[HN Gopher] Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling on...
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Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for
applicants
Author : smaslennikov
Score : 99 points
Date : 2021-02-23 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Smart hiring managers in this industry know that college doesn't
| matter and that one good Github project > any degree. I've not
| once taken someone's schooling into consideration while
| interviewing and I've hired dozens of people.
|
| I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do,
| but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if
| you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a lot
| harder to do if you have no money since you can't get a
| government loan to cover your expenses. UBI would be very helpful
| here.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Lots of students who go to lower tier schools don't even know
| that their 'elite' peers are working on things like projects,
| OSS, or interview prep. I personally had never heard of a
| hackathon until after I started uni, but lots of my classmates
| had already been to dozens in high school. The real issue with
| going to a bad college is students have no idea what they're
| supposed to do to get a job. Those students are dead last in a
| game they don't even know they're playing. It happens
| organically at a good school.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| In my experience most elite school CS students don't actually
| work on OSS. I see a lot of school projects posted to Github.
| That's why I like to look at it, because it's hard to fake.
|
| You're right that it's harder for people who don't have the
| resources to buy computers and spend time learning/hacking.
| I've hired several really good devs who only had an HS degree
| but also had an OSS project, but a lot of people just won't
| have the resources to make that happen.
| boatsie wrote:
| It would be interesting if colleges offered a reduced or free
| tuition in exchange for future earnings. That might incentivize
| colleges to only offer certain degrees, help with job placements,
| keep the quality of learning high, etc.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Sounds like a loan?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Or alimony, depending on how you look at it.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| The key difference between the parent commenter's proposal
| and a loan, is that the proposal ties the amount paid back to
| the income of the graduate.
|
| The thinking is that conditions would be structured to better
| ensure the college degree provides suitable income (only for
| certain majors, only if the college provides certain data
| about grads, etc).
| [deleted]
| awillen wrote:
| I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are
| really two positive things that can come out of going to college
| - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets
| your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you
| to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously
| in some cases it'll be both.
|
| The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a
| humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a
| worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are
| scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is
| less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year
| for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively
| bad choice for most people.
|
| Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to
| value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield
| financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that
| are providing substantial negative value to their students ought
| to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in
| huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better
| investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school,
| etc.
| antihero wrote:
| Your second sentence is indicative of the toxic attitude to the
| world that appears to be rooted in or at least exacerbated by
| capitalism.
|
| Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely
| incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose
| that create other _extremely important_ value in the world (the
| thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc)
| are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours,
| or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get
| scholarships?
| GCA10 wrote:
| Actually, I'll argue that college educations can pay off in a
| third way. It's not just brand-name prestige and useful skills.
| There's a lot to be said for the way that four years of
| residential education imbues grads with a valuable lifetime
| network of allies.
|
| The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts
| schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?)
| even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first
| two metrics.
|
| It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in
| downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in
| Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools
| and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the
| United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in
| sales, administration, community law practices and more.
| They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads
| lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong
| baseline economy that creates customers for us all.
|
| What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the
| residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman
| hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$
| for what's really just an online education without a valuable
| network stops having much appeal.
| DC-3 wrote:
| Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value
| education for its own sake and not for potential financial
| yield alone?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Those people exist, but they are a small fraction of the
| population.
|
| The number of people going to college to increase their
| future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the
| internet. University only exists for the credential now.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I think there's a value in being immersed in a subject,
| with peers equally passionate about it.
|
| You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab
| session where you finally get your assignment in a working
| state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his
| startup idea and showing a demo.
| [deleted]
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate
| and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your
| own passion and determination. It's the same reason
| companies have much more innovation in offices compared to
| remote working.
|
| The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former
| colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are
| CEOs, CTO, COOs
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I went to a crappy state school after community college
| and met exactly 0 passionate professors along the way. It
| was an astoundingly miserable experience. None of my
| classmates have gone on to do anything of note.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| which is exactly why a good school is better than a bad
| one: the courses and materials might be the same, but the
| experience can be totally different. IMO for most of us
| it's not worth getting into debt to pay any college,
| unless the college is in top X, or if you need the
| certification for your profession. Paying 60k a year for
| a mediocre college is one of the worst decisions you can
| make. You can achieve just the same amount of knowledge
| in less time on your own.
| raiyu wrote:
| If that's the case you can get it for nearly for free by just
| buying the books and reading them rather than paying $25,000
| a year for that same privilege.
| minikites wrote:
| So then why do we have formal education at all?
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| To create workers for the industrial revolution.
| minikites wrote:
| Formal education predates the industrial revolution.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Not for the masses.
| Noos wrote:
| no, we have formal education because not everyone is an
| autodidact and may need actual help in evaluating and
| learning skills.
|
| Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not
| learning physical therapy from coursera, or even
| something like human resources; some things you need
| others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide
| facilities for.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Apprenticeship is the historical way to accomplish this.
| dgfitz wrote:
| "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50
| in late fees at the public library." - Good Will Hunting
| keiferski wrote:
| You know the theme of the movie is actually arguing against
| that quote, right? The conversation on the bench is the
| climax of the film; Robin Williams lectures Matt Damon
| about the limitations of book learning.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I wouldn't go so far as to say that the movie is arguing
| against book learning, just that it's no substitute for
| real experiences.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure, I'd agree with that.
| minitoar wrote:
| I don't think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study
| humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of
| education. They're doing it because every adult or counselor
| in their life told them they have to go to some college no
| matter what.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high
| school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a
| bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant.
| Seriously, data entry does _not_ require a history degree.
| At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry
| positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees
| of some kind.
|
| (NB: Talking about in the US)
| minitoar wrote:
| Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major
| isn't relevant doesn't seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry
| is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive
| and complicated.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If the knowledge is not required for the job, what is the
| degree for? Is it a concealed/outsourced IQ test? Is it a
| concealed illegal minimum age requirement? Isit
| collective insanity?
|
| I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal
| and/or deranged.
| VLM wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd embrace and extend
| your remarks with two other illegal or semi-illegal
| reasons:
|
| One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more
| easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled
| tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a
| student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have
| to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in
| addition to being paid more, would simply move to a
| competing jobsite the next day.
|
| The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in
| freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up
| graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of
| legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or
| certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the
| office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something
| "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the
| office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel
| left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need
| not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a
| four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
| agar wrote:
| Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you
| have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You
| have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need
| to fill the positions in 10-15 business days.
|
| You would like to find people with the following
| characteristics: They can follow complex instructions
| with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they
| have good social skills to work with colleagues and
| occasional outside parties, they are fully literate
| (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and
| can be trained and managed.
|
| You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top
| 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?
