Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
newsnationnow.com
newsnationnow.com
The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.
The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.
Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.
While we're on the topic, can someone really explain to me what endowments are for? There's many universities that claim hardship but have multi-billion dollar endowments. I mean Harvard (the largest endowment) has over $2m per student. The "business" is clearly profitable without ever accepting a dime from students. I'm just unsure what this money is actually doing.
I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is to be like dividend investors, it does not appear (at least from what I'm seeing) that they are actually acting like someone with a goal to live off of dividends. There's more growth than that. Or there's something missing that I don't understand (more likely).
So yes, Harvard could cover just about all of their budget with the endowment returns, though they probably need some extra income to cover the holes formed by the restricted funds and avoid inflation pressure.
Is their current usage of the returns too conservative? Probably. Do they have an absurdly large pile of cash that they have no business holding on to? Not really; the investment returns roughly correspond with their current operating costs.
I was only using the more aggressive number as a thought experiment to the original poster about what it would take the cover the entire operating budget.
This comparison makes no sense.
1. GDP is a per-year measure, but an endowment is accumulated over multiple years. Therefore durectly comparing them doesn't really make much sense.
2. "some nation" includes some pretty small/poor countries. Should it be a surprise that an organization in the US is bigger than a country like Liechtenstein?
It’s not sitting there - it’s invested and working. Investment returns pay for operating expenses.
Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same? Why not theaters next? In the end, if keeping the balance in check is the main thing an istitution is bound to do, why not stop doing education (= expenses) and just focus on investments?
I literally don't understand what you mean. The purpose of the institution is to educate people (and other stuff.) They do that by investing money that they were given for this exact purpose.
What on earth could the problem with that be?
No only are they providing education to people, often for free, they're also lending people money to build and develop businesses along the way.
I think you've got some idea they have their billions in a Duck McScrooge style vault? They don't - being invested means they lend it to people to build things. It's all being actively used.
> Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same?
Many hospitals and health organisations have endowments. For example the Wellcome Trust has an endowment of $37 billion. I think they funded my wife's PhD in cancer.
> Why not theaters next?
Many art institutions have endowments. For example the Getty uses a $7 billion endowment to fund the arts so they're preserved for and accessible to people like you.
What is the issue you see here? If they kept it as cash in the bank it'd depreciate rapidly and they'd end up with none left.
In 1992 in Italy hospitals became "hospital companies", meaning what was once a public service with the sole aim of providing the best possible treatments to citizens for no cost, became at all effects a business (although still state owned) with incomes, expenses and a budget. You may think this makes sense, but since then our healthcare quality has tanked.
One notable side effect is that all hospital companies cut on the intensive treatment beds to save on costs, which backfired heavily during covid since we didn't have enough beds and many patients died without proper treatment as a consequence.
But it comes from Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Modern_col...
> incomes, expenses and a budget
Government-provided healthcare also has an income, expenses, and a budget. They don't just spent whatever they want with no planning and no income.
The article itself notes that it's common practice only in North america, and when it is used outside of USA it's in a different way:
>In the United States, the endowment is often integral to the financial health of educational institutions. Alumni or friends of institutions sometimes contribute capital to the endowment. The use of endowment funding is strong in the United States and Canada but less commonly found outside of North America, with the exceptions of Cambridge and Oxford universities
> Government-provided healthcare also has an income, expenses, and a budget. They don't just spent whatever they want with no planning and no income.
Of course, but there is a big difference in having a regular accountability and starting to think in terms of business. Suddenly intensive treatment beds become "centers of cost", not vital but expensive tools required to save lives.
Isn’t that a crazy number? How much of it goes to a bloated bureaucracy?
Tenure means a guaranteed job for life, and the university needs the money to guarantee it. The position exists even if there aren’t sufficient student or research grants to fund it.
Harvard is a bad example to use here because they are so massive. Other schools aren’t situated as well. And yea the endowments have taken a life of their own but tenure is a part of why they exist.
There has been an almost unprecedented ten year period of growth in the equity markets. And the big endowment which I keep my eye on at least has done significantly better than the market. It's prudent not to count on that continuing--not that the school could turn on a dime with respect to their revenue mix anyway.
