Academia is not Broken. We are.
curryhoward.blogspot.com
curryhoward.blogspot.com
So maybe it's not for everyone, but for me it's a short time in my life where I can study Elementary Theory of Numbers alongside Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Genetics and Life Forms without worrying about paying the bills.
Learning how to do a job isn't too hard. You learn on the job, anyway. This is true for computer scientists as much as it is for neurosurgeons (residencies).
School builds a foundation, and hopefully increases your interest in learning. It has mine.
I'm a grad student in English lit, and I tell my students that their wisest course of action is to study math and reading/writing. Those two skills are applicable to almost any other domain, make picking up other skills easier, and relatively few people really understand either.
I've been a proponent of teaching that and rhetoric for a long time.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the one thing that colleges and universities are phasing out of their cirricula in favor of Java, consulting, and how to pull all-nighters.
Plus if you decide early you can then pay attention to make sure it's a good match for you.
The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite unacademic.
Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.
If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-) Bullshitters are, as a class, the most successful people in history, I would guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...
Not true. Society nowadays in the US is actually relatively immobile, compared to the 19th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_f...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor
All five were from poor/middle class backgrounds. Compare to Bill Gates, whose father was a name partner in the largest law firm in Seattle, Preston, Gates & Ellis, and whose mother knew the CEO of IBM.
Employers created this system... You can't blame your friends with A, B, and C on their resume for expecting to get that cushy 9-5 job when employers openly say they are looking to hire people with A, B, and C on their resume. For them, meeting this criteria is their top priority. There's nothing wrong with having different goals and values from yours.
Have employers really hijacked the American educational system? I think this is how it always has been. Americans are very pragmatic. Education in America is very pragmatic. If you think college should focus more on academics for the sake of academics, you can have that experience too, but let's not cry about the system being broken.
The entitlement problem lies simply in overcompetition for these cushy 9-5 jobs due to the relative ease of getting A, B, and C on one's resume over the past few years. Pair that with the downsizing, cutbacks, and layoffs of the financial crisis, and the economics just don't work in recent grads' favor at all. (Look at our unemployment rate...)
I don't have a cushy 9-5 job, but my expectations aren't shattered at all. I didn't optimize my resume for A, B, and C because I enjoyed pursuing X, Y, and Z much more. I thought A, B, and C were mostly bullshit... I think employers are perfectly content with hiring bullshitters.
> "Bullshitting is the most valuable skill to have." (unknown)
I think it's just inconvenient that academia is mixed up with careerism. Neither group really cares much for the other, but unfortunately, the former is dependent on the latter. You can still choose your path and set realistic expectations though, and I think most people do this.
The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.
They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and their country.
(A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do anything else.)
(Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in making things up.)
> This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology.
These are extremely different disciplines. First, anthropology has actually a lot of practical value, skilled anthropologists are decent at making predictions, or at the very least, raising interesting questions. The CIA's precusor, the Office of War Information had a lot of anthropologists on its staff and has roots in that sort of study, surveying, and analysis from different objective and subjective sources.
Philosophy is more of an an art, but a bit of training in philosophy can help a person resolve some important practical questions, and can help build character.
So those two are fields valid for different reasons. Anthropology can be watered down and yucky due to its subjective nature at times, but can be very valuable when trying to draw conclusions from a mix of objective and subjective data. For instance, trying to synergize census data and diary accounts to figure out what the quality of life was like in 1850's Prussia. And then making predictions about how a change in water supply, or military conscription could have ripple effects in a modern society based on Prussian data from 1850, Greek data from way back when, and so on.
Philosophy is what it is, and it's a legitimate field. People who are only philosophers and don't have training in other fields can sometimes ignore obvious practical considerations, but I think it's an incredibly good second or third field of study in concurrence with something else.
