Will Your College Go Out of Business Before You Graduate?
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That said, I still flinch every time I hear about a new building on our campus. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the perception that colleges are living large while tuition rates climb, and I feel we should be more conspicuously frugal to combat it.
I'm hoping that in the future I'll be able to give to the Engineering school in some meaningful way, or contribute to need based scholarships.
It's a great photo-op. "This $x million building will teach a new generation of students".
There's also the scope for corruption, when they pick the builders, but that's another story.
I live in Louisiana. Tell me about it!
edit: Donors can actually set up scholarships in their name too (and you can even restrict the students who can apply if you so choose -- say, only engineering majors, etc.). Many of my friends in college were given generous need based scholarships from alumni who had set up scholarship funds for future students.
When I was signing my docs at Wash U they gave me an eight question sheet. "You don't have to answer anything that would make you feel uncomfortable, but some of our alumni have restrictions on which scholarships they fund. Check any which apply. Don't worry, your aid package is the same either way."
The two which I remember several years later are a) widow or orphan of a US military veteran and/or b) Methodist St. Louisian desiring to study engineering. They were sort of a fascinating time capsule into what really motivated the ~1945 graduating class.
n.b. for all current and future college attendees: this policy is negotiable. My mother called the financial aid office, pitched a fit, and got a one-time exception to it about eight different times. I was embarrassed by this, but only because I was young and stupid, since ten years later I certainly care more about the ~$10k of debt that I don't have much more than my status as a quiet, go-with-the-flow cog as measured by a financial aid officer whose name I don't know and who has almost certainly forgotten those calls ever happened.
This is exactly the first thing that occurred to me when I started thinking about donating to my alma mater. Haven't really figured out a way around it.
I hosted a coursera meetup recently (http://www.meetup.com/Coursera/Boston-MA/829362/) and I met two students who were enrolled as part time off-campus students, taking the required minimum of classes at the university, and only "spending" those classes on requirements for their majors. All of their enrichment beyond the major was through MOOCs like Coursera. They told me it would take 6 years instead of four, but cost way less, and the preferred the MOOCs for the advanced material anyway. The last piece of the puzzle for them was finding internships, so they could lay the groundwork for a job upon graduating.
Compared to my "find yourself" traipse through college, I was blown away by the steel-trap optimization these guys were applying to school. This economic downturn is breeding a whole generation of just-try-to-stop-me kids. It will be awesome 25 years from now when they are in charge.
I disagree that the economic downturn is the cause of these young peoples motivations. I would argue that due to a large amount of people achieving a high level of education, degrees are not a foot in the door. As a result personal investments such as attending networking events, doing work experience and building an online presence (Such as a quality GitHub account) will make it a lot easier to stand out from the herd.
The remaining cost I assume, was for "campus enhancements" like swapping out printed cafeteria menus with flat screen tv's (you must understand, this was an eco friendly initiative).
Universities are a trap. The future they're selling kids is non-existent and they know it. Instead of uni-hopping, students should start picking up topics/trades of interest early, studying on nights and weekends leading up to their hs graduation. The obvious suggestion is learn code, but it could include a lot more. Don't send your kids to school. Be proactive and find out what they're interested in early and nurture it. It may rob them partially of a childhood, but at least their adulthood won't be a depressing, seemingly pointless adventure.
A college education in which you go to class, study, and do assignments is not worth $50K. College lets you do a lot more than that, and it sounds like you robbed yourself of a great four years.
Let me guess, thats an euphemism for "getting laid".
Moreover, sitting in a tiny box, having sex, getting loaded (proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuJ60dAHyc4 -- a party house my roommates and I ran) and joining campus orgs (I ran the campus radio station as the General Manager my Sophomore year and was an active member throughout my stint at the school -- I was even awarded a years worth of paid tuition) was still not worth the skull crushing debt I now have to dig through.
If I skipped college, I still would have gotten laid, smoked pot, and learned how to program.
Edit: I taught myself how to program in my spare time. My degree is in broadcast management.
Parents and students, who may be going into significant debt to pay for their education, are also funding the widespread distribution of the same. Do they have a say in the matter? Perhaps it should be put up to vote.
The only reason I can think that universities would really get behind this is the vanity of professors who want their ideas out there, or they're trying to create demand over the internet so they can charge for it later.
"Knowledge wants to be free but room, board and our test proctoring system is certainly not." Strikes me as bizarre, something has to give in this system - either the fees to US schools, or giving away courses for free.
Why do you think your experience allows you to make a general conclusion? There are at least a few universities which teach truly valuable things: work ethic, overcoming difficult problems, and using practical (and modern) tools.
Which universities are you referencing? And more specifically, are they state or public universities that the average family can afford to send their child to?
Despite a narrow scope, I thoroughly believe that universities in general have evolved into a means for subduing the general public. It's an immaculately designed mouse trap that masquerades as a positive future. A great parallel would be diet pills. Just pay three installments of 49.99 and you'll be thin (read: drowning in employment opportunities) in no time.
Why not quit and go do something else?
Again, coming from a burned out industrial town, going to college was a big deal (if not the deal) for my parent's generation.
