Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
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Anecdotally, I think a lot of the money is spent on outside services through a corrupt bidding process. Back in 2008 I used to run a document scanning company. We did large contracts for the state of California and the Four Seasons Hotel chain. We had glowing recommendations from all of our customers, including a lot of large businesses in San Diego. So, foolishly, we thought we could toss our hat into the ring when UCSD started looking for a company to do their document management. Our bid was (based on what we could find out) roughly 1/2 of the winning bid. We had all the required bonds, same quality, faster turnaround time, and we offered more services. We didn't get the job. So UCSD paid twice as much for the same document scanning service, meanwhile some poor adjunkt professor is eating cat food! Great!
Think, for instance, any of today's failed states to see what total lack of basic governance actually looks like.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Libertarianism (i.e. absolute belief in the capitalist market and private property) doesn't work, because the markets don't reflect negative externalities like pollution, over-harvesting, misinformation, or antibiotics misuse. States need to exist to manipulate markets to reflect those things.
There are many industries where the profit motive is contrary to the public interest, like education, health, media, banking, prisons, military, drugs, junk food, gambling, etc. Either [a] the state should be the sole player in the industry (prisons, military), [b] the state should provide a public service in that industry to set a baseline for private competitors (education, health, media), [c] the state should impose regulations/taxation that prevent/discourage activity contrary to the public interest (banking, junk food, drugs), or [d] the state should outlaw the industry entirely (gambling (IMHO)).
There are many "markets" that are inherently monopolistic, or where private competition is nonsensical, like public spaces (parks, lakes, rivers) and public infrastructure (roads, telecoms, trains, airports).
Companies and markets are only good at medium-term thinking (at best). Google employees avoid thinking about the kind of society they're creating for their grandchildren, but that's the job description of elected representatives (in accountable governments).
Finally, but most significantly, there's that whole thing about capital accumulating to the top. Income and capital gains taxation is in the public interest, because equality and a well-financed state is in the public interest.
I feel like many Americans tend towards libertarianism because they feel that their governments are unaccountable, unrepresentative and corrupt. I think the problem in the US is the size and power of its government - not the concept of government itself. I think the federation of the US should be abolished (as in, all federal law). States could sign up to federal institutions/programs (central bank, defense, immigration, ...) when and how they please.
Personally, I think any moderately-populated area should have a single level of government spanning no further than 2-4 km from its parliament (i.e. within walking distance). Each of these states can assume common administration of adjacent sparsely-populated areas. If the states agree to a common legislative process, there's no duplication of effort in passing common legislation, except for each parliament voting on it or amending it as they want, which is democratic!
Libertarianism really grates me, but I enjoy debating it because I see that libertarians want the same things I do: liberty and equality for everyone.
Not disagreeing, because the point is true. However solutions for most of these have been found
a) over-harvesting : only a problem in a non-fully-privatized situation (in other words, the more government involvement, the more you have this problem). This one is actually an argument FOR capitalism.
b) pollution is also a tragedy of the commons thing, and could be solved by privatisation. Of course, in the real world that presents some challenges.
c) misinformation : this is not a problem of capitalism at all. Or rather, it's a problem that solves itself under capitalism (though not necessarily to people's liking). For example, insurance can fix this. Under central planning systems, every one I've ever seen, the problem is not so much misinformation, but the total lack of relevant information at all (e.g. employing the mayor's daughter in your management structure gets you the contract for city IT, good luck finding that info. Oh and if you're an idealist : good luck preventing that from happening).
d) antibiotics misuse : well, on one hand this is happening partly due to misuse. However, where do you have any data whatsoever that it wouldn't happen without misuse ? As far as I can tell antibiotics resistance happened even before WWII, when we were definitely not wasting antibiotics. At any rate, the ship has sailed and it's a sunk cost at this point. We should not waste money and resources fighting it, as even massive effort can only slightly reduce the rate here, it can't fix it.
(one theory I found is that what's happening is simply that we are effectively raising the price of new and therefore working antibiotics, dampening their use, until a balance with nature is found. Sadly, it is blatantly obvious that in order for this to actually happen, the vast majority of the sick would need to go untreated, so there simply isn't a good solution, capitalist or government)
On misinformation, you made the (unrelated) point that states are corruptible. Yes, they are; so are markets (e.g. LIBOR) and companies (i.e. employees acting contrary to the company's interest).
Corruption occurs when the people involved are undesirable, and the reward outweighs the risk of being caught. In states where the electorate cares and is informed, undesirables are less likely to be elected, and there's a higher risk of being caught. Ideally, the bureaucrats involved in choosing who to give the contract to (the bureaucrats being directly affected by the decision, because the government is smaller) would tip off the local broadcaster that the decision was rigged, and they would investigate.
I think it's more likely for corruption to be unveiled in states than there is in markets or companies. The larger the company, the smaller the chance - and free markets tend towards multinational monopolies anyway ("efficiency" and all that).
My mention of misinformation was referring to things like: the media reporting on celebrities rather than legislation, or misleading advertising, or the media being paid to report a certain way or avoid a certain story. These actions have negative externalities, and the markets won't stop them. What the market wants (more celebrity stories, or fewer oil spill stories) isn't always what the market should get.
It should be illegal to use antibiotics in agriculture, yet the markets love them. That was my point.
If I own the land, and I mean own and am responsible for - no taxpayer subsidized safety net if I go too badshit crazy with the nutrient depletion or chemical baths - then it is in my best interests not to ruin the property so that it remains valuable if and or when I want to sell it.
Either I intend to sell the land, thus making it worthwhile not to destroy it, or I intend to continue using the land for an extended period of time, and I wouldn't want to destroy it. I only really don't care if I have guaranteed payouts no matter what I do, and no responsibility or reason to care to take care of the land anyway.
> pollution
In the modern anarchist mindset, pollution is a violence against, depending on scope, either the local community that is negatively impacted by the polluter or the entire world in how that pollution negatively contributes to the environment.
In either case, any sane libertarian or anarchist joint arbiter would in the commons consider major polluters as causing property damage, and thus any company that wants to pollute would need to seek permission from the entire area around where they want to set up shop. And when remote injunctions start coming in about how their pollution is damaging the planet as a whole, the reparations would need to be either removing an equal amount of pollution that they put in or contributing in some way to projects that do, else they are being violent upon pretty much everyone in a way that any sane society would see they only operate when everyone is consenting.
> only states can stop it
More like only states can enable it - because in modern states you never own your land, and never consent to your neighbors, and never have contracts with them about mutual conduct agreements and recourse for violation you depend on the state to provide some fictitious encompassing control effect on those that perform the kinds of violence I outlined earlier. Except the state is itself inherently violent and amoral, and is easily corrupted because of the centralization, so it is much easier for the coal company to bribe the local town council than the entire town.
> so are markets and companies
And all your interactions with markets and companies are voluntary. If they are not, you aren't really operating in a free market. If they are not inflicting violence upon you or others, you really have nothing to complain about, really. And if they are, it is your duty and the duty of your peers to cease dealings with the violent aggressor and either economically deprive them of resources until they recant or defend yourselves appropriately as a last resort.
> corruption in states than there is in markets
The problem is that corruption is inefficient. In the absence of states, nothing restricts you from directly competing with anyone over anything, so if they are acting in a corrupt way, then there would be avenues for capitalization by competitors to exploit it. It is the same reason why in the short term it makes no fiscal sense for a business to try to raise a private militia to take over the town - the militia is an immediate huge competitive disadvantage, and you would cripple your growth potential to whoever you could subjugate because no sane external market would interact with you, and would likely do anything they can to boycott you into failure.
> What the market wants
Modern mainstream media is anything but a competitive market. The major networks would always take advantage of their IP and state resources to crush any upstarts who tried to provide real journalism and news anymore. And they would certainly get the full support of the US government in doing so.
