College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises | Hacker News Reader

College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises

theatlantic.com

I think that what's needed is a separation of concerns. Instead of a monolithic institution that is responsible for research, student enlightenment, self-discovery, vocational training, athletic competition, etc, we could move towards a micro-institution architecture and scale the different micro-institutions according to demand. Importantly, we wouldn't cross-subsidize the institutions, so if someone only wanted self-discovery for example, they could just pay for that and get a cheaper price than someone who wanted both self-discovery and vocational training. People could also decide how much of each they need according to their circumstances.

How do you make sure the nepotism families stay in control of the grander scheme

What stops a college from not offering a sports team?

Nothing! There are also a lot of vocational schools.

Maybe we'll see some unbundling but I doubt it.

Who wants to learn Circuit Design from a college with a lab from the 1980s? As opposed to one publishing research papers on the newest techniques?

What better way to get Alumina donations than giving them a tribal ties to the institution with sports teams?

My universities football team is actually self-funding and actually funds a lot of other programs. The sports teams can be considered as courses unto themselves considering this is where the NFL and other professional sports teams find their players (employees). I don't think it's as cynical as tribal ties.

So you don't want the top scientists, engineers and thinkers training the next generation? And you don't want popular sexy things subsidizing inventing new things that haven't had time to be popular yet?

How do you think we arrived at the current model?

The “next generation” gets trained by adjuncts and grad students. “Top scientists, engineers, and thinkers” are too busy with grant proposals to be bothered with teaching.

Sometimes. Other times you get the Feynman Lectures.

The article only mentions tuition once - which is the original sin of US universities.

I have generally found that US Americans don't really understand the incredible value that these institutions bring to the overall culture and economy. Thus the broader population has a will to critique but no will to improve the situation.

Most of ANY discussion with US Americans is at most 2 skips from : "yeah, but who's going to pay for it/ yeah, but how much money is that going to make you".

We're a lost bunch.

I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the US, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.

Solving the problems is like doing a kata in martial arts: It’s not the result, it’s the steps you take that change your mind.

That’s what I told students, when I taught physics for several years during my PhD.

Even back then you could look up solution templates for most of the problems: There are only so many educative small problems that first semester students can solve.

On the other hand: No one studies physics just for a degree and money. So maybe that problem is not as present there, as it is elsewhere.

the article describes a larger, more general problem that happens when a society can no longer deal with, or export it's contradictions, of which we have an ever growing mountain of absurditys, overseen by an entrenched army of incompetent assholes and idiots, ready to performativly weild there specific NO power, while meticulously observing the theatric rituals assosiated with there positions.

In an interesting collision, I saw this article, _The University after AI_, at the same time I was reading The Atlantic article ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7453440 pdf downloadable) . It covers much the same ground from an academic economic framework, describing the University of a platform/market maker connecting 15 different entities (student, faculty, employers, donors, researcher, ...).

And proposed some restructured institutions, but also saying that solutions were likely to be greenfield rather than changing existing model with the intwined revenue streams and battle inherent in change.

China doesn't have this problem.

Any society should aim to have the most educated population it can afford to have. Them getting a better earning through it can be a nice side effect of that, but it is a side effect. The main price is that living among educated people beats living among the dumb and uneducated, especially in a democracy.

The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.

While maximum US tax rates have varied significantly, the amount of money collected as a fraction of GDP has been remarkably stable.

I mention both rates and "fraction of GDP" because rates can't be spent.

The maximum take is around 20%, regardless of rates, and we're there now, and have been for decades.

>...The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.

The USA has about the most progressive taxes of all the OECD countries. In the United States high earners pay high taxes and pay a heavy share of the federal tax burden, while lower- and middle-income households pay comparatively little in direct federal income tax and there is no national consumption tax. In other OECD countries the high earners pay high taxes, but the poor and middle classes also pay high taxes including a 15%–25% national sales taxes (VAT). The US would have no problem affording that education if its tax policy was similar to all the other OECD countries, but that is not a choice voters have made.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

It certainly must be an interesting time to be in the academic world as a professor dealing with all these issues.

I was wondering what crises this was referring to. It's paywalled, but if the first couple paragraphs are sufficient it sounds like: students using AI and not learning, researchers using AI and feeling like they no longer have value themselves.

It starts out that way, but moves more into the viewpoint that the American university system is several things bundled together that are coming apart and AI is only part of the issue (others are just the Internet in general creating a parallel social life and the current American government deciding that research funding is a political tool rather than a value in itself.) Basically university traditionally is where young people figure out their interests and people they want to hang out with are, the education and credentialing system they need to get a job, and independent of these undergraduates, a research institution bringing in millions of dollars of grant money a year per university, which people not professors or grad students only vaguely aware exist.

https://archive.is/d4iQ6

Self inflicted wounds from people so out of touch and wrapped up in their own warped worlds they never bothered to take a pulse on what value creation and service to students meant.

I'd like those insecure folks downvoting this to mention if they are part of this grift and work for one of these "legacy institutions" or if they're just angry about spending a degree that isn't worth it's equivalent usefulness as toilet paper after adjusting for outcomes vs. spend.

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