Comment by insightcheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by insightcheck | Hacker News Reader

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> "Colleges and universities were never meant to be a way to riches and fortunes. [...] What exactly were you expecting may I ask?"

I disagree with the assumption that the administrators and many professors at universities intend for undergraduate programs to be primarily for learning, and not for improving job prospects.

Many professors focus on material benefits during the first lecture of the course. There are also numerous career fairs and sometimes internship opportunities with industry, which focus greatly on getting material benefits.

Consider also the marketing for many universities: many advertisements (e.g. on public transit) show enrolment at even research-intensive universities as a way to get into prestigious jobs. Alumni networks are also promoted in marketing (though I'm unsure how effective these really are). In my view, times have changed, and the expectation of material benefit is entirely reasonable and even supported by university officials.

No, that is what I am talking about. As one of the points below have mentioned more succintly- utility of a degree in terms of monetary renumaration is already determined by free market forces. For degrees that are determined as less useful, I find that there is no reason whatsoever to burden the tax payer with a bill so that "so and so" can satisfy his/her intellectual curiosity.

For degrees that are determined as less useful from a market perspective still one could make a case that there is a need to provide funding at graduate i.e. at the PhD level. I would give you that since most PhD students do go on to make significant contributions to scholarly literature therby vastly increasing human understanding and frontiers of knowledge.

But clearly this is not the case at undergraduate level. Sorry but the argument that tax payers should foot a bill just so that someone can satisfy his/her intellectual curiosity does not sound convincing at all.

It's fair that the funding of programs just to let people satisfy intellectual curiosity may not be convincing to many taxpayers.

However, real benefits of government funding can still exist. If we agree that work by PhD students in the humanities can create real benefits for a country, then there can be real benefits to having researchers come from a variety of economic upbringings, not just from wealthy backgrounds.

Many academics do social science research on how to craft better policies to improve the health and economic outcomes of underdeveloped rural parts of a country. They can arguably do more effective research if some of the researchers are from a low-income rural background. To achieve this benefit, a social science undergraduate education would need to be subsidized, so the student is eligible to work at the PhD level.

That benefit isn't large enough to justify the cost. If you're just talking about subsidizing the education of the most promising 5 percent of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, then sure. Otherwise, no.

It's too late to change. The economic damage of pulling back government spending for financial aid would totally destroy many schools and the cities and businesses that have grown up around/downstream of them.

Protecting jobs is not an argument for continuing wasteful spending. The same argument can be deployed to justify agricultural subsidies and many other wasteful practices. The net result is significant harm, even if locally and short-term it is the path of least resistance. It's procrastination at the level of a country.

You're not wrong, but when it comes to political will for change, destroying jobs and opportunity is not a good look. Democracies really cannot effectively avoid handouts to entrenched interests.

> They can arguably do more effective research if some of the researchers are from a low-income rural background.

Surely by now such an argument can be made with data rather than rhetoric? “There can be real benefits to having researchers come from a variety of economic upbringings” is a testable hypothesis. It would be unscientific to advance a funding regime geared towards this absent data.

I couldn't find data from a quick search, though I did find a study where researchers groups with a higher diversity of "ethnicity, age, gender, and affiliation" tended to have higher citation counts. [1]

Still, it's not too out there to say that a researcher who grew up in a low-income family can provide a very useful perspective for designing research for addressing poverty (even at least for designing research questions and better recruiting participants). I concede that the evidence may not reach the bar for large, massive investment, but it could at least be promising for at least some funding as a starting point—at least some needs-based scholarships.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701939/

> there is no reason whatsoever to burden the tax payer

Why burden tax payers at all? Just have Universities and Colleges charge the full freight of the degree/diploma to the student. That should work out swimmingly.

The issue with breaking down colleges and universities into "feeder programs" for jobs, is that they are terrible at that. Jobs require specific skills, and institutions are teaching subjects that might cover some of those skills, but not all of them and most importantly not the future ones. What Universities SHOULD be doing, is teaching students how to THINK about their intended subject. Consider different areas and approaches, and be able to be creative and innovative. You know, those things that VCs actually prattle on about? There are PLENTY of people that started in another field, and for whatever reason pivoted to tech. (And while we've had some student loan forgiveness recently, it's mostly the students that foot the bill for their education -- and the most expensive parts of the system are for-profit colleges which are supposed to be the "most" market responsive).

Lastly, the "market" is not all knowing and all seeing, and at times it's pretty fickle. Early on there was no "market" for something like the Internet, but it's proved pretty useful. Started as a wasteful to taxpayers pie in the sky project, too.

So only subjects that are profitable for employers should be funded? And PhDs should be funded even when they are not profitable but never undergraduate studies so that only people with enough money can afford to pursue an undergraduate degree? Sounds like an excellent way to give even more power to the already rich. This is the kind of late stage capitalism that makes my skin crawl.

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