In a real information market, people would seek what they are actually interested in. A lot of anarchist arguments about the collective psyche of most modern western democracies relates the whole distraction circus back to the implicit discontinuity in the brain about the organization of society in the first place and the amorality of it all. It also probably has a lot to do with how most people were abused as children - your brain will develop differently and you will always seek escapism. Confronting the reality of your circumstance is hard, and it requires enlightened rational individuals to do so. That is mainly why, while I morally agree completely with anarchist mindsets, I don't really advocate it in the modern world. It really wouldn't work with the current crop of humanity - it would require enough transitional generations to get to the point where we stop predominantly abusing our children, either through neglect or violence.
No, it's in your interest to fool some sucker into buying it on false pretenses. Don't pretend to moralities you don't actually hold, capitalist.
eli_gottlieb said: "Don't pretend to moralities you don't actually hold, capitalist". eli was implying that zanny was immoral (or at least amoral), which is something that cannot be deduced from one or two comments; moreover, pointless ad hominem attacks do not advance the discussion.
I regularly downvote comments which espouse views that I agree or disagree with, when they resort to irrelevancies and personal attacks, as was the case here.
edit: quote from HN's comment guide
"What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
Which brings us to the most important principle on HN: civility. Since long before the web, the anonymity of online conversation has lured people into being much ruder than they'd dare to be in person. So the principle here is: don't say anything you wouldn't say face to face. This doesn't mean you can't disagree. But disagree without calling the other person names. If you're right, your argument will be more convincing without them. "
Immoral by my definition, sure. But his espoused morality is "whatever the market will bear". All I'm demanding is that he doesn't pretend "whatever the market will bear", which is what he's explicitly proposing and endorsing, in any way matches what the rest of us think of as desirable.
If he wants to be an ideologue, he needs to come out and say it: "Yes, privatizing all the commons will result in sales that approach as close to fraud as the law allows, rather than actual environmental protection, but that's a good thing!"
Realistically, most people would want to extract as much from the land as they can in their lifetime. This means, while they may not necessarily destroy the land with in their own lifetime, they will bleed it dry by the end of their lifetime, leaving nothing to the future generations. This, of course, also presupposes that most people are rational, smart, and sane individuals. The truth is quite the opposite, and if you have doubts about the latter, just read YouTube comments of any video :)
1. Worldwide adoption of libertarian society at some fixed point in time (e.g., by magic), meaning that the largest land holders would soon absorb their neighbors and form estates of a size equivalent to US states or small countries. These people would presumably be responsible for families or even entire clans, forcing them to take a long term outlook. But "selling" might be problematic if there is no reliable store of wealth other than land.
2. Adoption limited to a geographic region (e.g., through a political process), with the commercial economy dependent a foreign currency. In this case, the rational strategy for a small land holder (less than 100 square miles) might be to extract foreign money from the land by selling crops, ores, etc., and then abandon the land.
I'm guessing that the optimal size of land holder that is big enough to be efficient, but small enough to saddle some larger entity with their externalities such as the cost of protecting them from the territorial ambitions of their neighbors. The bigger the estate, the bigger the cost of absorbing one's own pollution, crime, etc.
In these comments, my advocation of a "state" is an advocation of small (<4km in radius), democratic governments. This is my interpretation of a "stateless society" [0]. I don't want readers to think I'm defending most modern states; the smaller the state, the more responsible and democratic it tends to be. This is by definition: less people -> more representation.
A capitalist's idea of "ruining the land" is not Gaia's idea of "ruining the land". If a logging company owns a rainforest, it will want to plant more trees when it's destroyed everything else there. The company has no financial incentive to care about the ecosystem it's destroying by logging in the first place, nor the collateral effects of that elsewhere. Your retort may be that the logging company has to acquire the rainforest first - yes, but logging is probably the most profitable activity for a rainforest, so logging companies will tend to acquire such land. I feel sick typing this...
Another major example of markets encouraging overharvesting is when the harvesting occurs on land/water that no one owns (or can reasonably own). Then, the harvesters have no regard for the replenishment of the resource; they just want to make money. In unrestricted capitalism, a herd of bison or a pod of whales is a goldmine at market. A puerile defense to this may be that no one would whale if no one wanted to eat it. You may also say that we'd "cease our dealings" with anyone who ate whale - how would we know? Why would a capitalist care what this other guy eats on weekends if this guy's company is giving him a better deal?
Capitalism has little regard for Gaia. Individuals are mostly selfish, and capitalism runs on individuality and selfishness, so Gaia gets no consideration. We need states to ensure that companies don't act contrary to our long term interests.
You made the point that in modern states, neighbors never consent to one another's conduct, and they rely on the state for control and mediation. Yes, I agree, this is a failing of modern statist societies. But, in my view, if states were significantly smaller, those governing would be your neighbors too, and so legislation would effectively be a "mutual conduct agreement" anyway.
Sure, a state's governing may not please everyone - but if everyone is within walking and living distance, the society would be more able to resolve its differences, or come to a compromise. Thanks to this quality, I think smaller states could function with requiring more than the majority in parliament to pass legislation: e.g. 66% or 75%. Either way, at worst, you can move to a nearby state that aligns more with your beliefs. In this way, "governing" would become a market for ideas that work.
Governments are not violent nor amoral if they have the consent of the governed. If you want to live by your own rules, move somewhere that isn't governed. If you want to live in a town, you have to follow that town's law as determined by popular will.
On your remaining points:
- No, the actions of markets and companies can affect me without my deciding to interact with them, and to say otherwise is laughable and offensive. Capitalism is destroying our planet. Companies can lowers working standards, salaries and social welfare across the industry - especially when they collude.
- The whole non-aggression principle of libertarianism is tiring. Libertarians have to contort their beliefs around the NAP because the philosophy requires an absolutist principle for organizing society. Here are the contortions I see libertarians make: private property is not aggression, corruption is not aggression, market manipulation is not aggression, theft when necessary is aggression, governing-by-consent is aggression, etc. Other political philosophies take a more nuanced view of organizing society, and rightly so.
- Policing by economic deprivation doesn't work, because it's less immoral to deal with someone who committed an immoral action, than it is to commit that immoral action. Say Alice hunts whales (which are endangered), and Bob sells Alice her ships. Bob is viewed as less immoral, because he didn't actually kill the whales, and so it's less likely that others would stop dealing with him. The only reason Bob wouldn't sell Alice ships is if the whales are more important to him than the profit of selling the ships. You would require every {shipbuilder, oil company, ...} in the world to believe this, for whaling to be prohibited - and even then, you can sometimes whale from shore.
- Over the last 100 years, we've learned that consumers act selfishly, and so relying on the consumers to police doesn't work either. If you put whale in a market, consumers will buy it. If a company from a locality abuses people elsewhere, local consumers don't care.
- Your point on corruption is unrelated to mine. If we define "company corruption" as employees acting contrary to the company's interest for their own personal gain, and "market corruption" as companies acting contrary to public interest for their own profit, then only company corruption is inefficient. Market corruption is certainly "efficient", and there's little to stop it in anarcho-capitalism.
- Free markets tend towards complete monopoly; the more "freedom" companies have, the quicker they will conglomerate. There's a startup in this city? The incumbent(s) will price them out. As an example, the American media conglomerates are just the result of market forces (and physical realities). The sprawling, centralized US government helps them along, but they would've got to where they are now sooner or later.
- In an ideal world, with people who could make an anarchist society function well, what then would be your objection to a state (by my definition), or to abolition of private property (noting respect for personal property)? And hence, what base is there for anarcho-capitalism?
My belief in anarcho-communism is predicated on the idea that power is bad, as is my disbelief in capitalism and large-statism. Unfortunately, this is also why anarcho-communism is unlikely to ever be implemented successfully: you need power to usurp power, and power attained is unlikely to be forfeited.
http://eia-international.org/iceland-is-killing-fin-whales-f...
