libraries have been stagnant at best for decades. This includes those "various learning platforms and knowledge hubs." The digitization of collections and repurposing of facilities is driven by cost cutting as well as hampered by it. Archival storage is not cheap (the conditions for special collections drive many librarians to drink) and renovating century old stacks into usable people space requires capital expenditures few libraries can scrape together.
At the same time, Elsevier et al take larger and larger bites out of the budget for those digitized collections. The failure to invest in University presses will only exacerbate this in the long term. Attempts to provide an alternative to the for-profit parasites, e.g. open access platforms, wallow in grant funded misery with budgets considered laughable in the private sector.
Let's take nanohub.org as an example. It's funded by an NSF grant and everyone can access it for free. A university doesn't need to make any expenditures for their students to benefit from it.
Researchers choose to publish in Elsevier's journals, not for lack of a university press.
> Most of the information is digitized, which has better reach.
Previously, when university libraries had books and paper journals, anyone could read them. Now, members of the general public are not licensed to read electronic content there.
So digitization has reduced the reach of the content, not increased it.
Many libraries have computers for accessing the catalog, which now includes all the digital media. You make a good argument for why they should if they don't already.
I have spent a lot of time in university libraries and the disinvestment is often difficult to see unless you are doing deep research or in the weeds.
I should note that I am writing this response as somebody who is a professional researcher and scientist, not as an undergraduate student who needs to find a few references for a term paper. My needs are quite different than others and the library needs to cater to a wide range of people at all levels of research.
Many universities are in fact repurposing libraries as "study spaces" or as "learning centers". This often means dedicating more space to meeting rooms and desks, etc. To get that space, libraries either put the books in storage or quite frankly sell the books, especially books that are not checked out that often. Many of the technical books that I own are former library books. Moreover, even well-resourced government labs (like DOE national laboratories) are selling their books. I know because I have bought some (albeit through a third party). Putting books in storage is the better option, because at least the books are available, but it removes the ability to browse the shelf for adjacent books (a highly underrated research method) and often requires preparation to request books and then wait for them to arrive in a reading room. That said, it is far better to put the books in storage.
The availability of reference librarians is often greatly overstated. A library like the Library of Congress still has excellent reference librarians who often can perform apparent miracles to find difficult to locate information, but at university libraries, if I ask for a reference librarian, I often end up with an undergraduate assistant who does not really know much and cannot help you if you have a specific question to ask about locating something in a particular collection or how to use certain equipment like microfilm readers. Perhaps the undergrad can help other undergrads out, but when I was in grad school I never found this practice helpful when I needed specific information that I was already having difficulty finding.
To summarize, this trend may benefit some people, but it comes at the expense of in-depth researchers and their needs.
I will end by quibbling with that notion that "most of the information is digitized". The problem is that the Internet is so large that you can easily spend your whole life without ever realizing how shallow it really is in a single subject. Only once you go deep in that subject do you realize how much is not yet digitized in the first place. Yes, much information is digitized, but based on my experience, it is not "most". Some day that may change, but for the time being, physical libraries still play an important role here.
With respect, I think I already addressed your quibble. I acknowledged the backlog of materials yet to be digitized and explained how to expedite it on an as-needed basis.
It's no more burdensome than it would be with more library funding. Storage is always necessary because big universities own several times more books than they could ever hope to shelve in their increasingly crowded campuses. Digging deep into a subject's history can require materials that don't exist in sufficient quantities for every interested library to have one, necessitating inter-library loans at a minimum.
FYI Every online library catalog I've seen has a "browse shelf" feature.
And how many times do you need to be shown how to use the microfilm machine?
Fair points, I was just trying to give an alternative perspective, especially since my needs are likely different than others on here. I appreciate the feedback.
I tend to agree that storage is not a bad option, but so many libraries just cannot be bothered and would rather discard or sell materials.
Fair point about the "browse shelf" feature of online catalogs, but I was talking about the ability to just open an adjacent book and just browse through the book itself. Instant access in other words. This is much more difficult if requesting things from storage, though the trick is to request several dozen books at once from storage. That is reasonable at some libraries but others will be greatly annoyed if you do that, due to limited shelf space for holds/requests.