|
| What would be your initial filtering criteria?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Past work experience, letters of reference, relevant
| training program/certification. This is assuming there is
| not a degree program that can be seen as preparatory for
| the position. A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when
| it's irrelevant to the workload. It tells you the person
| was willing to spend $40-80k (in much of the US) for a
| piece of paper that didn't prepare them for the job
| you're hiring them for.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Young people don't have past work experience, hence the
| need for them to put themselves through a college to
| serve as a signal for what they might be capable of.
|
| Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of
| reference, no one cares about your college. But you're
| not going to have that when you're 18.
|
| University is also a social exercise, which can serve to
| signal that you are okay or at least exposed to the type
| of cultural norms that might exist at an employer that is
| already full of similarly college educated people.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I listed _relevant_ training /credentials. 2-year degree
| programs and 1- or 2-year training programs used to be
| more common than they are now, and should be restored as
| a reasonable entry into more white collar jobs.
|
| > Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of
| reference, no one cares about your college. But you're
| not going to have that when you're 18.
|
| That's actually not the case, unfortunately. My wife is
| fluent in two languages, can read and communicate in a
| couple more but isn't fluent, has 12+ years of
| experience, and letters of reference from CFOs and CEOs
| from major international corporations, and is struggling
| (here in the US) to get a non-minimum wage job in a
| medium sized city (we'd be better off if we were in a
| larger city, but this is where my work is right now).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| For a somewhat large company, it may be necessary to come
| up with hiring standards to save time, one of which might
| be a minimum of a Bachelors degree, and maybe of a US
| college for simplicity of verifying the degree. I'm sure
| if you had the ear of an executive and they really wanted
| to hire you, they could make an exception, but that
| solution doesn't scale.
|
| My point was more that the signal an elite college serves
| is relatively short lived assuming you then get
| experience at highly regarded employers. For example,
| once you have worked at a FAANG, no one cares if you went
| to a low ranked school.
| agar wrote:
| > A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's
| irrelevant to the workload.
|
| But it's not. It gives a good indication that the
| applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I
| listed.
|
| And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call
| center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant
| training program or certification. Few people grow up
| hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so
| they're not going to go to school for that.
|
| Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it
| tells an employer far more than they were "willing to
| spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to
| go to school to learn about something they love, then
| they get out and need a job.
|
| I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree
| holders as a desirable criteria.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry
| into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt
| and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so
| people can be differentiated from the other history
| majors, and all because a high school diploma is
| considered worthless by most companies for their non-
| technical entry level positions.
| minitoar wrote:
| Maybe the value of differentiating potential employees is
| worth it overall.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Size of their feet differentiates them too. How is it
| actually usefull?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| To expand on your point, it's the arbitrary and
| superfluous nature of this requirement.
|
| If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality
| example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too
| short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or
| too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter
| pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't,
| physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his
| dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't
| use this as a discriminator on _all_ my employees, only
| the ones that it made sense for.
|
| Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar
| jobs.
| minitoar wrote:
| If that's a useful differentiator then people would
| probably use it. Maybe you're trying to imply that
| whether or not a candidate has a certain credential is
| not useful as a differentiator?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Would they? We don't use IQ or neuroticism, are they
| useless? We have solid proof that attractive sociopaths
| get ahead more, is that usefull?
|
| Maybe we should not pretend that hiring is this optimally
| tuned machine that knows exactly whats needed
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Maybe for the businesses, I'm skeptical that this is a
| positive for society and the economy overall.
| Miraste wrote:
| High school standards in the US have reached a point
| where I would not trust someone with only a high school
| diploma to be able to do data entry. Bachelor's degrees
| aren't a perfect credential but they're a passable
| filter, in lieu of building a much more extensive hiring
| process for low-level jobs.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Seriously. If you're working class or higher, you have to
| try to not get a high school diploma.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The article is about colleges in the US, so I have no
| reason to doubt you. It's just a ready bleak observation
| for someone who is raised to pursue a career that would
| make me happy, and be lucky enough to live in a country
| that allows me to do that.
|
| More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US
| somehow lost the cold war and it's now a dystopian
| nightmare.
| minitoar wrote:
| I wouldn't know. I went to college for a topic I've
| always loved and that happens to be lucrative. I actually
| think the narrative of "pursue a career you love" is
| still the basic message. It's just framed as requiring a
| college education in order to achieve that. There is some
| truth in it, as it's hard to even get your foot in the
| door without the credential.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US
| somehow lost the cold war and it's now a dystopian
| nightmare.
|
| And yet the country is attracting talent more than it
| exports it!
| fallingknife wrote:
| 99% of the people writing about how the US is a dystopian
| nightmare haven't lived in any other country.
| awillen wrote:
| One million percent yes.
| dbspin wrote:
| Outside perspective - here in Europe, enormous numbers of
| people in late middle age to old age return to university
| out of love of learning. Despite low to negligible impact
| on wages etc. They generally have better outcomes in terms
| of overall grades also. There's a boatload of research into
| intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation that supports the idea
| that we have an innate love of learning.
| phabora wrote:
| > I don't think most people going to 3rd-tier college to
| study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of
| education.
|
| Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you
| that they won't get some cushy job from the education by
| itself.
|
| Are they _necessarily_ doing it for the love of education?
| Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more
| likely to be found in them than the students at the top-
| tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace
| of six-figure salaries and social status once they
| graduate.
| barrenko wrote:
| Library works pretty well for that, and has for hundreds of
| years.
|
| *big caveat for hard sciences of course
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I don't have a lot of experience with
| other humanities, but _history_ is a verb rather than a
| noun. You learn history by doing history rather than
| reading it. I do think that universities are often too
| conservative about getting students into the archive
| quickly but a bunch of institutions are rapidly equipping
| students with archival and analysis skills and sending them
| to do history. This is very difficult to obtain from a raw
| library.
| kop316 wrote:
| I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for
| this actually.
|
| Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more
| so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went,
| tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers.
| No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire
| class).
|
| Community College professors don't do research, so they are
| usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have
| actually known quite a few professors who are in actual
| industry and teach a class or two.
|
| I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known
| local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because
| everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree
| seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging
| anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
| DC1350 wrote:
| The problem with community colleges is that you completely
| miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the
| best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard
| time meeting people in a community college who can actually
| help your career
| VLM wrote:
| If you insist on a pyramidical social structure, 99% of
| the population will never meet or network with the top
| people in their field anyway, and as such a school that
| prevents them from doing what's impossible anyway yet
| saves money is wise, especially if the alternative is
| spending ten times as much on a pale imitation of what
| the people at the top would get but they'll never
| associate with them anyway.
|
| Classic microeconomics vs macroeconomics problem.
| Individuals can always improve but you can't extend "just
| pull yourself up by your bootstraps harder" to an entire
| civilization. An individual benefits personally by going
| to Yale, if they can. You can't fix a national education
| system by making the official strategy telling kids their
| only hope is getting into Yale. Especially if there's an
| alternative that actually works for the masses, like CC.