Not necessarily. Several highly lucrative drugs came from bio research conducted in the rainforest. The pharmaceutical industry is far more profitable than the logging industry. Of course, it takes a significant foresight to do research in the rain forest, rather than cut it down for timber.
> Another major example of markets encouraging overharvesting is when the harvesting occurs on land/water that no one owns (or can reasonably own). Then, the harvesters have no regard for the replenishment of the resource; they just want to make money.
This is true if you follow the first capture rule of ownership for resources located in public domain (not owned by anyone in particular due to their nature). However, an alternative would be to argue that all resources in public domain actually belong to everyone, rather than no one. So, if you were to capture a whale in the ocean, you would actually be violating the rights of every other person on the planet to that whale. Thus, you would be obliged to compensate everyone on the planet for the fair market value (minus the cost of capture) of that whale. This means, the best you could do is brake even on your whaling activity. All of the sudden, it's no longer such an attractive economic activity.
> Sure, a state's governing may not please everyone - but if everyone is within walking and living distance, the society would be more able to resolve its differences, or come to a compromise. Thanks to this quality, I think smaller states could function with requiring more than the majority in parliament to pass legislation: e.g. 66% or 75%. Either way, at worst, you can move to a nearby state that aligns more with your beliefs. In this way, "governing" would become a market for ideas that work.
I was actually just writing how much I agree with you, and how in the past I thought that the states in US should have a lot more power, and the Federal government should have a lot less. But than I remembered the state I grew up in, IL, and how incredibly, unflinchingly, and stunningly corrupt that state, and more specifically, the city of Chicago is. Given that example, I wonder if small governments can really avoid being corrupt. That's of course not to say that large governments aren't crazy corrupt as well.
That research was probably conducted in rainforests protected as a national park, right? At least, I highly doubt that the pharmaceutical companies actually acquired the land before conducting research, or that they would bother buying entire rainforests (to protect the ecosystem) if there wasn't a state to protect them.
An anarcho-capitalist may suggest that the pharmaceutical companies could create a fund with other people who care about preserving the rainforests, to acquire and protect the rainforests. But then, that fund would have to raise as much money as the potential profit to be made by cutting it all down - which is terribly perverted, I think. Still, such a fund would unlikely be universal enough to protect all rainforests and other important ecological centers. The point stands that whatever land a logging company acquires, it will want to destroy.
Logging is far too prevalent as it is - with all the regulation and restrictions imposed on it by modern states. I'm not sure how the argument could be made that logging would be less prevalent if there weren't any states to stop it.
> an alternative would be to argue that all resources in public domain actually belong to everyone, rather than no one
This is a nice idea in theory (and is semi-applicable in anarcho-communism too), but it can't realistically be determined what to share (e.g. these bison were on my property), how to enforce it (e.g. knowing who's harvesting what), or how to handle it (e.g. how to allocate compensation for killing a whale).
I'm not sure why we have to go through these economic gymnastics just to avoid the concept of having an association of democratic governments banning whaling or deforesting. What's so wrong with that?
> the state I grew up in, IL, and how incredibly, unflinchingly, and stunningly corrupt that state, and more specifically, the city of Chicago is
I have connections to Chicago, and can relate :-)
In my ideal world, Chicago would be broken up into governments even smaller than the City of Chicago today, which spans about 15km x 40km it seems.
I think many city councils are "optimized" for administration, and not for representation. If each of these small states were completely autonomous, and had to legislate their entire body of law, the citizens would care more, and they would develop more representative and accountable voting systems and institutions, due to the extent of the government's responsibilities.
Also, to make the point again, if a certain state is known to be corrupt, and does nothing to address it, it will probably lose business and residents to nearby states that aren't. Similarly, neighboring states would have an interest in supporting one another, and would try to discourage corruption (e.g. avoiding companies that bribe officials elsewhere).
The key point for smaller states, in my opinion, is that their constituents care. I feel like people are more apathetic in larger states, because they have less power individually, and their responsibility to keep their government accountable is further absolved. When you get people to care, and give them power collectively, everything else follows.
I see several possible problems with this approach. I had similar thoughts in the years past, an I was wondering what your opinions were as to the following issues:
1. Inconsistent laws in a small geographical area. As a real world example, take a look at the car window tint law in the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago. In Illinois you can have up to 60% tint on your windows, while in Chicago, the local rule is that you can only have up to 30% tint. Don't quote me on those figures, last I looked into it was 10 years ago. But the point is, you can live outside Chicago, have a perfectly legal 50% tint, and than, as soon as you drive into Chicago, your car is all of the sudden in violation of one of the local laws. And they do ticket you for it. In your proposed system you would have all kinds of inconsistent laws. This is a problem for automotive laws, food safety, building codes, etc. The only solution I see would be for all of the small governments to gather together and agree on some standard set of laws that they will all implement. But than you are more or less back to square one.
2. Large infrastructure projects. Large projects require a lot of capital and a lot of cooperation from people in a large geographical area. Things like highway construction, rails, bridges, aqueducts, pipelines, all of those would require cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds of individual governments in your system. And you would always have holdouts, townships that would demand an extra something for their cooperation.
3. Research projects. Currently the united states government sponsors significant amount of research. If we were to switch to the township system, than that research would not be sponsored any more. Alternatively, maybe a bunch of townships could unite in a consortium to pay for research. But then you run into problems with division of profits from that research. Say 6 out of 10 townships paid for the research which resulted in development of a cancer cure. Would they then be able to deny the benefits of that cure to the other 4 townships?
There are a bunch of examples that I can think of in addition to this. In the past after thinking about this idea, the Jefferson Township model of government, I decided that I could not think of a way to make it work. However, a State system might work. A state system would largely eliminate the Federal Government and programs like the Social Security, ACA, Medicare, and all of the other social programs. It would also eliminate the Federal Income tax. The Federal Government would be responsible for national defense (military), borders, interstate transportation, and the interstate laws and treaties. The interstate laws would be a set of laws that 3/4 of the states would agree on. Things like food labeling, minimal vehicle safety requirements, etc.
To pay for the Federal Government each state would pay a yearly membership fee based on the number of people in that state and the GDP of the state, or some other kind of matrix. It would be up to each state to organize their own Social Security, health program, and other social programs. Each state would also be free to decide how to govern it self, would have the power to collect income tax, etc. The main key to the system would be free travel. This means that no person could be prevented from leaving one state or moving to another. This would allow each state to experiment with all kinds of government models, and would allow people to vote with their feet.
Any way, my idea is as unlikely to ever come true as the Jefersonian system.
Having different window tinting laws is a good example of the kind of baseless legal inconsistency that could harm a region's competitiveness. If the states of a region could not come to an agreement on window tinting, it would probably damage their reputation elsewhere.
> In your proposed system you would have all kinds of inconsistent laws.
Although there's little reason to differ on window tinting laws, I can imagine reasonable states having different opinions on, say, engine noise limits. This leads to the same kind of inconvenience, but yet is more understandable. Nonetheless, if the people of a (small) state don't want loud engines (or perhaps they want to ban driving altogether) in their neighborhood, isn't that their right?
> The only solution I see would be for all of the small governments to gather together and agree on some standard set of laws that they will all implement.
Right, so for any matter that calls for it, you would hope that neighboring states would be able to agree to pass identical pieces of legislation. The Australian states do this all the time (when the pre-existing law wasn't federal).
> But than you are more or less back to square one.
No, there's a very significant difference between a collection of autonomous states agreeing to a certain piece of legislation, and a collection of states being forced to abide by a piece of legislation passed by a federal parliament.
In the former, if a company wants to coerce the entire country on some political issue, it has to coerce the politicians of every single state: in a federation, it need only coerce the federal politicians.
If an independent state thinks a law is bad (e.g. wants to legalize marijuana), it can remove it without being beholden to outside forces. If the law was made by a federal parliament, it can only be undone by the federal parliament.