You are right that I do not need to be shown how to use a microfilm machine, but often different libraries or archives have different practices and conventions about how to use their machines, especially for the purpose of preserving the microfilm. Being shown how to use it is more about learning their conventions and practices so that you can continue to have access to their collections later, and also to learn any issues with the machines themselves. For example, some institutions like the Smithsonian require you to wear special gloves when handling microfilm and limits where you can save any scans. Other places are completely free-form, but different machines have different quirks or could be down at the moment. Quirks include blurry images, need to wind the reels in a certain way, slow fast-forward (problem for longer reels), missing parts, susceptibility to nearby vibration, etc. If the undergrad helping you doesn't even know what a microfilm machine is, I doubt they can truly help you figure out how to get this particular machine working right. I ended up figuring this stuff out myself, but I would have preferred some assistance from a professional to be honest.
> FYI Every online library catalog I've seen has a "browse shelf" feature.
As someone who works in the field, I'm not actually sure what you mean, and am curious. can you point me to an example of a "browse shelf feature" in a library catalog you have used and found helpful? I'm just curious to see what you are finding, and liking.
This is a feature of some online catalogs where it lists adjacent books on the shelf. This is usually done by the call number, so it basically just lets you see what the previous and next call numbers are. Given that the call numbers are usually within some sort of classification scheme, this is a quick way to find related material.
For example, consider this book at the University of Maryland's library:
I don't mean to come off as dismissive of the feature. It is pretty useful! But I also value shelf access and just being able to dig into a book at a moment's notice.
Thank you for explaining it so well. Some libraries also have digital versions, allowing you to effectively browse the stacks from anywhere. The feature can and should be improved as it's a bit clunky. Digitization is a slow process, but we'll get there eventually. For now, we have growing pains.
The library of congress version is currently unavailable, perhaps it's gotten too much traffic from HN!
the umaryland version, @sheepshear do you personally find this feature useful, you use this feature? Or you were just giving it as an example for others who might want it?
Either way, this is a good example of the kind of "browse shelf" feature you were speaking of, looking more or less like this?
Former academic librarian and archivist here. It's true that university libraries are changing their shape, as you say. More study space, fewer physical collections and book purchases (and, in some areas, universities moving toward sharing their physical collections in remote offsite storage and only calling back materials when requested), and much more investment in electronic resources like journal and database access.
It's a complicated issue, but in general library budgets have been consistently shrinking for years/decades, even as the subscription costs for journal access from big for-profit like Elsevier skyrockets. It's even gotten to the point where universities with endowments larger than many nations' GDPs are struggling to afford publisher prices (see https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...).
Decreasing library budgets plays into this, but at its heart I think that there's a crisis of purpose as well. By not investing in open access publishing infrastructure themselves and not modifying the incentives for faculty review and tenure, universities have put themselves at the mercy of these for-profit publishers and are suffering for it. It's hard to blame faculty who are vying for one of the ever-diminishing tenured spots for publishing their articles in the best journals they can, regardless of whether they'll be behind a paywall, especially when the bar for tenure keeps getting higher and higher.
So we find ourselves in a situation where universities and public funding agencies are paying academics to conduct research and do peer review, then faculty are giving the results to a for-profit publisher, who then sells access to the work right back to them at an astronomical fee.
I'm hopeful if not optimistic that at some point, universities might choose to break out of the cat-and-mouse game they're in by investing in open access publishing and incentivizing their faculty to use it rather than continuing to feed for-profit publishers' wild profits. I've seen some (too limited) action on the first part of that but pretty much none on incentivization part. Certain funding agencies are starting to require open access publication as a condition of some grants, but the change has been slow.
For open access journals, why don't professional associations (e.g., of history/physics/etc researchers/professors/etc) organize it, and declare that starting 01 Jan 2026, the Open Journal of Nanoscience will be the prestige publication, and Open Nanoscience Letters will be the second rank (or whatever roles are needed). Would anyone in the professional assocation have reason to object? Would support be widespread?
