Hacker News Reader

Comment by excuse-me | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly enough not every one of your prof's dozen grad students gets to be a prof. Fortunately there is a use for STEM PhDs outside the lecture hall.

It's like saying nobody should do math in school because there aren't enough math teacher jobs for every student

View on HN

The difference is that these people have spent large fractions of their lives preparing for careers that they can't get into. And they are generally very smart people, so it is to nobody's benefit for them to waste their time.

You might also say, that they are very smart people, so they should know what they are getting into. That's valid, but it takes articles like this to spread the word. Many very respected people are not being fully honest about the situation, including Obama and everyone else at the top. Professors have every incentive to lie to prospective students; they need multiple grants to get tenure and every grant agency wants to be funding multiple students. It is certainly a pyramid scheme.

In the short term, it is very efficient, because we get good science done for very little money. But in the long run, it might backfire; I honestly don't know.

Universities are still extremely expensive, just with the people (grad students and post docs) who do most of the actual science getting very little of the money. It's just extremely unfair and calling it a "pyramid scheme" is charitable.

Overall universities are just extremely inefficient. Where does all the money go to?

The person in the article who went into an administrative job may have been onto something.

Part of the problem is also the biology/chemistry bubble. In the 90ies these areas expanded extremely and now they are downsizing to more reasonable levels again.

With CS degrees they would be better off.

"Where does all the money go to?"

Pensions: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06-19/university-of-cali... (That's one article about one university system, but most others face similar issues.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: College has become the most effective means of wealth transfer from Generation Y kids to the Baby Boomers...financed by the government, of course.

The University of California system has actually decreased its per-student spending in real terms by around 25% over the past 20 years, so there isn't really a case of where the money has gone there (they never got it!). It's true that there are likely to be future problems with pensions, but they don't at all explain the current increases in tuition. Those are due to state funding cuts.

More specifically, if you take the total UC system budget and divide by the total student population, the result for 1990 (inflation-adjusted) was $21,000 spent per student. The result today is $16,500 spent per student.

Tuition has gone up anyway, because taxpayers stopped funding it faster than that rate of per-student cost decline. In 1990, state funding amounted to $16,000 per student (inflation-adjusted) out of the $21,000 total cost, leaving $5000 to be made up by tuition, donations, and other sources of income. Today the state contributes only $9,500 per student, and is in the process of cutting that to $8,500. So even with a more frugal $16,500-per-student cost, that now leaves $8000 to be funded out of non-state funds. So it's not surprising that tuition has gone up significantly.

No, Social Security wins that title.

I heard a report on NPR once that mentioned that the increase in "administrators" has been the major driving force in the increase in tuition. The system, hiring its own graduates in order to fudge the employment rate while increasing the cost of tuition to pay for those administrators, seems like a clear Ponzi scheme.

That's the most infuriating part of it, and lines up with my own experiences in university. During my years there tuition exploded, but the faculty saw little to no additional hiring, and certainly our profs weren't getting major raises.

Instead the administration exploded, with new assistants and managers appearing every day. The worst part was that it was still impossible as a student to get anything done. It took me literally 6 months to reschedule an exam (through processes clearly spelled out by school regulations, in fact). This was at the University of Waterloo, FWIW.

In the end I had to threaten to sue the school to get them to do anything. In hindsight, it was entirely an empty threat, but it seemed to get me on an escalation chain somewhere. It took an additional month to get the exam set up.

I have zero respect for the administration at my alma mater, nor any institution of higher education. As far as I am concerned, they are all leeches, subsisting off the good will and good work of the profs, post-docs, TAs, and students who are actually doing anything.

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" - to this date the post-secondary education system is the most egregious example of this quote I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with.

What do university administrators do? Schools seem relatively simple to manage, since most of the labs are small scale enough to run themselves, with the university providing some basic infrastructure.

So failure is going to industry and creating technology that makes money and benefits millions. While success is to lock themselves away in a university teaching the next generation of smart people that the only thing they should aim for is to create the next generation of ......

While this is true, the article also highlights the fact that many STEM PhDs are forced to work outside of their field, forcing them to throw away years of education. And also consider the statistic that a recent American Chemical Society survey indicated that 38% of new PhD chemists were unemployed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com