If an independent state thinks a program is bad (e.g. a war, a department, currency devaluation), it can remove itself (personnel/funding) on its own volition.
Regional agreements are very different to regional parliaments.
> This is a problem for automotive laws, food safety, building codes, etc
Buildings don't tend to get up and walk into a different neighborhood. I think that if the people of a state want certain building codes (or none at all!), that's their right. I don't think it's a big ask of construction companies to abide by the codes of the state they're building in: they do that all the time today.
I think regional agreements could be justified for things that are inherently mobile, or that make sense to operate at scale: automotive laws, food safety laws, airport administration, public health insurance, extradition, public broadcaster funding, university funding (maybe), infrastructure (telecoms, roads, train tracks), park administration, military, ...
The difference here is that if some state doesn't want to contribute to a regional health insurance fund, it doesn't have to.
> 2. Large infrastructure projects
Right, this is harder when you have many autonomous states, but they're still certainly doable. If there's an imperative to do something, the states will come to agreement.
States that contribute to interstate highways could sell permits to their citizens as part of their car registration. There could be toll booths to sell temporary permits to non-citizens. This way, if states A, B and C want to build highways between each other, but state D, adjacent to A and B, doesn't want to contribute, then A, B and C can fairly bill the citizens of D that end up using that highway anyway.
> If we were to switch to the township system, than that research would not be sponsored any more.
Why not? Research would only stop being sponsored by a state if the people of that state didn't want to sponsor it. And if they don't want to, they shouldn't be forced to.
If your point is that something like the Cold War would never happen in small-state anarchy, then I concede that. But, for all the merits of the space race, it was not worth the risk of the Cold War.
By the way, check your thens and thans :)
> However, a State system might work. The Federal Government would be responsible for...
Again, it seems like you're confounding the differences between having many independent states, and having a federation of states. My points above stand against federations (as in, federated parliaments). Federations should not exist: they are a remnant of a bygone era of imperialism and war-mongering. If by "federal government" you're referring to agreements between most states to pass some legislation (e.g. open borders), then sure, I'm with you. But if you're talking about having a legally-usurping federal parliament that is in command of the military, then I'm not.
Your post basically makes the point that cooperation is harder when you have more autonomous states. I agree, but I think (1) states will cooperate when there is an imperative to do so, (2) if a state doesn't want to cooperate, then that's their democratic right, and (3) by having the choice of cooperation, states can experiment, and better ideas will flourish.
1. Person X buys land because they need to live.
2. X asks real estate broker, "Don't I need air rights too?" Broker says "nah, the air's clean around here". (It is.)
3. Industry Y decides to move into town. Buys up all the unsold air rights from the broker (maybe with a little kickback). (Industry Y sells widgets, of which everyone needs an endless supply.)
4. Industry Y does what industries do and pollutes the air. Person X is out of luck, gets cancer and dies. (Person Z, who was smart and kept his air rights, is out of luck too, because everyone else sold out and it turns out particulate matter doesn't respect property law.)
Don't believe me? This is exactly what's happened with fracking. Affected homeowners are told they can't sue because they don't own the water/mineral rights around their land.
Anyway the end of this story in anarcho-capitalist-libertarian land is:
5. Person X gangs up with other townsfolk to pay their private police force to strongarm industry Y into selling their air rights to a collective trust.
6. Townsfolk look at their combined police-and-regulatory trust, see that it is good, and decide to name it "government".
2. Existing water rights in the US have as much to do with free markets as they did in the USSR.
Sure. Let's just privatize the entire fucking atmosphere! We can all pay rent for being made of carbon atoms, too! Those belong to an owner, after all!
Excuse me, I'm going to go do something else before I fully rage out.
I espouse libertarianism more under the following: freedom financially and freedom socially. So the former is generally a conservative ideal while the latter is usually a liberal ideal. A practical example is: I believe in small government (freedom from government financially) and I also believe same-sex marriage should be legal (freedom from government in sociall policy). This is my libertarianism.
One small edit - an informed AND ENGAGED public.
We now have a perfect cycle in the US. - Government isn't working, so people believe government can't work. - Government can't work in the future because very few participate.
Wash, rinse, repeat - and remove funding for education while you're going along to make sure people are not getting informed or engaged.
Also, it feels to me that "participate" has lost half its meaning: people think voting is enough. IMHO, the other half of participation is running for office. Many people complain about all candidates presented before them, but wouldn't put in the work to run themselves.
See, for example, the electoral loss of Eric Cantor.
> The key point for smaller states, in my opinion, is that their constituents care. I feel like people are more apathetic in larger states, because they have less power individually, and their responsibility to keep their government accountable is further absolved. When you get people to care, and give them power collectively, everything else follows.
> Libertarianism (i.e. absolute belief in the capitalist market and private property) doesn't work, [...]
For the vast majority of (US) libertarians, libertarianism is the first sentence, not the second. Only a small group of libertarians are free-market anarchists.
Universities are obsessed with the rankings of US News. And for some reason, they feel that campus renewal and renovation construction projects are the secret to mastering them. So instead of paying a decent wage to the people who actually comprise the "college experience" for their students, they pay outsized amounts to further improve their already glittering campus so that it looks better on the 15 minute admissions tour that prospective students take.
Somewhere the priorities are out of whack. I think if universities stopped spending so much money gaming the rankings, they might realize that paying their staff more and paying their faculty more would translate into a better, more involved college experience for their students. And that, in turn, would make their students evangelize to other prospective students about how much they love their college...
Improve the product, not the marketing.
I guess a revolving door supply of cheap labor is what lets them fill an IT position while only offering $25k. You said you worked there briefly, I assume you found a better job and moved on.
Clearly the product is not the problem with enrollment meeting quota and certainly no downward pressure on tuition cost... I say that tongue in cheek -- this is the university's (business') perspective.
Furthermore, 18-year-olds with guaranteed loans don't look at the price tags for those gimmicks rationally. When you're a kid with $300 in the bank the difference between a $50,000 loan and a $80,000 loan is so abstract it might as well not exist.
Combine those two factors and you get runaway spending and debt with little emphasis on teaching quality.
Your comment really is illuminating to me: news outlets, and possibly parents doing touring when college shopping only really care about the surface.
with adjuncts it depends on the major and class. the whole idea is that they are not full time, so if a person chooses JUST to do that , then I am not surprised they have a hard time getting by. I have a full time job and adjunct (the adjunct position pays pretty good), but from what I observed adjuncts make more for their time than joining the reserves.
I dont know how the hours and the workload worked out for the french teacher, but usually a class is either 13 3 hour courses or 26 1.5 hour ones. thats about 40 hours for the semester. the outside of class time really varies on subject, years of teaching the course, the students, etc. I generally expect to spend 1-2x the time of the class with outside of class time.
This seems obvious to me. When someone donates millions of dollars to a university, they want their name on a building. The Thomas J Somebody Architecture Building. The Susan C Millar Library.
Nobody wants the Frank T Frankhauser IT Department payroll fund.
I teach overseas, and I would never qualify to teach in an American school -- I have a college degree, and some teaching experience (from when I was in college), but no teaching credential.
An adjunct typically has a PhD or a masters degree combined with real-world experience.
Public school only require a bachelor's degree, but technically, teaching public school in most states also requires a teaching credential (especially with the No Child Left Behind law's "highly qualified standard), which is not part of most content (that is, non-teaching) programs. However, many districts are purportedly willing to hire a masters/PhD candidate and then back-fill coursework necessary for a credential (e.g., curriculum design, classroom management) as well as guide toward content certifications. These additional courses and certification exams are paid by the teach out-of-pocket, of course.
So, as with many things, YMMV.
No more than you are. If they don't have an M.Ed. or B.Ed. they're unqualified. Assuming you have those you may also need to do a certain number of teaching hours post qualification to get a teaching licence/QTS.