University presses could handle the implementation (I know, more easily said than done, but they have the expertise). Cost reduction would appeal to university administrations.
People do organize themselves and accomplish things, and with (guaranteed?) savings, (no?) opposition, (wide?) support, this one seems like low-hanging fruit - from my very outside perspective.
Professional associations often do organize themselves and then proceed to engage in the same, hideous forms of profit seeking that the big names do, especially if their journals are high impact. The incentives are just wildly misaligned and an attitude of “if they get away with it, why shouldn’t we do the same” is pervasive.
They need to disinvest from new buildings, "lifestyle" dorms, expensive gyms and amenities, and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this).
Tuition inflation is absurd. The goal is to grow learners, not set
them back.
Be careful. You may end up with universities where only millionaires take classes. The universities would like this because of money and the millionaires would like it because the proles would keep out of well paid careers. We would be back to how education and science worked a few hundred years ago.
As in health care I don’t think there is a market solution. Government needs to mandate lower prices for them.
This is what really gets me about loan forgiveness.
I'd be in favor if it was only for people who pursue certain degrees that we need. But going to party schools? Going for the cliche "underwater basket weaving" degree? The money being funneled into building a new pool and rock climbing wall for one of the dorms?
How is this going to solve anything? Unless the school itself has skin in the loan, currently the only impact of bankruptcy discharge would be on private loan operators (who would probably go under) or on taxpayers who would absorb the loan losses. The schools are getting paid their tuition from the loans immediately, they won't even notice.
Presumably the idea is that guaranteed student debt is what enables US tuition levels. The schools will already have been paid, but the next generation of students won't be able to get loans for tens of thousands of dollars -- the lenders will have gone under and nobody else will want to be in that business, so universities will have to lower prices.
I think that's the idea. It sounds rather painful to me? But the status quo is also very weird?
that's no different than what we have no. we don't need everyone going to college especially to major in history of tampons type degrees.
the end goal is for loan companies to decline people who won't be able to repay their loans given the expected value of their degrees. (Your future earning potential is the collatoral for your loan).
For people that want to "expand their horizons", they can go watch khanacademy on youtube.
Maybe it's a "beautiful thing" for some sports, but for contact sports like football, it doesn't lead to a "healthy mind." Instead, it leads to brain damage. CTEs didn't go away just because we stopped talking about them.
Your comment seems sarcastic, but the athletes aren't getting much of the beautiful mind part, few students get the athletic experience, and the institutions are nuturing their TV revenue.
Good intramural sports would serve far more students.
Most universities are on the death march to rebuild Versailles for athletes and whoever else. They can't even bother to build something beautiful like a gothic church with all that ill-got blood money. Instead, it's a construction competition to teardown and replace buildings like bathroom decor.
I don't know if grievance studies is a cause of tuition bloat. Most of the departments I know to be labeled as grievance studies were founded well before tuition increased, so it makes not much sense to attribute them to increased tuition. The increase in tuition hews much more closely with the decrease in government funding to these institutions, which requires more tuition from students, which means students desires must be catered to... so increased lifestyle luxuries makes sense there...
It might be naive but I imagine training students to make improvements to weapons systems increases government support of universities and training students to criticize the government decreases it.
Like I said, the founding of such studies predates the increases in tuition. Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim. There are far more direct, closely related situations, like the federal and state governments decreasing funding or the inverted proportion of funds coming from govt/grants vs student-paid tuition via the loan system.
>Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim.
Right-leaning politicians are citing "grievance studies" as their reason for not liking universities, so the only stretch in this hypothesis is to think it might have been happening for decades before bubbling to the surface. It's not that it makes students distrustful of the government, it's that it makes politicians ask, "why are we paying them if they're going to make our goals harder to achieve?" I would not be surprised if the protests against the Vietnam war turned the inner view that many held about university faculty, but few expressed it because of the esteem the public held them in at the time.
This is a totally different claim than what was obviously meant by the first post.
