Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies? | Hacker News Reader

Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

economist.com

85 pointscwan98 comments

I must admit that I am always a bit prejudicial when I hear an business person (or a business magazine like this) talking about universities.

They seem to view Universities as a business proposal: "How much do we invest? How much do we get out of it?", which it shouldn't be. Take this quote: "If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”.

My feeling is that the person who said it is thinking of streamlining it, removing subjects which bring little profit, and increasing those with profit. So out goes "geography" but also "gender studies", and instead more money is put into "pharmacy", "genetics", "economics and MBA".

The result would be great from a business perspective, but that's what companies and business are for. If there's plenty of money many companies will be investigating in those subjects just as well.

Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded, more knowledgable even of things that may not bring money, and should let professors study subjects despite there being no monetary advantage.

Where has the passion for knowledge gone? Let the student have a place to get knowledge, and the professor have a place to expand it.

I teach at a community college. The price is quite low (and my pay). Society does not want to pay for knowledge. It does not see a benefit in having people who appreciate art, literature, culture, music, etc. It only sees a benefit from electrical engineering and other such subjects. It's a problem of society and it's short sighted goals.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems.

I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to appreciate literature and culture. I am also quite happy to support the artists whose work I enjoy. But I am not happy to have tax money support it until long after ever child learns the basics well and the local police department is fully funded.

[Edit, fixed typo.]

You seem to think that these are independent issues. I.e. if we just throw more money at basic literacy, road-maintenance, and policing, then society will be better. If we throw money at art and cultural education, then we're losing out on money for the above.

The fact is that a lot of social problems stem from cultural problems. You can keep throwing money and teachers at those kids down the street, but it won't get them to read. Instead, you need to change their culture (and their parents') to one of scholarship.

I find this "don't spend my tax dollars on anything that doesn't directly benefit me" attitude to be mean-spirited, but more importantly, to be one of the cultural problems that helps to foster the ills you cite.

I find this "don't spend my tax dollars on anything that doesn't directly benefit me" attitude to be mean-spirited,...

He advocated spending money to educate illiterate people rather than already-educated people. I think it's pretty clear he isn't illiterate, so how is he advocating only spending money that directly benefits him?

Yummyfajitas said it quite nicely, but permit me to say it on my own behalf.

I am not at all saying do not spend my tax dollars on things that don't directly benefit me. I said that we should not spend it on things like art and literature until after we have taken care of things like basic education, infrastructure, law enforcement, and yes even universal healthcare and gaurunteed access to sufficient food.

I am a great lover of America and I think (with perhaps some admitted bias) that it is a truly great country. But I know kids on my own block that can barely read and I pass by a homeless shelter with large crowds outside it on my way to work, and there is an active police officer sitting behind me in law school class because he doesn't make enough to support his family comfortably. I strongly object to spending tax money on art and literature until long after those issues are fixed.

And no, throwing money at those issues won't fix them, but it would be a start. Money is not sufficient for a solution, but I suspect it is necessary (or at least highly helpful).

It sounds like you have the attitude of the government just providing the basics. I've taught you to read to go read what you want. But without access to a decent library, without training on how to appreciate literature it seems that your point of view is to utilitarian. The arts enrich us all in ways that can't be counted merely by monetary utility. I would like to live in a society that recognizes this and is willing to support it. It's not like it would cost a great deal or that the money could not come out of the budgets of other government agencies. It doesn't have to mean an additional expense.

Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but my liberal arts classes in college were a joke. They were crowded, hurried, narrowly focused, and taught by professors that didn't seem to have the time or the inclination to provoke the students into new ways of thinking at all.

I suppose it's different at schools that can afford to staff these classes at 1:15 student teacher ratios with good teachers but the money that was spent on making me a "well rounded" student would have gone a lot further if I'd just been given a pile of books to read and some time at a quiet desk.

Ok, I read too much into your comment, so I apologize for the "selfish" remark.

I've composed a few half-responses, but I'm wrestling with what I'm trying to articulate.

I think what it comes down to is that the issues you cite will never be fully fixed. Second, but more importantly, the amount of money required to support cultural projects is tiny compared to, say, infrastructure upgrades.

So, I object to the idea that we can't do any of that (with tax dollars) until these other things are done. In reality, if we adopt that attitude, it'll be too easy for fear-mongers to kill any cultural project.

There is the thorny issue of the government using tax dollars to fund art work that I hate, or that offends me, but one of the cultural goods I value is a tolerance of that. I.e. I don't like that, but I'm glad to live in a society that could produce it, alongside the stuff I do like.

Many of the problems you name have little or nothing to do with lack of funding. You can't fix poverty by throwing money at it. At least, nobody has ever managed to do it.

IMHO, this is shortsighted. Art is of almost zero practical use. Investing a tiny fraction of society's resources in art is a sign of a society that has evolved beyond the starvation stage.

Are you saying that all art should only be commissioned by rich private interests? No investment in art by the public? You would demolish the National Mall, Statue of Liberty and other such art works?

Or do you draw the line at hoity-toity works (as decided by whom?).

