These companies target people who dream of a better life and then convince them to take-out massive loans. Kind of like if payday lenders were being propped-up by the federal government.
I'll probably work until Midnight or 00:30, and then pick right up at it tomorrow morning, because _I want the docs to be up-to-date_. I was working on all that today and yesterday, but there was also the regular support load from my labs. Plus, one of my co-workers was stuck in a project to reverse-engineer a binary file format, and I was helping her through using the Python `struct` module for the first time. It would be nice if we had an extra employee to help shoulder the load, but he's out right now (his wife was in labor).
My clients don't want to spend time managing technology. They just want to do the stuff they love, to do their research. But things like broken servers, laws, hackers, and the threat of negative PR, get in the way. I try to deal with all of that for them.
I'm a staffer at a university. I already knew that some portion of the student body thought of us as parasites[1], but I didn't know that the outside world held the same view.
[1]: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...
And it's a pretty bizarre interpretation of the linked article to say that the author is implying that sysadmins (as a subset of non-teaching staff) are parasites. Rather, the article's claim is that the relative growth rates of teachers, students, and non-teaching staff imply in the aggregate some inefficiencies in the way the college's functioning has been evolving. The argument may or may not be correct, but it's analysis isn't prima facie ridiculous and its meaning is worlds away from what you're saying.
On top of THAT, even the most uncharitable interpretation of the article (ie, tarring college administrators as mostly parasites) would quite obviously not include the kind of work you're describing, ie support staff for course materials.
The role of universities is expanding. Should universities play a role in the local communities? Should they do research? Should they perform outreach to improve diversity? Should they accommodate all facets of student life? Should they have sports? Should they teach courses to non-students? Should they fundraise? Should they support extracurriculars and provide leadership opportunities? Should they offer financial aid? Should they manage real estate and parking? Should they resolve disputes among faculty and students and departments? Should they invest their endowment? Should they support alumni? Basically, each of these needs a team of people to manage.
When they remove all the full-time faculty by replacing everyone who leaves with underpaid and overworked adjuncts, they fail at that mission. Nobody is going to care about any of the other things if they can't actually learn anything there.
Good luck with your surgery.
My take away is that a lot of universities are pinched between being vocational schools and “University” The for profit places at least do away with the idea that they aren’t vocational schools, it’s all about a job. It seems like “college” or “university” should maybe be used more sparingly in their names. That might lower the value prop a little but theyre starting to puss in everybody’s soup.
This was something that infuriated me about college. We were taught about linked lists, and how CPU registers work at the physical level, and two or three languages that nobody uses.
And then I went out looking for a job and nobody gives a shit about this. I've been in the industry for decades and I've never had any use for a linked list.
Any college can teach a couple basic programming classes and call it a computer science education, I guess. To avoid that I didn't even consider going to a non-ABET accredited school.
Shouldn't the presitigious universities be finding ways to educate, train and credential as many people as possible, rather than maintaining barriers to entry to their educational materials? Or do we need to perpetuate prestige and social strata through these institutions' selective commitees?
Instead of focusing on those schools, why don't we as a society try to remove the stigma of going to community college or learning a trade?
Yes, and my wife is currently pursuing a graduate degree through there. It requires 3 on-site classes, and appears to be just a rigorous as a degree program in person.
"Grading" is really the only thing you are paying for, at this point.
Many of the most prestigious institutions have put their lectures and course materials on line for free.
But it doesn't do you much good to go to an employer and say "I went through all of the materials for all of the courses needed to get this MIT degree, and understood all of it, honest! So you should give me equal consideration as an MIT graduate!"
The employer will be much more likely to hire the candidate who they can verify completed all of the degree requirements by just contacting MIT.
A part of his argument is that people who get into elite schools and don't go to an elite school tend to have approximately the same life outcomes as people who go to elite schools, suggesting that the schools are just filtering for people who will be successful anyway and rubber stamping them.
Another part is that, if education's economic value was through adding value to people by exposing them to valuable ideas and skills, then there should be some correlation between how deeply exposed you are to those resources and your life outcomes, but in reality there's really only a binary between whether or not you finish the degree. 7 semesters of college seems to do nothing significant for you if you don't get a piece of paper to show people, which is very strange if college actually adds any substantial value other than as a filter.
There's more too. It's a polarizing book, but I think his framing is at least approximately correct, as it fits better with how the real world is working than any other framing of education I've seen, and if he's right, then the current paradigm of education is just fundamentally not scaleable, and really needs more fundamental restructuring than just giving it to more people.
People who have the opportunity to attend an elite university and decline it would be doing so because their opportunity cost is better.
But the question is still open: why should credentials not be open to fair competition? Shouldn't a poor woman in Africa be able to compete for the same computer science credentials, bar exams, medical exams (this would require further vetting of practical lab skills) as a Harvard student, through the same exams and projects? Of course, Harvard could still give its students its own stamp of approval, but the education and credentials should be open to competition, not behind walled gardens.
Though MIT publishes many of its course materials online for free.
Currently taking their graduate math diploma, from the London School of Economics (part of university of London),the whole thing will be around $3000, with the registration and exam fees separate, so you only pay for what you use, in a way
that's 2 years of income for someone living in India.
even for most people living in the UK, that's a big chunk of change
First is copyright. It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.
Another is communication. This is more important for some programs, particularly the programs where there is heavy discussion involved (instead of just lectures), you need seamless, high-quality, real-time communication between people. And I'm not talking about G.729, or Speex. I'm talking uncompressed wide-band G.722, with low jitter and no packet loss. And at least voice communications is essential, because there is so much information that is lost when communication goes text-only. Ideally the conversation would be video, because there is information lost when you go audio-only.
