Texas Governor's call for $10,000 bachelor's degrees stumps educators | Hacker News Reader

Texas Governor's call for $10,000 bachelor's degrees stumps educators

statesman.com

17 pointscwan18 comments

Colleges don't give a damn about tuition costs. Students don't give a damn about tuition costs. The cause of all of this is the federal subsidies of student loans.

If the direct result of a university raising tuition by 10% is that 5% of the student body drops out because of costs they would damn well find a way to make schools cheaper. As it is right now the incentives lie in making fancier student housing and more expensive programs to compete with other schools funded, ultimately, with federal money.

On the other hand, if the main costs are salaries it might not be so simple. Good people are expensive.

I had to choose between MIT and the University of Iowa when I graduated high school.

My tuition was paid by a small amount of scholarship and a combination of Pell Grants and student loans. I could have gone to MIT and ended up with a massive debt, but decided that I didn't want to be saddled with that.

You better believe I gave a damn about tuition costs.

>I had to choose between MIT and the University of Iowa

You had to choose between MIT and UofIowa? Most of the people I know who are at MIT also got into other great schools. Did you get into anything better than UofIowa? What is your major? Did you graduate? If so, do you regret not going to MIT? Don't you think it would have made a difference in the long run to have graduated from MIT? This is really really interesting.

U of Iowa is also a great school. One of the things I would say is actually better about U of I than MIT is the diversity of programs that it is great at.

Iowa has the world famous Writer's Workshop, one of the top medical schools in the country, the largest Dada art collection outside of Zurich, and an amazing media school, just to name a few.

The issue was one of cost, but I'm glad I chose the school I did.

I was in Boston last weekend, and spent the day at the MIT museum. It was inspiring, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I felt a bit of regret, looking at all the accomplishments of MIT students.

When I was a kid, I must have read Steven Levy's "Hackers" half a dozen times. To me, the MIT hackers spending days on end cloistered in a basement with Chinese takeout and soldering guns was about the most exciting thing I could imagine. That's what I wanted to be.

I started out majoring in mathematics, but I was drawn to the equipment in the media department. I ended up with a major that I created with my advisor (Iowa was starting to experiment with customized majors) which combined communications with multimedia art.

In my junior year, I started a 'zine, thanks to the computer lab with its desktop publishing software and scanners. By the end of the year, it was making money, and my best friend and I had started a store. We both dropped out, and I went on to publish the magazine as an actual business. It lasted long enough to get me into web design in 1995, and my career took a completely different turn. I'm now the national head of a UX department for a large agency based in New York.

I wish I had been able to go to MIT. I imagine that I would have been someone like Jeff Han or Marc Andreesen, but the reality is that going to MIT wouldn't have been an automatic ticket to brilliance. It still would have been me, with my lack of focus and direction at the time. Jeff Han and Marc Andreesen didn't go to MIT, nor did Steve Jobs, or Woz, or Dean Kamen... it's all about the person, not the school.

A major factor is the Baumol Effect - we can't easily apply productivity increases to labor-intensive tasks like education. I mean, robotics and better tools has greatly increased blue-collar productivity, and computers and networking has greatly increased white-collar productivity, but at the end of the day, teachers can still only teach the same number of students and doctors can only see so many patients per day.

That's not to say that there have been no productivity gains (laparoscopic surgery, for instance), but that those gains have lagged behind most other industries. The best way to control costs in industries like education and medicine is to find ways to create productivity gains. If we could either make it easier for teachers to impart knowledge to more kids simultaneously or make the imparted knowledge stick better, we'd be easily able to solve this problem.

They can't think of any way how?

Maybe they could cut back on the resort like environments?

If these educators lack the ability to imagine how it's possible, maybe they shouldn't be teaching.

Here's one idea of many. Average time to graduate is in excess of five years now. We also read that most college students have to take remedial classes. We also read that 1/3 of college students learn nothing before they graduate, not because they already knew it, but because they learned nothing. OK, stop accepting students that need remedial classes. If you can't add two fractions together or write a 5 paragraph essay at a sixth grade level, you should not be in college end of story. Just stop accepting these people. But do write down the names of the schools they went to, and shut down those schools if there are more than a certain number of these illiterate people graduating. Or why not just return to some vocational education. It's absurd to think that the entire public is college material and people are some sort of uniform robots that can be programmed to do high tech work. A lot of people are not so smart. That's just the way they are. I am tired of having to fix my own plumbing because I can't find a good plumber because there is no vocational education! Plumbing pays $100 an hour if you have your own truck! That's 12 times more than most PhD grad students make.

Huge amounts of resources are wasted at college dealing with people who should not be there. No college in the US should have a class in basic arithmetic or writing. Those classes should not exist. If you need those classes, go to an adult education center that services the homeless and ex convicts. Not college.

I went to college at the University of Iowa in the 1990s. In-state tuition came to about $2,000 per year.

Even adjusted for inflation, that would be maybe a little over $3,000 a year today.

The costs of higher education are out of control.

How much of subsidy is the state government providing? Utah also has very low in state tuition, but only because the state income tax subsidizes it.

While this seems to be mainly a headline grabbing talking point that is lacking any path to implementation, Rick Perry (or at least one of his speech writing advisors) seems to have some interestingly disruptive ideas about using technology to make education both better and cheaper. The call for a $10,000 bachelors seems to hinge mainly on utilizing web based technologies and distance learning.

