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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures, private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world.

You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and amazing.

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you equated "for-profit" education with "private schools". The two are not the same. Most of the category that you think of as "private schools" are non-profit, but religious or otherwise not government-sponsored.

I can only assume the parent is blaming the spiraling cost of education on Capitalism, when in fact it's the perpetually increasing federal loan guarantees spurring massive inflation that is the root of the cause.

The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the industry in the late 1960s. No coincidence both industries began to skyrocket in cost at exactly the same time, shortly after Nixon ended the gold standard, and the Fed acquired free reign to generate immense inflation and aggressively tamper with interest rates (spurring the cheap consumer debt boom of the past 40 years).

Everyone recognizes that healthcare and education became very expensive recently. Nobody seems to ask what changed in the last few decades to cause that. They act like Capitalism didn't exist in 1960.

The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the industry in the late 1960s.

I'm guessing that you're referring to the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, which is hardly "taking over the industry".

> the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world.

By whom? In particular, are there any ratings of American versus European universities by people who have experience of both? I only have experience of the latter; from what I've heard from Americans talking about their university experience, it sounds markedly inferior.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...

Another:

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

Both of these organizations are British.

Here's one done by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai:

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html

The exact ranking varies, of course, but the trend is clear. The top U.S. universities (and the top U.K. universities) outrank everyone else.

ETH Zurich does pretty well, but doesn't make the top ten on any list.

Okay, taking a look at the criteria they say they use.

Most of the weight is on research. Fair enough. I'm prepared to believe that conclusion, at least as an overall tendency. However, the context of the discussion was education, and that's the context in which I'm disputing the basis of the claim of superiority of American universities.

Of the fraction of the weight placed on quality of teaching, a significant chunk goes on 'perceived prestige' which obviously begs the question.

A small chunk goes on student/teacher ratio, which is a weak indicator; in particular, its behavior is more threshold than monotonic (i.e. you don't want it to be too high, but there's no real advantage in having it remarkably low).

And a chunk goes on total budget per teacher, which is a positively perverse criterion and tends to substantiate the stories I've heard about the level of waste in American universities.

So that's the 'world university rankings'. Moral of that story: when you see an official looking table that seems to support a controversial conclusion, look carefully at where the data comes from.

The U.S. system has both research universities and teaching colleges. Some institutions are both (e.g., Harvard), but many are one or the other.

>when you see an official looking table that seems to support a controversial conclusion

I've presented some data. If you have contrary data, present it. Otherwise it's just your opinion, no? I mean, you dispute the metrics they use, but don't provide any of your own. What would be a better measure of the quality of teaching?

Are you trying to get someone on the internet to admit that they are wrong? I applaud the effort. Here are upvotes.

(Sibling comment since it's not giving me a 'reply' link for some reason)

To be clear, I'm not claiming European universities are better for education (as opposed to research) than American ones. I only have experience of the former, so I'm not in a position to make that claim. I'm merely disputing the reverse claim. I'm saying unless we can find accounts from people who have experience of both, the correct position to take is an agnostic one.

For profit education is good at delivering education for those that can afford it; in the case of university education that means providing an excellent degree programme and qualification which saddles graduates with cripplingly high loan repayments they will take over a decade to pay off.

What they add in prestige, they subtract by making continuous employment a full-time professional job the only practical option for the average graduate. I'd hesitate to call that a "disaster", but it is a huge factor in the phenomenon the article (edit: and particularly the Economist link posted by spindrift http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989...) describes: educated professionals in the US actually [necessarily] working more hours than the average person.

Schools like Harvard, MIT, Princeton (which I assume you're thinking of) are non profits.

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