Academic Bankruptcy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think there are certain industries, like health care and education that shouldn't be treated like for-profit ventures. It probably won't sit well with this crowd, but there are some things in life that should supercede wealth acquisition.
Similarly for education. The for profit schools get their money on the backs of the poor and those who shouldn't be in college. Obviously they don't get all of their money from such people but a large portion of it comes from these people. The profit motive in education is a bad one and should be avoided.
There's an assumption here that for-profit ventures perform worse or serve interests worse than non-profits. In my experience with non-profits, there's lower accountability, higher salaries with less performance, less accomplishing of the organization's objectives, and more corruption and politics. Nonprofits have historically done very poorly at their stated aims, and vastly, vastly underperformed for-profit companies in building up the world. Also, the majority of universities and schools are already set up as non-profits, which might be part of why they're so dysfunctional.
Non-profit, mostly, have standards for admission. The for-profits don't. They just want people to spend money. Faculty at for profit colleges get fired if their standards are too high. The for profit system is all about getting students in and making sure they never fail a course. Keep them paying. For profit motive in education as it currently exists is a disaster.
For profit education is great for giving a single individual specific skills they need that will make them money.
For profit education is unlikely to be interested in giving a person a "wide liberal arts background". And the thing about a wide background is that isn't worth much to the individual in terms of money. They might look back on their lives as having been richer for it or they might not. But giving a person a wider background is worth more to society as a whole, in everything from life being more interesting to politics being less polarized.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
He is pondering changes to the voting system, as this issue is discussed every month or so.
The root of the problem is that the rating system is programmed as a measure of /comment quality/ while people use it as an "I agree" or "I disagree" which is something different entirely.
We could add a separate counter for "Agree/disagree" and "quality comment" but you'd still need the cultural change. You need your users to value quality comments, even if they disagree with the content of those comments. Looking at an argument you disagree with and seeing it's merits is a hard thing to do yourself; it's a very difficult thing to get other people to do.
If we want to change things, I think a better thing to look at is maybe making who voted publicly viewable? I know I quite often upvote people I argue with (I mean, if your comment is worth responding to, surely it is worth an upvote) and I think if they can see that I upvoted them, it sometimes inspires conversation rather than argument.
First, writers who go on about the how high tuition, but don't investigate how much people actually pay can never be trusted. The only figures to contemplate are average and median tuition actually payed. The stated tuitions are simply the maximum; it is true that Trustees have spiked the maximum in the last 20 yrs, figuring, why not make Saudi princes pay as much as possible. This is not inflation, but a policy change that affects a vanishing minority of students. Any writer who doesn't make this plain is either stupid or dishonest, and my advice is, stop reading as soon as he or she pulls this stunt.
(I realized how much fraud there is in journalism on these themes, when I looked into in-state tuition at my old school, College Park, and was startled to see it is the same, after indexing for inflation, as it was in the late 70's. Admittedly Maryland is a fairly well-heeled state, most state schools have been savaged by legislatures in the last 23 years.)
Presumably the Times pays him because they like what he says; clearly there is no fact checker. In one of his earlier [diatribes](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/19/what-if-colle...) the claim was let pass that the average 'full professor' makes $12,198,578 / 30 = $406,619.26 per annum. He also suggests that it is typical to spend 5 years as an associate professor, then 30 as a full professor. The data on a large state university are before me: these are the numbers for the humanities faculty:
62 full profs at average $99,431 --nice work if you can get it.
69 assoc profs at avg $64,722
51 asst profs at avg $53,687
For all I know, the Universities should all be drowned at sea, but we'll never know if we are given out and out liars like Prof. Taylor to read.
When someone gets a college degree in Electrical Engineering I think the goal is not really to learn electrical engineering or electronics -- again you can learn those things faster and cheaper on your own -- the goal really is to get a document whereby an institution declares you are fit to enter the electrical engineering field as a working professional. If you get a degree in Religion, what "field" are you certified to work in? The religion field? The priesthood? Professorship of religion? Do we honestly need more of those and/or to the extent we do could it not be done cheaper and faster, outside a university? Perhaps done by a church-related organization?
Also, though I agree that religion is influencing some things, I don't think religion really "drives" most of anything that's really important anymore, like inventions and innovation, like building things, like creating new products and services, developing new technologies. The vast majority of that activity is totally perpendicular to religion. If anything, one of the biggest areas where I see religion making an impact is as an anti-science, pro-superstition, anti-education, anti-progress force, especially in areas of medicine and biology. But you could easily never take a class or read a book on religion and go on to become an excellent businessman, scientist, engineer, inventor, programmer, musician, etc. And still read or talk or think about religion, in your free time, whenever you felt like it. And again, for free.