IMHO, it is super important that societies develop the "refined" sides of the brain to control our atavistic instincts.

No he is saying that there is a slight flaw in the logic that:

1, An educated population is good for society.

2, Education happens by going to university

3, People that don't want to study hard and become doctors/engineers/scientists can go to university and do media studies.

5, Since they have been to university they are educated and therefore good for society - see 1.

6, Since more people want to do media studies than chemistry the chemistry depts are be shut down to increase funding for media studies.

There's obviously a spectrum between fully investing in arts & culture studies and fully investing in STEM disciplines or public infrastructure, so let's try to avoid superlatives - in an ideal world, all disciplines would be fully funded and productive, but I doubt anyone in this forum is claiming that we should cut off funding entirely for anything, and certainly not destroy(!) existing art.

Interesting you mention the kids who are barely able to read while saying you don't want to pay for someone else to appreciate art, literature, music, etc. What sort of reading do you have in mind for these kids to learn? Should we just teach them how to read an operating manual for machinery or the instruction set for putting something together? Reading is an essential part of learning to appreciate art, music, literature.

I think it was Socrates that said the unexamined life is not worth living. I guess I'd like to give everyone a chance at having a life worth living by exposing them to thoughts, ideas, and experiences that are essential to an enriched human life. This means teaching us all how to appreciate art, literature, music, etc. It also has the added bonus of making society a better place to live.

I think they should have the ability to read anything and everything they want or need to. If they choose to read only operating manuals then they will at least be able to. If they choose to read Faust, The Inferno, and Paradise Lost, they should be able to. I am troubled when we want to spend tax money to help people who already have basic education appreciate art and literature when we are not doing enough to make sure everyone learns the basics first.

As to the Socrates quote, I think he was right. But I believe he was talking about introspection, not art, literature, and music created by someone else. And we as a society should be concerned with making sure everyone learns the basics they need to function in modern society before we worry about making sure those priveleged with already having those basics down can appreciate art on taxpayer money.

If we teach someone the skills they need to earn a respectable living they will then have every opportunity to pursue the arts with the money they earn. If we spend taxpayer money supporting the arts for those who are already earning a middle class income, we may very well be short changing those who are not.

I am personally a great fan of literature, theater, and certain types of music. But I purchase my enjoyment of those things with my own money because my father made sure I got a good basic education that enabled me to go to college first then get a solidly middle class job and now pursue law school at night while I work. I went to public school but my parents especially my father provided me his own time and materials bought with his own money to supplement that to make sure I learned well. I want to make sure that children whose parents cannot or simply do not do that still have the same chance I did.

That's great that you benefited from good parent(s). I wish everyone was equally well off. I think it's OK to allow people to enrich their lives by exposing them to the arts. It's a pittance to do so in comparison to war, a prison-industrial complex, ag subsidies, etc.

EDIT: I should say to allow government to provide people with the opportunity to enrich their lives.

I think it's sad and I think we are sliding more and more into that mindset. But I also think the situation is brighter than you describe it in some countries.

In Italy (where I come from) school is extremely generic, with around 12 subjects being taught in secondary school. University is similarly open, with courses being done simply because "it's good for the mind", and people being free to pick and choose courses, and even change degree.

On the other hand it's a very old syllabus (especially at school) so there is a lot of pressure to modernise it. But EVERY time someone tries to modernise it and decides for example to drop latin, or history of arts from schools and add a foreign language and computers, you hear an uproar of people who complain that school (and partially Uni too) shouldn't be a place to get you ready for a job (for those you can go to specialised colleges) but instead one to feed the mind.

But yeah, I agree with you that all societies are becoming less and less concern with non commerciable knowledge. And as long as we judge people's worth and achievements by their money, I have little hope this will change.

There are two sides to a price calculation - the supply and the demand side. The price for teaching is low because the supply is huge - there is a vast pool of people who want to teach literature, and are willing to do it at very low prices. If a literature adjunct quits, the college can immediately go to the waiting list and find someone else willing to take the job for $5k/class.

In contrast, if I (a programmer) were to quit, my company could probably not find someone willing to take the job for $35k/year.

It would be very shortsighted if society overpaid for college teachers, just as it would be shortsighted if they overpaid for military contractors or the stock of bankrupt automakers.

I wasn't referring to pay as evidence society doesn't want to pay for art, culture, education, etc. The low pay is one consequence of this fact. There is definitely an oversupply of teachers in the humanities and sciences. But it is true that funding levels per student are decreasing and that there is increasing pressure to 'streamline' the process. This is a buzz word for cutting out the unimportant stuff like art, music, etc. It's bad for society in the long run.

You are making some broad generalizations and it doesn't exactly work like. Replacing any programmer is just as easy as replacing as replacing any adjunct. Replacing a specialist scholar is just as hard as replacing your special programmer. Adjuncts are Luke your basic php programmer. Thye know just enough to get the job done. But a university chair is like an architect, you don't give just anyone that job.

