Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Two comments: an op-ed piece I saw in the Wall Street Journal the other day[1] made the point that the Department of Education's new regulations on for-profit institutions of higher education define levels of risk of student debt that would also give many "nonprofit" higher education institutions bad ratings. "We know this is true because if you applied the regulation to a law degree from George Washington University, a bachelor’s degree in hospitality administration from Stephen F. Austin State University or a bachelor’s in social work from University of Texas, the programs would all fail to meet the standard." Seeing the George Washington University Law School mentioned in that context made me go ouch, as that is not a completely slouchy law school, and I actually stayed there for a summer for one of my law school internships (I attended a state university law school) and later attended a student conference there. Even reasonably decent law schools are not a good financial risk these days for many students.

My other comment is that the article kindly submitted here, which I've already submitted to my Facebook friends, makes the interesting point that dental school enrollments have fallen sharply since more and more public water supplies in the United States have fluoridation. People today have much healthier teeth than they had when I was growing up. Dentists, by this view, are true professionals, as they are even willing to advocate public health measures that help work dentists out of a job. I admire that.

[1] "Making ‘Profit’ a Dirty Word in Higher Education" By Steve Gunderson Nov. 12, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/steve-gunderson-making-profit...

"Profit" should be a dirty word in higher education. Primary and secondary too.

Why?

Because then the goal changes from "raising your ranking by churning out well-prepared grads" to "making a quick buck". If the profit motive is present, making a slow buck will always lose to making a quick buck as soon as people who only wear management hats show up.

> Because then the goal changes from "raising your ranking by churning out well-prepared grads" to "making a quick buck"

1. Why is it about making a quick buck? Why can't it be a long term investment?

2. Why can't an institution have both these goals at the same time (make money, churn out well-prepared grads)? They aren't mutually exclusive.

Because thats not how the world operates. The financial system is structured such that it rewards year-over-year profits and punishes anything less. A for-profit institution is going to be beholden to investors. Incentives are a strong predictor of outcome.

Most of the state institutions seem to be less concerned with "raising your ranking by churning out well-prepared grads" and more with "attracting enough students to pay for administrative and real estate overhead".

At least with for-profit schools there's no motivation to over-build and over-hire.

Because it is (close to) impossible to write an objective measurement system that can tell the difference between a legitimately good school (as defined by the rather abstract things that we as a society want education to be) versus a school that is good at gaming metrics. And when you introduce a direct profit motive tied to metrics, it is highly likely that executives will find a way to maximize profit while minimizing cost, which likely means gaming the metrics and doing little else.

Government institutions and private nonprofit institutions have this problem already (at least somewhat) with U.S. News and World, but they are at least theoretically controlled by foundations/trustees/the state, which have in common the property that they profess an interest in education itself, not education as a means of extracting money from people.

I don't really see anything you've pointed out that doesn't apply equally to profit / non-profit. Given your second paragraph, I'm not sure you have a lot of hope that public schools are doing the right thing.

"they profess an interest in education itself, not education as a means of extracting money from people."

I'm sure counter-examples exist, but the best businesses are not about "means of extracting money from people", that is just a natural consequence of a decently provided service. Governments and Institutions also think in terms of "extracting money from people" although they are less honest about it (why yes, I've worked with both).

Well-regarded nonprofit colleges are mostly doing the right thing, with some stat-gaming around things like number of student organizations, expenditure per student, etc. to jockey for higher positions in U.S. News. Not in their core educational functions.

We as hackers can tell that our $1,500 Macbook Pros are better than $450 Inspirons, so Apple thrives.

The problem is that it is much more difficult to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality education. With vocational training it is easy: do employers like the graduates? Do they get hired at a substantially higher rate than non-graduates? Do they get paid more? But with education it is much, much harder.