Both of these issues are things where the for-profit world needs to be leading the way.
Educational institutions will fight for looser copyright restrictions all the time, to the point where the people in charge tune it out. Lobbying is also harder (not impossible, but harder to do), because you can risk the 501(c) status. Having for-profit companies pushing for looser copyright restrictions for education would massively help, by reducing barriers and making people less nervous about distributing material without the threat of copyright claims.
As for communication, the distributed startups have been facing this problem head-on for some time, but I don't think there is a single Body of Knowledge that exists for the way to do one-way (lecture), two-way interactive (Q&A, office hours, etc.) and n-way collaborative (discussion session) most efficiently. It's one thing to talk about theory (we do that really well!), but the people in the startups are living this today. Give us the tried and tested Way To Do It, backed up by your experience.
You seem to assume that teaching always requires licensing copyrighted materials from others, like textbooks I guess. In my personal experience, that's not really necessary.
I've experienced higher education in two countries, Germany and China. In Germany, there were no mandatory textbooks. Professors always used materials they created themselves, sometimes just before they were needed, sometimes adapted from previous times the course was taught, sometimes in cooperation with other professors. If you wanted to read more about the topic from a different angle, you were free to read a textbook, but it was completely optional and I never did.
In China, the professors had all been to the US for their PhDs and they used textbooks popular there, always stressing which prestigious universities the book authors were affiliated with. That doesn't mean anyone bought the books. You'd usually get credentials for an FTP server that had all required material.
In neither case any copyrighted works were licensed. In Western countries you'd have to follow the German model, but in countries with less effective copyright enforcement, the Chinese model also works.
Most have fair use or fair dealing exemptions covering classroom and exercise use. Can you exemplify a jurisdiction that does not have enough fair use/dealing?
Nearly all US universities are so flush with cash that they're constantly rebuilding to attract customers (ie students). The scamming ones must have owners and executives taking the money and running, because there's no way they can go bankrupt unless they're trying hard to do so and/or completely incompetent at managing business survival.
PS: The associate vice provost of a dept I worked for was reimbursed $80-100 from the university for dinner nearly every night, had a free suite just off campus (worth $3000/month) and seriously requested helicopter rides to work. They were in-charge of the biggest cash-cow besides undergraduate tuition, netting around $200 million annually.
In short, there is a spectrum of wealth in the education system just as there is with individuals and families. Anecdata from one of the wealthiest doesn't give a full picture of the entire system.
And in fairness, anecdata from those most poor doesn't give a full picture either. I'd argue that so called "non-profit" universities are indeed better off at the mean than is generally known.
Also, any university with a reasonable endowment, especially if it is small to boot, is not nervous in the least. The "nervous" set of universities would include, in this order, for-profit universities, small privates with small endowments, and large privates with small endowments. (The last category, large private-small endowment, should be all but dead. So if any are still out there they have something else going on. Maybe a good football or basketball team or something?)
I'd also add to this list small publics which have small endowments and are located in states with upcoming, or current, fiscal shortfalls. (Especially states with both, like Kansas, Wisconsin, etc). Though these universities are not so much "nervous" about going away, as they are "nervous" about what will happen when their states merge them together to streamline costs. I doubt most states would get rid of their small universities, even in lean economic times. (I could be wrong about that though? I just doubt it.)
But how did they get to a cost structure where they have to be so nervous? If they could keep costs to where they were in real terms 25 years ago they could charge less tuition (thereby making it easier to fill classes) and break even without dipping into the endowment.
Harvard can hire hundreds of overpaid administrators, build ugly buildings, and invest foolishly and it’s “only” a colossal waste of money. When Union College copies Harvard’s poor decision making there’s a lot less margin for error.
Just like in health care, insane cost growth is the whole ballgame.
It's not necessarily the university's fault in every case and instead is due to the changing face of higher education in America. Many colleges and universities were able to rest on their laurels for decades as the American economy transitioned from a labor force to a variety of specialized jobs across many new and exciting fields (as well as specialized training in old fields too).
The jobs market is again shifting and has been for many years. College has become increasingly unaffordable due to institutional hubris and from the fact that many colleges have been focusing on the wrong priorities to attract new students (luxury dorms! exotic food! useless majors!). Alternatives to expensive college degrees have sprung up everywhere, and while many universities scoffed at the thought that these new types of education would be embraced by the public, the alarm bells are beginning to ring louder and louder as traditional institutions begin to see declines, not only in general enrollments but also in specific programs that have been popular for decades.
Some places can weather the storm as they have prestigious names or large endowments or illustrious alumni networks or great sports teams. Others have to pivot to embrace the idea that college has become too unaffordable and orient their institutions towards new ideas and programming that will bring in students. The problems higher ed faces does not 100% come down to institutional cost structure, but instead a reimagining of how one can achieve a college-level education without resorting to massive amounts of debt.
A university is a giant hedge fund with a small education arm attached for tax benefits.
I'd only heard a similar one, that General Motors is (was) a massive health care and pension bureaucracy with a car-making division.
But also some projects not so much clear reason - demolishing functional libraries and replacing them with buildings that have fewer seats &c (although disabled access could have been an issue in one case).
The biggie is large scale speculative development of student residences. That bubble is going to have to burst soon...
Isn't it the really old historic buildings that attract people? After all nobody can build an old building. Being able to say your uni is 800 years old is something, no?
If you look at Oxbridge, all the new buildings are the ugly ones.
Kind of like... The federal government vs the taxpayer! www.usdebtclock.org