Hacker News Reader

I want to agree with your point, but I strongly suspect that universities are much more capable of price discrimination than the government is, and that close to 100% of subsidies are captured by tuition increases.

Put it this way: if Obama waved a magic wand and said "Twelve months from now, anyone majored in engineering gets $100k from the Treasury. No questions asked.", I think you'd see approximately every college in the country debut a tiered pricing structure by next semester.

Incidentally, I'm not just being cynical here: most selective universities have official policies where a) they bid for desirable students with grant aid (academically inclined students, desirable minorities, etc) but b) external scholarships decrease grant aid, typically at a 50% ratio. If someone external to the university subsidizes your education, the university acts to capture the subsidy, justified entirely by "Because we can."

I paid for a good portion of my college education with external scholarships. Each time I scrounged up another $2,000, the university financial aid department said "Great! We'll decrease your loans by $1,000 and decrease your grant aid by $1,000." (My mother aggressively negotiated with them on this, every time, and got the clawback rescinded "as a one-time exception" something like eight times. I thought this was embarrassing at the time. I plead youth and stupidity on that.)

As a proud owner of a physics masters degree, I say that this is a load of elitist, prejudiced, confused nonsense.

> This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about. I strongly disagree. It's horrible.

Mathematics isn't the only 'hard' subject. What is hard to one person may be easy to another. I'm absolutely sure that you haven't even tried Semiotics or Gender Studies, and I'm also sure that the skills needed to study in those fields wouldn't come as naturally to you as mathematics does.

Also, just because you don't see the relevance in those fields, it doesn't mean that there is no relevance. Gender Studies, for example, has a place in sociology, psychology, politics.

And of course, wealth is not the ultimate objective of everyone. My peers who wanted to persue a scientific career certainly aren't loaded. In fact, those with art degrees made more contacts at university and many have managed to land well paid jobs.

Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect.

Maybe engineers should be required to take an intense, no-hands-held Gender Studies class, if the other departments are required to take difficult math classes.

conceptually very difficult to grasp

I walked out of university with a degree in engineering (CS), conversational fluency in Japanese, and a degree in cultural studies. When I think of moments of difficulty during my education, "Women can be black and blacks can be women, too, which complicates things, because the experience of black women is not the same as the experience of black men or white women. This is ignored by a lot of writing about the experience of being 'black' or being 'women.' That is bad." is not one of them. (This is the thirty-second version of Intersectionality.)

This is the thirty-second version of Intersectionality

Do you really think that's fair. Don't you think that a snarky "thirty second version" of anything can portray that area of study as a waste of time?

I think Classics or Comp Lit might be more daunting than Gender Studies.

That is, a field of study with a nigh-bottomless reading list. The more you can read, and the deeper and more varied your cultural vocabulary, the better your essays will be. A field with clear advantages for ability to read or speak multiple languages. That is, if you want to excel.

Some of the commenters here have clearly never taken a humanities class with a challenging reading component.

One data point: I was the sole major in Comparative Literature at my undergrad college. At the time, the department had a requirement that you do four higher-level literature courses in two languages that were not English. That meant that you had to reach fluency in two (non-English) languages by the start of your third year. Nobody did it, and eventually (years after I left) the department began allowing people to get Comp Lit degrees by reading works solely in translation (something my professors found hideous).

One nice thing about being the sole graduate in your subject? You win all the university and/or departmental awards in that subject by default. Looks impressive (to outsiders) but feels awkward.

For what it's worth, my two languages were Ancient Greek and Latin (I went on to study Classics in graduate school), so apparently, you wrote your comment just for me.

I knew a German lit student and looked at his summer reading list (to prepare for grad school). It contained about 100 books, and he aimed to grind through a substantial fraction of them that summer. I read a lot (back then), but not at that level.

That was one of the experiences, besides the time I took French and had my ass handed to me by people who were also simultaneously studying other languages, that brought home to me the linguistic workload that can be part of a humanities degree.

Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect.

No, because it's bullshit. Bullshit can be made arbitrarily hard to understand, and it's generally productive to do so if you're an academic trying to justify your own existence.

That's, unfortunately, a common reply by people who simply dislike some areas, and refuse to believe that not everything they don't understand the purpose of immediately is crap. I even used to be one of those holier-than-thou, "this is pomo obscurantism!" insufferable science undergrads myself. Of course, like most, I hadn't spent any real effort researching the subject before reaching such a "conclusion" (conclusion in quotes because I didn't really investigate the matter, just picking up a few quotes from Chomsky and Sokal or whatever)...

I actually still dislike lots of it, especially the secondary literature (which is, I think, full of garbage), but it doesn't take that much reading in the history of philosophy to gain a basic understanding of what problems 20th-century continental philosophy was responding to, or to realize that they weren't all insincere idiots who somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes for 80 years.

I'm not talking about dense language. Actually, there are some pretty brilliant orators and writers who take these ideas and put them in pretty accessible language. But the ideas are still difficult. They lead in increasingly complex directions in terms of how we got here, where we are, and what to do.