That said, while I agree with his premise, I'll admit to being a little sad about the consequences: people in power rarely talk about it, but the kids who go to the "name schools" have a huge career advantage over the kids who go to Podunk University. I should know -- I went to a tiny school, and somehow managed to end up in silicon valley, where the leaders and power brokers are (wait for it)...almost exclusively graduates of the Ivy League. And this isn't the only industry where that's true.
It's disheartening. A hard-working, smart graduate from Oklahoma State with a degree in computer science degree will be at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to getting the best jobs -- the big boys (Google, Facebook, etc.) might send a recruiter to the campus career fair once a year, but they aren't hosting hackathons, sponsoring scholarships, or setting up permanent shop in the career center, like they'll do for Stanford or Berkeley or MIT. And when it comes time to reach for the management fast-track, those Ivy contacts go a long way.
So, who wins when the ability to pay for college out-of-pocket determines the economic winners and losers? Not the poor. We're rapidly heading to a country with a rigid and unyielding class structure, thanks to the brutal realities of unfettered market capitalism.
I can only speak for Silicon Valley where I grew up, but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district. Your family's financial status impacts where you live, which impacts the quality of your education, which in turn deeply affects your odds of being accepted to an "elite" school in the first place.
That's a huge problem. The "need" calculation takes into account things like your parents' savings for retirement, as if they're going to cash out their 401k to put you through school. The effect is to lock out the vast majority of students whose parents were responsible, but not rich.
"but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district."
Absolutely. That's probably the biggest source of institutionalized classism (and racism) in our society.
If a kid was already a scion of the upper eschelons of the rigid class structure you're suggesting, why on earth would they squander their birthright to go work 15 hours a day with a bunch of tech weirdos? Rich kids don't go into engineering.
You're wrong. They may spend more time at MIT and Stanford, but they spend plenty of time at Brown and Yale and Harvard and the other top schools with CS programs. I know for a fact that Facebook hires a ton of people from Harvard.
"Rich kids don't go into engineering."
You're thinking Paris Hilton, when you should be thinking Moderately Well-Off Kid From Berkeley. That's more than sufficiently "rich", for the purposes of my argument. There are huge numbers of kids living in the suburban midwest for whom a Berkeley CS degree is a financial pipe dream. Dad might be an insurance salesman, and mom a teacher, and they barely have enough money to send junior to State U., let alone a top-tier CS school.
These companies hire more from MIT because MIT has so many great candidates, but they are not shy about hiring qualified students from all over (as you personally demonstrate). There is some evidence (from Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study) to support the claim that where you go to school does not generally matter (with a few important caveats related to class and ethnicity -- poor black and hispanic kids do benefit a bit from brand name schools).
EDIT: I should also add that since the elite schools have such great financial aid, the problem with the rigid class structure starts and ends in the K-12 years, like hkmurakami said. The middle and upper class kids get the best schools and academic support network while growing up, so they're the ones that go to Harvard, even though Harvard will always make sure you can afford to attend. This is very disheartening: I agree.
A brilliant, hard-working student who goes to Oklahoma State will have fewer opportunities than a brilliant student who goes to MIT. The "average student" is irrelevant to my argument.
What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT.
"What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT."
If this is true, then it implies that the top schools are simply very good at monopolizing the world's intellectual talent. So which seems more likely to you: that the top-tier universities monopolize the world's intellectual talent, or that we've set up a system that systematically rewards the kind of people who get to go to top-tier schools?
Given your previous caveats about minorities and middle-class kids, I think you generally agree with my premise, and now you're arguing just to argue.
But we're not comparing low-tier to high-tier. We're comparing top 4 or top 5 versus top 20 or top 50. There's plenty of probability that a brilliant student might end up at a top-20 or top-50 institution rather than a top-5 one.
The problem is that while there's a very high probability that a randomly-chosen graduate of MIT is very smart and qualified, there's an extremely low probably (and going further down) that any randomly chosen very-smart-and-qualified graduate went to MIT. So by biasing your hiring towards MIT, you're almost eliminating false positives at the cost of massively increasing false negatives during the hot part of the business cycle when demand for new workers is highest.
I've seen a similar effect in action personally. I went to UMass Amherst for undergrad, and when I finished I did interviews. Some companies wanted to talk, many didn't, I ended up with two offers from BigCos and lots from SmallCos and start-ups (this was 2011, so yeah, during a hot-hiring cycle), but still a noticeable "failure rate".
I get a little bit of real work experience and then come to Technion (which, at least in this country, is not known to be called "Israel Institute of Technology" for nothing) for graduate school. Internship-application season arrives. Now everyone wants to talk, and the only things to which I can rationally attribute the change are the name-brand of Technion and the fact of having had some work experience (which does set me strongly above "pure academics", but many people work between undergrad and grad school).
I didn't change (much). I just acquired a pre-made Bayesian evaluation of my potential from someone whose word is taken more seriously than that of UMass Amherst. And the really neat trick here is that Technion simply is not as selective as MIT, by sheer numbers: I'm told that maybe the top 10% of applicants can get into Technion for undergrad, and another 20% of those (2% total) can do well enough to go on for an advanced degree. These are far more than the percentages of applicants who can get into the CS programs at Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and MIT combined. Technion just doesn't have equally tough competition for entry due to its smaller applicant pool.