Liberal Arts is a luxury that many cultures cannot afford. When you're just starting out or trying to survive as a culture, you need engineers, hard-core scientists and business people. Take China and Israel for example. The upper class can go for Liberal Arts at any time, but the culture as a whole will lean strongly to hard science until they're established enough to enjoy that luxury. Times are bad now (but getting better) and soft majors are not wanted, but when times are good again, they'll be more jobs for the softies to fill.

This is a most unenlightened point of view. Music, art, story telling have been part of human cultures for thousands of years. One of the finest aspects of being human is enjoying these things. Literature, art, and music are always needed. They make life worth living.

Some societies don't have the money to make these things available to everyone. That's a shame. The U.S. and EU are societies that can afford to make these things available to everyone.

Why downvote me when you agree with my original post. You yourself say that "soft majors are not wanted". Indeed, they aren't wanted but they are needed and it's a shame that they aren't wanted. There's a reason dictatorial governments always control the arts, music, and literature. They fear the ideas, the progress that these things bring to a country.

I've not down voted you. It's a matter of survival. I sleep on the ground under a tree until I get a sleeping bag, and then maybe a cot. Before I buy a nice soft comfy mattress, I need a safe, secure structure for it.

Think of the liberal arts in this way. Once we have what we must have to survive, then we can go after the things we want as humans to enrich our lives and those around us. I love art and English majors... I just can't enjoy Rembrandt when I need a place to live or clean water to drink or a sewage system, etc :)

I upvoted you, but on the flip side, we currently have a large number of students who are coming out of college with low real-world value degrees and huge amounts of debt.

It's probably unsustainable to have 175,000 psych and history majors[1] graduating every year with 10-20,000 dollars in debt[2]. (Not to speak of all the business/marketing majors)

I'm not saying that colleges should turn into work-training programs, but there's a huge impedance mismatch between the cost of college, the skills conferred by the degrees that most people get, and the rewards for those in the workplace.

At some point, the average decent public university degree (in a non hard-science) will cease to pay for itself over the long term. Then the only people doing the humanities will be those of a class privileged enough to afford them, which is an outcome that I don't think anyone wants.

Even when you take into account the often generous financial aid packages in the US, costs are still spiraling compared to benefits, especially in the less lucrative degrees.

1: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/figures/fig_15.asp 2: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/general/2006-02-22-stude...

However, this may simply mean that fewer people should be going to college, not that the university system has a deep flaw. If, for example, 100k psych majors are graduating only to work in social services or some slightly related field, should these people be going to college at all? Are these skills necessary for the workforce? It's important to recognize that just because we wish it were so, 50,000 psych and history majors won't suddenly switch to the hard sciences. Now, it's possible that university is instead a luxury -- if they have the money to pay for it, it's an extremely appealing situation. However, many if not most do not have the money to pay for it. In summary, I'm not sure this is a problem with universities, but with students. How do we persuade people not to go to college?

P.S. When the author states that universities are weak and "ripe for takeover" he then uses STEM funding being too spread out as an argument. This is stupid because if we did consolidate STEM funding like he suggests, it would probably go to mostly the 50-100 best universities in the country. This would only solidify those schools' power and work against his entire argument.

The deep flaw is that too many people go to college for impractical degrees.

Are impractical degrees that bad, in and of themselves?

Provided you can afford the impractical degree or you don't mind the debt to get it, then no, they're not. The problem is that people are investing tens of thousands of dollars into degrees that won't return anything on that investment. I've heard the argument that such an investment is not in money but in making one a more well-rounded person, but I've personally never understood paying so much for knowledge that can be gotten for free with the internet and a library card.

I'm well-rounded. I can also program, do math (it's not just for high school math teachers) and speak German.

Meanwhile, my friend the psych/sociology major is out of work despite intelligence and conversational aptitude, and my friend the anthropology major works at a laundromat for what would be less than minimum wage in most other states.

These are people just as smart as I am, with much better GPAs. We all bought the "college => easy middle class" thing hook, line and sinker; I'm just lucky enough to have chosen a degree that pays.

This is anecdotal, but I know of many people who got jobs from big firms during University's career fair. They were doing things like History, or English language.

The reason why the employers were so keen on them was not that they were going to use the subject itself (e.g. History) but the techniques. A history graduate can read _a_lot_ quickly, summarise it, and hand you a report. Those are great skills that are often required in a job (in some jobs more than others).

So impractical degrees may still be... practical. :) (that said I personally don't think a degree should be judge on how practical it is. But I agree with the poster above that if you do want to focus on things that give you better job prospects in the short run, then there are colleges (in the Canadian/UK sense of shorter, more focused higher eduction courses).

Ah, but which are those, and do we really want to get rid of them all? Math degrees, for example, are not too lucrative employment-wise (except for statistics, which often is in a different department anyway). Do we really want to axe the math department?

Biology is even worse--- its starting salaries are approximately the same as most liberal arts fields. Does biology get to stay because it's science, though, despite having no better a business case than English does?