There are some objectively observable traits that can (sort of) tell you whether an environment is likely to contribute to certain kinds of personal intellectual growth: do students read and respond to (at least) the Western literary canon? Are classes small enough to facilitate meaningful discussion? Are a wide variety of courses taught? How deep into their respective fields to the syllabi go? Does the school actually own the equipment and materials necessary to perform the kinds of laboratory procedures that a graduate in the sciences should have experienced? Are the classes hard enough that not everyone gets perfect scores all the time? How many hours do students need to spend on the coursework to make good grades?

But all of these can be gamed. Hire lots of cheap, incompetent professors. Have small group discussions where you basically just sit there for an hour talking about nothing and wasting time because the professor is doing something else on his laptop. Force students to write papers, but have an institutional culture where they are mostly bullshitted or plagarized and no one cares. Don't actually take the time to grade students' work, but assign bad grades to the handful of students least likely to make a fuss. Assign lots of busywork. Etc. Attract students with good high school test scores by lobbying to divert government funding that would have allowed them to attend better institutions, and set your own prices cheaper.

Think of any other property of legitimately good education, someone can probably find a way to appear to have that property more efficiently than actually having it.

The only reason this isn't widespread is because administrators are generally people who want to provide good education and have the freedom to spend pretty much whatever they can get their hands on to do so.

If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students, they will find ways to hit the metrics that actually influence reveneue (i.e. rankings) while spending less than the other guys, and that will probably mean compromising the quality of the education they provide.

I guess I wasn't really clear in my post, sorry. My basic belief is that government / public institutions aren't anymore "holy" then for-profits. The profit motive is transformed into a power motive in public institutions. We can see this with the growing bureaucracy at our public institutions that has raised tuitions and removed resources from students. The quest for grants is in full force and professors are teaching less. The things you list that for-profits can do are done at public universities.

"If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students"

To the point, I don't believe a lot of administrators are thinking of the student first. I see a lot of "integrity of the institution" which leaks over into free speech and open discussion suppression. Admins do not serve the student first, they serve the politicians and the next step in their career.

As always, their are exceptions, but I don't see many of the dreamers and idealists left.

Try "utility".

I've never understood that. Isn't there way more Floride in toothpaste than drinking water?

Also Floride doesn't prevent gum disease right?

Floride doesn't prevent gum disease per se, but it does prevent cavities, which are real money makers for dentists.

You may only brush your teeth 3 times a day, but with fluoride in water you're exposing your enamel to it more frequently especially if you're a child who's drinking water often.

People really underestimate the degree to which public oral health has improved over the recent past. A few decades ago, most children had cavities. In most communities in USA today, that's not the case. Many experts would credit fluoridation for a portion of this improvement, but I think education and access improvements also deserve credit.

Flouridation became widely used in the US in the 1960s. It's hard to discern facts with all the hyperbole from activists against it but I thought flouridation was unnecessary now because of toothpaste and how people brush their teeth more. From Wikipedia, most countries in Europe substantially reduced cavities without flouridation and tooth decay rates remained stabled or declined in Germany and Finland when it was stopped. Though it does say that in-school dental care and more going to the dentist in Europe than in the US may be the reason.

But so many people in the US have home filtration systems, filtered water jugs or drink bottled water that it seems it's more due to flouride toothpaste and better hygiene. While there is some flouride in some bottled water, it's generally less.

Flouridation [sic] became widely used in the US in the 1960s.

Yes but many communities only fluoridated in the 1980s (I know because my father was the concerned citizen who eventually got this done in several nearby towns), and the smallest water districts still don't have it.

Off topic, while I know how to spell fluoride I rarely write flurodiation. And I rely on Google's spellcheck which for whatever reason will show incorrect spellings. And in gmail, it will also do the opposite; indicate a correctly spelled word is wrong.

Haha actually even simple "fluoride" eludes me fairly often. The gmail remark reminds me of the "please advice" idiom that MS-Outlook established. Of course the original, grammatically correct request is "Please advise," which one might expect to see at the end of any issue-raising business email. Because Outlook "corrected" this phrase to "please advice" for so many years, many people now actually think "advice" is correct.

Thanks for your comment on fluoridation.

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