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Comment by akulbe | Hacker News Reader

I realize I'm likely going to be a dissenting opinion here… but I'm not sure this is a good investment.

Unless you're going to enter a field that requires the pedigree that starts with college (i.e. medicine, law, engineering), it's arguable that college isn't even worth the tuition you pay for it. Like another commenter says, they have no incentive to do anything that will reduce costs.

The quality of the education seems to be on the decline too.

It feels like colleges are turning into breeding grounds for social justice warriors more than they're turning out folks who are prepared to enter the workforce.

It feels like the onus should be on the colleges to make costs more reasonable, rather than getting another handout from a rich benefactor (which will not last long).

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That may be true (but is arguable) if you see college as nothing but a vocational school, training you to be the best worker which society could ask for.

A truly liberal (in the John Stuart Mill / Enlightenment sense of the word) education gives you the tools you need to engage with the world. How can you ever change society if you are only able to see the world in what makes money, and are never given the time and resources to think beyond what is today towards what could be?

It is true that some people can learn some of these things on their own, but having 4 years to think surrounded by an environment where everyone else is focused on that same goal can really make a difference.

If a pragmatic man like Bloomberg believes in the value of a liberal education (again the old sense of the word), you can bet it's not total hooey.

(although see my other comment for what I believe is behind at least the timing of this announcement)

> A truly liberal (in the John Stuart Mill / Enlightenment sense of the word) education gives you the tools you need to engage with the world.

But the current education system doesn't give you either.

You don't get tools to be useful - IE STEM related, engineering, math, etc.

You also don't get the tools to "engage" with the world. Blocking traffic, needing safe places and being triggered by anything you disagree with isn't "engaging" the world.

At that you absolutely don't need a special expensive institution to teach you how to behave. A century ago it might have made sense - formal conduct was rigid and failure to adhere could displace you out of aristocracy. You needed to know your proper dinner routines and manners perfectly. You needed to know the retinue of history and contemporary science topics popular in the era to not be left looking ignorant of a conversation.

Of course that later circumstance was only applicable in an era when major scientific advancements were slow and costly to disseminate. Thats why it required the infrastructure of a university to supply it. I feel like that might not be quite as much of a barrier today, and nobody is expected to stay current on all news - there is simply too much, too fast, even of the purely scholarly variety.

While I don't think your average 18 year old is of "mature" character or often fit to participate in normative adult culture it also isn't a danger to them to have to learn how in the moment. The worst that happens is they lose a job or two and rebound - it isn't a lifelong disgrace in an insular society anymore.

Your view of college seems to be very media influenced. Just like 99.9% of Arabic people aren't terrorists, 99.9% of college students aren't 'safe space triggered social justice warriors'. Maybe you should grab a statistics class at a nearby college. ;).

The media has really painted college students in a bad light. There's such a wide variety of students and personalities. It's a great place to share ideas and form networks.

As the spouse of someone who suffers from depression and suicidal thinking the outrage against “trigger warnings” really pisses me off.

Trigger warnings are just that. Warnings.

We watched A Star is Born, and having my spouse go back on almost a years worth of progress and treatment when a single “trigger warning” could have avoided that is beyond enraging.

And what’s most hypocritical is the people who are complaining about trigger warnings are people who are complaining that a little paragraph of text describing certain known triggers may be contained in the text or movie before. So people who suffer from a variety of potentially harmful diseases such as depression and PTSD are pussies because they need a trigger warning to help them avoid media that may be harmful to them, but you’re a strong reasonable and logical person to protest the inclusion of a minor warning that you are under no obligation to read and can easily skip.

Doesn't really seem like the movie's place to create its own trigger warnings. There could be hundreds of warnings per movie. I've even seen tumblr fan fiction warnings that a story only contains CIS relationships. Not to mention, how do you identify and quantify triggers in a medium? It's not like it's some solved science and the patriarchy is just avoiding it. These are open ended questions without one size fits all solutions.

For example, if your wife has over a year of progress on the line, and there isn't a culture of mainstream trigger warnings, why did you play it so loose by wandering blindly into a movie?

And then you lash out at the world for when your gamble doesn't pay off?