"We are wasting money on these fields" and "these fields piss off reactionaries so they cut our budgets, despite being a tiny portion of the overall budget and not hiring new lines in years" are just totally different.
Whose first post do you mean? My two posts mean the same thing, doing what legislators want would tend to increase funding and doing what they don't like would do the opposite. I guess you could read my first post as being about wasting money if you think criticizing the government is not useful... I guess there are some countries like Singapore out there where that is the case.
Were they the same size upon founding as they are now? A few activists get their foot in the door, push to hire friendly administrators, who push for more activists, who push for more administrators… Eventually everything is taken over
In what world do academics have power over which administrators can be hired? If you really think that some professor in CRT could take over a department, then you just show that you don't have a clue.
Like many other things now, from healthcare to midtown Manhattan, it's by the wealthy, for the wealthy, of the wealthy.
The wealthy want beautiful new buildings and a good football team, and a high-touch experience for their kids. They are happy to pay administrators lots of money to deliver on those things.
> If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.
I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink!
I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
> I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
Exactly. I'm fairly knowledgeable about my STEM specialization but in university I had access to great language learning and exchange programs, top-notch political science and philosophy departments, architecture departments, etc. I remember bumming around in philosophy seminars not because I was a philosophy student (though I did take some philosophy classes) but because I found it so interesting. As long as I didn't increase the grading burden on any of the grad students/professors, everyone was happy and the quality of instruction I received was fantastic. In the real world the closest I have is books I read or MOOCs where a lot of people are in it to get a certification or a badge of completion rather than just marinate in ideas.
You may find it worthwhile to reach out to local community colleges, because once you're "in the group" you can find people doing various things, and they're often not advertising, but will be willing to take a bit of cash on the side.
I'm sorry for derailing this thread, but am curious. Have any of you used services (e.g. classes, study groups) at the local community college? How does it work out when you're a decade beyond your graduate program? I miss a lot of aspects of the university system but have a full-time job and a life now (sadly.) I've been thinking of taking classes and networking at some of our really well-rated community colleges but I'm not sure what the experience is like.
I'm sure it heavily depends on local circumstances, but for whatever it's worth, I badly fucked up my first attempt at going to four-year right out of high school due to mental health reasons and ended up doing two years at LA City College before going back. It may have been mostly the Biology and Chemistry departments, but the quality of student there was still the highest of any school I've ever taken classes at, and that includes Georgia Tech, which is typically regarded as a top 10 engineering school. The reasons were somewhat peculiar and specific, but the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 80s left a whole lot of immigrants from former Soviet Republics fleeing the collapse and most of them ended up in LA. We had a whole lot of former engineers, scientists, and medical doctors who came to the US only to find their foreign credentials were not honored by US institutions and they had to start completely over. They utterly destroyed our curves thanks to all of the knowledge, dedication, and discipline they already had compared to an average 19 year-old.
Heck, even my Bio 101 professor was abnormally brilliant. She'd been a researcher at Harvard Medical School who worked on highly experimental treatments in a ward full of terminal patients and just finally burned out from being around so much death all the time, so there she was in Los Feliz three blocks from Scientology world headquarters teaching at a community college, probably the hardest class I've ever had to take.
It really depends upon the community college and class.
You tend to have some younger screw-up, unmotivated students, especially at entry level classes; some younger students that are there for economic or other reasons; some older students going back to school for life reasons; and then some older students who are intellectually curious and doing it for enrichment.
What the make-up of a class, and the resultant culture is, is a crapshoot. But it can be outstanding.
As the other said, it really depends on the college. The one near me is more technical oriented and has a number of programs basically designed to train people for employment at local factories.
If you avoid the standard college classes, you get a pretty wide cross-section of the people in the community. Math 101 is mostly going to be college-age kids.
I do, but I would argue that local community colleges is still most certainly in the "university system", just another tier/flavor of it. I would consider participating in community college activities to be participating in academic institution style activities that also happen at universities.
Yah- I don't think they're disagreeing with you, but just suggesting that CCs and other adult education may be a practical way to scratch the itch that you described.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, every word of your comment is the truth.