| kop316 wrote:
| I think your comment misses my original intent. If people
| might value education for its own sake (which is what I
| was replying to), then I have found Community Colleges to
| be the perfect place for this.
|
| But to address your point:
|
| > The problem with community colleges is that you
| completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long
| as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll
| have a hard time meeting people in a community college
| who can actually help your career
|
| Since the instructor I had was a well known local
| musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig,
| and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I
| think you would be surprised just what type of networking
| oppritunities are actually are at a decent community
| college.
|
| Like I said in my comment:
|
| > I have actually known quite a few professors who are in
| actual industry and teach a class or two.
|
| One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we
| found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart
| worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year
| university. So he went to community college, and a
| colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as
| he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was
| able to pay his way through college with that job) and is
| one of the best contrbutors to that group.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| I suspect community colleges are a fantastic way to
| recruit people who one would not find otherwise. People
| taking classes at night and holding down a full time job,
| and doing well, just out of interest- that's someone who
| has potential.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Yea I missed the point. Everyone I've ever met who went
| to a community college did it specifically to learn job
| skills since those are what all the programs were for. I
| didn't know they taught things just for the sake of
| knowledge or personal interest.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's a massive number of people who as adults or even
| seniors take classes on a non-degree path at a CC--
| whether it's a language, an arts class, or whatever.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Another problem is wildly varied quality. I've seen
| course material from some community colleges that made me
| think "wow, this seems to be a high quality resource" in
| all sorts of interesting subjects, but most community
| colleges in places I've lived near or been too have
| limited programs and often low quality ones at that.
| Noos wrote:
| They generally aren't that high quality in terms of
| classes, and the humanities they offer are "transfer
| credits" when they aren't practical skills. I mean that
| there's little chance to go to a community college that has
| a strong English section, or gives any more than the basics
| of history or psychology.
|
| CCs are mostly there either for cheap transfer credits, or
| technical programs for local industry; things like cad/cam,
| aviation tech, etc.
| indy wrote:
| University is the last place for anyone who values education
| for its own sake
| curiousllama wrote:
| Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for
| education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social
| focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education
| (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking,
| etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-
| colleges).
|
| In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera
| insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
| the_only_law wrote:
| I imagine for many subjects, great benefit comes from the
| probably millions of dollars worth of equipment you get
| access to.
|
| EDIT: didn't see GPs caveat.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Because if you want education for its own sake, Google
| university will get you there much faster and cheaper.
| Universities are to get that diploma.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| With the costs required to obtain an education as they are,
| we are well beyond valuing education simply for the sake of
| valuing education. If it requires years and years to pay off,
| then we absolutely must look at it like an investment.
| awillen wrote:
| As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to
| get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a
| university.
|
| Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their
| recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO
| ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB"
| then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do.
| They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to
| one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless
| (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about
| what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is
| correcting that issue as people become more aware of what
| they're getting.
|
| And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich
| families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is
| different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to
| value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value
| education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not
| including the opportunity cost of not working for four years
| or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of
| thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of
| money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think
| there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education
| at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
| VLM wrote:
| Its also a regulation issue.
|
| Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new
| doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med
| school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical
| doctor job.
|
| Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new
| public school teachers at all, and as such the state U
| system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree
| holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is
| perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads
| in my state have to find non educational work. Four years
| of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them
| good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a
| civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money
| and talent.
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| >Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their
| recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K
| TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING
| JOB" then sure, that would be fine.
|
| can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list
| out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg.
| https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
| jawzz wrote:
| Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they're
| all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or
| artist who gets discouraged from study because "just do CS so
| you can make money" or "just go to the library it's literally
| the same thing as four years of training under experts in the
| field and discussion with other smart young people."
| DC1350 wrote:
| Almost everyone goes to college to get a job. People who
| can afford to take risks like trying to become a
| philosopher don't come from backgrounds where price is even
| a consideration. No middle class person dumb enough to
| believe trying to be a sociologist is a good idea will be
| smart enough to actually make that happen.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I don't really know of any great sociologists though.
|
| I kind of feel it may be a made up field to promote forms
| of Marxism and not something that actually contributes much
| to the body of human knowledge. Nothing entirely wrong with
| that either if it's something a person is into, it's just,
| well, we might actually be better off with less sociology
| students. The half baked and non realistic ideas that come
| out of that cause problems in the real world.
|
| The reason I feel this is not from outside observation but
| because I spent a bunch of time in sociology classes many
| years ago. 4 as I recall. I wish I'd spent the time in
| extra math classes and I believe the world would be better
| off if people did.
| minitoar wrote:
| You are wrong. Not every reply is saying that.
| awillen wrote:
| Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher
| is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for
| academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if
| you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely
| unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc.,
| maybe, but still not great odds.
|
| It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery
| winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad
| investment.
| brighton36 wrote:
| That probably has more to do with 'greatness' as a
| product of the publishing system. (Meaning: it's great
| because it's published in a prestigious medium, not
| because the content is inherently superior) The next
| plato will likely be completely uncelebrated in these
| mediums, and will publish on an uncelebrated website or
| publisher.
| smm2000 wrote:
| To be fair, first Plato was born in aristocratic family
| and got best education possible at the time with private
| tutors. He definitely did not go to equivalent of 3rd
| tier university.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I didn't know that. But, I'm not surprised. It's entirely
| possible that Ted Kaczynski is the plato we're looking
| for.
| wl wrote:
| I value education for its own sake. So I got my degree from a
| well regarded university in a lucrative field that I'm good
| at and enjoy. A roof over my head and money in my bank
| account, I can study anything I want without worrying about
| the financial yield. Sometimes that takes the form of free
| MOOCs. Sometimes that takes the form of paid classes taken
| through university extension programs. Unlike when I was
| taking classes for degrees, I'm learning things I want to
| learn, not things I have to. It's very nice.
| teeray wrote:
| This is certainly true, but the harsh reality is that there
| are "job training" degrees and luxury degrees. If you have
| all your other financial ducks aligned, I don't mind if you
| drive a Mercedes or decide to get a degree you can't possibly
| hope to get a job with. Otherwise it's just financially
| irresponsible.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not
| everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the
| language requirement most top schools have excludes many people
| who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra
| money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in
| highschool as most college language classes work much better if
| you took it in high school).
|
| I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended
| up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not
| something I can do, at least in an academic environment.
|
| That's said my life is much better for having attended college.
| However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should
| spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four
| years is too much. So if you do two years at community college,
| that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of
| $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is
| just tuition.
|
| That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the
| whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people
| spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these
| for-profit institutions.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > For example the language requirement most top schools have
| excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second
| language
|
| Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second
| language in high school?
| offtop5 wrote:
| That's the admission requirement. You also have to take a
| language in college.
|
| In ether case this isn't easily doable for people who come
| from unstable homes.
| awillen wrote:
| I don't actually think you're particularly far off from my
| point.
|
| In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of
| non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI.