This is the point where people from my neck of the woods (Ontario, and, frankly, most of Canada) suffer severe cognitive dissonance. We have two very different post-secondary tracks, and around these parts a "college" in colloquial parlance is a diploma-granting institute aimed at providing students with marketable skills (technicians, technologists, accountants, nurses who have no aspirations to teach nursing later). The programs may be two or three years, but they are all identifiable by their practical applicability. (The full designation of such institutions is "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology".) Quite apart from that, we have the Universities which, apart from a few professional programs (medicine/dentistry, law, etc.), come with no promise of applicability whatever. (And even professional degrees are merely preparation for practical situations that will eventually lead to real certification. A BEng degree doesn't make you an engineer, a PEng certification does, and so on.

The point is that, from my perspective, more people should probably be going to college rather than to University. It's not that we don't need thinkers, but that we need more thinkers that can translate thought into action.

EDIT: closed paren to avoid major bug.

Clear goals. Different goals require distinct methods to achieve them. College and University. Perhaps we need more ways to teach and educate people. Ideally one desire thinkers than can translate things into action, but while this is a goal, why don't we try to find the way to give every student the best way to build a good education?

That's more-or-less the point of the two tracks. To put in in a frame that will be familiar to most of the readers here, the study of computability (computer science) is a fascinating theoretical pursuit that has some practical application in the real world, but that theoretical base is often glossed over in the rush to produce "qualified" programmers. Here, at least, the coder stream is in one track (with a sound theoretical base), while the mathematical and electrical engineering streams are in the other. There's nothing preventing a computer scientist from learning to code, nor is there anything keeping a diploma-toting programmer from pursuing mathematics further, it's just far less likely that a kid going into a computer science program is going to expect to emerge from the program as a code monkey or that one entering a programming stream will be wondering when the damned algebra is going to end.

> "How do we persuade people not to go to college?"

I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The argument is always practical vs. impractical degrees - but that's not all of it.

The problem is twofold, IMHO:

- Impractical degrees are disproportionately expensive compared to their earning power. You learn a lot of stuff, go deeply into debt, and wind up not being able to pay it off. In short: impractical degrees are overpriced.

- Practical degrees are (in most places) worth the money, but unbelievably loaded in terms of curriculum. Students come up as one-dimensional idiots, who have been impeccably trained in one subject area and nothing else. This creates effective workforces, but creates ineffective citizens, contrary to the humanities (read: most of the impractical degrees).

The two problems are IMHO rather separate, but the second doesn't get nearly enough attention. I cannot begin to count the number of engineers I graduated with who had not even the faintest idea of how politics in our country works - or some of the most basic philosophies the nation is based on, or even the most basic of 20th century history. Few of them appreciate art to any degree, and even fewer practice some form of it themselves.

Our engineering programs are creating idiots - people who can design bridges and write code like no other, but are worthless as people otherwise.

But, are you sure that the "impractical" degree programs are actually doing any better? Perhaps at top private schools one can get a good liberal arts education, but my observation going to a public school was that the science and engineering students generally seemed more well-rounded and more broadly educated compared to the vast hoards coasting along in psych, soc, and polysci; who were mostly interested in the party scene.

I've had many friends in many colleges, some of whom went into the sciences, and others into arts... beyond a limited demographic there were few people who were solely there to party. It's a tired stereotype perpetuated by shitty movies.

My experience has been that arts students tend to be more aware of, well, life in general - politics, the arts, social issues, etc, whereas engineering students were more or less of the "oh, I've heard OF it..."

There are two beneficiaries to post-secondary education: the student, and society (particularly, democracy) at large. The problem here is that the way things are structured, the degree programs that will most benefit a free, democratic society will make you broke, forcing people to choose one that will most benefit themselves only.

We risk creating an entire generation of mindless, uncultured automatons hyper-obsessed with material wealth, wading knee-deep through a pool of educated but broke people.

It wasn't always this way - there was a time when getting an engineering degree also meant a breadth of education in indirectly related subject areas. Where engineers took music, sociology, and fine arts... I've noticed a rapid decline in breadth in engineering programs, though, and IMHO this is a silent problem that has yet to rear its ugly head in the papers.

In my experience, STEM students are interested in solving problems. They are simply uninterested in learning bout problems which they cannot solve. Many of the `life in general' subjects you speak about are problems that cannot be solved...only moved in one way or another.

If they had solutions, if they appealed to an analytical mind then you would have interested STEM students. Maybe there should be a course taught by top politicians, spin doctors and media moguls: `Hacking Public Consciousness'. I almost guarantee that this would attract the students you talk about.

It's a tired stereotype perpetuated by shitty movies.

What, and your statement that scientist and engineers don't care about anything else wasn't?

Look, this is all anecdotal, but the CS/science/math/engineering students I knew in school were generally voracious readers, well informed about current events, politically opinionated in a highly educated way, appreciative of the arts, and involved in extra-curricular activities. They were frequently well-traveled, multi-lingual, and musicians. They were reasonably well represented in student government.

Maybe the schools you went to were different, but this is my experience.

