I have a tough time with this article. I understand what it is trying to say. The costs are ridiculous. But what I see among my friends is that those who went to large public flagship schools got lost, and had a much tougher time. However, those who went to smaller private schools on scholarships built better connections with professors, and tended to do better long run.
Interesting. That's directly opposite what I've seen. My close high school friends nearly all went to Ivy League-quality schools: Yale, Penn, MIT, Caltech, etc. Some of us are happy. Most of us are succeeding. A few of us are excelling. (Personally, I'm struggling. I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time, no matter how hard I try to subscribe to the learning-for-learning's-sake theory, which is not great for grades.) We're all stressed out of our minds.
Three of my equally, if not more, intelligent friends ended up at public institutions or "second-" or "third-tier" schools. Unequivocally, they're happier. They're thriving, as the article puts it. Student council presidents, top of their class, balanced social life, good job or graduate school prospects.
Of course, this is all anecdata. Me as much as you. The article at least has some semblance of data.
In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
College is only not worth it if you don't get out of it what you want. Most of us go to college because society tells us it leads to a "better life"--which is an inherently unquantifiable notion.
You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly means you are good at following orders.
That's why you have to evaluate the grade in the context of the course! GPA is meaningless; individual grades are much more informative. See Harry Lewis, recently appointed dean of Harvard's engineering school, on the subject. [0]
The savvy employers do this—though probably not enough. There's a finance firm that hires exclusively Math 55 [1] alumni—I forget the name; a number of tech firms screen for CS161 [2]. Both among the hardest classes you can find. An A in those takes a hell of a lot more than just following directions.
>It mostly means you are good at following orders.
Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.
Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with.
Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.
Nah, I sort of agree. I graduated with almost 4.0 for my masters. There's so much more I am learning now - things everyone who didn't do well in school learned - humility, balance of life and work, ability to adapt without explicit rules, implicit socialization and direction, ability to self direct, ability to group direct, ability to lead, ability to learn things not traditionally used as metrics of intelligence. Education gave me a beautiful foundation of knowledge, the concept and form of theory and knowledge, and a strong love for it. It didn't teach me how to live, nor could it teach me how to think outside the bounds it defines.
> a "better life"--which is an inherently unquantifiable notion.
Spoken like a true liberal arts major.
A better life is pretty easily quantified. The part that gets you tied up in knots is deciding what "better" means. You stop a thousand people on the street, I guarantee you that a ridiculously overwhelming majority can give you an easily quantifiable answer to the question, "What is a better life?"
The answers won't be that hard to distill down to, "Enough hours spent doing these things." The numbers are there.
And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
Heh, I'm a computer science major to my core. Spoken like a CS major at a liberal arts school, I suppose.
I suspect we agree. If you could universally define "better life," you could quantify it. But you can't. We're also bad--really bad--at analyzing ourselves. Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
> And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
I'm not sure what you mean. Higher education has become increasingly accessible to the economically disadvantaged, not less.
Also, here's Harvard College's mission statement:
> Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.
That's pretty damn well summarized as "we empower our students to lead better lives." We can argue over whether college comes close to achieving that goal, but I'm comforted by the fact that the stated mission at least aligns with my personal reasons for attending school.
> Higher education has become increasingly accessible to the economically disadvantaged, not less.
The FAFSA is not a college-led program. Colleges have had to adapt to it and other grants and loans, but the accessibility is not at all what college has been optimizing for.
Indeed, the question of optimization you posed was not about accessibility, either. It was about outcome. Read up on the Occupy protests if you haven't heard about them; the one in Hong Kong only just dispersed.
Tangential, but I wanted to respond to this part of your statement:
Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
I found that writing in college, for classes, was not fun. It was boring, there was a lot of "write about this thing" that I really didn't know all that well. Further the topics weren't something that interested me deeply. Even worse, on the rare occasions that I did get to choose really interesting topics, the situation was depressing, I just didn't know enough to be able to make a good argument, didn't have enough perspective to understand how to find the structure of the problem and argument, and didn't really nave the background to position my statements. It was an exercise in just noting what other sources said, and putting lots of footnotes - extremely dry crap.
