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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Eventually this becomes an issue of national security. If your brightest minds are categorically excluded from education in the service of maintaining the American class structure and quarterly profit margins, if debt cripples to such a degree that it disenfranchises anyone from considering education in the first place, then it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in the type of research and development that keeps and maintains your nations elite status.

A parasitic idiocracy ensues from which the prospect of recovery at all is grim at best.

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> If your brightest minds are categorically excluded from education in the service of maintaining the American class structure and quarterly profit margins

Why would corporations wish to exclude the brightest minds so they can increase profits?

Its more efficient for them to satisfice through obtaining graduates with good signalling factors (good schools) than sort the wheat from the chaff themselves

Ensuring opportunities for working class and marginalised people is an issue that can only be addressed by community or government

> Its more efficient for them to satisfice through obtaining graduates with good signalling factors (good schools) than sort the wheat from the chaff themselves

I find that unconvincing. Aren't progressives constantly talking about how corporations are exploiting workers by paying them less than than their productivity? In other words, each employee makes money for them on net. All things being equal, it's in corporate america's interest to have as big of a workforce as possible, because more employees = more productivity extracted. Even in a situation where corporations aren't labor limited, they'd still benefit from increased competition on the labor supply side driving down prices for them.

Yea but colleges != corporate America and colleges want as much money as possible

[ES: Speculation]

Were they to do so deliberately, it world be to get a larger piece of a smaller pie.

More likely something like that would be an emergent phenomenon where no one was doing it deliberately.

If you're accruing massive debt attending college, you're doing it wrong. Community colleges and state schools exist. You can work part-time during school too. Its like buying anything - there's a spectrum of cost. You don't need the $60k/year school.

Also, if anything, the education system is contributing to our future idiocracy - esp. the public school system, which is a complete and utter failure.

Come on, we are relying on 17/18/19 year olds to do a proper financial risk analysis on _debt that can never be bankrupted_? Adults have created this mess, don't put the blame on students 'doing what they've been told' e.g. go to college (more prestigious the better, too)

Colleges have a literal vested interest in keeping kids stupid about loans and debt. There should be a million places you have to sign, with big red disclaimers about the responsibility you're about to undertake. Who else is to blame? You signed the paper work. I was once that age, and decided not to go into crippling debt. Many, many young people decide not to fall for the trap. Alot of naive ones fall for it tho.

How is anyone excluded from education? What you are saying is the exact opposite of what is happening. A far higher percentage of Americans are getting degrees than 30 or 60 years ago.

Yes, more Americans are getting degrees now than in previous generations. However, if the cost of getting a college education continues to grow and if it becomes increasingly difficult to get a college education without taking on crippling levels of debt, then more people will choose not to go to college in order to avoid heavy debt burdens. This will mean fewer college-educated individuals.

The worst case scenario is that we return to the pre-GI Bill status quo, where generally only those from wealthy families could afford a college education unless they won scholarship money. There was a period from the late 1940s until roughly the 1980s or 1990s when college opportunities were extended to the middle class and the poor through the expansion of public university systems that offered low (or even no) tuition, extended merit- and need-based scholarships that are funded publicly and privately, and student loans. Tuition and other expenses were low enough to where it was possible for many students to cover some or all of these expenses by working a part-time job during the school year and/or by working full time in the summer, and for those who needed to take out student loans, debt levels were not crippling. But in the past few decades, the cost of college has risen to levels where working part-time during the school year and full-time during summers just doesn’t cover costs like it used to, and where people are graduating with increasingly burdensome student debt loads. The high cost of housing isn’t helping matters.

I see a few potential solutions:

- Price caps imposed by the federal government as a condition for accepting federal student aid, though this could mean cuts to services.

- Upstart colleges and universities forming that offer a reduced-cost college experience by being “no frills” and focusing on teaching without offering the wide array of services that even the most modest universities offer (e.g., no career centers, no well-equipped fitness centers, no luxury dorms, no on-campus health centers, etc.). However, some of these services may be mandated as part of accreditation standards, though I don’t know much about this.

- A concentrated effort to improve the nation’s K-12 education so that way high school graduates are equipped to perform a wide array of jobs that don’t require higher education, along with an effort by Corporate America to hire high school graduates for jobs that truly don’t require a university education.

The article shows that the cost of going to college is not growing significantly though. Only the sticker price is growing, and Americans are not aware of (or just underappreciate) the significant value of a higher education.

Doesn't that mean that the main problem is a marketing/information issue, and less of an actual affordability one?