How is this the fault of the institute? If people are pursuing what they want, and the institute is providing it, then they are succeeding in sharing knowledge. Isn't this the mission statement of most colleges and universities? There are reasons schools like ITT and University of Phoenix exist; and a whole different reason for schools like MIT, RIT, Standford, etc. to exist.

People need to realize that there is no need for 175k history major graduates each year and that they will probably never use their degree. The same goes for many other majors, but you know what, if you love it, pursue it, right? Isn't that what entrepreneurship is all about? Just be realistic about your path.

If the cost of schooling is getting out of hand then the people paying for it should do something about it, as some already are. See University of Puerto Rico: http://www.workers.org/2010/world/upr_0520/

The issue isn't that 175k students love history. The issue is that 175k students have been told "This degree will teach you how to think, not what to think", and that they will learn how to free their minds while contributing to the cultural dialog of the nation. It's a great hook, but it's not always true.

Reality - arts degrees don't teach you how to think. They teach you how to argue more forcefully - give three reasons and a summary, not just one reason. Also, pretend to have considered the other side of the case before you dismiss it.

Reality - this cultural dialog is a bunch of guys with no idea of business or economics arguing about what is, essentially, business and economics.

You post raises a very important question: What is the purpose of universities?

In my mind, the original goal of expanding knowledge for its sake alone is the rightful place of "higher education" and in and of itself means that these institutions will be expensive to attend and therefore not for everyone.

The secondary purpose though of equipping a modern workforce is something that more and more, universities have chosen to assume. You fricken need a post-secondary degree to be a secretary these days. This is where the problem is.

Current institutions should be forced to accept their role as either the former or the latter. As a society we should place less emphasis on the need for the accreditations that stem from the former as well.

You have a point, but keep in mind that taxpayers are subsidizing all of this through federal student loans and Pell grants. With the administration pushing student loan forgiveness, private universities, including the high-priced ones like Harvard and NYU, can sell people degrees in subjects like gender studies and religious studies that do little to improve the employability of graduates who possess them, sometimes for as much as $40k a year in tuition alone. Years down the road, when those graduates are unemployed or underemployed and can't pay back their loans, the loans will be forgiven, Harvard et. al. will keep the money they were given, and the taxpayer will have to eat the debt.

If the government is going to pay for this, there needs be a serious discussion about educational outcomes and what best serves the national interest. Should we subsidize people pursuing degrees in gender studies or Latino/Black/Asian/Minority Interest Group Studies, and if so, why? How will that make us more competitive in a global market or result in innovation that improves our quality of life?

Completely agree with the sentiment, however you may be overestimating the fully rounded student thing. Things may be completely different in the US - what I'm writing is all UK-centric, and somewhat anecdotal - but I suspect they're not.

Here, everyone I know who studied "STEM" subjects really had to put in some serious work to get their degrees. This was true from modestly ranked universities all the way through to the top places like Oxbridge and Imperial.

For people who studied humanities it was completely different. At the very top places/courses, yes, you would have a LOT of work. At least one large essay due a week, a mountain of reading material, and a deep appreciation of your subject. However just a few steps down, at slightly less competitive but still very well regarded institutions, I have friends who were given maybe three essays a term (semester), with many spending under ten hours doing anything related to their course in a given week. Sure, people are going do a lot of important growing up in their three years, but many will admit that their course is a bit of a joke, and they're doing it for the piece of paper, not because of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

Sorry if that sounds somewhat unpleasant, I didn't mean it to be. Universities should not be run in the cynical way that you fear, but something does need to change.

You are right, Universities are not only for getting money or for making profits. Society should clarify what they want university to be, what is their goal. When the goal is well defined is time to think about the best method to pursue it. Money is one of the factors but not the only one.

  A place for knowledge, research and innovation is not a factory and can't be managed as such.

Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded

Full roundedness is a financial luxury, of concern only to those who are financial at least relatively well off.

If universities are serious about the love of knowledge, learning for learning's sake, and all that jazz, then they should offer 100% free degrees.

If you have your own place to live, and can do the work, you should be able to get a degree full of well roundedness for absolutely no money.

Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect?

They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money.

I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor.

What business model in the future should universities follow?

The idea is that the experts pass on their knowledge, gained from research, to the students. Sure there are a large number of people who can teach, say, Calculus 1, but there are dramatically fewer who can teach the higher level courses. This is one of the attractions of top universities -- you have the leading experts in the fields teaching their specialities. Thus it isn't clear to me that teaching and research should be separated at the highest level. At the University of Phoenix level, yes, it makes sense.

The merger of research and teaching is a public good, for multiple reasons. One, it makes it easier for teachers to spend some time doing. (naturally apprenticeship programs could serve the same goal) Two, it makes the public bankroll research they might not otherwise see the importance of (having very poor understanding of how progress works.)

I don't think you understand what a public good is. A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not.

Further, research subsidizes teaching at most research universities, not the other way around. Universities take almost half of the NSF's budget in the form of "overhead", most of which is subsidizing teaching and general university waste.