However, 5-6 years after college, I found myself working with a research group at a university (as a staff support programmer), and I did get to spend all my time figuring things out, coding and generally doing cool stuff (basically your 60hrs/week programming). When the time came to make a final report on my first research project, and write up an academic paper about it, was annoyed at having to do another paper. It turned out that academic papers tend to have page counts too, and I'd need to be even more careful about footnoting ideas etc.
Something surprising happened with that though - the page count turned out to be a big problem, but in a completely unexpected way: I had to cut and rewrite several times, just to make solid statement and argument small enough to fit in 8 pages! Amazingly I had gone from "how do I fill 8 pages?" to "crap, I only have 8 pages to say this!".
I think the big difference was the depth of knowledge I had, combined with my genuine interest to describe work I found interesting and satisfying. The college writing course taught me how to footnote, how to present an argument, how to build a reasonable conclusion, but had missed the part about writing being fun when one knows the material well. I went on to also enjoy some other types of writing - grants (convincing someone you have a good idea and getting them to fund it) and position papers (aka white papers, on ideas that our group thought would be good directions for further research.
I'm mentioning this because even if you don't like the writing now, I'd suggest not letting it poison your future views of it - the experience can be rewarding under the right circumstances. Hopefully it will inspire you a bit to get through your current papers a bit easier :)
>(Personally, I'm struggling. I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time, no matter how hard I try to subscribe to the learning-for-learning's-sake theory, which is not great for grades.)
Think of it as learning the vocabulary you can use to communicate your STEMlord ideas to the peasants/mortals ;-).
>In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
"I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time"
I used to teach math at a large public university, and would always have kids asking 'what's the point of this' and thinking it was a waste of their time.
My experience is that top students can get an equivalent if not better education at large public universities. (I went to Duke and Michigan)
Public universities are much less forgiving, which means mediocre or unmotivated students get crushed in cases they would get hand-holding (and A- grades) at a private university.
As for connections, they're important and you get better ones at top schools, unequivocally, but you don't need them for many careers.
This is absolutely true. I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, Northwestern for law school. After being given the run-around any time I wanted to do any little thing, I was floored by how much attention I got in the private institution. When my wife got pregnant her third year of school at Northwestern, with a delivery date during finals, our dean of students took care of everything to accommodate her. At Tech, she would've been shuffled from disinterested administrator to disinterested administrator for weeks.
I went to a public school for CS. Noticed same. First and second years are full of "filter" courses. Calculus, Physics, and CS 101 weeded out whole swathes of students. Many large classes where you are mostly a faceless StudentID #. Many students switched majors, some schools, some droped out. It was brutal and this wasn't even a top tier school.
I agree, but I'd add one thing. In addition to the mediocre and unmotivated students, there is a depressing number of motivated but somewhat unprepared students who get crushed as well. I really think a lot of these students would have thrived at a university that was more supportive.
I'm not advocating hand holding or coddling, but I do think that impacted majors at very strong public universities aren't really doing right by the talent level they enroll. They do society no favors by enrolling a student who didn't have a strong high school calculus curriculum, giving her a C her first semester, and then telling her that her GPA is too low for engineering now.
This observation is mostly accurate - the less forgiving part is true, but grades can still be a bit of a crapshoot.
My own grades are highly erratic - I dominated in some of the hardest math classes where I went to undergrad (a public school), often being one of the top performers and easily the most knowledgeable, but did awful in other classes. I never cared that much about easy classes, and only applied myself on hard classes because they were mentally stimulating/challenged me. I also did not care about grades - I viewed my purpose at college to learn & develop, not be a 4.0 student.
When I went to grad school (a prestigious public school), I applied myself in all of my classes and did solid overall - all of my classes challenged me pretty hard, and so it motivated me to work hard.
It is no surprise that the students on scholarships are typically more successful in the long run. But the reason for the success is not only the college.
> It is no surprise that the students on scholarships are typically more successful in the long run. But the reason for the success is not only the college.
Private colleges give out scholarships like candy. It's a form of price discrimination.
I think you're conflating the public/private divide with the college/university differences. I went to a public college, which avoids the issues inherent in enormous universities without the skyrocketing costs.