The purpose of higher education in the US to create a market for student loan debt and generate revenue for states. The US is a capitalist society, and education is not a right, it's a privilege, and student loan debt is a billion dollar industry. We saw how the states nearly rioted over the possibility of being denied the revenue from student loan interest if it was forgiven. Believing education is about educating people is about as naive as believing hospitals are about healthcare, or houses about shelter. All of it is entirely about profit, debt and tax revenue.
So much of how the US works (or doesn't work) makes perfect sense when you realize this. Education, business, tech, government, the media, pop culture - it's all grift, top to bottom. It's all carnies and frauds and sociopaths working angles and trying to squeeze you just a little harder to wet their lips with one more drop of your lifeblood.
It is not the truth, it is largely opinion informed by deep cynicism that fails to reflect on the complexities of human behavior and motivation. That does not mean it is completely divorced from any truth, but it is not usefully informative by itself.
Whether a society is capitalist or not does not define whether education is a right or a privilege. Another mistake is defining a country as capitalist and then shutting down any remaining capacity to think about it. Most countries contain a mixture of economic principles at work, so a surface level knowledge of capitalism that seems stuck in the 1800s will only leave you appearing naive and outdated.
Which country is it again that created the internet and has helped expand education not only locally, but globally for all mankind to benefit? Which country is it that created the greatest video platform on Earth, populated with a vast wealth of university lectures and documentaries on top of allowing people casually sitting at home to speak their mind for anyone to see (within reason)?
The U.S. is not without its problems as any country, but we're familiar with many of the problems we have which were already solved once before within the last century. Young people trained on cynical ideologies are highly suggestible, almost encouraged to see certain events as validation for that cynicism. It becomes their organizing principle, no longer looking for what solutions are being produced by a system or what uncorrupt motivations someone might have for any given decision. Only the negatives.
If you're a hard-line right winger, the goal is actually to set undesirable groups back, but that's a pretty fringe position.
Based in recent history, most recently on spending cuts in the proposed house spending bill, this appears to be well within the mainstream of the Republican party.
I'm not supporting the GOP, but we are $33T in debt with interest rates rising dramatically. We're probably in a perilous position. We need to cut back and raise taxes.
FWIW, I'm well aware the GOP has also contributed greatly to that debt.
Libraries need to change. most people go to the library to use the computers. what if we expanded the role of libraries to be places for autodidacts to learn and practice new skills? imagine a library full of maker equipment. 3d printers, sewing supplies, wood/metal working equipment. the modest government investment would be paid back 10 fold in the amount of innovation an individual would be able to accoplish.
That's already the model for a lot of libraries. They are all "learnings commons" now. Sometimes there are "maker spaces" or whatever attached to it, for tool use. They can be next to each other but don't have to me (who wants to study next to a table saw anyway)
I think libraries are adjusting fine to accommodate these needs. Really, the most important building in any educational institution is still the library, even in 2023. What libraries fail (start failing (?)) at is their archival responsibilities. And apparently, from the article, their publishing responsibilities too.
I think libraries function well in their original purpose. When I visit the library the computers are mostly empty and there are lot of people there - reading and browsing books. I think the death of the book is overhyped by people with a vested interest in technology. (Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in technology)
I'm fairly certain that our local library has a 3d printer. They are definitely trying to take on different ways for people to learn and gather information, but wood/metal working equipment seems like it would be a liability nightmare.
That's a good description of what my library does these days. Did a big doubletake at the row of printers the first time I saw 'em. They also lease out bigger tools (I borrowed a leaf blower and a string trimmer) and WiFi hotspots. I borrowed an cheap electronic drum kit (which convinced me to buy my own), and I'm on the waitlist for a steel tongue drum.
The problem for academic libraries is they hold a lot of material that is not readily available online. There is some effort being made to fix that, but it takes time, effort, and money to get archival material online (I've worked on a couple of these projects myself).
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/outward-odyssey-a-p...
If you look here they have many other series on all sorts of topics:
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/
I also often end up read books by other University presses.