There is also a major harm - most people are not good at both research and teaching. By merging teaching with research, you force people to perform two tasks, only one of which they are well suited for. The job "professor" is about as nonsensical as "ninja developer"; if we merged assassination and development, the result would be pasty white nerds getting shot by bodyguards and sneaky Japanese guys providing endless material for DailyWTF.

>A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not.

As I said, the merger of the two is a public good. It makes research a fundamental part of our notion of learning, and it makes undirected research possible.

I'm firmly in the teachers should do, and doers should teach camp. Society as a whole is better off if there is cross-pollination between these two fields. If you can only do, no one will benefit from your knowledge. If you can only teach, what exactly are you teaching? So teaching is not 'waste.' Industry would do well to allocate significant resources to teaching, and in fact they do. Government has more freedom to think long-term and focus on fostering more researchers at the expense of present gains. If you had your way, it would create significant gains in the next ten years, but out 20-30 years, there would be a significant drop off.

In fact, there's evidence we're already experiencing this drop-off, due to declining school funding, both at the university and k-12 level.

Undirected research is quite possible outside the university system. Perhaps you've heard of Bell Labs? When the government still subsidized them [1], they did plenty of undirected research. In the university system, about 50% of the money the government has earmarked for research is actually used for that purpose. At Bell Labs, the number was close to 100%.

Most grant supported research groups do plenty of undirected research, and the NSF rarely objects when a project makes discoveries not listed in the grant proposal.

You are telling me that (roughly) doubling the amount of money devoted to research will harm research? I really don't understand the mechanism by which that would happen.

"If you can only do, no one will benefit from your knowledge."

Let me be very precise, since you seem to want to misinterpret what I wrote.

A researcher's skill set: generating new knowledge and spreading it to other researchers, and eventually practitioners. This is done through published papers, presentations at conferences, conversation and source code. Generating new knowledge is the primary skill here - other researchers will usually go to great effort to understand it.

A teacher's skill set: understanding existing knowledge and spreading it to people with no background in a classroom setting. The primary skill is motivation and understand people very different from you (e.g., premeds who hate math rather than other math Ph.D.s), and maintaining discipline. The goal is to convey existing knowledge, so creating new knowledge (the primary skill of a researcher) is more or less irrelevant.

There are not that many people who have both of these skill sets. I only had the researcher's skill set, and I know many people with the teacher's skill set.

Also, by "waste", I was referring to general university waste - overpaid and under worked administrators, duplicate offices, etc. If you ever work at a university, you will realize how wasteful they are.

[1] I believe the system was that every dollar AT&T lost at Bell Labs was deducted from their tax bill.

>You are telling me that (roughly) doubling the amount of money devoted to research will harm research? I really don't understand the mechanism by which that would happen.

Again, because you are taking that money away from education. Good education is a fundamental part of good research. They don't need to be in the same building, but they do need to have the same people involved, if only that the researcher was at some point educated.

>There are not that many people who have both of these skill sets. I only had the researcher's skill set, and I know many people with the teacher's skill set.

It doesn't matter. You should try to teach anyway. If you're any good at what you do your experience will be worth something to the people you teach. You experience is in many ways more valuable in teaching 30 students for a year than it is applying that experience. Education is a multiplier, not simply additive.

Obviously, you need both. But trying to do each in a vacuum is short-sighted.

I'm confused - first you wanted education to subsidize research. Wouldn't that have been taking money away from education, back when you believed that was the status quo? It seems as if your fundamental assumption is that the status quo must be correct.

In any case, yes, I agree with you that most researchers will need to have some sort of undergrad education. I don't see any reason why that education should be provided by researchers - cheap adjunct professors seem to do a reasonably good job at it.

(I do agree that a PhD program will need to be taught by researchers, since it is basically just an apprenticeship.)

As for teaching, my experience was worth considerably less to my students than a better ability to explain simple concepts would have been. The fact that I developed a nice outgoing wave filter for the Schrodinger equation did not help my fashion business student who barely knew algebra. It didn't even help the top 2-3 students who were breezing through my class, who might (possibly) have understood the concept of a PDE, or at least nodded along as if they did.

What might have helped them was someone who (like them) struggled with calculus, mastered it, and knew where the difficult points were. It also might have helped to have someone who could get to know students, understand how they learn best, and then tailor the lessons to suit them. Or someone who can look at a sea of blank faces and determine when they are confused. Unfortunately, that person wasn't me. I know a number of people who are that person, but only a small fraction of them have published anything beyond their PhD thesis.

I couldn't agree more. I attended a small liberal arts college and feel that I learned a lot from dedicated professors who did little, if any, research. And then I was a graduate student at a university where teaching was considered a chore by professors who wanted to spend their time in the laboratory. At the very least, there should be a greater demarcation between undergraduate professors (who should be teachers) and graduate professors (who should be researchers). As to your business model question, one start would be to make research more grant-contingent. This already happens in hard sciences, but could be applied more to humanities as well.

Yes. University level teaching needs to be done by academics, otherwise it wouldn't be university level, but it doesn't have to be done in universities.

