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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Here's a potentially simple way to perhaps shave as much as 25% or more from the cost of STEM degrees in the US:

Eliminate all non-STEM coursework from degree requirements.

This could easily shave not only tens of thousands of dollars from a STEM degree but it would also cut it down by a year (if not more).

I would also vector students who lack the proper foundation in say, language skills or the sciences, to take courses at community colleges. Not only would this lower costs to students, it would also support local colleges.

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Talk about removing non-STEM courses from university suggests a disagreement on what university is.

IMO if you want to remove non-STEM courses, what you actually want is a trade school. University is all about learning outside of the normal narrow viewpoint, so removing everything outside the narrow viewpoint defeats the point.

"But so what", you might say. Well, here's the problem: trade schools already exist, and nobody wants to hire from a trade school because it's seen as less classy.

I think this is the fundamental problem: People want a degree to primarily satisfy employers, and what employers want is to exclude people. You can't have an all-inclusive exclusive degree, it's an oxymoron.

Either you change employers' minds to match your vision of all-inclusive degrees, or you change the degrees to match employer's vision of exclusivity.

> University is all about learning outside of the normal narrow viewpoint

PRECISELY!

Watch this then and tell me I am wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKkNIOkGtnQ

We are funding and paying for a "narrow narrow viewpoint" to our detriment. This is isn't what universities are for. I am 100% in agreement with you in that regard. Watch the interview and think about what he is saying.

This is a 1.5 hour video, you might want to summarize a bit...

Being informed requires effort and some dedication. A bullet-point summary can't possibly capture what one can learn by taking the time to listen to a careful intellectual exchange with nuance and detail that escapes a summary.

That said, the conversation, among other things, explores the mechanisms through which academia tends to self-radicalize (note I am not specifying a direction) as well as some of the consequences of such radicalization.

The problem is accreditation and standardization. We know roughly what is in a BS degree for CS or any typical engineering. The baseline is mandated by the accreditor.

We don't value half the gunk that the accreditor demands, but universities like to make students pay for cheap filler gunk, and they get more influence over the accreditor than any normal employer would. It's really a cartel, with universities all colluding to waste about 2% of every student's life. For every 50 students, that's like a murder.

Employers would jump at the chance to hire somebody with a 4-year degree that is like the MS minus the AA. Replace the cheap filler gunk with more-advanced STEM classes.

Sadly that isn't offered, at least not in a widely-recognized way with standardization.

Isn't this an associate's/technical degree? To be a successful engineer/doctor/lawyer, you need some non-STEM coursework for communication, ethics, or just to expand your view.

To last point, many state colleges in the US let you transfer credits from a community/regional college easily, so you can save ~50%

While I do understand what you are saying, the educational deficit we are seeing is at the high school level. When I attended high school we had coursework on ethics, logic, philosophy, business, literature, languages, etc. The average high school graduate in the US is shamefully unprepared for life.

My greater point is that adding $50K in non-STEM coursework as a graduation requirement is wrong.

The other element of this conversation is that non-STEM departments have developed deep one-sided political bias over the last several decades. As a result they are engaged in activity almost indistinguishable from indoctrination. We are issuing government-backed loans for kids to be exposed to ever more extreme narratives with no option to opt out. And then we make them pay for those loans. This is wrong.

If you think bias and indoctrination are something that only developed "over the last several decades," you're mistaken. This has been the case of all universities, since time immemorial. And the swing to the left started in the Sixties (at least in the US).

You are, of course, absolutely correct. I said the last few decades because that is, again, as you said, the current "phase" we are on.

We want universities to be places where ideas from a range of schools of thought mix and are able to be explored openly and without negative repercussions. I don't want the extreme right to own university thought any more than the extreme left. We know the consequences of mono-cultural group think are never positive. The canonical example of what happens when the extreme right owns university culture being Nazis, of course.

My personal view on this is that private universities can do as they please. Any university that is publicly funded, either directly or indirectly (government guaranteed loans are an example of this) must have faculty and a culture that reflects the nation with balance and openness.

The fact that our universities have tilted so far to the left isn't good for the nation. Anyone who disagrees with this should consider what things would be like if the opposite were true. If the right owned though at our universities it would be just as much of a nightmare in the making.

This interview with Niall Ferguson (Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/Stanford professor) was a real eye opener. Some might disagree, but I think the topic warrants some thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKkNIOkGtnQ

Hey, careful with that "Nazis" label. It implies a lot of things that are a poor fit for politics in the USA. It certainly doesn't just match up with the extreme right.

Consider these examples:

FDR actually put one ethnicity, the Japanese, in concentration camps. Harvard (proven in court) and others are discriminating against people of Asian ancestry. In 2019, 44% of colleges had segregated graduation, with black-only ceremonies. The typical Planned Parenthood is in a black community, and the founder specifically wanted to prevent that community from making more people.

Are those people and institutions the extreme right?

I meant it more as a time and event marker rather than a comparison or description of US politics.

The point is universities must have balance and promote tolerance. The extremes —either extreme— are undesirable and lead to nothing good for society.

I take the down-voting as evidence of sorts. I am saying we need balance and readers don’t like it. I don’t need to wonder why, I know.

Many of the stem subjects would be easier to automate the instruction of and are taught by researchers who would prefer not to be teaching - making some portion of the in person lectures at research universities for stem of limited value.

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