Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Late to this thread, sorry.

I have two tangental questions.

#1 In general terms, what's China's commitment (investment) in higher ed? Compared to the USA and other economies?

USA's tuition, loans, student debt is always good for an argument on HN. Almost no one mentions that the USA decided to privatize higher ed some decades back. So I was wondering if China and others made the same mistake.

#2 How does current China think about growing inequity?

One persons's story in "American Factory" resonated with me. Glass furnace technician Hong We https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10930334/ works his ass off, making huge personal sacrifices, to further enrich Fuyao Glass America owner Jeff Daochuan Liu.

Shown is gob standard corporate team building meetings where Fuyao uses economic nationalism to motivate their underpaid staff.

What is Hong We's future? When will the feel goods not be enough? When will Hong We demand to be paid fairly?

I assume Labor in China will follow the American trajectory. With all that political and cultural strive that entails. But I'm keen to hear what others think.

Edit: I think Cao Dewang is the founder and owner, not Jeff Daochuan Liu. I regret the error.

The problem with making higher ed only a public service is you run into rationing. If all positions have to be government funded there tends to be fewer positions.

There are plenty of people on HN who likely would not have made the cut in a EU country.

Supply in the USA hasn't kept pace with demand.

How would you remedy that?

Unsure. Controlling university spend on administrative positions is attractive. It would be similar to mandating expenditures on claims for insurance companies.

Access to education seems higher in the US as-is though it is still in perfect. I am one of the people the US system left behind. Not sure how to get back to school.

US higher ed already is a public service. Only 25% of students are in private colleges/universities, and ~every professor who does research is funded mostly by government.

I believe that what's actually happening with US higher ed supply is that we stopped founding large research universities. Many of the great public schools were endowed using federal land[1] and eventually the government ran out of valuable agricultural land.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university

The institutions themselves are mixed and the student funding is also mixed but can lean towards private, especially if you are not a first pick for higher ed but are still capable. In non-US locations there can be no private funding option.

Student tuition has replaced a lot of government funding. As we can see it has gone to administrative spending. Do you think new unis would fix that?

I was staff (vs faculty) for a public uni. It was understood that all state funding would eventually go away, effectively making it a private uni. I'd have to look up the numbers, but state funding went from 80% in the 1970s down to 10% in the 2010s.

Obviously, rising administrative overhead is due to cost disease, and misc adjacent theories, like Graeber's bullshit jobs).

But I haven't seen anyone discuss the corollary of "keeping up appearances". Parents now spending ~$3,000 per credit hour (non-resident) have high expectations. Better housing, better food, better amenities, responsive office staff, etc. All that cruise ship caliber fluff needs that much more bureaucracy.

Hmm. I didn't think so previously, but outcomes at least seem to support your theory (0).

I would be very interested to see any research discussing the reasons for this difference and whether cultural expectations account for any of it (expecting a degree on the employer side driving up demand).

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education

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