| That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you
| intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a
| good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very
| much the exception.
| offtop5 wrote:
| To be blunt, many of us graduate high school unable to
| properly read and write . At least 2 years of college is
| always needed to shore these basic skills up.
|
| Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master
| degree holders for
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I'm not trying to be a dick, but introductory foreign
| language courses were, in my opinion, broadly perceived to be
| a complete joke, and passable without the slightest
| capability of forming a complete sentence.
|
| Is it possible your community college was just unreasonably
| difficult?
| offtop5 wrote:
| Ahh.
|
| Yes, infact I took French again at a different community
| college and passed.
|
| The first community college I went too tried to cram 6
| semester units into a single class. This still had the
| effect of derailing my life as I had to pick a different
| school to transfer to.
| devwastaken wrote:
| It's not just humanities degrees that are the problem. The
| problem is the market is not actually in "high demand" like
| higher education advertises. Graduating CS students across the
| U.S. are turned down by employers constantly and end up working
| in a job that doesn't require their degree nor does it use any
| skills from it. I have multiple friends in this exact
| situation.
|
| We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally
| fail and be taken over by real market demand education.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Could you elaborate on CS graduates getting turned down? I've
| seen how much trouble companies have hiring, so the only
| reasons I'm coming up with are these graduates aren't willing
| to relocate or they studied CS because it pays well, but
| they're not actually that good at it. Something very
| underappreciated, and possibly the cause of the classic CS
| class bimodal distribution, is how many students live the
| stuff outside of school, so someone _academically_ good at CS
| ends up competing with someone who has random open source
| projects, sysadmins a linux server, knows how to set up a
| network, _and_ has a CS degree.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| They came for the high school drop outs and I did not speak
| out...
|
| High school grads, College Grads, Liberal Arts Grads, Non-
| STEM Grads, Non-Tech Grads, and now here we are.
|
| They came for the average CS graduates and I did not speak
| out.
|
| How far do we have to get up the stack to notice we have a
| problem? Harvard Medical Grads?
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The problem with education was explored by Bryan Caplan in
| The Case Against Education. Education is more about who you
| admit and less about what you teach.
| Balgair wrote:
| _Eidolon_ is a now defunct online magazine specifically about
| the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail'
| essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in
| the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and
| lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a
| dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such,
| _Eidolon 's_ essay is a goldmine.
|
| Two things stuck out to me the most:
|
| 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I'm not going to
| downplay the extent of the problems we're facing. In addition
| to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities
| more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems
| facing higher education in general. Even before the massive
| disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already
| looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis,
| which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the
| other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce
| has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in
| academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not
| to mention academia's endemic problems with classism and sexual
| harassment."
|
| 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name
| sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of
| Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her
| assessment of _Eidolon 's_ efforts is so dour and bleak,
| despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there
| is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities).
|
| The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what
| exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities,
| and the Classics specifically, are _Dead_.
|
| "Abandon every hope, who enter here."
|
| https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...
| yTh0 wrote:
| I can't tell if things like this are real issues or "but
| think of the horse and buggy driver!" problems.
|
| We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long before we
| had PhDs.
|
| Obsession with normalizing agency to abide fiscal concerns is
| the real issue here.
|
| Let wealth collapse by refusing to buy into the idea we owe
| deference to those that hold wealth.
|
| Teach the classics. Write open source.
|
| None of it has to be done for a dollar, or outsized prestige.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long
| before we had PhDs._ "
|
| I think I'd like some evidence for that.
| dpoochieni wrote:
| An (sadly? or rather realistically) that is what it boils
| down to, people who read the classics, read the classics,
| whether at Harvard or elsewhere. People who are critical
| thinkers, are critical thinkers, again whether at a college
| or elsewhere. People who X, X. To think that spending money
| (and increasing amounts of it) will change this is sheer
| insanity. Sure, you might get a few that otherwise would
| have never Xed to now X, but is it not just fundamentally
| inefficient? For every p that now Xs how many are still as
| lost? What would one do next?
|
| Concerning the nurture component; Change their parents?
| Take the children away to be raised by a government?
|
| Concerning the nature component; Alter their DNA?
| phabora wrote:
| How is this an example of an efficient market when one of the
| outcomes is to simply get a "name-brand degree"?[1] Ideally it
| should just be about the other alternative, namely what you
| learnt.
|
| Let's not even get into the problems associated with education
| as a commodity.
|
| And (further)... let's not even get into the effective
| subsidies that private universities can get through things like
| tax breaks.
|
| [1] Try to justify that without circular logic.
| fossuser wrote:
| There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives
| around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a
| classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market
| value of a classics degree is basically zero?
|
| I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but
| it mostly applies:
| https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
|
| "The current university system in the US is a mess of
| incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means
| school's tuition is able to reach extreme heights and
| competition for this money leads to spending on sports
| stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the
| success of the students.
|
| Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and
| the majority of their effort is typically not spent on
| undergraduate education. This means professors are not
| typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent
| teachers.
|
| Universities care about their students to the small extent that
| it helps their brand to have successful students do important
| things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual
| outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them
| passing classes and not failing out)."
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree
| cost the same as a CS degree
|
| Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue
| together and name "college education". There's this ancient
| classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that
| were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy,
| Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-
| oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split
| between people who think of it as "this is an investment in
| yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is
| to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who
| would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those
| who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to
| school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect
| justice through political action? To signal your desirability
| through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your
| desirability through a brand like "Harvard"?
|
| I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea
| of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as
| different things as different types of achievement. This will
| come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the
| aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
| VLM wrote:
| > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
|
| Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to
| produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more
| expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree.
|
| It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving
| graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or
| earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much
| require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS
| community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure
| the greater classics community does to the same extent.
|
| Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting
| tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure
| you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of
| production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids.
|
| Which might explain why the classics are going away as
| available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands
| over long term.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
| when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
|
| Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and
| demand.
|
| > Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research
| and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on
| undergraduate education. This means professors are not
| typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be)
| excellent teachers.
|
| Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as
| this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers
| (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also
| better teachers.
| wetmore wrote:
| > Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt
| as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better
| researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were
| generally also better teachers.
|
| I've had the opposite experience.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| > Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt
| as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better
| researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were
| generally also better teachers.
|
| In engineering/math, I've seen it swing both ways. Some
| professors couldn't be bothered to teach, because are so
| busy w/ their research and/or jaded w/ the University:
| implicit assumption is to baby the undergrads and shepherd
| them along the system. In regards to funding in relation to
| teaching ability, one way to look at it is that a PI is in
| essence a salesman, you have to sell your vision to get
| funding/appointments, sell your lab to get good phd
| candidates, and sell the subject to undergrad as something
| that is interesting and worthy of learning.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| You are right on the mark on the PI being a sales-
| man/woman/*. People forget how basically the purpose of a
| leader is to sell the product, and sell it hard.
