They need to disinvest from new buildings, "lifestyle" dorms, expensive gyms and amenities, and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this).
Tuition inflation is absurd. The goal is to grow learners, not set them back.
Tuition inflation is absurd. The goal is to grow learners, not set them back.
Honestly, start with the latter. See what happens. Maybe include a first-loss provision for schools with an endowment.
As in health care I don’t think there is a market solution. Government needs to mandate lower prices for them.
The Stanford's get unlimited free laundry.
Government isn't going to get involved here because most are private, for-profit masquerading as nonprofits while fattening up their endowments.
I'd be in favor if it was only for people who pursue certain degrees that we need. But going to party schools? Going for the cliche "underwater basket weaving" degree? The money being funneled into building a new pool and rock climbing wall for one of the dorms?
No, no, and no!
I think that's the idea. It sounds rather painful to me? But the status quo is also very weird?
that's no different than what we have no. we don't need everyone going to college especially to major in history of tampons type degrees.
the end goal is for loan companies to decline people who won't be able to repay their loans given the expected value of their degrees. (Your future earning potential is the collatoral for your loan).
For people that want to "expand their horizons", they can go watch khanacademy on youtube.
That's the old Brit way of thinking, and we sent that packing over a century ago.
I'd thank you to not return us to the 'good old days.'
Those shouldn't be called "universities", then.
Good intramural sports would serve far more students.
point taken though, maybe the choice of sports does not fit the ideal.
The wealthy want beautiful new buildings and a good football team, and a high-touch experience for their kids. They are happy to pay administrators lots of money to deliver on those things.
If you're a university, the goal is to fill up your university with satisfied customers and increase revenue.
If you're a student, the goal is to form social networks that you can later use to help in business.
If you're a politician, the goal is to increase college attendance rates.
If you're a hard-line right winger, the goal is actually to set undesirable groups back, but that's a pretty fringe position.
If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.
I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink!
I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
Exactly. I'm fairly knowledgeable about my STEM specialization but in university I had access to great language learning and exchange programs, top-notch political science and philosophy departments, architecture departments, etc. I remember bumming around in philosophy seminars not because I was a philosophy student (though I did take some philosophy classes) but because I found it so interesting. As long as I didn't increase the grading burden on any of the grad students/professors, everyone was happy and the quality of instruction I received was fantastic. In the real world the closest I have is books I read or MOOCs where a lot of people are in it to get a certification or a badge of completion rather than just marinate in ideas.
Heck, even my Bio 101 professor was abnormally brilliant. She'd been a researcher at Harvard Medical School who worked on highly experimental treatments in a ward full of terminal patients and just finally burned out from being around so much death all the time, so there she was in Los Feliz three blocks from Scientology world headquarters teaching at a community college, probably the hardest class I've ever had to take.
You tend to have some younger screw-up, unmotivated students, especially at entry level classes; some younger students that are there for economic or other reasons; some older students going back to school for life reasons; and then some older students who are intellectually curious and doing it for enrichment.
What the make-up of a class, and the resultant culture is, is a crapshoot. But it can be outstanding.
If you avoid the standard college classes, you get a pretty wide cross-section of the people in the community. Math 101 is mostly going to be college-age kids.
The purpose of higher education in the US to create a market for student loan debt and generate revenue for states. The US is a capitalist society, and education is not a right, it's a privilege, and student loan debt is a billion dollar industry. We saw how the states nearly rioted over the possibility of being denied the revenue from student loan interest if it was forgiven. Believing education is about educating people is about as naive as believing hospitals are about healthcare, or houses about shelter. All of it is entirely about profit, debt and tax revenue.
So much of how the US works (or doesn't work) makes perfect sense when you realize this. Education, business, tech, government, the media, pop culture - it's all grift, top to bottom. It's all carnies and frauds and sociopaths working angles and trying to squeeze you just a little harder to wet their lips with one more drop of your lifeblood.
Whether a society is capitalist or not does not define whether education is a right or a privilege. Another mistake is defining a country as capitalist and then shutting down any remaining capacity to think about it. Most countries contain a mixture of economic principles at work, so a surface level knowledge of capitalism that seems stuck in the 1800s will only leave you appearing naive and outdated.
Which country is it again that created the internet and has helped expand education not only locally, but globally for all mankind to benefit? Which country is it that created the greatest video platform on Earth, populated with a vast wealth of university lectures and documentaries on top of allowing people casually sitting at home to speak their mind for anyone to see (within reason)?
The U.S. is not without its problems as any country, but we're familiar with many of the problems we have which were already solved once before within the last century. Young people trained on cynical ideologies are highly suggestible, almost encouraged to see certain events as validation for that cynicism. It becomes their organizing principle, no longer looking for what solutions are being produced by a system or what uncorrupt motivations someone might have for any given decision. Only the negatives.
Based in recent history, most recently on spending cuts in the proposed house spending bill, this appears to be well within the mainstream of the Republican party.
FWIW, I'm well aware the GOP has also contributed greatly to that debt.