I can get a free meal at least once a week for the entire semester just by attending technology company information sessions.
And I'm amused to see listed Standford, Berkely and MIT as 'Ivy'! Big, yes, famous, but Ivy?
http://www.cva.edu/ This college in St Paul last year just got some art accreditation that purportedly takes into account future financial viability. They just announced they can't remain financially solvent. So much for accreditation.
At this point I think education will have a rather interesting next few years.
More aggressively another college might take over the failed institution, as in the case of Compton College's failure in 1995. El Camino College not only accepted Compton's students but took over the facilities and faculty as well.
In such a scenario, the school would prioritize using the money to make sure that current students can graduate and that their degree is worth something for at least a couple years.
EDIT: That was poorly worded. I meant to say that the fund is meant as a buffer to help the school avoid shutting down, so that they have time to get their act together. But it also helps guarantee that their degrees will be worth something for at least a few years, so that students feel safe continuing at the school and so recent graduates are not screwed over by something that wasn't their fault. I'm not sure, but this might even be an accreditation requirement.
As far as why they would do that, my guess is that is probably a requirement to get accredited.
I'm sure the other regional accreditation agencies have similar requirements.
[1](PDF) http://cihe.neasc.org/downloads/Standards/Standards_for_Accr...
The full sticker price (Tuition, Fees, Room and Board) just passed $40k/year last year, and it's having an impact on our ability to recruit students. Since so much of our budget comes from tuition, though, a shortfall of even 30 students from predicted numbers (out of a total student population of about 1400) can cause a serious budget crunch.
This question is easy to answer. In a time of declining public funds universities are trying to attract students, because tuition is about the only funding source left. Consequently, universities have to look appealing to students, and that means cushy dorms, spiffy libraries, the lot.
Again: these are investments made from the general fund, and the university tries to recover these through increased tuition income. A classic market failure.
If anything it's a direct result of the ease at which students can get loans from the federal government.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098258 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112837 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4738488 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963251 etc
People keep calling things like city planning a market failure when it is full of regulation.
Or healthcare when the U.S. government spends the most money on healthcare in the U.S.
etc
People throw the term around without knowing what it means.
EDIT:
Changed "is a market failure" to "are market failures".
edit: I was being humorous.
Market failure is a concept within economic theory describing when the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient.
Colleges are not operating in a market system. They get money rationed to them by the government in various ways. Therefore it is not a market failure.
- Stanford tore down some donated admin buildings across from Schwab GSB that
were not even 10 years old. A good portion of the
med school is being gradually torn down and rebuilt
near the hospital. (Will the roads ever be back to
normal two-way traffic?)
- Davis is littered with new buildings.
- Harvard's 10 year construction schedule and $30,000,000,000.00+ under HMC.
The better deal is probably to ROTC, though. Especially since the military is downsizing, you could comfortably spend your service commitment doing interesting stuff and then leave debt free and with great experience. USAF or USN, obviously. It also seems like an excellent way to do medical school if that is your goal, too.
Schools pay professors huge salaries, tuition rises, meanwhile the quality of the education is the same. Of course, specialized degrees like law and medicine that require special training and licensing will always be around. But I'd expect many colleges to start hosting introductory classes entirely online to save money and probably dropping entire degree programs within the next several years.
Although it's awkward majoring in something that has nothing to do with your current line of work.
What's really annyoing is that no one asks for your GPA (well at least, they didn't ask me) no matter where I applied; just the school and what courses I took. The more I see people who don't have a college degree getting things done, the more I feel college, while you do learn, is still a scam as far as jobs are concerned. And I'd rather learn for the sake of learning than learn just to get a job.
http://www2.westminster-mo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/brow...
Put on my resume that I graduated. From a school that was good, not the shitty one that went out of business.
Actually, as someone who didn't graduate, I find that just not mentioning whether or not I graduated works fine. I just say 'University of X, 200X - 200X, Mathematics' on my resume. At this point in my career it doesn't matter, and back when it might have mattered almost nobody has the balls to say to you "I see that you attended University of X for n years, did you graduate?".
Not counting the ethical part, I don't think this is very smart. All of the jobs that I have worked for do background checks on both your employment history and education.
As yukon already explained, they don't ask you for your transcript. Instead, either the company's HR department or the background check company they hired just goes direct to the source. It's not an instant process either. Typically they complete everything several months after you're hired.
Being able to accomplish things is so rare -- if you have that ability, the simple truth will suffice.
This is absolutely true. Most employers will look past all sorts of lapse of judgement in your past (especially if done in your early 20s), but lying is inexcusable.
Bottom line: do whatever it takes to get solid time at companies with coworkers who'll vouch for your quality. That is the bedrock of your resume: bachelor degrees are just placeholders until you have that.
I can't speak for private universities, however.
Here is Stanford's 990 from 2011: http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/Stanford_990_...