The typical adjunct almost certainly doesn't want to teach public school. Even in the crappiest community college discipline issues are minimal compared to teaching in high school or middle school and you have way more autonomy than a public school teacher.
With a masters you could teach in an American university, I believe the minimum requirement is a masters degree.
The median income in Mexico is around $10k (PPP adjusted). I wonder how much cat food they eat?
If you click through, you'll find that all of their positions are unpaid. It seems that magazine editor is no longer a middle-class job, either. You have to be rich enough to be able to work for free.
http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...
For everyone else... I'm pretty sure sports COSTS money.
That said... keeping a few young ladies running track can't possibly be the cause of the imbalance people are talking about. I'm pretty sure the money is sucked up by administrative and non instructional staff. But without the spreadsheets it is difficult to say anything with certainty.
"compensation of a single person like Zimmer now approaches the reported inflation-adjusted $3 million annual operating deficit that ended a community resource benefiting both medical students and trauma patients."
I guess we can argue about the meaning of the word "significant" now.
On their other hand it is bizarre to come into a thread about how teachers aren't getting paid despite school costs rising and present as an alternative paying teachers even less.
On the gripping hand I'm not entirely sure what you think the welfare theorems have to do with this but its worth remember that they do not and quite likely cannot actually describe reality.
But my main point is this: given that good competition exists, if colleges don't fix this quality issue, enrollment will drop and the situation for their teachers will keep getting worse.
(But professors at Coursera could get paid well for their efforts, if Coursera ends up with an effective business model.)
It does cost though ($200/month), which can be significant out-of-pocket if you're in a low-paying job, and you may not need whatever service that $200 buys you. It's unclear what that goes to, but I'm assuming it's to the coaches.
Still better than American university prices
You then have something close to the original Universities around 1100 ad or so!
Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...
https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...
Duke: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-...
Barnard: https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_boo...
Though the Text says out of 90k in spending $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries which puts just salary's for administration at 15.5 not including their share of the building etc.
So, a reasonable estimate ~25-40% of each dollar actually spent goes to administration depending on where you draw the line. AKA is a dean Administration or Faculty.
PS: Not that facility get to actually spend anywhere close to 100% of there time on teaching.
0) It is one of Columbia University's affiliated undergraduate schools, so facilities/athletics/administration/some budgets are tightly coupled to the mothership, which has approximately more money than god and subsidizes many things
1) It is in NYC, so the cost structure is not representative of the rest of America
2)) It is a Women's college, which probably changes some stuff (though I don't know what)
To clarify one thing: Columbia doesn't exactly "subsidize" Barnard - in fact, Barnard maintains its own independent endowment and board of trustees. Columbia and Barnard "partner" together to provide a number of joint services (for example, Columbia students majoring in theater take their classes at Barnard, and vice versa for some other departments, but many departments exist independently at each school). Barnard retains its own independent administration for most positions; there is very little sharing of administrative roles.
Student organizations are joint-funded through student fees, and almost all are open to both Columbia and Barnard students. In fact, there was some debate a few years back about the Barnard group overseeing student organizations not contributing its fair share towards Greek life[0], which was soon rectified. It is important that fund transfers between (e.g) Columbia College and Barnard are generally not considered internal transfers the way (e.g.) Columbia College and SEAS (the engineering school) would be.
This is not unlike the situation at certain other schools like Harvard and MIT, which sometimes allow cross-enrollment, or other schools which pool resources for student activities. The main difference is that Barnard professors are awarded tenure from Columbia University, not from Barnard (which cannot grant tenure independently).
That said, I agree that Barnard's expenses are not indicative, but that's more because they share many resources with another school (Columbia) and reap efficiencies that way, not because Columbia "subsidizes" their costs. Columbia saves a lot of money from these partnerships as well, and I doubt that they would keep the current setup if they didn't feel that they benefited from it financially as well.
[0] http://columbiaspectator.com/2011/04/26/inter-greek-council-...
Here's a summary of the conclusions
A recent study by two professors of economics attempts to arrive at the ideal ratio of tenured and tenure-track faculty to administrators in order to operate effectively. Analyzing data from 137 public universities from 1987 through 2008, they found that on average the ratio was two administrators to one full-time faculty member when the most cost-effective ratio is one administrator for every three full-time faculty members. They found that an imbalance between administrators and faculty where administrators outnumber faculty is what accounts for the rise in costs. Administrators and non-instructional staff have continued to rise despite less state funding. Furthermore, more part-time faculty are being hired at very low wages to offset the costs of administrators whose salaries tend to be much higher than faculty. Critics argue that the ratio should not be applied universally, as different types of universities have different needs when it comes to instructional vs. supervisory staff. But many agree that the goal of higher education is to focus on those who are in the classroom and not those pursuing an agenda of business development.
All government employee salaries in the state of Texas are public info [0], I used to check out how much my professors made. And how much my dad made. You can see salaries by employer as well. I'm not sure where to find historical salary data but it has to exist somewhere.
[0] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically... it is the department for all of the IT people at the University. It is enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that is just one of the operations level bureaucracies that the University needs. There is Facilities. There is Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.
These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. Be that as it may, honest people CAN debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the cost rises being discussed.
[Edited for grammar]
Every few years there would be a reorganization to create a bunch of new job titles and new useless layers of bureaucracy, since that's the only way to give people more than a cost-of-living raise.
You could fire half of them, hold the other half accountable to a reasonable level of productivity, and notice no difference. There might be a net gain.
Not saying that is a bad thing; actually, it probably improves overall productivity vs the US model. But it's not a free lunch, and it's not the employer's charity - it's the money people actually worked for, equally distributed over working days and holi-days.
They only pay the value of the package - you can calculate your hourly rate on total yearly pay / yearly hours worked, or are free to imagine you get paid total yearly pay / total hours of the year, and then boom, you're also paid for the vacations, for weekends, for the nights and so on. But in fact you're only paid because your boss knows what value you provide and how many hours you'll be there that year.
The student employees weren't much better, because it wasn't ever established what their behavior should be. I remember a lot of time spent torrenting, watching movies, and playing games -- occasionally breaking to reimage a computer.
Are today's college students such thugs that we need fully equipped police departments on campuses? Police departments are usually the second most expensive part of a municipal budget. How many of the "neccessary" bureaucracies did we do without a generation ago?
Universities below the elite level are headed for a massive crash. They better start the rethink soon.
Safety is a big issue, especially for parents (who pay many of the bills), so universities view law enforcement and safety spending as a competitive advantage.
It is also the case that many universities are located in small, rural communities that might not have the police resources to handle the campus population (for instance, I went to a school that had about as many students as there were non-student residents of the town).
Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.
The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.
Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity.
That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.
That's because you're thinking like a market rather than a human being.
Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.
One is also in Predictably Irrational: in short parents were always late picking up the kids from day care. The day care decided to issue a fine for late parents. The unintended consequences of this were that the parents were way more late on average because they felt they were paying for it. It switched the system from one based on social norms to market norms.
At ball games everyone used to be forced into the same shitty seats. Now the well to do get a pass and have luxury seats with better food and views. Instead of fostering community it further alienates the rich and the poor. This leads to a filter bubble of sorts that prevents both groups from empathizing with each other.
Same with courts and the legal system, fasttrak lanes, free shows put on that have secondary markets.
If you say that basing all interactions around money or segregating people into different groups that get different service can be a bad idea, I agree.
No, they're the sum of the constitutive people, minus all the parts that don't deal with property, trade, contracts, and debt, plus distortions added by institutional arrangements.
If people take their decisions freely, quite often money is not the top priority, but more traditional - and human - values may be.
Then the term "free market" is an oxymoron. By conjuring a market, which deals with money, property, and profit therein, you have already made it unfree.
IRL, there are lots of problems (in general), most of them not from markets, but lots also because people make bad decisions in markets. I think those are communication problems, though - people not agreeing on values. So many people scream "market failure", but nobody ever screams "voter/election failure", when people make bad decisions there that cause problems.