Or, to put it another way, the problem is not that academics do research, it's that no-one else has read and understands the relevant literature to be able to teach up-to-date at that level.

Why not create a university that gets good academics who can also teach (train them if necessary) and pays them good money to do the teaching well. They would continue to do research somewhere else. That somewhere else would be a university with grad students, but no under-grads, and it would pay on the basis of research alone, with no internal teaching.

The model already exist: school vs. universities.

It is just---and this is just my opinion---that as human knowledge became bigger and bigger, what the people at the edge, pushing the envelope do, is further and further from what a 1st year undergraduate does.

Basically we would need another school in the middle for what is a BA/BSci for example, and use univeristy (and university professors) for masters and phds.

As for your example of hard core research professor, the problem is that at one point the number of professors who know a subject become very very small, and hence it's important to put the student directly in contact with those who are expert in the field. Alas it doesn't always work. But for very high levels (masters and phds) that's the only way it can be.

As a counter argument, from the wikipedia article on Richard Feynman:

Feynman gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood.

Right, but the school v. university model is breaking down for more than one reason. The problem has two edges. Just when you want, because of the expanding boundaries of knowledge, increasingly well-prepared undergraduates, you get the opposite. US universities typically have to teach a depressingly unchallenging hodgepodge of general education courses and remedial courses because students get fucked by the high-school system and because everyone and his brother these days simply must to go to college, no matter how dumb the brother is. A society that depends on universities to teach basic English composition, to take the most egregious example, is like ... well, I can't think of anything that's quite that ridiculous, but it's a massive waste of resources. But it's also a problem that no one wants to solve: It relieves high schools of the burden of actually teaching anything. It's lucrative for the universities, which just throw cheap grad students at the problem. And the four-year continuation of secondary education that the University has become for many is a nice (if hugely expensive, but who gives a fuck) way to keep down unemployment. End of Rant.

It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup.

This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

In contrast to what this surprisingly uninformed piece claims, the top universities do compete on price. In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. There actually is downward pressure on price, but this is because it's coming from the top schools, not from any disruptive force. Why? Because the top schools don't make most of their income from tuition, so they can afford to lose it.

In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price.

I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on nondischargeable debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening.

Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon.

> Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid.

The vast, vast, vast majority of people in that 55% are not even remotely poor. Most are of upper-middle income and of even higher socioeconomic status (e.g. progeny of diplomats, famous art gallery owners, and esteemed professors who make a merely upper-middle income but are higher in social status).

Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

It "spends" that money by giving aid packages that can only be redeemed by purchasing their extremely expensive product. Don't get me wrong; I think it's better for universities to price discriminate in this case than for them not to do so. However, it's not accurate to claim that they're bending over backward to provide equal access to the poor, as they're demonstrably not doing this.

Looking at this specific example, Yale is free if you earn less than $60,000, and admissions is need blind. What more do you exactly want them to do?

The real systemic problem is in our primary and secondary education systems. Equality of opportunity does not exist at those levels, and this hurts people thereafter. I see no reason why elite universities should be the vehicle by which we purport to "correct" this glaring defect in our educational system. The problem is much too large for that.

I can tell you from experience: people making upper-middle income don't get much aid from the ivies. If you're poor, it's free, and if you're rich, who cares, but if your family's income is in the low six figures, you're looking at big loans.

I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.

Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring?

(I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?)

It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year.

But since we know that 55% receive financial aid, it means that among those who do receive aid, the average package is $31,000 per year.

55% of Yale students get almost their entire tuition paid for by the university. This is not counting outside scholarships, etc. This isn't just "some" aid - this is a huge amount of aid on an annual per-individual basis.

Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

Because Iowa's Senator took them to task, threatening to revoke their Non-Profit status if they kept overcharging our kids.

It appears that the US's top, world-class universities will survive relatively easily, and the affordable and profitable degree-factories like Phoenix may as well. State Universities will too in one form or another, depending on the finances of their state govt.

But the private ones in the middle that charge high tuition & fees, are not particularly renowned, and have come to rely on easy credit for huge student loans are going to struggle.

Go to a state school. In California, the tuition for a California State University is about $5500 a year. If you can't afford that, you likely qualify for a CalGrant which is awarded based on need and are around $5400 per school year.

For example, San Jose State University here in Silicon Valley, doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has, but you can still get a very good education, in some ways better than at a more prestigious school. In California's CSU system, teaching is emphasized over research. Perhaps due to practice or self selection, most professors at SJSU seem to be very good teachers. Professors have few (if any) graduate students so they have more time for undergraduates and there are more research opportunities for undergrads.

Isn't California bankrupt?

> doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has

Thats the problem: The deal isn't go to university and learn stuff. The deal is go to university and you will get a better job, the extra salary you make will pay back the tuition and lost years of income.

As more people go to uni the more the market segments - it becomes go to Harvard/Yale, you will pay 10x as much in tuition but earn 100x as much in salary. But go to nowheres ville U and your extra salary is 0.

The problem is that for this (and the previous) generation the extra salary no longer pays back the costs.