They want to make as much money off their endowments (savings) as they can, and spend as little of it as possible on things that they don't need to pay for. Note that while the endowment is huge, actually a large part of it is restricted in what it can be used for, by "generous" donors who put conditions on their money, funnily enough. Turns out that they don't want the money spent on just sending kids to school, they rather want to see their name on art in museums, on professorships, and on department buildings.
Harvard to take an example, has an endowment of $53B, roughly (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy21_harvard_fin...). Approx. 80% of that has donor restrictions on it and only $9B is useable freely for anything desired.
Last year, Harvard's operating costs were $5B (roughly). To pay for that (roughly):
-- $1B came from student tuition
-- $1B came from funded research grants
-- $2B was released from the endowment
-- $1B in gifts, royalties, licenses, other income
In a sense, $2B spent from such an endowment is not too different from what you would plan for your own retirement. Admittedly, Harvard Management Company (investment arm) earns much better than average though.
It's a choice by these universities, how big they want to be, the ambition of their educational goals, and to some extent, yes their power and influence. They are no different than many corporations.
If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Harvard is significantly different than most corporations because Harvard doesn’t pay taxes.
Yet Harvard is not a typical not for profit either, as you won’t find many non-profits with a $53B treasure chest.
> If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Yes, the majority want a different system, your average person doesn’t really like the fact institutions like Harvard/Yale have a combined ~$100B tax free war chest and supply 8 of the 9 lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.
Public universities generally have little/much smaller endowments by comparison because they rely on government for their steady stream of revenue. And because of that they can, and have pressure to, fulfill policy-based goals of educating students at little to no cost, or heavily subsidizing it.
Some public universities are acting according to the incentives they've been given, and accumulating their own endowments to insulate against political unreliability, and you can also see why college sports are such an important revenue stream for them as a result.
But it's the best time of your life!
Harvard is free for people not in the donor class, so I'm not sure what your are asking.
Also, universities do research and teaching, and the research costs money separate from teaching/tuition concerns.
My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.
That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
This is even referred to in loquation's post, by describing it as an ideological problem. I agree, and would pose the ideological question as follows: Should education be treated as an individual investment or a societal investment? If it is an individual investment, then it should be paid for by the student either up front or through debt, and that investment is recouped directly through higher income. If it is a societal investment, then it should be paid for by society as a whole (i.e. publicly funded through taxes), and that investment is recouped indirectly through opportunities that require a more educated society.
He's not.
Its like writing to tell people they are illiterate
> loquation
> Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society.
Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.
You already believe that, you just disagree on the definition on student. Or should we take 14 year olds out of school and send them back into the coal mines?
That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.
> Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors
A second semester senior without a job lined up negotiating a seven figure contract... what could go wrong?
> IT students handle the networking
This is already a thing at most colleges.
> mechanical engineers the boilers
Might be possible, but could also be a disaster.
> hospitality management majors dorm maintenance
Students already do work in dorms at front desks and so on. Business majors aren't qualified to do plumbing, electrical, etc.
Students who are qualified to do plumbing and electrical are probably better off selling that labor on the open market.
At the end of the day, the other basic problem is that at most colleges, most college students who need work can get better-paying work than the sort of work that's available on campus. Why work in Uni IT over the summer if you can get an internship literally anywhere else that probably pays better and could become a full time job?
Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right
Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally?
I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.
Anyone who has operated in a student-run organization will tell you that when you're doing anything complicated (like managing a college IT department), the ~4-year limit on institutional memory is a serious issue, especially when it involves people who mostly don't have the experience to be proactive about documentation (and, I should note, institutional documentation is not an easy problem for organizations filled with seasoned professionals).
Both soldiers and drivers can be alone for hours and sometimes have to make life-or-death decisions during that time.
Students are students. Their job is to be students, not administrators or full time workers. That's why things run and maintained by students typically don't have the follow through and professionalism of people who are paid to do it.
We have this. They’re called grad students and if they hang around long enough we call them professors.
I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him.
I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)
- Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard.
- Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.
Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.
> but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes
1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.
2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.
3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.
There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.
Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.
Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.