I think this is what people roll their eyes at when they think of trigger warnings: the abolition of personal responsibility and effort, that you have any number of personal issues yet expect the world to read your mind instead of, say, watching a movie before your mentally diseased (your words) wife watches it to ensure her safety.

The underlying fact is that everything is subjective and trying to enumerate every possible situation that someone may react to is impossible. Why is it not the responsibility of the individual to learn more about the movie by checking the ratings and synopsis?

Can you explain what exactly a trigger warning would even contain that somehow helps here? It seems that if a single movie can unwind a "years worth of progress" then the situation is rather critical and movies are the least of your concerns. How do you label everyday life with such warnings?

I have zero issues with trigger warnings. If it helps someone so be it. No skin off my back.

Just alot of this country views them with disdain which is unfortunate. It's been branded as weak to have a mental disorder. Meanwhile beliveing in Q-Anon is perfectly ok to them.

I completely understand and agree with your frustration. The blame is not only the people who deride the value of trigger warnings, but also on the Left, which has this horrible tendency to take good ideas and apply them to every situation imaginable watering them down to the point of uselessness. I say this as someone very much on the Left. The evolution of trigger warnings into content warnings took them from a real way of protecting people into a self-parodying attempt at shielding people from topics they don't like.

> Just like 99.9% of Arabic people aren't terrorists

Yeah, sure, one in a thousand Arabic person is a terrorist...

Assuming there's 1 billion Arabic people on the planet...all you need is 100,000 members of what the U.S. classifies as terrorist groups to have 1 in 1000.

ISIS already fills up 35,000 of that 100,000. You still have Hamas, al Queda, and many more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...

>You also don't get the tools to "engage" with the world. Blocking traffic, needing safe places and being triggered by anything you disagree with isn't "engaging" the world.

Are you of the opinion that this is the primary topic studied at American universities nowadays? I’m having a hard time squaring away your obviously propagandized portrayal with reality.

I agree that the Liberal Arts are crucial, but this sentiment seems to be gone in favor of a more vocational approach.

While it still exists, good LA programs are rare, and largely dismissed by society as not worth it.

See all the parents and friends asking... "How are you possibly going to make a living with a Liberal Arts degree?!"

I wonder what American society would look like if this were flipped on its head? Make liberal arts the central piece of a college education, and leave vocational training largely to employers.

I'm not sure if it's realistic to think that'd ever happen, but I wonder what it would look like if it did?

>Unless you're going to enter a field that requires the pedigree that starts with college (i.e. medicine, law, engineering), it's arguable that college isn't even worth the tuition you pay for it.

I'm not sure why it makes sense to exclude those fields. Bloomberg's investment will help students from low- and middle-income backgrounds enter those fields, just as it will help others earn degrees that provide lower earnings potential.

Speaking of earnings potential, even those with degrees in arts, liberal arts, and the humanities - who only make up 13.4% of college graduates, by the way - have median earnings of $51k/year [0], compared to less than $35k/year for high school graduates [1]. An extra $16k/year in earnings - nearly a 50% increase - over a lifetime can justify a lot of upfront tuition and opportunity cost.

The only degrees that are arguably a bad financial investment for the individual are those in education [0], and teachers are important enough to society that I don't think it would be beneficial to discourage students from attaining those degrees. College degrees more generally also have positive spillover effects - see e.g. [2] and [3].

[0] https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/...

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/more-education-still-means...

[2] (PDF) https://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/socret.pdf

[3] (PDF) https://www.amacad.org/multimedia/pdfs/publications/research...

> It feels like colleges are turning into breeding grounds for social justice warriors

Is this really the case? All colleges probably have a vocal minority of activists, and some colleges have more than others. But I'd guess the vast majority of students are still there to learn and have fun?

> It feels like the onus should be on the colleges to make costs more reasonable, rather than getting another handout from a rich benefactor (which will not last long).

Agreed, this won't do anything to solve the underlying problem. Lately, it seems like throwing money at a problem is all we prepared to do (see also the Proposition 10 homeless tax).

A large function of a college degree is simply getting past the Baby Boomer gatekeepers that own your future job.

> It feels like colleges are turning into breeding grounds for social justice warriors more than they're turning out folks who are prepared to enter the workforce.

