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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of these non-elite colleges? Does it serve the public good for them to be eligible for federal student loans? Tuition at our local community college is $4,000 a year. The facilities and staff seem more than adequate for training people for routine jobs requiring more than a high school education. It seems like expensive cargo culting to send all these ordinary students to expensive universities that ape the blue blood trappings of Harvard and Yale. Maybe rich families whose kids can’t get into those schools should have something like this school as an option. But why divert public resources to support them?

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I’m a bit confused by the thesis. Is the idea is we should have community college and Stanford and nothing in between?

> Is the idea is we should have community college and Stanford and nothing in between?

Apparently community colleges and Ivy League schools, and nothing else, I would assume from the Harvard/Yale reference.

> What is the point of these non-elite colleges?

The lead example, Colby-Sawyer, seems to be “non-elite” only in that traditional evaluations of elite status rely largely on graduate/research programs, and its a baccalaureate-only institution, and apparently one of the better (despite being small) undergraduate institutions in the region.

> Does it serve the public good for them to be eligible for federal student loans?

Federal student loans shouldn’t exist, but make no less sense at schools like Colby-Sawyer than any others.

> Tuition at our local community college is $4,000 a year.

Comnunity colleges generally do not have baccalaureate degrees, and do not substitute for schools that do any more than those schools substitute for graduate schools.

> Why divert public resources supporting these extraneous colleges?

Because they aren’t extraneous.

> It seems like expensive cargo culting to send all these ordinary students to expensive universities that ape the blue blood trappings of Harvard and Yale.

Colby-Sawyer very much does not ape the trappings of Harvard and Yale, and one of the draws of schools like it is that the focus is on undergraduate education, not graduate research with undergraduate programs as an afterthought among faculty duties.

Explain how this isn’t non-elite.

https://colby-sawyer.edu/academics/majors

Lists of majors are not what makes a college elite or non-elite; there are elite and non-elite schools in every field.

(OTOH, that list makes it pretty clear what makes it something a community college won’t substitute for, since those are mostly bachelor’s programs, plus a professional masters; with the few associate’s programs in health sciences being the only thing that most community colleges might be able to provide, even before considering qualitative differences.)

The school is not remotely elite, that is a fact, and the list of majors it offers is a tell. You think I’m saying the majors list _causes_ it to be elite or not. Or you don’t really think that.

No, I don’t know what you are saying because you are being deliberately indirect amd avoiding making an argument rather than vague handwaving and innuendo.

An odd collection. One can major in Creative Writing, but not English or Comparative Literature?

> Comnunity colleges generally do not have baccalaureate degrees

Even this is changing - many of our community colleges in Washington state now offer a BA, especially designed for non-trad students who are returning to the classroom and/ or need a more flexible schedule.

Or you know we could make sure that public schools stick to a budget instead of draining students like vampires. Limit student loans to something reasonable and make them deal with it. If they don't become "world class research centers", who cares, students are there to become adults and get an education. They probably don't need "world class sports and entertainment" facilities. Bunking with someone in a cheap dorm room with basic almost prison like accouterments was one of the happiest times of my life lol. I could make enough money to pay for tuition and room/board over a summer or semester. This was at a middle of the road state university. Now it would be almost impossible.

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