I would say the same damn thing regarding the knee-jerk right-wing proprietarianism, except that rich Bay Area techies have had a tendency towards the less-well-considered forms of "wannabe ubermensch" libertarianism for a long time now.
If you pointed out that leftists cluster on Reddit you <i>wouldn't even be correct</i>, as Reddit was pretty unambiguously rooting for Ron Paul in the past couple of elections.
Reddit always seemed divided to me, lots of leftists and lots of libertarians. Maybe the Paulians were noisier and more visible. HN seems a bit more libertarian to me, maybe because people here have higher incomes.
Please don't. Being harsh is not a good way to argue against blithe nonsense. It's a way to corrode the discourse and ruin the community [1]. If you're patient and reasonable, there's at least a small chance that you'll evoke that quality in others. If you're harsh, the chance of provoking the same and worse is high.
1. That particular comment was actually relatively mild. This is a personal appeal to drop the harsh tone on HN in general.
The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.
This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788
I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems to be a big factor in a student's choice of a school today. Admittedly, this is mostly based on anecdote and stereotypes (I think there's a reason why "college life" is commonly associated with parties and frats). I won't say that the social aspect of education is unimportant, but it seems that rather than making the education itself more "fun", universities in the last few decades have gradually increased funding for recreational buildings, big events, frats, and sports [1], etc. Of course, I don't know how significant these costs actually are, and I'm happy to be convinced by some budgetary data if this is actually a non-issue.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...
- Chinese proverb
(Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y.
[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...
[2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html
tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.
Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party.
〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates
> Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises.
I haven't read Clark's book personally. But a passage via SSC [1] (a link which I cited for you to follow and actually read):
> efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility
which is, uh, sort of better relates to the toppish-level discussion.
SSC cited how Georgia raffled off the land they stole from the Cherokee. The white lotto-winning descendants weren't appreciably better off. This exemplifies how dynastic wealth can diminish because of a lack of some intangible value (work ethic? genes?), which incidentally Gen Y may not have inherited from Gen X and the Baby Boomers. I.e. I see no issues with my theory so far.
Also your Socrates quote is off point. The Greeks had this notion that civilization had descended from a Golden Age to a Silver Age, and from there a Bronze Age. They also believed civilization would continue to decline linearly. This is obviously silly since the Western World's economy has appreciated a wazzilion fold since the Renaissance. But the point of the Chinese Proverb was more consistent with the "Mandate of Heaven/Dynastic Cycle" meme. I.e. dynastic wealth ebbs and flows like a business cycle. This idea is incompatible with neither dynastic long-term growth nor societal long-term growth.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-th...
Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. I will not be surprised that a lot of college teachers teaching skills of no use are finding it hard to make enough money.
Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create.
> Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes.
You seem to be awfully certain of that. Unless you meant to assume what you set out to prove (French lecturer is poorly paid => there isn't demand => poor pay is justified) I don't understand your argument. Clearly there is demand: sum up the price paid for the French credit by all the students in the class. There's just a middle man that skims a tremendous amount from the tuition paid for those credit hours before the money reaches the teacher / support staff.
That is rubbish, mostly the left liberal hippy logic. If a person is valuable there is always another competitor who will hire him for a higher pay to get the competitive advantage.
Administrative staff costs are rising as well, but the tenure track professors are expected to do less and less administrative work, theoretically allowing them to teach more classes. I don't know how much this works though.
In America, an institution of higher learning is not respected until they have a few sports teams with coaches, athletic directors, supporting staff, facilities staff and subsidies in the form of athletic scholarships.
> “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”
Students may pay for the privilege to receive a higher education, but the real customer is society. The product is competent graduates that will keep society moving forwards.
Once you start asking the opinion of the raw materials in your assembly line, everything goes downhill.
PS: what meaning are you attaching to the word 'society' here?
The way I see it, Education (at any level) is a process of self transformation. You cannot really purchase Education, you just pay for the opportunity to be part of that process. In this sense, your self at the time of admission is the raw material, your actualized self at the time of graduation is the final product, while the body of students can be considered the total inventory of product in process.
Second, every process of self actualization is Hard with capital H. It requires lots of work, and can be stressful (or even painful) at times. There are no shortcuts. It requires diligence to push through all that work, and perseverance in times when you feel like crap because it seems that you are never going to make it. Professors are guides and mentors, but ultimately you educate yourself. And because of this, no outcomes can be guaranteed.
Traditionally, Universities were modeled after medieval guilds. Professors, as guild masters before them, accepted candidates and teach them the art of the guild. They did not do so because they were not nice guys, but for a profit motive (Universities nowadays directly in the fees they charge, Guilds in the past indirectly through apprentices' free labor).
If the apprentice/student persevered for a fixed number of years, they received the social recognition of being competent in the art of the guild. In the Guild, apprentices became journey-man which gave them the right to practice their art in the territory controlled by the Guild and to receive a salary for it. In University, the undergraduate is considered a knowledgeable person in their major and (though we like to pretend that higher education is not job training) eligible for jobs that require specialized qualifications. In neither case does this imply that the student is now considered equals with the teacher.
For the undergraduate/journeyman to be considered equals with their professor/master, they have to pursue more self directed, advanced education for an undefined number of years. In both cases, the candidate must present a proof of competence in the art beyond what is expected from mere practitioners: For the journeyman it's called "master piece", for the graduate student "PhD thesis". This proof is presented to a group of masters including but not limited to your mentor, and they measure, debate and maybe approve it. If that last is the case, you are considered now to be a peer of them.
None of this fact seem to be common knowledge among undergraduate students, and Universities make no effort to disabuse them of their ignorance. Instead, they are now following a service industry model where every customer receives a standardized, repeatable service, and customer satisfaction is paramount. Until the day that we invent machines such as those in the first "Matrix" movie - where specific information and skills can be downloaded to your brain by direct manipulation of your neuronal patterns using electromagnetic impulses inside your skull - this model will only mess up with the older model of apprentice/master transfer of knowledge through the hard but proven self actualization process.
"It requires diligence to push through all that work, and perseverance in times when you feel like crap because it seems that you are never going to make it. Professors are guides and mentors, but ultimately you educate yourself."
This is a much richer view than the original comment, but I'll need to work through your later paragraphs. Thanks for taking the time needed to formulate the response.
Adjunct instructors went out of their way to be friendly, and non-confrontational. They would let stuff slide, exam do-overs, class meetings held at coffee shops etc etc.
Tenured professor not giving a damn about teaching, or being at least socially cordial. Some are just complete assholes.
Even saw the the behavior change when a professor got tenure. It was a pretty sharp switch to "don't give a fuck about anything" in a matter of a semester.
I am saying this as an average pattern I noticed, at one particular place, there are exceptions of course...
Meanwhile, at the private liberal arts college where I teach, most of my senior colleagues are just as committed to good teaching as my junior colleagues are. (The younger folks may be more innovative, but by and large they don't care more.) I've never seen someone's teaching go downhill when they get tenure; if anything, the research pressure eases up a bit at that point and they feel free to focus a bit more on the classroom.
So maybe what you've observed about tenure is accurate in some places, but it's at odds with the places I've been.
Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one of those kids what they'll want to do when they stop formal education, they'll go back to the few things that they are taught are desirable, and the few other occupations that are close to them. One of which, for every single kid, is to teach, since they've been surrounded by them all their lives.
Keeping studying after getting a Bachelor's is also a very tempting option for kids that are afraid of change. Think of something very different from college, or get a master's? Go look for a job, or get a Ph.D? Inertia makes some people go for advanced degrees, even though they don't really understand the road they are getting into.
I know plenty of people who finished a Ph.D, started doing post docs, then realized that now their options had narrowed significantly, that the tenure track was not going to happen any time soon, so their options were to become adjuncts, study even more to consider teaching at a high school, or accept that 5-10 years worth of education was completely wasted. This leads to a major glut of qualified people, which then get paid very little.