I recognize that unnecessarily obscure language is a hallmark of academia and socio-political thought. I think tomes like Negri's "Empire" wallow in it. But what I'm referring to is what happens when you get past that, either as the reader, or as the theorist.

You should spend some time with some serious, high-level astrology. I am not kidding. You will find that there have been brilliant defenses of it over the centuries, and it is full of various tidbits of ancient wisdom from the wisdom literatures that you may find quite profound.

It is, nevertheless, bullshit, because it can not be meaningfully mapped back to reality. Its predictions are bunk, the framework it offers you doesn't work when pulled into the real world, if taken truly seriously it decreases your ability to make accurate predictions about the world and the people in it. People had centuries to polish the turd, even to find painfully clever ways of including little tidbits of non-turd in the turd, but it's still a turd at its core.

The presence of a few good tidbits in a discipline proves nothing about it. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to define something totally false in every detail. The question to be asked is how much truth the discipline has, and how well it can not merely assert the truth, but demonstrate it in a non-self-referential manner. Pretty much every social science in the modern era fails this test miserably.

Ideas that sound profound are a commodity, truth is harder to come by.

That's only looking at it through one particular lens. The cultural value and historical context of these writings are useful to explore. Also, as a forerunner of modern astronomy, astrologers' observations were incredibly accurate and are still relevant to the field.

That's the foundation of my post, not news to me.

Liberal arts degrees subsidize the hard science and engineering degrees since the per-credit-hour tuition is the same but the guy doing gender studies is way cheaper than the girl using the microbiology lab.

STEM degrees subsidize the liberal arts degrees by bringing in grants and research money.

This is generally not true; the overhead charges from grants and research money just about pay for the added cost of the (much) higher faculty salaries, travel, research equipment, and the increasingly onerous grant application and accounting/auditing/reporting processes, but not for undergraduate education. In fact it's usually prohibited to cross-subsidize education with research grants, and funding agencies are surprisingly strict about this, doing things like auditing whether computers bought on a grant are used in teaching a course (not allowed).

In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former Computer Science dean: http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...).

The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are actually making money, i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education: http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humani...

STEM students subsidize liberal arts by creating a world in which somebody whose only skill is art history can live without starving to death or dying of a childhood disease

It will (hopefully) turn out that way but right now you're being a bit selective in your consideration of the STEM contributions.

On a related note: a good alternative to student loans would be letting students sell a small percentage of their income over the next (say) 20-30 years in exchange for all or part of their college tuition. This would be lower-risk to students than loans, and give investors an incentive to help students get a lucrative education and a decently-paying job.

Student loan debts are really a problem.

Sounds like Australia's system [1]: "This funding is in the form of loans that are not normal debts. They are repaid over time via a supplementary tax, using a sliding scale based on taxable income. As a consequence, loan repayments are only made when the former student has income to support the repayments."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia

There's a huge difference: the Australian system doesn't allow student loan investors (just the government?) to get more than the inflation-adjusted value of the interest-free loan. A percentage-of-earnings scheme, by not placing such a limit on the amount of money investors can make, would have two interesting effects:

1. Investors would have more incentive to help students succeed financially, since they get a cut of the profits.

2. Students who strike it rich would, in a competitive market, end up subsidizing everybody else. Think startups: the returns on VC's money come disproportionately from a few successes, and this lets them invest in a bunch of companies that probably won't be big hits, to get the few that will get big.

Who decides what's "useless," and on what timescale? Even within the STEM fields, should studying or researching string theory be subsidized? What about atomic physics? Astronomy? Pure math?

That is true at the graduate level. If you pursue a PhD in life science, physical science or computer science your tuition is waived and you (usually) get a stipend. If you want a PhD in liberal arts you have to pay tuition.

Are you just saying/guessing this? I have a PhD in Classics, and although I did my graduate work 20 years ago, I'm still in contact with people in that field. The standard is that for a five year program, nearly everyone can expect (1) to be a TA for 1-3 years (and receive pay that way), (2) to receive a writing fellowship (often from your university) for 1-2 years (and thus be able to receive pay while focusing on a dissertation) or (3) to hit the jackpot and receive an external grant for 1-5 years which spares you from some of the teaching duties in (1). In addition to that, everyone (except non-US citizens) has his or her formal tuition waived by some bizarre sleight-of-hand that the university does with itself.

Let me stress that since Rariel brings it up below: nobody pays tuition (again, except non-US citizens).

People take out loans for extra money (the grants and TA stipends ranged in the 9,000-12,000 dollar range per year in my time, 1992-1997), but nobody pays their tuition. One standard joke was that we were so much better off than the professional students (Business, Med School, Law School) because they did pay tution. I never paid a dime in tuition and finished graduate school with nothing more than mild (< $3,000) credit card debt.

I have no reason to believe that this system has changed. Do you have any sources for your claim?

Liberal arts PhDs get tuition wavers and stipends from being TAs. That's how universities staff intro writing and language courses.

Somewhat, but most liberal arts PhDs only get a small stipend from being a TA plus in-state tuition if it's a public University. Maybe what you're thinking about is being funded, that allows you to get your PhD essentially for free. I'm sure that is available for STEM as well?