Which brings us to women's studies - which, from all of my experience, seems to be formalized, institutionalized political activism and not a legitimate field of study. They don't submit their views to review or analysis from anyone outside their field, and intentionally create so much lingo and jargon that it becomes very hard to discuss in practical language. It's kind of the opposite of physics - physicists are always trying to explain very complex systems as straightforwardly as possible, are open to hearing anyone's view who can provide falsifiable evidence, and it's a cause for celebration when the old view of physics is falsified and a new paradigm takes over. Women's studies is the opposite - they're trying to take fairly common situations and give them complex and obfuscating terminology, they're insulated and very poorly receive anyone's opinion that doesn't support their current worldview, and fight tooth and nail against anything that disputes their canon.
So, I fully agree with your comment, except that I think the three fields you chose were a little unfortunate. Philosophy can be valuable for people even when not directly relevant to careers. Anthropology has some bullshit involved with it at times, but can definitely be a solid field of study. Women's studies, though... I don't know, I don't want to see philosophy or anthropology get associated with that at all.
Maybe the most damning thing is that women's studies directly contradicts itself frequently and gets indignant when someone tries to reconcile it. Most egregiously - one of the major justifications and arguments for sexual reassignment surgery is that transgendered people have "the other gender's brain pattern" - something like that, you can look it up in greater detail. So that's taught in Gender Studies 317 or whatever, but in Gender Studies 201 they're saying gender is all a social construct and all gender roles are created by the media.
They don't want to get at correct worldviews, they want political power. If innate gender differences lends them political power - funding, access to services, favorable laws, new members of their political voting bloc - then there's innate gender differences. If "gender is a social construct" is good for political power - because it demonstrates oppression, justifies favorable laws, funding, and attracts new members to their political voting bloc - then gender is a social construct. And they let these two irreconcilable points of view live in the same building, and use whichever is convenient for the current argument!
So, I guess you could say "one of these three is not like the other" - Anthropology has some practical career applications even though it can be abstract. Philosophy is definitely a legitimate field of study, and can be very good for developing a person's character even if there isn't immediate career opportunities involved. Women's studies? Well, it's not politically correct to say, but a thorough examination makes it look like it's not particularly a valid or good field of study, that's shameful that universities allow it into the same halls where legitimate disciplines are taught and learned.
Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.
If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them.
This isn't a question of differing philosophies and values. This is just objectively wrong. In the degenerate case, if we all decide to become poets, then who is going to farm the food to feed us all? This should clue you in to the fallacy of your statement above. The marginal value of an additional poet is lower than the marginal value of another farmer, or another assembly line worker, or another programmer.
Moreover, there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.
I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields...
Holy mackerel, what a mouthful. You've got to be trolling, but I'll bite anyway.
Let's start with the fact that YOU are the one that's characterizing things as "male" or "female"; I don't see anyone else doing so. Of the three cubicles bordering on mine, two of them are occupied by females; shall I call software development a "female" field? If not, then why would I ever praise it?
But your statement is its own dis-proof. You (and the rest of the "progressives") are praising what you label "female fields", and implicitly condemning the "male" ones. Doesn't this show a priori that we don't universally favor one or the other, but rather have, as a society, a diverse set of opinions?
Finally, I'd like to retell an old joke from my (engineering) college:
Scientists learn to ask "why does that work?". Engineers are taught to ask "how does that work?". Accountants learn to ask "how much will it cost?". Liberal arts majors are trained to ask "do you want fries with that?"
It's a little cruel, but still funny, I think.
You should ask a postdoc making ~30k a year to do cutting edge science the same question. They could triple that tending bar.
there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.
Those postdocs derive greater satisfaction from doing their science than they would by tending bar. In their own internal calculus, the rewards of their career are greater than the simple money equation.
Progressives like to think they're being deep and insightful when they observe that there's more to the world than just money. But it's not news to anyone, least of all to economists. This is embodied in the concept of utility. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility :
Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. ... [Quoting Paul Samuelson] "Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire."
Thus, in the case of your hypothetical postdoc, the opportunity to do his (or her) science is worth $60K. (I oversimplify due to things like marginal utility, but that's the gist)
However, there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function. I know I can't.