I believe we should spend a whole lot of effort teaching kids what odds they are actually facing when they make their career choices. I still meet interns that are doing post graduate education at the same time that don't realize how terrible the odds really are, and that's with them working in a company that is one of the few industry outlets out there for people that went into Ph.Ds and then saw how scary the teaching market was, so it's not like they cannot hear plenty of stories.
Bad information just leads to bad resource allocation for all of us. We should help with that.
By all means, we as a society should discourage people who don't know what they want to do from taking post-graduate education as a default choice, and we should discourage people who don't derive utility from teaching from being in the adjunct labor market. But I think that the majority of people in the adjunct labor market would actually say quotes like the ones above - they're not just "kids" without agency or passion for the work. And they would probably find it demeaning for the top post here to deign to "help" them to choose "rewarding... career choices." I'm pretty sure they've already chosen.
If we're going to spread information, let's focus on spreading transparency about hiring practices at universities to the students and grant-givers who fund their budgets.
I had to turn them down, as I was already doing private corporate trainings, where we charged $3,000/day.
I didn't get paid that much, obviously, but I thought it was really amusing that the amounts lined up.
And if you look at the history of the state education system, it was largely modeled after the Prussian education system, set up by the king, which "attempted to instill social obedience in the citizens through indoctrination [...] The purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy." [1] And I would argue that the school system serves a similar function today.
Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well.
Texas and others developed their own standards, for example.
Teacher wages approaching subsistence level is just the next step in the McDonaldization of education. Even the teachers are just another brick in the wall.
Or to take examples in a different way: Spain and Ireland's issues were mostly caused by a housing bubble.
1: http://www.dst.dk/pukora/epub/Nyt/2014/NR300.pdf (in Danish, but it would go under the "Brændsels -og smørestoffer o.l." category)
Ultimately though, I think the sad state of schools in this country is a (big) symptom of society's greater ills. Rampant corporatism, anti-intellectualism, and creeping authoritarianism from a runaway security industrial complex have been happening for decades... and schools are just one aspect of the decay of the social fabric.
I can't help but get the feeling that a dystopia is congealing around us with no way out politically. A lot of intellectuals have foreseen the ills of unbounded capitalism that are really starting to set in now, but I don't think anyone has proposed a credible solution.
See: this entire thread, in which the solution to corporatization of the university is almost automatically assumed to be adding more capitalism.
1. Opportunities, there are tons of opportunities in U.S., if you want to learn you will find a way to despite all the flaws.
2. Immigration, there are a lot of highly educated people immigrating into U.S.
Additionally we still cannot anticipate how whole MOOCs business will turn out.
So yes the are problems and they are very bad, but not as crippling as you might expect.
Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. Most university students go to public schools. Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.
Harsh capitalism would be harsh on the universities who cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries. It would punish universities who don't produce results, instead of giving them students with free loans from the taxpayers. Harsh capitalism would see universities that can't evolve disappear.
I feel like blaming things on capitalism and lack of regulation is so overplayed and fashionable that people can't take a second to think that maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place. Everything the government does right is lauded while everything it does wrong is blamed on "corporate interests" and capitalism.
If the government did not guarantee and subsidize the loans, interest rates would be higher and/or banks would be more careful which students they lent to.
Look at what you can spend yourself into at the University of Phoenix.
Many are not much better.
There are plenty of examples of humans being mean to each other in pretty much every setting. America's allergic reaction to public healthcare is an example of a systemic/cultural cause of significant unnecessary suffering[1]. Sure historically communists have done much worse, and indeed still are in North Korea, but that's not much of a target to beat.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/17/nhs-health
I suspect the same is true in US tertiary institutions, and that railing against exams is just a tired old trope. It's hard to believe that it would be the general standard in the US to have the entirety of the final mark attributable to exams. But, like I said, I'm not familiar with their curricula.
Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students need 6 figure loans to graduate.
> Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government.
As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
> Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.
The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to universities without needing loans. If Universities are public, they should admit based on merit. And instead of cycling money through govt to student to university, just subsidize the university and make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed. Maybe if it is too hard, just increase % of admitted students based on merit, some that couldn't quite make it and are rich perhaps could buy their way in.
> maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place.
Can you point to an example of an attested and well functioning higher learning system not regulated and propped by a government?
School vouchers are a great alternative to public schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher
Also, wrt the exclusion of religious schools, that'd be a non-starter in the southern states at least. It'd probably make more sense to mandate some minimum curricula or require that inspectors be able to attend the school unannounced if the school is receiving public moneys via vouchers. There'd likely be a tantrum about religious oppression, but, really, man and dinosaurs, contrary to the teachings at many of the churches and Christian academies around here, really didn't live together [1].
[1] Ok, in the conventional sense of dinosaurs, not the XKCD sense of birds as living dinosaurs. http://xkcd.com/1211/
Are there universities on the voucher system?
False dichotomy. There are plenty of things that fit in between "rapacious megacorporations" and "government cronies". Like, for example, unsubsidized nonprofit educational institutes. You know, like you might have found in the 19th - first half of the 20th century.
19th century? So it is easier to imagine going back to 19th century than a system with an accessible public university system without student loans.
I argue that it is precisely because of government intervention that these things happen.
> As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
Are you implying that without government, we as a society would be unable to educate people?
> The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to universities without needing loans.
That will make universities even more inefficient. Do you know what will ensure "make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed?" The fear of failure that universities don't experience now. The fear that if you don't do your job, students will not willingly give you money. "Harsh capitalism" solves that problem.
Well I don't have to imply you just have to show a few example of a successful world renown university run completely outside the control of a government. There are example of successful higher education institutions controlled and sponsored by governments. Western Europe has those example.
> The fear of failure that universities don't experience now.
Again, can you show one single example of a university outside the control of government that accomplishes and is driven by this mythical fear.
> "Harsh capitalism" solves that problem
Be honest now, have you been reading some Ayn Rand? That is fiction you know that, right?
It may very well be that the various 20th-century post-war G.I. Bills started the college bubble in the first place, by democratizing the expectation of higher education to the lower classes for the first time in history.
Not arguing against public funding of education, but you're making a nice point about the inherent BS of degrees that exist merely on paper.
Nobody actually cares about that piece of paper - employers want to know what you DID and what you're CAPABLE of.
A college degree used to be reasonable proof of peoples' abilities, but today conflating the two usually doesn't help. Thus post-college unemployment, or idiots running companies from nice positions.
It dawned on me this week that Y Combinator itself is structured more like this 'dying lecture/exam model', set in a physical place where 'students' and 'instructors' can interact directly rather than being intermediated by some app, screen or paper. If there is any group in any place who would be more likely to disrupt education by the application of high tech, I'd be surprised. That they adopt a model you say is dying suggests that there may be more life in it that might be expected.
I'd also wager that Y combinator has much smaller class sizes and is more like a tutorial then lectures.
Ideological blindness aside there is something wrong when education costs more and more but the instructors are paid less and less.
And it's still under assault by "little regulation" and "harsh capitalism"? If it's so frail in the real world, then pack it in; the philosophy has no hope of success. It will never find any more fertile ground than it has there. If you don't like the result of decades of liberalism/progressivism's control, perhaps it's time to find a new governing philosophy.
I've been at both American and Danish universities, and the American universities today really do not seem progressive to me. Many professors will claim to be left-ish, sure, but structurally the universities are not run according to a traditional public-service model, and are not internally egalitarian. Their structure, with tons of administrators, large pay differences, odd systems of performance reviews, people job-hopping for pay raises, administrators desperately looking for revenue, etc., reminds me of American corporations more than it reminds me of public service. Just the pay inequality in itself is shocking, more like corporate levels than civil-service levels. An American Dean's salary might be twenty times or more what a PhD student is paid, and professors' salaries might differ by 2-4x even within just the tenure-track segment. In Denmark the entire range from "highest paid professor" to "lowest paid PhD student" is maybe 2.5x, and professors' salaries are on a boring civil-service scale with about 30% variation. This already makes the American environment much more like a company: competitive, hierarchical, not really egalitarian, big focus on revenues (for the institution) and salary/advancement (for the employee).