|
| Think of a research group like any other business. You
| have to create a product and sell it, except the product
| is publications and publicity.
|
| Related, university presidents are fundraisers first, ie
| selling their nonprofit to donors, in exchange for
| buildings, chairs, spots on committees (for poors),
| fuzzie-wuzzies, etc.
| fossuser wrote:
| > "Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer
| and demand."
|
| I suspect that's because these students are really buying
| prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.
|
| > Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt
| as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better
| researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were
| generally also better teachers.
|
| This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy
| competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers
| in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not
| all researchers teach much though and being good is more of
| a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I suspect that's because these students are really
| buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest
| option.
|
| Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get
| to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for
| tier 3.
| fossuser wrote:
| Which is exactly what I'd predict in a world where
| "Interest Surges in Top Colleges, While Struggling Ones
| Scrape for Applicants".
|
| When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier
| colleges don't actually have the product that's in
| demand. So they can charge basically nothing since
| they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a
| business (unless they lie to students who don't know
| better and pretend that they're selling prestige they
| don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of
| lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit
| ones are explicitly this.
|
| If they actually provided valuable education that'd be
| different, but they largely don't.
|
| I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but
| the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be
| good at education.
|
| Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at
| education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution
| could do what Universities largely just pretend to do.
| You could make money from ISAs and aligned
| incentives/student success. You could also make money
| from companies as a recruiting agency if your students
| were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum
| would be closely tied to what's needed and what's
| relevant.
|
| You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't
| want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff
| (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or
| economically viable on their own.
|
| Actual education is super powerful, it's just a
| diminutive part of what Universities have become and
| they're not very good at it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all
| but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually
| be good at education.
|
| Actually, the top schools would benefit from these the
| most. With close to 100% employment rates and better
| median salaries than anyone else.
|
| > Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at
| education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution
| could do what Universities largely just pretend to do.
| You could make money from ISAs and aligned
| incentives/student success. You could also make money
| from companies as a recruiting agency if your students
| were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum
| would be closely tied to what's needed and what's
| relevant.
|
| I wonder how much income stream is coming from
| underperforming programs at modern Universities. For some
| of them it must be substantial. And I'm also wondering if
| some of them also redirect the income toward more useful
| programs or research.
| fossuser wrote:
| Lambda School style ISAs cap the return at 30k.
|
| The top schools don't need ISAs because they're selling
| prestige they can charge a lot more for. Since they're so
| highly selective they can admit only students who will
| succeed anyway.
|
| Maybe over time that prestige will change, but I don't
| see that as near-term. I think it'd be better if they did
| ISAs, I just don't think they'll want to (or their ISAs
| will be worse for students than Lambda School's).
|
| Right now top schools can charge up front and it doesn't
| really matter what they provide.
| violiner wrote:
| > a classics degree is the easiest option
|
| You have clearly never studied Ancient Greek.
| timthorn wrote:
| > a classics degree is the easiest option
|
| I'm not sure I'd agree with that assertion.
| fossuser wrote:
| You can substitute it for English, Communications, or
| Literature if you prefer.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Elite colleges are weird. At state schools, usually the
| technical programs are the most rigorous. While elite
| colleges offer largely identical technical degrees, their
| most difficult or prestigious course might be something
| obscure like Philosophy, Politics & Economics.
|
| It's almost like a shibboleth: only those who actually
| went to the school will recognize the prestige.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer
| and demand.
|
| I suspect a lot of this is because of enormous amounts of
| risk-free (to the schools) money from the government.
|
| Also, different degrees definitely cost different prices -
| the cost of an MBA is far higher than the cost of a masters
| in history, for example.
| musicale wrote:
| > the better researchers (more publications, better funded
| labs) were generally also better teachers.
|
| Also anecdata, but I've observed no such correlation. In
| the sciences I've seen the opposite - that Nobel prize
| winners (or similar) can be terrible at teaching
| undergraduates, and even poor mentors for grad students.
| Some faculty even seem to resent teaching introductory or
| undergraduate courses. In contrast, I've found many
| graduate students still remember what it was like to be a
| beginner trying to learn and understand the material for
| the first time. (Though not all of them are great
| lecturers.)
|
| That being said, in CS I've found many Turing award type
| faculty to be fantastic lecturers (and occasionally
| acceptable graduate advisors.)
|
| Overall, I'd put my money behind the incentives: at a large
| research university, tenure is based on 1) research grants,
| 2) research productivity, publication, and reputation. The
| university will pay lip service to teaching (both mentoring
| graduate students and teaching undergraduates) but it is
| usually a distant third if it is actually considered at
| all.
|
| It's not a coincidence that the university and faculty will
| talk about a "teaching load" - i.e. a burden that one is
| supposed to endure that distracts from the primary goals of
| fundraising and research.
| yw3410 wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with your article.
|
| I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that
| incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free,
| the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of
| students rather than quality.
|
| This already happens in things like recruiting where
| incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a
| stretch to apply it to ISA agreements.
|
| It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who
| offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the
| winnings.
|
| What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living
| wage on completion until you found a job.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think LS is piloting a program that pays students per
| month while they attend.
|
| Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential
| return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't
| thought of.
|
| Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that.
|
| I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of
| successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would
| be the most likely way to get a return.
|
| LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them
| importantly different.
|
| - They cap return to 30k.
|
| - They only apply if you get hired in a software role
| making more than 50k a year.
|
| - They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit
| 30k).
| oceanplexian wrote:
| You are correct about lending being the problem. Education is
| not a free market where capital is allocated in proportion to
| value that is created, because all of the loans are
| subsidized. And the government can't put itself into a
| position where it subsidized some loans but not others based
| on the curriculum, because there would be public outrage.
|
| A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to
| take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they
| were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a
| test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a
| deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient
| employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of
| knowledge.
| gshubert17 wrote:
| I've listened to lecture courses from The Great Courses
| (Teaching Company) on literature, history, music,
| philosophy, and science for 20+ years now. I get to learn
| what I want, at my own pace, etc. The lecturers are good,
| and I can replay or repeat lectures as I like. Many
| advantages of taking college courses without the hassles
| you ran into.
| hardtke wrote:
| > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
| when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
|
| Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to
| get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill
| one can acquire in college is how to communicate,
| particularly how to write well. The second most valuable
| skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each
| major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value
| of learning these skills is basically the same however you
| accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job
| right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to
| communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends
| long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
| neonological wrote:
| >Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when
| the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
|
| This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and
| demand economics then only rich people would be able to
| afford a CS degree.
|
| Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics
| and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics
| completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian
| and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in
| acceptance.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think it's not good - not because a CS degree needs to be
| more expensive, but because the liberal arts degrees are
| over priced.
|
| A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does.
|
| CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible,
| not less.
|
| The current system harms the poor.
|
| As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand
| economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions
| (often this is true of specific departments too).