I dunno man, I took the community college route, $2k/semester on average. If I was a traditional student I would've been eligible for free tuition on the basis of my ACT (27) score — I graduated with a 1.89 GPA. University is only $3k/sem, but I've managed to secure funding despite my mediocre college GPA. Assuming that continues my average tuition cost will likely dissipate to nothing.

While I was at the college I was living on my own, working full time for $15/h - entry level shit - and throughout that period I stayed close to breakeven with zero external funding and that's with a 1yr COVID-hiatus and relatively high food expenses.

University is a different, but nonetheless, similar story. Grants have magically become available to me transitioning from the poor-school to the university. I will say the property rates here are off the chain, similar to what I'd expect in an economically booming metropolitan. But that leads me to my point:

I can't tell you whether or not somebody from Yale or the University of Nebraska is going to get hired based on their school, however I'll go out on a limb and say that if the UN gal was even remotely prudent she'd be able to skate out with pretty minimal debt, if any.

A lot of people are chasing experiences and prestige, and those things cost money. Unfortunately, out-of-state charges are actually obscene. However there are programs that exist to except certain regions from those. Working to expand those and distribute the student population, I believe, would be generally more favorable than other interventions. Maybe I'm wrong, but the only thing that changed from college to university was the textbook publisher but more importantly - people doing the work we're supposedly being trained for in class.

Moving people around with economic incentives that will, I would presume, bolster the number of participants available on smaller campuses would do a lot to improve things all around. I've seen even modest labs put together some pretty impressive research.

And another nit to pick is that colleges very exclusively target fresh-outta-high school kids. And that is in and of itself pretty predatory, but more importantly it's putting half-baked people in a system they are not equipped to deal with, and with long-run non-trivial consequences if they fuck up - and there's quite a few ways to fuck up. And maybe that's orthogonal to my point above, but at least it would be an available option for those willing to scrutinize the risk/reward proposition, and maybe a basis for restricting funding to individuals.

I would expect a more mature population, on average, to be more diligent in every facet of their education, but especially when it comes to fiscal responsibility and the willingness to hold the system accountable - something which I've been made to do in a couple of instances, which I don't expect I would've done as a kid. My intuition tells me "they" don't want actual adults in, though. Kind of a liability seeing how all the shit works when you've been in the real world, unsheltered for a decade, and coming into the domain of a bunch of pretentious airheads that can't organize their head from their ass.

I dunno, that's my two cents.

and probably even more than 200 years ago.

The question how this is compared to peers, and if it is actually brightest minds who have opportunities, or those who have monetary support from parents.

Universities aren't the only places research and development take place.

But it is where the majority of useful research takes place, because Universities are where researches are created.

Most research at private companies is namesake.

This isn't even remotely close to true.

The only perspective in society from which it appears that Academia does more R&D than the private sector is academia itself. Academics in this respect have their eyes wide shut.

At mot, publishing in academic conferences at private companies is namesake. But academic publishing in general is a shadow of its former self in terms of dissemination power, both because most academics are horrible writers and also because a product you can buy (with a support contract) or a well-documented software package is many orders of magnitude more impactful than a paper no one will read.

And even then, many companies publish far more than even highly productive research universities.

Consider AI. There are little pieces here and there that you can attribute to academia. But for the most part, over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI.

over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI

Those big steps are standing on the shoulders of decades of academic work, and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia.

> and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia.

Right. Who then promptly left academia when they needed to start doing R&D at a meaningful and consequential scale.

The academic contribution to chip fab R&D today is nearly inconsequential compared to private sector investment, both in raw dollar amounts and especially in terms of impact per dollar spent.

This is like saying that academia is responsible for Google because its founders spent a couple years on an NSF grant. Yes -- but then they left to do the real R&D work at scale.

Academia plays and important role in training people. But the R&D component is -- with some exceptions -- mostly a matter of "training young people for the real work by messing around on toy problems".

But they are where the vast majority of researchers are educated.

Educating to create a researcher, vs application of applied research vs results of commercializing in less than one decade is a fair observation.

Elaborate. Also, if you could elaborate on how one would partake in such things without previously having a degree.

This YouTuber[0] does an excellent job recreating chemistry research from papers and improving on the techniques to be accomplished with household materials. He documents his failures and takes an empirical approach to arriving at his successes. I’m not sure of his background, but it’s certainly research that he’s doing. Watching his channel always reminds me that the scientific method does not have “first obtain an expensive degree” as one of its steps.

[0] https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY

If their goal is to exclude the brightest minds they're doing a shit job.

If anything, bright minds on scholarships are diluted with sportsmen and everyone and their dog on student loans.

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