American colleges in crisis with enrollment decline largest on record
fortune.com
fortune.com
I'm always baffled how much tuition was at my public university, yet teacher and TA salaries are so low. It's like everything except academics attached itself to drain money from students
Cut that lifeline. Then it will revert back to the usual alumni fundraiser cycles for new teaching buildings.
There should only be a single tenured faculty position and every one else is an adjunct or post-doc who gets paid $500 to teach a course. These adjuncts and post-docs have to work very hard for decades for a chance to be considered on the list to replace the tenured prof when they retire. Think the money that can then be directed to the university president and all the acclaim and prestige that high salary will give to institution. This is the only way forward.
/s
I remember a highschool teacher saying the students were never the reason she was frustrated. It was the administration.
Yeah, but then the sports fans would cry "Cut everything musical". The band members would argue "Cut everything on stage", and the drama society would return with "Cut all the sports".
FWIW, I don't think that sports should have a large place in tertiary educational institutions. It is the activity that has minimal positive impact on education, and largely negative educational impact on those people who play sports.
While everything else at university leads to some sort of learning, sports leads to the opposite - blind and uncritical tribalistic support of the university team, purely because "That's our side". That sort of thing results in blind and uncritical tribalistic support of politics later in life.
We want fewer "I support $FOO because I'm part of the $GROUP that must support $FOO", not more.
This isn't meant as judgemental, but people only employable due to the labour shortage and only accepted into their field due to the labour shortage are also the people who will struggle most come a lack of a labour shortage.
I know someone who has been acting as her boss's replacement since her boss left the company. But the company refuses to promote her into that job because she doesn't have a degree. 20 years of employment with the company, plus demonstrated ability by actively doing the boss's job, doesn't count as much as an old piece of paper.
To emphasize: This company has a degree requirement not just for hiring inexperienced candidates (of unknown quality), but also for promoting experienced employees (of known quality). Stupidest thing I've ever seen.
Overall college was a waste - more useful for atheists to get married then anything else. In the age of tender and online dating maybe it’s not even good for that.
My advice to people is just leave, get an entry level IT job, start getting experience. You will be working next to people who have six figures of college debt, but unless you tell them they will likely never know. I’m happy to tell them which school I went to if it comes up in conversation, I just omit the part that I left without obtaining a degree.
In the beginning I got turned down for loans occasionally because I didn’t obtain a degree, but no bank has asked my educational background since the 90s.
Of course if you want a non-IT job like practicing law then this may not work because many state bars require a regular college degree in addition to everything else and there is no flexibility. Same with anything medical that doesn’t involve hair exclusively.
I think this sort of learning can, for somebody who is motivated, exceed the knowledge gained at a university. College is meant to give you a holistic, comprehensive overview of your major. But you can get that from sheer experience and from continuing to learn from a variety of sources. Books are also great at providing holistic knowledge on topics.
Learning is inherently painful. You are encoding boring new information into your brain, and most of it will be useless. From personal experience, 95% of the things you need to learn in CS or mathematics are boring. It is extremely difficult for most people to find motivation to do this. Schools (with grades, etc.) provide a structure to incentivize this.
Why do kids have fun playing? Because they learn this way.
Playing is learning.
Or it used to, until the philosophy settled in, that playing is meant for wasting time (and you surely can waste time playing as most modern games are made for time killing) and learning has to be intentionally hard.
The most effective way to learn new things for me, is still to play around with them. Whether it is compilers or a new graphical framework. And then systematically move on and read documentation about it.
People can do this alone, but you are right that for most, including myself - a structured class can be very helpful. But it does not have to be a pain. The most I learned was in classes where the tutor understood how to teach in a fun and easy way.
Compilers and UI APIs are easy to learn. I did it too. Education is the problem of teaching people much harder things.
> It hurts me to read this
Hey man, look, I was a great student and graduated from a good college with a 4.0 GPA with a math and CS degree, and now I've made a lot of money in industry. I am a huge proponent of the U.S. educational system and of the freedom of the individual to become educated.
But there are hard things you have to do in life; unless your name is Erdős, who, btw, was on speed the whole time.
It was relatively easy for me, but learning something real is something that is hard for all humans. The subjective experience of encoding millennia of information into your fleshy brain. Just like working out. The best way to work out is with a coach or buddy. There's a reason humans evolved to be social. Same is true with educational structures.
Play-based learning is a fad designed to satisfy liberal white women. Real, practical results come from overcoming challenge.
After more research about the history of alternative education, I don't think this was accurate. I feel bad for resorting to stereotype.
"Liberal" is absolutely correct here, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_education
"White" is iffy. In my experience in the U.S., thinking about alternative education is a luxury that only some can afford to do. Therefore, it is an issue of affluence.
"Women" was out of line. This is not an issue of gender, not role, and I think it was harmful to reinforce certain traditional roles here.
I lied about my GPA btw, it was around 3.8. Math is hard. And I only went to a mid-tier state school. It was only "good" in that I enjoyed it and learned a lot. It was difficult for me to find a job even in the bull market of 2009-2020. But even though my personal outcome wasn't completely ideal, I still believe in the value of structured education with its grades, sorting, ranking, etc. because, at its best, it drives you to separate the learning from the intrinsic reward (which is necessary to learn the boring things you need to), and to simply be accountable for yourself. I don't think another human (besides Thoreau), or play, can provide that;
these lessons must come from the heartless industrial machine.
The vast majority of tech nerds turned IT professionals self-taught themselves how computers work by being concerned only on what interested them at the time.
I imagine many folks who have watched a lot of videos on, say, economics or history or physics or whatever else hugely overestimate what they understand since they get no expert feedback to test their understanding.
Programmers tend to like self-teaching since it's very easy to get that feedback--write the code and see if it works! But not every subject is that way.
The places where professors should beat a YouTuber is being able to use experience from past classes (which they kinda don't seem to, since there's always a video for common misconceptions). And cases where it's impossible to "watch" with classes that need a high level of participation.
Of course something like grades are a good driver to get students to cover every topic, instead of grazing the ones they like. (Again not something impossible to get gamified a different way).
Quite the facial expressions on parents dropping off their kids and good chunk of life savings at these ivory towers.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...
These what-ifs are so fucking odious because they’re completely divorced from what actually happens in the real world.
The problem with the rape of men is it's never taken seriously or seen as a non-issue because women are raped more often, case in point: your comment
I have no idea what that video is basing this on. The government continues to substantially subsidize college education through guaranteed loans, Pell grants, tax breaks, and research grants. And, colleges/universities had a reputation for “progressive ideas” since the 1960’s and it’s not like the powers that be have just recently caught on and tried to shut that down. Depending on who you ask, they’re more progressive and ideologically biased than ever.
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reaga...
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” -- 1970, Roger Freeman, a Hoover Institution economist and a key educational adviser to Nixon
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ684842.pdf
Once elected, Mr. Reagan set the educational tone for his administration by
• calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students
• annually demanding 20 percent across-the-board cuts in higher education funding
• repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses
• engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the highly respected president of the University of California
• declaring that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity"
Reagan also tried to end department of education
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-29-mn-13948-...
In fact, one of the only major changes the federal govt has made in the last couple of decades is to make college loans something you cannot get rid of in a bankruptcy.