| cldellow wrote:
| For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be
| the case in the Canadian public university that I attended,
| the University of Waterloo.
|
| > why are all degrees four years?
|
| UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically
| gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year
| degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be
| written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to
| inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)".
|
| > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree?
|
| Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs
| $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data:
| https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition)
|
| It would be interesting to understand how they set the
| prices.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > UW offers three-year degrees.
|
| Some engineering programs are a five-year bachelors, due to
| a requirement to have a 1-year internship. Yet, other
| universities offer a 5-year BS+MS engineering program.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > It would be interesting to understand how they set the
| prices.
|
| It's not the same everywhere. Cross the border to Quebec
| and it's a flat rate (every program is the same).
| dbspin wrote:
| Wow. As a European I had no idea that Canadian education
| was so expensive. Was under the mistaken impression that it
| was largely free, like health care. Obviously much cheaper
| than the US - which is life destroyingly expensive. But the
| figures you cite are still pricey enough to exclude
| enormous numbers of people from higher education.
| ido wrote:
| For comparison in Germany and Austria public universities
| are mostly free or close to it (a few EUR100s per year in
| misc fees).
| chongli wrote:
| _it was largely free_
|
| It is largely free if your means are limited. I'm in 4th
| year of mathematics at Waterloo right now and all but
| $170 of my $4300 tuition this term was paid for by
| government grants and bursaries.
|
| Waterloo is actually even more expensive for
| international students. Some that I know are paying
| ~$3000 per half credit (5.0 credits per year is the norm)
| and that's just in mathematics, not software engineering.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Wow. As a European I had no idea that Canadian
| education was so expensive.
|
| It also depends on the province (most funding is at the
| province level).
|
| > Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely
| free, like health care.
|
| Ohh don't worry, what they don't pay in insurance fees
| they pay in taxes and fees.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| What does the last part of your message mean? Obviously
| no one believes universal health care is actually free.
|
| The US spends a metric ton on medical expenses any way so
| a qualifier for Canadians like that doesn't seem right.
| swat535 wrote:
| The government will basically offer financial aid to
| everyone and the interest rate on those are really low.
| My friend got a law degree for ~40k CAD and he got it all
| from financial aid. Now that he is working, he is paying
| it off with a comical interest rate.
| cldellow wrote:
| I suspect the engineering tuition is set as a function of
| supply and demand - the University of Waterloo has a
| fairly competitive engineering program. For example,
| engineering at Laurentian University, another public
| university in the same province, is only $10,000/year.
|
| Still, that's a large burden. There are government
| programs that provide a mix of non-repayable grants and
| deferred payment loans to people who qualify based on
| family income. I don't have too much personal experience
| with them, but I think the intent (and, for the most
| part, effect) is that economic ability shouldn't be a
| barrier for attendance.
| bawolff wrote:
| Waterloo is probably one of the more expensive canadian
| schools.
|
| Not saying others are cheap, but just looking at waterloo
| is probably not represtative.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| US education is hardly "life-destroyingly expensive".
| It's more than the rest of the world, but it is
| definitely manageable to pay for it yourself with student
| loans. If you have financial aid (billions of dollars in
| aid is out there for good students in financial need).
| More cost-conscious folks can save thousands more by
| splitting an undergraduate degree between a low-cost
| 2-year college (community college, junior college) and
| then transfer in to a 4-year school to complete a degree.
|
| College costs around the
| world:https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-college-
| costs-aroun...
| mavelikara wrote:
| Availability of credit does not make a purchase less
| expensive.
| conistonwater wrote:
| Bear in mind those are Canadian dollars, not the regular
| dollars, so the price tag is always going to be a little
| more confusing for the non-Canadians.
| musicale wrote:
| > life destroyingly expensive
|
| nailed it
| filoleg wrote:
| >UW offers three-year degrees.
|
| Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty
| common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
|
| I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While
| the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the
| median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some
| people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2
| of those personally).
|
| In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as
| "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate
| in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that
| workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and
| graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per
| semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
|
| Of course some classes have prerequisites and time
| overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always
| control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was
| the experience at my public college, as well as that of
| almost everyone else I talked to.
| bilegeek wrote:
| >Of course some classes have prerequisites and time
| overlaps
|
| One semester is designed with a particular set of
| prerequisites in mind. Most times, one prerequisite holds
| back every other class on the career path. So, if you
| don't take that one class that semester, you can only
| take the elective courses until you take that class.
| Which means that when you run out of electives, what was
| supposed to be one semester becomes two, with the only
| course you qualify for in the second being the one you
| missed (this isn't necessarily true for the spring
| semester, since you could take the missing class during
| the summer.)
|
| This is fine, but it leads to a disparity; taking on more
| classes than the recommended workload has a pretty linear
| correlation with decreased time to a degree (though the
| problem still persists that you don't qualify for your
| next classes); but taking on less than the recommended
| often jumps straight to doubling the time needed for a
| degree, with very little room in-between.
| filoleg wrote:
| It all heavily depends on how your specific college
| manages your curriculum and how open the choices are.
|
| My personal example: decided to ignore most of the
| general studies classes I could ignore (aka those that
| weren't prereqs for any major-related classes, like most
| social studies) for the first year, did two 14-16 hour
| semesters for the first year, about 12 hours (each
| semester) for the second and third year (aka minimum
| required to be considered full time), took one fall
| semester off and then did one summer semester instead,
| and then finished off my last year with two back-to-back
| 22-24 hour semesters (during which I took a lot of those
| classes I ignored during my first year).
|
| My school let us do it pretty much free-form, and it was
| amazing. Taking all the important major-related classes
| early on let me become knowledgeable enough for
| internships before a lot of peers (since I ended up
| taking some important major classes a semester or two
| ahead instead of taking gen ed classes like a lot of
| others did at the time), and during my last year I got a
| bit of a break by taking some of those "general ed"
| classes that most of my peers took early on.
|
| I love this system, because it allows people to balance
| it all as they see fit. Some people would like to get all
| the gen ed classes out of the way first. Some would want
| to save them for last. Some would like to take them
| regularly at a "one general ed class per semester" pace.
| Some people would like to just do 16 credit hours every
| semester. Some would like to slow down at times and them
| ramp up heavily at times (which is what I did). Some
| would like to graduate early, others would like to take
| their time. Whichever style works for you.
|
| And yeah, we had a general guideline for every major,
| with every class planned out every semester serving as a
| "sample workload", but it was just a guideline. Most
| people followed it to a degree, but not close. Others
| completely threw it out of the window, because they sorta
| knew what and how they wanted to do it. I think it is
| helpful to have for those who don't want to plan out
| things to their max efficiency and just want to not worry
| about it. But it isn't something that everyone is forced
| to abide by, it is more like an advice.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| The University of Oregon charges based on credit hours so
| more or less its an identical price for any degree (sans
| scholarship). I've always been under the impression this
| this is the norm. I'm glad your school offered reduced
| rates for some degree paths but I think it is an outlier.