Now lets pretend a consumer does in fact only make rational choices, and their utility function for every conceivable situation is known. I have distinct, although unproven, suspicion that determining what choices the person would make through their day would be NP-complete as their present choices would effect their future choices. Thus all possible outcomes would have to be considered far into the future if one truly wanted to maximize utility.
Therefore, assuming what I have just said is fairly logical, it is impossible for a rational consumer to exist even if their utility function is known, since it would be impossible to for them to compute any given choice in a finite amount of time.
In conclusion any discussion that touches on "utility" or assuming a group of people is making "rational" choices is doomed to failure. The truth is we don't know why any given person make any given choice.
Also you seem to ignore the important of positive externalities in your arguments. I believe this is where you disagree with other posters.
Of course; I never claimed otherwise. It's certainly true that any person's utility function is at least partly unknown to them, and in any case changes over time. As a result it has little value as a predictive tool. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Ludwig von Mises attacks this head-on in Human Action (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action ).
It's undeniable that at any juncture, the action that a person takes is based on some judgment, conscious or not (and quite possibly mistaken), that the chosen action delivers a greater utility than its alternatives.
Thus, the hypothetical postdoc-cum-bartender is deciding -- for reasons that we don't know, but real all the same -- that he would prefer to do his research over bartending, even to the extent of giving up $60K to do so.
Who are we to second guess his decision? Precisely because, and not in spite of, the fact that his reasons are inscrutable, we can only assume that he's making the best call he can. By what right can we override it? And more to the point, if his/her university is providing such a valuable career for him, who are we to say that they must sweeten the pot and throw in even more money?
Would you argue that a scientist is less important than a bar tender based on their incomes?
But you're being a little careless, too, when you throw around a word like "important". Can you be more specific?
Hmm, sounds more like economics produces cases of local maxima, not absolute maxima...
Because a capitalist would prefer to pay nothing of course. Scientists like Einstein don't get rich while millions or even billions are made off the foundation of their discoveries.
Not true - all of the best businessmen I know quite like to pay people, and pay them well. A mentor of mine runs one of the most profitable architectural firms in the Middle East, he always talks to me about the difference between the "going rate" and "staying rate" - he prefers to pay 20% to 40% above market, sometimes double the market rate in salary and bonuses and he has an insanely high rentention rate in a competitive field. Whenever I had people contract or work for me, I either paid them considerably above market, or otherwise worked to get them ridiculously good compensation - I worked to get them good compensation by their own standards and goals, whether it was travel, training, getting to work on really really fucking cool projects most of the time so work didn't even feel like work... and so on. Short-sighted people like to screw people. Brilliant people like to compensate well.
> Scientists like Einstein don't get rich while millions or even billions are made off the foundation of their discoveries.
Einstein was probably a bad example to pick of that - his lifetime compensation was sky high. He didn't get as much as, say, J.P. Morgan, but he was loved and adored by a great many people, was a renowned and honored guest anywhere in the civilized world, and basically was able to live the quality of life of a multi-millionaire as he chose. It's like being President of the USA - Presidents don't make all that much money, but make incredibly high compensation overall.
They do that because they are __required to__ in order to retain talent and competitiveness. If they could get it for free, you can bet they would. Why do you think so much outsourcing is happening?
And Einstein was not a bad example to pick out of that. His contributions possibly number in the trillions, yet his salary was quite low.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xCDZxEc...
You'd be surprised - often it's more cost effective to pay people than to try to get them for free. You get a different quality of work, support, and dedication. Ever had an unpaid intern? They take up more time than they're worth. Free labor is very expensive...
> And Einstein was not a bad example to pick out of that. His contributions possibly number in the trillions, yet his salary was quite low.
Salary is a part of compensation, but not all of it. Again, the U.S. President makes something like $400,000 per year, but his total compensation including prestige, perks, fame, power, etc, etc is one of the highest in the USA. Salary is not the only form of compensation. Money/direct monetary benefits is not the only form of compensation. When you can eat anywhere for free, and stay in any hotel or palace as an honored guest for free, you don't really need so much money any more. Einstein was on that level for the latter half of his life.