There are admittedly things the American university model does do well; it's well regarded in research, for example. But one thing it is not, is a straightforward public system along the lines of what a social-democratic government might run. (One might say the same about the healthcare system, for that matter.)
I have never heard any self-proclaimed socialist ever utter these words. Do you get your entire concept of the Left from right-wing strawmen?
http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/April/130430/6C71...
A bad product, the employees and customers are treated poorly, and prices are skyrocketing. Hmmm.
I was taking at a private "degree mill" part time classes at $180 per credit hour. The school required 7 students to teach a 4 credit class during normal hours. So at the minimum number of students the school was just making enough money for overhead... Most clases were 10-15 students. It was a private school, so tuition covered almost all their bills, no state funding.
Now ask where sutdents in State Funded Colleges money is going when there are 50 students (and more!) in a class? Where the hell is the undergrad tuition money going if the school only pays "minimum wage" for adjunct or grad school staff?? Where is State and Federal dinging going if Undergrads are paying more than their share of the university bills? It's not gping to TEACHING... And it's not going to "student contact" professors either, and its not "healthcare" or "retirement"... There's a giant money hole in the system.
Outside of the top-ranked flagship state schools -- which carry as much prestige as an ivy in some fields (e.g. in CS uiuc, u.w., austin, etc.) -- state schools are actually by far the best bang for the buck around.
For example, $180/cr is actually not far off from what most non-flagship state schools cost. In fact, there are schools in my state that cost within $10 or so of that. Crucially, all these institutions have quite good reputations in the region, no one perceives them as diploma mills, and they all have great CS departments with a sense of continuity.
I don't know what things are like now, but in my grandfather's day European universities had a very different credentialing system from US undergrad institutions. In lieu of course credit, course-based grades, etc., they simply had a battery of (oral) examinations at the end.
US grad schools can be much like that. In essence, there were no course requirements for a PhD in mathematics at Harvard, but rather a three-day Qualifying Examination, a Minor Thesis (don't ask), and a traditional dissertation. Much the same was true of a physics PhD at Princeton then (the 1970s), except that there was an experiment in the mix (even for theoreticians). And in the Princeton math department, the joke was that students were asked the first day "Does anybody wish to submit his thesis?", and the record was 3 months.
The other issue is the potential for market dynamics to correct these problems with college, if they exist: spending too much on admins, and skimping terribly on the teaching. Essentially kids are getting stiffed, and then employers are getting sub-par employees. If kids are going to college to get a better job, then these decisions on the part of schools are hurting them.
That said, if the economy really is all "bullshit jobs" (a sentiment that has floated around here recently) then the college admins know it won't matter how badly they educate the kids, and they'll never be found out. If that's the case, then I'd argue our larger concern is the fact that so many jobs are bullshit.
Of course it’s possible to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.
So it is unusual now, but it is going to become more common in the future?
> So adjuncting is decidedly not a middle-class job. But it does sound like one, probably because, before the adjunct bubble, it was.
..."Professor" sounds like a middle-class job. I'm not in academia, but when I was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded like a grad student on a stipend.
This attitude was perhaps more appropriate a decade ago, before adjunct faculty were covering a significant portion of the course load and students could reasonably expect most of their courses to be taught by people with the word "professor" in their job title.
Also, if the cause of adjunctization is rising administrative costs in colleges -- are there any universities that have figured out that problem? That is, how to prevent a bloated bureaucracy of overpaid administrators?
According to clay christensen , the guy behind "the innovator's dillema" , more than 50% of colleges will go bankrupt soon(until 2020/2024).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-colleges-...
Would be interesting to know if college prices began rising at a higher ratio to the CPI around this time.
Third, colleges seem to teach whatever garbage they feel like, slap a "major" label on it, and charge a ridiculous amount for it. As institutions you would be hard pressed to find more inefficient organizations in the economy. I can't for the life of me understand where all the money is going. It shouldn't cost $100,000 to turn a bright high school student into a programmer in four years. In some European countries they do a better job in two years, with one third the budget, even though labor costs are higher (see Sweden).
We have to face the fact that a lot of college lecturers are zero value-add to their pupils. This is a big problem underlying the salary issue that is hardly ever discussed. Moving outwards, many college programs are zero value add too ... outside the stamp of a degree which they confer. Which if you think about it, you could get cheaper abroad.
Only a matter of time before India or some Baltic state makes cheap degrees available to US citizenship holders at cut-rate prices. I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.
Sure they do. Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford. The name is more important than even graduating, even "Harvard dropout" has a certain cachet.
I know a lot of people working at Google who don't even have degrees. There are over 5,000 Engineers in Google's American HQ. Thinking that everyone of them works there purely because of the brand name of whatever college they went to seems to be a rather self-limiting belief.
100$ was mostly for teachers with not much experience, mostly students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers.
I am also not familiar with for-profit universities though, which it sounds like maybe yours was?
I am still sort of thinking that something got misunderstood on the way from the family member sneaking peaks at salaries in the office, to you, to us.
My university was for profit, as I said it's a french based university. The director owns multiple Lamborghinis (not sure although if it is related to being for profit).
My family member was not sneaking peaks at salaries, she was the one hiring the teachers, signing contracts with the teachers, etc...
As everyone who has done any teaching knows, the time spent standing in front of a class is just a small part of the total required time.
However, that doesn't count time answering student questions. That doesn't count office hours. That doesn't count making up homework or tests and grading them.
For me, each class I teach is about 40 hours of work per week. If that is your number, then I got paid about $10 per hour. And I would have been better off at McDonalds as I would have gotten benefits for being full-time.
For those of us who like to teach, this is a Catch-22. It is good for students to have teachers who have been in industry--however, the pay is lousy relative to that same industry. At the same time, I would also be providing cheap labor to the university who should be paying someone a reasonable amount of money.
It did not account for answering questions by email, it did not account for grading them.
As I wrote below, if a teacher taught 8 hours of a class at 100$ / hr, he would be paid 800$, even if he has to spend 10 extra hours grading a student.
But to be honest they weren't giving that much homework, and only one test at the end of the class. I'd estimate for every 80 hours taught, there might have been only 10-15 extra hours. Which for 100$/hr or 300$/hr is worth it.
I have to prep 2 3 hour lectures per week. Each lecture easily takes 8 hours to prep. 6 assignments--have to make them up, set up automated tests, get things set up in source code control, and help students when things come back wrong if they can't figure it out. A midterm and a final--have to make it up and correct it. Add in office hours as well as replying to students via email and I'm easily at 40 hours per week.
This is why so many teachers just prep once and regurgitate each class (including assignments and tests). It's just sooooo much less time consuming.
Don't feel bad. My poor TA (who was a student in a previous class I taught) was stunned too--"It takes this much time?!?!?! And you did this by yourself for our class?"
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/1364...
This addresses many of the issues that we are solving with our startup Oplerno.
If the information in this article does not result in behavior changes (non tenured lecturers walking out of raw deals, or students requiring their University to disclose and guarantee a minimum percentage of courses taught by full time professors, or employers refusing to hire candidates coming out of degree mills) for a significant percentage of the incumbents, absolutely nothing is going to happen.
The adjuncts in the article and the ones that have recently been in the news, such as the homeless professor in the NYT, are the tip of the iceberg. And without adjuncts talking about it in the open nobody would know.
The kind of behavior change you are suggesting doesn't happen overnight, and certainly doesn't happen without there being viable alternatives. This is why we are trying to create a viable alternative.
Being children, I have not yet discussed this with them. However, I plan to have this topic fully explored with each of them well in advance of their freshman year on high school.