Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth

There is no reason a tuition should cost more than $2,000 a semester. An entire undergraduate education should be under $20,000 without grants or assistance.

I went to a small state STEM school with low tuition and a small student body. Most of my upper level classes had 20 students max, and the school was profitable. (Organic Chemistry III and P. Chem had only 4 students, myself included, and we were asked to take turns teaching the material and were corrected if we stumbled -- trial by combat.)

I now earn $500k a year total comp.

Also telling: my company hires people without degrees into six figure positions.

Get a degree if you can get it for cheap. The socialization and academics can be beneficial. Some fields will still require it (biochem, medical, lots of engineering disciplines). But I'm also a fan of Peter Thiel's approach. Just jump into your field if you have the resources at your fingertips.

This article goes way too far in its conclusions. It points out some real problems with American universities (and makes some specious claims about their history), then generalizes this to saying that all universities must be destroyed. There are myriad countries that have both a strong university system and a strong vocational system and don't saddle any student with a mountain of debt. Don't mistake the dysfunction of the USA for something fundamental about The World and All Human History.

>In 2020, every white-collar business and college in the country pivoted over to distance work and distance learning because of Covid-19. This was arguably going to happen over the next decade anyway, but fear of germs caused it to happen in a year. As colleges struggle to reopen during Covid, students who are used to distance learning anyway struggle to understand why they have to pay exorbitant tuitions for a campus they never see, nor in fact need in any way, if their goal is to get the piece of paper. Chop.

I am going to assume this person has never taken online classes. They're horrible. I have never met a person who likes them.

>A wealth of free code boot camp options have erupted in the past two years, where you can receive every necessary educational element to become a computer programmer at no cost, the boot camp helps place you in a job,

The problem here is that programming computers is dead easy but we've convinced people it's on par with engineering or medicine. We are training scientists when we need technicians. Why teach people computer architecture if they'll only write Javascript? Why teach them operating systems if they'll run everying in V8? Why teach them algorithms if they'll only write CRUD apps and glue code? The long-term effect of bootcamps will be, I am pretty sure, not to dismantle universities but to drive down the salaries of programmers.

>and then you pay them on the back end as a portion of your salary. No debt is ever accrued.

that is literally what debt is what are you talking about

>And the kids are too young and too naïve to consider that every single person they encounter in their grade school life, from parents to teachers to administrators to peers, are lying to them."

followed immediately by

>Every element of this vicious monster was created by a well-meaning person who thought they were doing the right thing. Every person involved in it today – teachers, parents, politicians, administrators, real estate agents – is disincentivized to fix the problem. They don’t even realize they’re part of the problem.

Well then, it isn't lying in the first paragraph, is it?

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Oh, and this goody:

>[Online learning and WFH] was arguably going to happen over the next decade anyway, but fear of germs caused it to happen in a year.

It's a virus, not germs. It wasn't simple hypochondria, it was a real global health crisis.

I'm enjoying the read, but realize that the author thinks they are a lot more clever than they are.

What really hurts the USA more than student debt is the explosion in University inefficiency, 1950-2020. My dad started a top-10 university professorship job in 1956 and there were 10 faculty for every admin person. Today it's f*cking 1:1. There is an explosion of centers of excellence and staff researchers and overhead people that contribute to the 5% annual inflation in college costs for the last 30 years.

If we would destroy all these leeches and bureaucratic red tape then we wouldn't need these student loans and the poor students wouldn't be so enslaved by our new form of 20Y indentured servitude - the useless college degree!

There were occasional voices telling the Millennial they didn't need to go to college; and that if they did, they didn't need to borrow and spend so much money doing it... They were, to put it mildly, not well received. "Universally derided" might not be too strong.

Something to keep in mind as the accusations of "disinformation" and reassurances of "Trust the Science (TM)" fly thick and fast today.