My university (Olin College) was undergraduate-only, but your general point about good teaching being a rare skill is definitely valid. Our student body was definitely pretty high caliber both technically and in terms of explaining-things skills.
> it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state
This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction in those courses could be pretty easily replaced with videos. It's not ideal, but seems to work OK.
> For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops.
This is certainly true if you just hire some students and tell them to do their best, but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process. For example, it's reasonable to provide instruction for the instructors on how to be effective, and invest more in quality video or written content to explain technical details that a student might not be able to articulate well. In my experience, being taught by student instructors definitely also helps prepare students to teach as student instructors, in a virtuous cycle.
Many of the tools for doing this well don't exist in a cohesive form today, but to the extent that people are working to make education cheaper, this seems like a promising direction to investigate.
Berkeley is not a good counter-example.
There are usually several teaching professors doing a full time job behind the scenes -- handling a myriad of student crises, handling a huge quantity of special accommodations, plagiarism and other academic misconduct, behavior issues (on the part of both students and staff!!!), constant question bank maintenance, constant schedule tweaking, interfacing with faculty demands from down-stream courses, and so on. Those are all trivial, though. Most important -- by far -- is training and managing a large course staff most of whom have never taught a recitation or graded a homework assignment!
Scaling up from a class of 1 instructor and 40 students (at Olin 20 or 15 I'd guess?) in one class to class with 40 staff members and 1000+ students and several lecturers is its own skillset. Those instructors are not teachers. They are mid-level managers. It's a different job, and not one that most undergraduates are prepared to take on.
And the face that it's a machine matters. Teaching a few recitations or lab sections and grading homework is not even remotely the same as instructing a course.
It's a bit like saying that you don't need experienced management at a logistics company because, after all, everyone learns how to do the warehouse job within a week. True, but keeping that machine running requires institutional memory and is itself a full time job. And just because you can train cogs quickly doesn't mean many of those cogs would do a particularly good job at designing and operating the underlying machine. Or even a miniature version of that machine.
> but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process.
Having spent time both inside and outside the elite academic institutions, folks who use places like Olin or Berkeley as barometers for "normal" are wildly out of touch with 90+% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA.
Students at places like Olin or Berkeley are already the cream of the cream of the crop. At Olin or Berkeley you have a handful of good student-educators every year. At normal places the acceptance rate is closer to Olin's reject rate, and the applicant pool is way lower quality. At normal places an above average Olin kid comes around once a decade or less, and the annual cream of the crop at Olin or Berkeley simply never pass through.
Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job.
Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.
If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.
This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. The basic is that students are employed by a company and work there half the time. In return the company pays for the studies in the other half.
It's called 'an apprenticeship' in the UK for example, and similarly elsewhere I assume.
Some universities offer them for professional degrees now too - I had a colleague at Arm who was part-time and a student on such a programme. (Two days a week year round apart from a break for exams iirc - quite distinct from the (more common) summer internship format.)
The school is paid for by the tax payer and the company pays the apprentice a salary that should represent the value they create as an apprentice.
The company also pays for additional courses organized by their guilds. For programmers and system administrators this might be how to build a pc or a network or how to build some software project.
It‘s a great system for companies and apprentices. I think there are even some Swiss companies that try to build similar programs in the US because they have a hard time hiring in the US.
Dyson Institute (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering...>) is something similar in England. All students are paid employees of Dyson while working toward their engineering degree.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Coopera...
This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman.
The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engineering positions in the highly-rural western and mountain states.
Most students transfer to a 4 year institution to complete their degrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
There've been a small handful of HN submissions, though no discussion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22deep%20springs%22
Several comments as well:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There was a detailed profile of the school sometime in the past decade or so. I've been past it on CA-168 and recognised the name.
I thought the article had run in the NY Times or WSJ, though I don't find hits for the period I had in mind.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22deep+...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Awsj.com+%22deep+spri...
It's hard to express just how remote it is. You'd have to head out into Montana or Alaska to do better.
@dredmorbius's summary is good. Couple additions/nuances:
L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs to train public servants/leaders. He hoped they would play a larger role in society. (Some do, some don't...). To all incoming students, the school distributes a pamphlet written by Nunn called "The Voice of the Desert", in which he articulates his vision for the school and his appreciation for the mysteries of the wilderness.