| filoleg wrote:
| Unfortunately, they didn't reduce the rates. It was the
| same tuition price per semester, regardless of credit
| hours (as long as you still stay full-time, because the
| price for part-time is half). Which meant that people who
| graduated in quicker time spent less money. The cost was
| also the same for all undergrad degrees.
|
| But it wasn't much of a concern at GT, because of the
| statewide Hope/Zell Miller scholarship covering the
| tuition based on the credit hours (and not on the actual
| semesters, you just have to have GPA high enough to
| qualify, which wasn't that high at all). So if you wanted
| to speedrun it and risk your GPA, you could do that. But
| if you wanted to take it slower, that scholarship allowed
| you to do so, because they paid regardless of how many
| years you took to graduate, as long as you were full time
| (with some nuances around part-time that aren't worth
| getting into right now), had high enough GPA, and you
| werent over the total cap of credit hours needed to
| graduate from your program.
| screye wrote:
| > There is so much broken with modern universities and
| incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years?
| Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when
| the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
|
| Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in
| the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each
| other.
| awillen wrote:
| Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a
| psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in
| three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have
| friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably
| would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on
| their degree.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It might be different now, but I remember my computer
| engineering degree could have probably been done in 3
| years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite
| tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain
| order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to
| take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition
| of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write
| compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take
| university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own
| if I wanted to.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a
| MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level
| theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
|
| Ya, and the acting students can learn about "compliers"
| online too. Outside of a garage startup, an engineer is
| useless if they cannot integrate into a larger team
| through the spoken and written word. I've run into BS
| students who haven't read a book since highschool. I've
| met compsci masters students who still panic if asked to
| stand up and explain their work to a large group. If a
| few hours learning about theatre helps solidify your
| language and presentation abilities, maybe it should be
| mandatory.
| foolinaround wrote:
| while communication skills are essential, needing a
| theatre program is a stretch.
|
| Students should just join a toastmasters
| mywittyname wrote:
| I was required to take public speaking as part of my
| degree.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Well, the one thing we can all agree on is that football
| has no place in education. I have never played it, don't
| watch it, and therefore it has never done anyone any good
| anywhere.
| evilduck wrote:
| TBF you can learn how MOSFETs and compilers work on your
| own too, you don't need college courses for those either.
| A higher education degree is a package deal and isn't
| necessarily intended to be a vocational training course,
| for better or for worse.
| packagetheft wrote:
| You can get a very simplified and overall summary of a
| compiler and mosfet but you won't necessarily be learning
| it. Knowing the basic of a mosfet is very different from
| actually getting hands on experience and taping out a 7nm
| chip.
| taurath wrote:
| But of course businesses do treat it as a vocational
| course if they gatekeeper based on that degree. The
| actual value on the job is different than in the
| interview room, a fact that perpetuates inequality. I'm a
| counterpoint in that I've no degree but have done well,
| but I can't find myself recommending self learning
| because the barrier to initial entry to industry is so
| high.
| agar wrote:
| Have you considered that one reason businesses gatekeep
| based on the degree is /because/ of the well-roundedness
| that comes from a university education instead of a trade
| school or online learning?
|
| Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still
| measurable during an interview: presentation skills,
| discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable
| research into the hiring organization, insightful
| questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration
| skills articulated through example and past experience,
| etc.
|
| If an interview is exclusively writing code on a
| whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you
| during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
| foolinaround wrote:
| the business just did not have a good filtering
| (recruitment) function - either time or expertise, and so
| decided to use other signals, like college degrees, etc.
| matwood wrote:
| > why are all degrees four years?
|
| Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you
| certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some
| classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in
| college I went year round so I could have a more even
| schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her
| undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She
| didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to
| get done and move on.
| boatsie wrote:
| I think the parent post refers to all of the different
| majors taking the same time.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Can you get four years worth of government-backed tuition
| money out of a student when the degree only takes. a
| year?
| jdale27 wrote:
| As other comments have pointed out, many colleges do not
| require you to stay for four years if you can finish
| faster. But most students do not want to, or are not
| capable of, taking twice the normal course load. Not
| everything is a conspiracy by the elites to extract more
| money from the masses.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| The student loan system created artificial demand. Demand
| increases price. Students get larger loans because it's easy.
| Demand continues. Prices rise more, and so on. Price will
| rise as much as the market can bear.
|
| Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians
| make out well. Students and often their parents lose.
|
| That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two
| years of community college and then transfer for two more
| years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too
| often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g.,
| two years of community college and then transfer for two
| more years where a degree would have more prestige
|
| Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable
| to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly,
| finding a community college with programs in a given field
| that would support transfer to a prestige school is
| difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal
| students and often the surrounding community is not student
| supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on
| tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab
| fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any
| significant campus-based aid, which can make them _more_
| expensive for some students than "prestige" universities.
| fossuser wrote:
| Agreed - "students refuse to do so" as the parent comment
| mentioned because they recognize the risk, both with the
| things you suggest and the ding to the prestige they're
| trying to buy in the first place.
|
| While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also
| think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason
| for the federally backed loans was to give people access
| to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent
| is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives
| that get created are quite bad.
| tzs wrote:
| Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have
| lead to tuition increases?
|
| I've not been able to find much historical tuition data
| online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about
| 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten)
| showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-
| federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
| lumost wrote:
| Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the
| price increase. The current loan program was introduced to
| stem increasing government direct grant expenditures.
|
| Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs
| have risen to match the maximum that students are willing
| to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest
| rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm
| willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates
| rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.
|
| Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face
| diminished demand for college education. It's a great time
| to found a new university with a lower cost structure and
| more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors
| degree in order to join a CS master program? Why can't they
| test or interview folks into master's programs? Schools are
| precluding themselves from good candidates that didn't see
| the value in bachelor's degrees (often for the reasons found
| in this thread).
| fossuser wrote:
| Even if you have a BS, you'll still need to get
| recommendations from professors you likely have not talked
| to in a decade (and also take the GRE).
| beastman82 wrote:
| I suspect this is not generally accurate. I have an MS in
| CS and had neither recs nor a GRE score
| wikibob wrote:
| Where did you go?
| fma wrote:
| Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science requires neither
| GRE nor letters from professors. I got my letters from my
| former managers. Of course you can get them from
| professors, if you want...they want letters from anyone
| who can vouch for your competency and ability to complete
| the program.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I suspect willingness to complete an undergraduate degree
| is a strong signal to masters' programs. The 4-year degree
| is itself part of the test for the master's program.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a
| bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program?
|
| Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I
| have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything.
| It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any
| kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
| foolinaround wrote:
| oh i did not know that! Which college is this? US?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Every school that has tried to get me to consider their
| masters CS programs (despite not realizing I don't have a
| bachelors) so far has rejected me on the basis that I
| don't have a bachelors. Definitely curious where you
| went.
| musicale wrote:
| > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
| when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero
|
| If that is true it probably says more about the short-
| sightedness of the job market rather than the practical
| benefits of a program in Classics.
|
| A Classics education - like CS in fact - actually has wide
| applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason
| we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin
| classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance
| to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are
| unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.
|
| Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and
| writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the
| complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts
| computer "languages" to shame.
|
| Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the
| job. ;-)
| fossuser wrote:
| > "Classics graduates are also likely to have superior
| reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS
| graduate."
|
| "Typical" might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn't
| buy it in the general case.
| musicale wrote:
| Classics programs generally require more evaluated prose
| writing, as well as text reading and analysis, so it is
| reasonable to assume that they would yield benefits in
| actual writing skill.
|
| However, it would be interesting to have some data to
| compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs.
| CS graduates.