They’re not mutually exclusive. You can be a skilled worker, who also advocates for social justice... I don’t even see how one would obstruct the other.

I’m also wondering how this means that “the quality of education seems to be on the decline.”

There's a difference between advocating for social justice and being a "social justice warrior", as the term is generally understood today (the meaning has shifted a good bit in the last 20 years).

As far as I can tell, at this point when people hear "social justice warrior", they hear: (1) the person's interaction with the world is all about status signaling, not achieving actual justice and (2) the "warrior" part is taken seriously, in the sense of perceiving anyone not perfectly aligned with you as an enemy to be destroyed, by any means necessary.

It's obviously still possible to be a skilled worker with a mindset leaning in that direction; I've met some. But it can make someone very hard to work with, for sure.

Obviously the pure form of "social justice warrior" as described above is a caricature that one encounters rarely in practice. Most people grow out of point (2) once they get old enough, for example.

re: quality declining Source? I don't see this at all.

re: sjws This is just a vocal minority demonized by certain political groups to stir up anger. Sad to see it's convincing people.

The moment someone unironically uses "social justice warrior" either to refer to themselves or an opposing group I can't take them seriously.

Why?

It's a red flag that they're highly susceptible to social and news media propaganda and are bad at statistics.

Considering academia is vastly one-sided politically, influences the minds of entire graduating generations, and there has been fallout in major companies and even laws passed, the issues around "social justice" are in fact real and much bigger than you may think.

Maybe academia would be less politically one-sided if the other side hadn't built their brand on ignoring science in all its forms.

That's an inflammatory statement that offers nothing productive. There's no political party against science, and there's just as much non-scientific dogmatic content from both ends of the spectrum.

How do you square that opinion with the fact that the parts of academia that are least one-sided politically are the parts which actually do the best job of using the scientific method in practice?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/leftist-academia-demo... is a decent recent-ish article on the topic. Note the offhand comments about blatant discrimination in hiring, which might just be a relevant thing here. And from what I've seen, non-liberals in humanities departments commonly have to deal with what is pretty much the textbook definition of a hostile work environment. It just happens that political affiliation and opinion is not a protected class, so it's not possibly to do anything about it other than leaving. Which is what people do in practice.

"Wow, geez, the Republican party is so one sided, like, everyone there is a Republican!" That is such an utterly meaningless argument.

You can use that argument to challenge literally any well established fact regardless of it's merits. It is by this argument that increasingly extreme viewpoints have entered the political mainstream. E.g., "It's a problem that everyone in this room so one-sidedly believes the Holocaust is real! It's about time us Holocaust-deniers get a seat at the table, in fact, it'd only be fair for us to have HALF the seats at the table!"

That's not what I said though, is it? Arguing against a made-up statement is indeed meaningless.

Academia is not a political party, and has all kinds of people, so being so one-sided politically is a valid concern. There's also a big difference between beliefs on issues and historical facts. Facts, by definition, cannot be debated as they are objective truths.

You just repeated the claim I am arguing against: that the mere one-sidedness of a group of people's beliefs is in itself a problem without discussing the merits of those beliefs, for which I constructed the example of "the mere onesidedness of Holocaust believers is problematic and equal representation from deniers should be introduced"

If you've got a problem with beliefs commonly held within academia then debate them on their merits and not on the mere fact that some group of people seem to have consensus on something.

As stated, there's a difference between beliefs and facts which you are conflating. You cannot debate facts like the Holocaust.

The OP was saying SJWs were a vocal minority where I claimed otherwise. If you're also saying that they're widespread beliefs then it looks like you're just agreeing with me. The actual problems with those beliefs was not the topic of this thread.

Quality declining is an interesting point that's hard to quantify. I went to a very well-viewed public school, and a large potion of my classes were quite unimpressive. (Think poor teaching; questions/answers to exams basically provided to you the night before the exam by the TA, exams graded on a ludicrous curve such that you don't really have to master anything, etc.)

Friends of mine who have stayed around the university swear that things have only gotten worse since our time, with the rise of more and more online classes and less and less true understanding expected.

I can't provide hard data on whether quality of education is declining, but I can say that large parts of my education were somewhat suspect.

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