Nunn founded at least three schools in his lifetime. The first was intended to train young men to become technical staff at his power plants. (Nunn supplied Tesla with power for some of his early experiments in Telluride, CO.)
The second school was founded back east. Its student body walked out en masse to volunteer for WWI.
The third school, Deep Springs, was founded in 1917, in a location isolated enough to preserve its student body in the face of social pressures. (Worked!)
At least nominally, the student body hires and fires the faculty, determines each semester's curriculum, and conducts the admissions process to replace itself. The extent to which it does that independently varies from one school administration to another. (When I was there, we had T-shirts that said "[[frontside]] In 1917, two radical social utopias were born... [[backside]] "Only one survived.")
It's a feeder school for larger, more prestigious institutions you've heard of.
It's also a really f*cking hard place to live, work and study, because of the sheer immensity of your responsibilities, and the intensity of social interactions.
Labor: I served as the farmer's assistant, the dishwasher, and the dairy boy when I was there. The dairy boy, the feedman and the cowboy are all responsible for the care, feeding and continued survival of livestock; the butcher is responsible for their merciful killing. The farmer's assistant has to grow the alfalfa to feed the cattle (or sell). Labor's no joke, and you can't screw it up without other people suffering. Life at DS is heavily interdependent, and the consequences of mistakes are real. (I've been told this may not be true at most liberal arts colleges...)
Social: If you don't like someone at DS, chances are you will still see them 4-5 times per day, including every meal, for two years. The school has an isolation policy. It is the only human community in a high-mountain desert valley. The near towns (Big Pine and Bishop, CA) are about a 30-40min drive away, IIRC. The students stay in the Valley for the length of each term. The only ones who leave are: 1) "the driver," who picks up groceries and applicants during application season; and 2) folks with a medical appointment. That's it. It also has a "no drugs or alcohol" policy during term, the enforcement of which is variable.
You might say it's free for a reason; you pay in other ways. I made several lifelong friends there, but I'm not sure I would counsel my younger self to do it again.
Every year or so, a mainstream media outlet rediscovers it. CBS did last year: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deep-springs-college-california...
Wikipedia has a list of notable alumni. Many are named Bill.
Bill Vollmann
William Vandenheuvel
And a third Bill who supposedly founded DARPA. I'm blanking on his last name right now.
The founding director was Roy York.
There's Robert Sproull (1918--2014), who was director of ARPA. Might you be misremembering his name?
(I'm not denigrating it. I've been a landscaper, dishwasher in highschool who was yelled at in Chinese nightly for not doing jobs other than dishwashing--like washing/polishing his car between rushes, General contractor, auto mechanic, and electrician. I know about manual labor, and I never liked it after my 40's. This program looked fun though.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range
"Home on the Range" is a classic cowboy song, sometimes called the "unofficial anthem" of the American West.
I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
Several students in my high school also attended Alice Lloyd over the years. One of my closest acquaintances did custodial work and always spoke highly of it and seemed to enjoy being on campus and working there.
I think both of these schools (and I am sure the others) perform a much needed service and I would love to see more schools offer something like this. I was a work-study student in college but of course $8 / hr didn't cover much. It would have been nice to have some sort of merit / effort based compensation above the cash pay to help offset tuition costs.
BTW I'm Iranian and since I feel like everyone here is American I thought maybe sharing a little different point of view could be beneficial. I myself think of immigrating to another country a lot and honestly seems like everything here designed in a way to make us immigrate. From mandatory military service to economic problems and being disconnected from the world (more in a economical sense again where we can't have international transactions, but here I am connected to you informationally(I think I just invented a new word)!)
Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more affluent regions.
This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.)
This turns up in India (particularly in technology), the Philippines (medicine), Eastern Europe / former Warsaw bloc (science, mathematics, computer programming), and in the US. For the latter, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has long had an excellent computer science programme. Its graduates are educated at the cost of Illinois taxpayers (both individuals and businesses), but tend overwhelmingly to leave the state. There's effectively no tech cluster near UIUC, and very little of one in Chicago itself. Tech employment in the state is ~320k vs. 1.4 million in California. And that's actually reasonably good --- 7th ranked in the US, ahead of Massachusetts, which at least has a tech tradition.