A degree should be seen as a certification of knowledge, not a certification you are qualified to work in a certain field. There is nothing inherently wrong with going to university for love of learning and knowledge without focusing on what job it will lead to.
But you could easily never take a class or read a book on religion and go on to become an excellent businessman, scientist, engineer, inventor, programmer, musician, etc. And still read or talk or think about religion, in your free time, whenever you felt like it. And again, for free.
You can replace "religion" in the above statement with just about any other university subject and the statement will still be true. I'm not arguing that religion is necessary or important for everyone to study, just that it is a valid field of academic inquiry and study and as such very much belongs in a university setting.
"College product" is overpriced and is largely sustained by "parent pressure". Parents and society in general do not know yet any acceptable/established alternatives.
My bet is on "open horizontal stack". Right now, every college is a small "vertical stack": its own library, teachers, physical space, etc. I think in the future we will have one national library (e.g. Chegg.com), one network of educational spaces, one network of classes (e.g. SupercoolSchool.com), one employment system for students, one office for transfer of technology, etc.
However, I feel the timeline on that is fairly long, and it doesn't seem likely nothing else will be disrupted before that.
Track 1: Fixing existing system
Track 2: Building new educational stack
Why the article veers off to combining the Columbia and NYU philosophy departments at the end, I don't know (though I could make, dark, knowing comments out of frustration).
I'd say that American society ought to take a complete U-turn and start valuing and providing the highest possible quality education to the most and the most qualified citizens, not as good sold to people but as an investment in the whole of society since an educated population is a benefit to everyone, not just the educated.
But that wouldn't fuel another massive ripoff, so it doesn't seem too likely...
Nearly everyone I know that I would consider 'the best and brightest' got most of the school they wanted paid for through scholarships. Many of them got housing paid for, too. This is even more true of grad school; it's often said that if you have to pay for your own grad school, you probably don't belong there, but there are a whole lot of programs for qualified people in undergrad, too.
And really, I think if we're talking about 'the good of society' we need to look real hard at what sort of degrees we are paying for.
I'm not one of the "best and the brightest" - I'm not claiming to be some sort of 'john galt' figure, carrying the world on my back, hell, I don't even know if I'm a net positive. but I think I've made some small contributions. Some people, I think, create real value services I provide, services that are quite a lot cheaper than the competition. And the book I wrote, while it's not the best book in the world, is the most up-to-date book on the subject. I mean, I haven't sold that many copies, but we're most of the way through the first printing... it's something.
If after highschool someone told me "Hey, go to school... we'll cover housing, tuition, books, everything" I'd have gone to school and studied history. If I did that, do you think I would have contributed back more or less? Maybe I would have written a book then, too... sort of a "war nerd, only without the wit" or something. I dono. Maybe I would have done something good and important that was enabled by the degree... but my guess is that I wouldn't.
I mean, what actually happened was that my parents said they'd try to help, but I'd have to work to cover a large part of it, and it'd be a hard slog through community college, then through a UC. This was 1997-1998, so obviously, there were huge opportunities available for the taking. Now, you can argue that maybe I should have gone back to school in 2002, but while the boom lasted, working was unquestionably the best decision.
IE, yes perhaps an excess of history PhDs might not be a useful thing to produce. But a base-line knowledge, of say, history, economics, mathematics or etc. among a large percentage of the population is a crucial good - for society, for me. I want an informed electorate, I want a population less likely to fall for bogus scams, I want "line workers" qualified to step into other positions, etc...
how do you propose to raise the quality while also raising the quantity?
Right now, it seems, the major differentiators between the 'quality' schools and the not-so-good schools is exclusivity. If you go to a top school, you can be assured that nearly all your peers passed through a very stringent filter, and the same with your lecturers. (though, my understanding is that you are unlikely to actually have much two-way interaction with your lecturer.) If you get into a top school, you know that if you screw off too much, they kick you out.
We already have a system of 'community colleges' that will let anyone in and are almost free. These schools are judged "not very good" not really because of the quality of their instruction, but because of the lack of a filter. Anyone can pay a couple bucks and show up at a community college. I've taken a few classes myself. The thing is, most people just aren't serious. Take a math class? most of the students will drop out before the class finishes. Community college is full of people like me who put their career ahead of formal education.
Yeah, you could change that a little by providing reduced-cost housing, but I think you'd still have a whole lot of people who just aren't that serious, or who see better opportunities elsewhere.