During the recent election he also advocated replacing elementary school textbooks with laptops. The laptops could be used to provide students with electronic copies of textbooks that were more up to date, cheaper, and able to be supplemented with educational games and multimedia. (http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EUFAVG0.htm)

Then again if they come from Rick Perry those laptops might have several gigabytes of creationism along for the ride.(http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=1312...).

This whole idea of "let's move to online learning and AP classes as a substitute for learning at an actual college" is going to seriously shortchange students. AP classes are nowhere near as educational as taking a college level class (even if you ultimately 5'd the exam), and I'm skeptical about online learning because I feel like a lot of what I learned in college I learned outside the classroom.

Well, maybe it is useful for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went to one of the best universities (famous west coast one) and was really looking forward to it. I had dropped out of high school to go to community college where I did learn many good things like calculus and physics.

At the big name university though, I learned almost nothing in the classes.

Partly this was because I had been programming and designing and inventing for years, reading journal articles, participating in conferences, selling my software, freelancing, etc. The classes were really backwards and a waste of time.

But it was also because the professors at research universities are really lousy at teaching and don't give one whit whether they are effective, assuming they can even be bothered to show up for lecture rather than send their pet grad student/slave boy.

Did I learn things outside of classes, like you mention? Absolutely! And I would have learned those things outside of classes by not enrolling in the first place at all.

All in all I wasted a bunch of money and a few years of my life that I should have spent starting my next business earlier rather than stalling out while my competitors advanced.

Now I am not saying it is useless for everyone.

But something like engineering, come on, that stuff can all be learned faster and deeper from practicing it rather than listening to BS from guys that have never released a single finished product in a usable state in their entire lives. What the hell do they know.

Medicine, sure, people should go to medical school.

Languages? Move to that country. History? Library. Engineering? Build and invent things; then try to manufacture, market and sell them. It goes on and on.

When books cost more than a years salary in the middle ages, university made sense.

Now I can buy books for $10 on the net that have more info in them than the $200 college textbooks, and I can participate in discussion groups and mailing lists with professionals to learn more of any craft, and I can send emails to the greatest experts in the world and get a response back within hours.

The internet community has replaced college. Universities are obsolete. Going into debt for that stuff is just for dumb people.

OK, I got a bit off topic there. Let me get back to the post I started with. I absolutely 100% agree that any sort of online learning community that you have to pay for or that is associated with these obsolete institutions called universities will be a substandard way to learn things and should be avoided. I totally agree with that. However, that doesn't mean that online access to community doesn't work. It does! It's just that so-called educators nowadays can't possibly succeed at educating on line when they can't even do it in person. Non-organized independent learning communities, whether they are called that or not (they aren't called that) are in fact a fantastic way to learn and far superior to modern institutions. As learning communities of equals, they are closer to the universities of ancient times when people actually became educated.

I disagree to an extent. Some of my freshman lecture courses had 500+ people in them! I was coming from a highschool that graduated a total 80 seniors.. talk about culture shock. I would much rather have done this course online and saved the money. Perhaps have another avenue to speak to tenured professors about interests, but this would be fine for an online learning session.

I think that rather than just throwing out numbers, what they should do is evaluate what the actual cost of education would be and remove all the useless excess courses added to the curriculum unnecessarily.

Blindly raising tuition and charging more than necessary isn't good nor is it smart to just slap a blind number like $10,000 and ignore all the economics at play. While I think the four year rule is somewhat good for commitment, I also strongly believe the education system needs a major makeover instead. Not all degrees are the same and should not all fall under the same timeline as each other. Everything should be restructured to make the best of each person's education instead.

"what the actual cost of education would be and remove all the useless excess courses added to the curriculum unnecessarily."

couldn't agree more.

i am currently in college, and i have to take 3 engineering electives (classes, outside of my engineering major), 2 social science electives, and i get to take 3 "any/free" electives.

one could make an argument that it broadens the educational experience or whatever, but from experience, half these classes are BS, and almost all of these just suck up a lot of time, which could be better spent focusing on one's chosen field of study/ or other interests.

Also, remove gyms, college team, etc.

  one could make an argument that it broadens the educational experience or whatever

While I tend to agree with your point, the truth is that undergraduate study is not about specialization. There is a trend in that direction, but in my mind it's a bad thing, not a good thing.

In a perfect world you would take comprehensive classes specific to your chosen field, but those classes would take a more holistic approach, and would draw course material from a multitude of sources.

8 courses over 8 terms. At most you've reduced your direct tuition costs by ~15-20%. And I would argue that you're actually loosing value. If you want to do a program where you leave undergrad as a hyperspecialized specialist in one sub-field of engineering, be my guest. It'll make it easier for me when I get out looking for your jobs.

It's true that there's a crap ton of bullshit courses out there. But you know what, you get to pick your electives. Pick them right, and you'll get to avoid most the bullshit. I took a macro-econ course from one of the most passionate (and hilarious) profs on our campus to supplement my eng courses. And now I have some extra understanding into what actually effects my actual job market.

Remove the non-profit status (i.e. make 'em for-profit) of all educational institutions and the problem will sort itself out within a generation.

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