It's a bit hard to read by total employment and compensation, but my sense is that positions are less technically interesting within Illinois as well.
By position, top-10: CA, TX, NY, FL, VA, WA, IL, MA, PA, GA.
Bottom ten (starting at the bottom): WY, AK, ND, SD, MT, VT, HI, WV, DE, ME.
Top ten metros by tech employment: NYC, DC, LA, SJ, SF, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta.
Atlanta has 40% the tech employment of NYC.
https://www.cyberstates.org/#interactiveMap?geoid=0__usa
https://www.cyberstates.org/pdf/CompTIA_Cyberstates_2022.pdf
You touch an excellent point that I never factored in when looking at why western government organizations demand free education in poor developing countries through policy or loan measures.
People who are taking highly specialised degrees and training for free cannot work locally because there is no market.
You earn on reputation, interest, and skilled labour through these measures.
And add to this liberal skilled-worker visa entry programmes with work-to-stay requirements.
Rich nations to poor: you raise 'em, train 'em, and pension 'em. We'll work 'em, pressure down their wages and bargaining power through work-to-stay reqs, and capture all the surplus labour value.
Bond villains, eat your hearts out.
I always thought these aid and loan programs through organizations like IMF, WP, and countries require return on their investment beyond interest on principal.
This is why they include clauses related to education, democratic participation, financial and taxation reforms, etc as a condition of receiving the aid.
You can be less cynical and think they are advocating for reforms which make these countries grow and pay back the loan otherwise they might default.
You can be more cynical and think many of these policies are detached from what is needed on ground looking at impact.
For example, opening a particular industry or providing consumable aid often distort local markets and might impact local businesses and exports through currency manipulation.
Maybe you believe onerous regulation and compliance of first world without the enforcement budget and low corruption make these places less attractive for businesses. Introducing those as condition of receiving aid might be net negative in the long run.
It all depends on how you view with your lens.
Although countries who are receiving aid like this have no choice in the matter. They are desperate for cash. Power imbalance exist and can be abused.
There certainly are countries that seemingly offer a lot, but before you sell Iran being a country of free academic opportunities, think twice about the fact that there is freedom of speech outside of it.
While respecting your opinion (despite the fact that you would not have the same freedom of speech without anonymity in Iran), I think it's naive to think that just providing you with free pseudo-education with no chance of real success or quality of life is what this thread is about.
Another point is that I currently don't have any anonymity. There is only one "mahdi7d1" on the internet as far as I know. And my username everywhere is the same. All my friends and anyone who knows me knows of my username and remembers it (Their curiosity of what 7d1 stand for makes them remember it!) So even a normal person might be able to trace down my activities on the internet and find my real Identity.
Also I haven't said anything to be afraid of lack of freedom of speech here. Moreover there is much more freedom of speech here than people both inside and outside realize and I would like to try to see how much there is!
I think the argument can be flipped. The problem is that of incentives and the wrong culture dont allow the debt-free, work-study program to be more widespread, by leveraging endowments.
Take for example a place like harvard.
Consider that the objective of a harvard portfolio manager is to grow its prestige and carry incentive payout, by increasing its AUM and reinvesting returns. The primary incentive of the fund manager is not to generate income for student use.
You then have the same problems on the administration side. Their chief objective is not to lower overhead for students, but to increase admin count, payroll, nonstudent "research". Arguably this culture permeates down to alumni giving which is why oftentimes gifts are restricted. Alumni do not want gifts to fund admin largesse. Administrations with clear mission statements ('debt free students') would have far more leverage in fundraising towards that goal.
So to complain that using endowment for tuition is "cheating" is missing the point: endownment is a critical to bridge the gap between student labor value and total tuition.
Instead, we should look at universities with higher endowments with deep suspicion. Is it a culture of misaligned incentives that is resulting in a huge debt burden to students ?
Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?
So universities have incentives to convince the students to take on as much debt as possible.
For the sake of thoughtful discussion, i chose to omit the topic of debt trap.
Your comment makes it painfully obvious that any attempt to tackle incentives discussion must by definition include all incetives , such as (unlimited) backstop of debt.
_Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?_
All universities have a debt-free path to students (these are not kids, they are adults). It is called "paying up front" or "paying when you receive a bill." We obviously know that is not feasible, but I don't look for changes to the dealership model because Subaru does not provide "a debt-free path to car ownership."
I'm not sure I accept that work-centric universities prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal. The story is an advertisement for a college. It is published by a news source that seems to have a lot of stories critical of colleges.
The story does not say specifically that all students graduate debt-free; for students who graduate Hard Work U (I think the "you" is misplaced) and take loans, the average debt at graduation seems to be no different than some CUNY universities. Hard Work U forbids federal loans - not "offer a path to debt-free" but forbid it. Federal loans may be subsidized - and gosh, wonder why they started with the fed before moving on to private loans? Wonder how their revenue streams work?
You will notice also that there is no graduate program, where a considerable amount of student debt is held.
Also, from what I can tell, CotOzarks' annual tuition is considerably higher than the in-state tuition charged at the state school I work at, which has been consistently defunded at the state level. We service nearly 10,000 secular students; "Hard Work U" (this is branding, dude) services 1.5k deeply religious students and still advertise as a liberal arts college! Land-grant unis, regional comprehensives, small liberal arts schools, cannot at all replicate their...unique business model.
But we can call ourselves universities. I wonder why it's not "University" of the Ozarks? They're accredited by HLC, so I don't think there's a quality issue. But they do advertise as a liberal arts school and seem to have a lot of these "jobless majors" I keep hearing about.
The historical and material conditions that cause students to accrue debt are not going to be answered by "just offer summer jobs." The idea that "too many" universities (how many, precisely?) have some "debt-free" option that they could just flip a switch on...I mean, yes, If I were a university, I would simply provide a debt-free option for students! C'mon. Most of my students have jobs during the semester; do you assume they would drop them if we offered private work against their tuition? Would you be surprised if the answer was "no"?
You are free to spend time playing video games and not learning to prepare yourself for a career. That is a choice one makes.
Outcome can be the basis for a claim for fraud - but that battle is already being fought elsewhere.
The true issue is, what incentives are at play that result in so much debt? Why cant you say thay "1 summer job is enough to pay for a year of tuition" anymore (this used to be the norm in the 70s!)
Whats preventing your students from working the summer to pay for tuition? It isnt students. They are working all the same. What incentives does the school have that are contrary to that goal
> [...] Berea’s $1.6 billion endowment covers around three-quarters of the college’s operating expenses for its approximately 1,600 students. College of the Ozarks has an endowment just shy of half a billion dollars; its endowment-per-student ratio is one of the highest in the country.
> Relying on this type of funding does limit the number of students that can be enrolled each year and can make the schools particularly vulnerable to changes in the economy.
So the students don't really need to work as part of the model. It's more of a "Large endowment and private donations enables colleges to not charge tuition".
But I do think that work experience is important for college students. Even if your work experience isn't directly related to your field of study, just having stood behind a cash register, gives you a lot of maturity when facing the job market after graduation.
In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and teachers.
While these are not universities per se, the opportunities they open up to students are top notch. You don't need an entire college education to "set graduates on a path towards breaking the cycle of poverty", which according to the article is what work colleges aspire to achieve.
This vocational education is also much more economically efficient than universities in the same country, mainly due to losing the weight of bureaucracy and credentialing structures. Teachers are well-paid, ops run smoothly with few personnel, and students get access to many new job opportunities completely free of charge.
First issue is, that basically everyone wants to study and actually goes to study, even if it's underwater basket weaving, and they already know that there are zero job prospects even at the time they are filling out the forms to go to college (~middle of the fourth year of high school).
The second is, that college gives you some benefits (almost free college dorms, food coupons, due to student-status, you can work student-type of jobs with some tax benefits, etc.), even people who wouldn't otherwise study, enroll just to get the "status", and people who want to study eg. english literature, but are not accepted for that programme, enroll to eg. electrical engineering, that they have no interest in, but it's easier to get in, and they still get the "student status".
The third is, similar to the second, even when they should finish their college (hopefully graduate,... or quit), they try to prolong the studying process, to keep the "student status" longer.