Actually College is different from Trade School. Its not clear salary is the goal. Becoming a person better able to function and contribute is the goal. Sometimes that means, yes, gender study papers.

I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.

If you're reading this and assuming it means the end of the value of academic credentials, I have some bad news: the Valley is one of the most credentialed places I've worked. And with few exceptions, the people you hear about in the Valley entrepreneurial echo chamber went to great schools, or got advanced degrees from schools with great research programs.

In my entire life before moving to SF, I knew only a handful of Ivy League graduates. Here, nearly every other person I meet is an Ivy grad, or a grad from a top-tier research school, such as MIT, Stanford, etc. It's gotten to the point that I'm fairly surprised when I meet people here who went to lesser-known schools. Credentials are still important, even in the so-called egalitarian world of technology.

Call me cynical, but if you're reading this and hoping that the imminent collapse of the university system ushers in an egalitarian utopi, you might be waiting a while. Credentials will continue to matter -- they just won't be accessible to anyone but the rich.

Reading this one could think that university is a good source for entrepreneurs. Credentials can become a signal that you are a capable people.

I do agree with this in some points.

My main complaint with US universities (from my experience) is lack of focus on producing the brightest people possible. It's simply too easy to be "undecided" for 3 years and end up with a wishy-washy degree that doesn't prepare you for much.

Once I realized that grades were a low standard, I started setting my own standards and put in a lot of extra time and effort that ended up getting me a good job right out of college.

So the comparison of universities (at least undergrad) being lazy, like the car companies, I can agree with (again, from my experience). Higher standards and expectations of student performance are needed.

I set my standards early, quit looking up my test scores, got out of college what I wanted and skipped the rest. I figured I knew better than my Professors how well prepared I was, the test score was not adding information, so I refused to look at it. I was honestly wondering if I would graduate, but I did.

MSEE Stanford

Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?

I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.

So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.

"Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day.

What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.

"For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day."

No, but it does mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.

But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims?

The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?

This happens because the rankings cited are a function of the academic output of the faculty. In contrast, this article is largely worrying about undergraduate-specific issues. In other words, I think you've identified a non sequitur committed by the author.

I agree, these are only vaguely related issues.

An undergraduate gets into Univ A and Univ B. Which one does he choose?

A highly promising young researcher is recruited as a faculty member by univ A and univ B. Which does he choose?

The difference between these questions also explains why some ratings place large, public research universities in the top few spots, and why in others (like us news), none of them crack the top 20.

Of course, top faculty and research can be a draw for undergraduates, so they aren't totally unrelated, but grad (especially phd) students are far more influenced by the second question as well.

There are many rankings, including acceptance rates, graduation rates. This causes its own problems, with the admissions process now skewed so heavily toward propping up these pointless figures (acceptance rate anyway) that High School Juniors are being asked to commit in writing.

American academic system should ideally create employers and not employees

In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D".

Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy".

Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy".

Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsistence living, if you make one at all. But the Alphas live in a magical city, where cocaine and girls are all easily affordable on multi-million pound salaries.

The UK once ruled the world. The US couldn't be following us down to ruin better if we'd given them a map.

Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.

The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect).

As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.

These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars.

With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be).

Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.

This can change quickly. American cars in the 60'ies were not commodities, design was much more important back then.

There is nothing intrinsic in education which makes the university's prestige the most important. Look outside USA, e.g. at northern Europe where the prestige of the university is not important, but the grades and (esp.) the person are.

For some professions the university and grades is all that's considered when employing someone. But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.

> But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.

In many small programming shops I know of, whether or not you even have a degree is irrelevant for pretty much this exact reason. A healthy GitHub portfolio & a blog with some reasonably insightful articles > any CS degree you can name (including MIT).

If a 16-year-old asked you, sincerely, what the best past forward for a programmer was for them, would you unhesitatingly recommend uni? I have my doubts.

I have felt for some time that the best education in CS is a macbook pro and a 2 year backpacking holiday and this conviction is only growing over time.

In the UK, the prestige of the car one drives is at least as relevant as the degree one has. Really, and I don't see how the US is any different. A few years back (when I lived at home) my Dad's company prevented him getting a Renault Espace as a company car. He wanted it for reliable transportation and to get children and stuff around. But he wasn't allowed one, because it wasn't professional enough. So we got an enormously long Volvo instead, which was great because the rearmost seats faced backwards -- anyway, I digress.

The point is, social signalling is very important in both cars and degrees, and if I had to rank them, I'd say car prestige could even matter more than car quality, whereas education is the other way around.

It's a virtual certainty that upstarts wont have the same prestige.

The situation is even worse if Upstart Tech is non-accredited. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult for Upstart Tech to become accredited if it doesn't behave exactly like Dinosaur Tech - most of the requirements consist of measuring inputs (e.g., contact hours, student services), not outputs (student knowledge).

If university are a source of education, knowledge, research and innovation and not a factory for making cars, why should they be managed in the same way?

If people were like a car, you could push the accelerator to make them move quickly, but there is no accelerator to push to achieve the goals of universities.

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