Please reread my sentence which you've just completely ignored. Unpaid interns obviously don't have the talent that most people want. But despite that, people still want them!
When you can eat anywhere for free, and stay in any hotel or palace as an honored guest for free, you don't really need so much money any more. Einstein was on that level for the latter half of his life.
Einstein could do that, but with what stipulation? Most likely that he had to give a speech. He can't just go to a multiple month luxury resort free of obligations that any billion-air mogul can today. And again, what is the value of these free meals and visits that can only be offered to you first? I would peg that at around $20 million at most, which pales in comparison to the billion dollar industries that have resulted from his discoveries.
Nobody said that.
"If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them."
I agree, as long as you're not forcing people to support them via taxation.
"We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture."
Women are traditionally less responsible for earning a household's income. Few people dismiss a woman as a mate because she makes too little money. This reduces the incentive to enter a high-earning career.
Nobody here has suggested this.
> "If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them."
No, it is not. I respect historians and artists as much as I do programmers and engineers, but let's be realistic - there's nothing truly noble about any of the above endeavors. They are, in the end, self-serving interests.
I'm an engineer because I love building things. It makes me happy when I build stuff, and while I can rationalize and self-aggrandize by thinking about my "contributions" to humanity, the reality is that I do this because I want to. There has been no great sacrifice involved, and I would hardly think society owes me one.
Similarly, I do not believe artists, historians, and other such "soft" majors are any different. They do what they do because it tickles their fancy - which is great, but let's not sit around and circle-jerk about the nobility of their cause and how everyone owes them a living.
> "I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields"
This would be disturbing, but I do not see this. Do you have any links to this?
How is some random performance artist providing me value? And if they aren't, why should I "support" them? I they aren't providing value to me then why should I be obligated to pay them? I can understand paying for roads, schools, police--but this?
There's a mechanism in place for me to determine if I wish for an artist to provide me value. It's called "I pay them."
Oh, wait. I know--since you say that the contributions of these people cannot be measured by money, then clearly this "support" you mention is not money. Sure, I can do that. "Great Job, folks!"
The big problem is opportunity cost: if you're a top-nerd American, you can probably make a relatively large amount of money right out of school as a hacker, engineer, consultant, and so forth. Why, then, go to grad school, get paid relatively little, toil for a job that might not exist, and deal with the uncertainties of academia? On the other hand, if you come from a developing country, grad school stipends can seem relatively large, your home labor market for advanced grads might be saturated, and an American PhD might be the key to advancement.
There are not that many single American women in Shandong, but there are a lot of people who don't think studying for four years is that bad of a price to pay to see their incomes quintuple.
I mean, most of the employed programmers on HN make, what, $80 ~ $100k? Imagine there was a country where programmers routinely made $500k for writing routine CRUD apps. Fancy a spin there for a few years? That is roughly the scale of the economic opportunity gap (though it will, inevitably, close).
"The universities" are great in the US because the professors and researchers are (mostly) awesome.
You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some terrible fiction books.
But I'm not bitter. (;
Our country is broken.
Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt. Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay off the loans. How could they decide something like that??
Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student. There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans people took out, but can't repay.
People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make good decisions??
Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing. Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent for people like this?
In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years ago.
Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual accountability -- you lose individual freedom.
I've never been dissuaded from thinking that there is a place for people-who-just-want-good-jobs in colleges. There are plenty of opportunities for people who wanted to go further in computer science, I don't know of any college with a good computer science programs that's lacking in high level math and AI courses.
That said, I absolutely agree with "The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken." People need to decide up front if their priority is a 9-5 job and plan accordingly.
For now I'll leave it by just point out that there are only 4 top US CS schools, not 5 (in west to east order, Stanford, UCB, CMU, MIT).
Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.
With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.
And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5 probably proves it.
Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5 list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or so.
My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make good judgments on the topic of this essay.
So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14 in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self-perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending #14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school.
I wish I were making this up. I'm not.