And the fourth, when they actually finish college, especially the ones with "useless degrees" (the ones, that there are no market needs for) have issues getting a job, since a lot of employers for "shitty jobs" (baristas, etc.) prefer hiring people with student status, due to much simpler hiring and firing process, much simpler bureaucracy and a bit better taxes.
So yeah... we (the taxpayers) pay a lot of money for a lot of students who either intentionally study stuff that we don't actually need (and the added value of that education in the later job (eg. barista with a masters in ancient greek) is basically zero), and for students who just abuse the student status for all the benefits and student work, making job-seeking harder for graduates.
There is also an additional problem of people studying something that the job market needs (medicine, engineering, CS,...), and then leaving the country the moment they graduate and never paying back their studies (because they never pay taxes in our country).
There are many alternative systems, that I'm not 100% they'd work better, by eg. colleges charging some tuition, and then graduates having to stay in the country and work in the field that they studied for X years (so their degree gives them some added value in their paychecks and then taxes that would bay their tuition back passively), or paying back their tuition directly if they want to leave or do some other, unrelated work.
I don't know anything about Berea, but I cannot recommend College of the Ozarks.
I can't be more clear: this is a submarine about a terrible college that no one should attend.
First, and most importantly, College of the Ozarks generally has a really terrible educational product. Really, TERRIBLE. It's difficult to over-state how bad the educational product is. Go look at their CS faculty. Almost all community colleges have way better faculty, to say nothing of other four year colleges.
Second, the work program is generous but not amazing. It's an $11K tuition waiver, which comes out to 15 hour/week job at $20/hour. Room and board is expensive, and off-campus living isn't as cheap as other options in Missouri.
Third, for students in Missouri, Truman State is an infinitely better product at roughly the same price point ($12K, and no one is stopping you from getting a part time job on or off campus...). It's a "public LAC" so the product is in the same category, but infinitely better.
Especially in CS, students are MUCH better off going to Truman State and working part-time. They'll make up the (SMALL) difference in part time job earnings through a combination of lower living expenses and way better internship placements. I'd be astounded if the average Truman CS student doesn't come out financially ahead of the average CofO student at graduation, and will eat my shoe if the Truman CS student isn't better off after 1 year of work.
Fourth, better not be homosexual or you'll be expelled / forced out. Always worth mentioning because many students don't realize this until too late.
But, again, I cannot overstate how bad of a deal CofO is compared to state schools (Truman, UMSL, Rolla) for Missouri residents, especially in high-demand fields like CS. The cost isn't that dissimilar and the faculty and educational quality at the state schools are infinitely better. I mean, go compare the CS faculty. Truman and UMSL have real CS programs staffed by real CS faculty. Rolla is a proper research university. CofO, on the other hand, has one faculty member whose industry experience is closer to "IT" than "SWE" and their curriculum is out-gunned by most community colleges. Honestly better off getting industry certs through a community college program.
yeah, sure
You are NOT rewarded for knowing more info, techniques or anything that are not in the courses. Do you know Linux/Unix? Fine, no one cares. Do you know X language with Y framework? That doesnt give you more grades or be able to skip courses (you cant skip). Do you know about cross-compiling, new shiny things about the field that could be INTERESTING? No one cares.
At least they could make a club or especial program, but nope.
> Our European visitors are important to us.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Besides the irony of "being important" and GDPR [0] not having been solved for a simple website, this is the first time in a long while that I see something like this, and it made me think (again!) how weird, unfair, and strange the world is, in relation to laws and regulation.
[0]: https://gdpr.eu/
Should instead read:
> This site has been unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area for years, because it makes more economic sense to us to sinkhole Europe rather than bother to comply with GDPR.
Things suddenly start making sense when you look at them from this point of view.
Even today, if you go to a Ashram/Japanese Zen temple, you're expected to go and clean stuff. The surrendering of the ego is itself quite therapeutic, if you come from a Western culture where the ego is so massively magnified/glorified.
Sadly, Indian culture is itself being choked off by vestigial-British Govt. in India, so won't be long before someone writes the equivalent of the "Darkening Age" for Asia.