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't mean to come across as overly harsh or partisan
| against liberal arts majors. I think the content is often
| interesting. I just think it should be taken along side a
| technical major too.
|
| I do have a bias against overly flowery language that
| obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes
| from the less technical side of the academic spectrum:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
| musicale wrote:
| I assume you haven't read many academic papers in CS? ;-)
|
| That's a bit of a joke. Clarity is of course a primary
| virtue in all forms of academic writing, and one that is
| often ignored either unintentionally or in an attempt to
| impress one's reviewers and/or to signal one's membership
| in a particular tribe.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| > This means professors are not typically rewarded for being
| (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
|
| This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when
| I was in college. The joke was that being voted the
| department's best instructor by the students was an excellent
| way to be denied tenure.
| gandalfian wrote:
| _why are all degrees four years?_
|
| The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year
| official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans
| are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a
| university with longer courses but more holiday and students
| interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I think people need to stop thinking about higher education in
| terms of financial yield. Or at least make it a much smaller
| piece of the metric.
|
| If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education
| on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life
| that isn't directly related to your occupation?
| keiferski wrote:
| Seems to me like further polarization. Only those that can
| afford the elite colleges (or be "smart" enough to get in) will
| be educated, while the rest will skip any personal development
| and just go right into the market.
|
| Educating people in the skills necessary for being good
| citizens doesn't cost that much. Most of the books required are
| free. Yet somehow the common response to "college is expensive"
| is "get rid of it" instead of "make it less expensive."
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > Yet somehow the common response to "college is expensive"
| is "get rid of it" instead of "make it less expensive."
|
| I don't know what country you are talking about but at least
| in the US, we have community colleges which are very cheap
| and can "educate people in the skills necessary for being
| good citizens". It is only the worthless degrees from private
| / for-profit colleges which are a problem.
| keiferski wrote:
| I have taken classes at communities colleges. I'm sure many
| are good institutions, but my experience was that
| absolutely no one there cared about learning. It is very
| clearly treated as "second class."
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why can't the skills necessary for being good citizens be
| taught in HS like they were back when going to college was
| rare?
| keiferski wrote:
| Because the world has grown more complex and more education
| is required. It isn't 1955 anymore.
| fallingknife wrote:
| How is the world more complex? What else needs to be
| taught today?
| wiz21c wrote:
| > the skills necessary for being good citizens
|
| this one hundred thousand times.
| econnors wrote:
| > Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be
| "smart" enough to get in) will be educated
|
| This is how it is today. The only difference is people are
| paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not
| actually learning valuable skills.
|
| > Yet somehow the common response to "college is expensive"
| is "get rid of it" instead of "make it less expensive."
|
| We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can
| get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like -
| unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of
| useless degrees, and increased tuition.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yet somehow the rest of the developed world manages to
| offer liberal arts degrees that don't cost $50,000 a year.
| The trick is: don't spend millions on football stadiums,
| don't hire hundreds of administrators, and don't offer
| student loans that are impossible to default on.
|
| It really isn't that complicated, especially for the single
| wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I work for a consulting company which helps these
| struggling colleges. It's a difficult discussion to have.
| When you tell them that they are spending way, way more
| than they need to on administration, they usually 'ahem'
| and 'guffaw', especially when the implication is that the
| people in the room with you are part of the problem.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can
| get low interest rate loans"
|
| What? Giving out easy loans doesn't make something cheaper,
| it makes something more expensive up to causing a bubble
| that will crash the rest of economy, like we did with
| housing in 2008.
| [deleted]
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| You have the wrong idea because of the headline prices of
| elite schools. Yes, the prices are high.
|
| On the other hand, no-one who is admitted to (say) Harvard is
| going to be prevented from going by an inability to pay.
| These top schools are rich enough to fund need-based
| scholarships.
|
| (source: wife is a professor at an Ivy League school)
| michaelt wrote:
| Nobody's "unable to pay" so long as there are government-
| backed undischargable loans on offer.
| austincheney wrote:
| > or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a
| particular career path (e.g. CS degree)
|
| I so completely disagree. College/university is for education.
| If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load
| of money.
|
| As an example lawyers and doctors don't gain skills in
| law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced
| internships for that.
|
| CompSci graduates can't tell the difference because the
| software industry isn't mature. In all other professional
| career paths there is some combination of licenses or
| certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a
| prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck
| driver than it does to be a software developer.
| bilegeek wrote:
| > If you want skills go to a trade school
|
| Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers,
| carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any
| of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were
| machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist,
| a college degree is required unless you want your resume to
| go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of
| having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e.
| nepotism).
|
| The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during
| employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact
| that most can't get employment in the first place without a
| degree, and internships don't pay the bills.
|
| In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have
| generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather
| than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges
| still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
| austincheney wrote:
| > if you want to be an engineer or scientist
|
| Get a graduate degree and then a professional license, such
| as CISSP. Software developers are just skilled technicians
| like carpenters and plumbers.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than
| it does to be a software developer.
|
| More what? Licenses? License != skills.
|
| A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and
| having the ability to see is probably the most difficult
| aspect. The technical sections contain information that you
| have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most
| people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study
| per section.
| austincheney wrote:
| > More what? Licenses? License != skills.
|
| Right, but what are the minimum requirements to become a
| software developer? A single 30 minute interview? There
| aren't any administrative or legal requirements. There is
| no minimum educational requirement.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>I believe there are really two positive things that can come
| out of going to college
|
| While I agree with you and approached my university education
| with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see
| universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment,
| open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc.
|
| Whether _any_ of these practical or experiential goals are most
| optimally met, in terms of time /life/money/effort expanded,
| through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and
| heated discussion entirely :)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile
| investment "
|
| I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that
| univerities are not really there for education but instead a
| giant sorting machine to separate plebs from
| (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick).
|
| They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows
| their production, and supplies millions with the best goods.
| Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a
| percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would
| destroy their brand.
|
| Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are
| they best because they pick brightest students and they
| contribute nothing special?
|
| A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on
| this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum
| principle.
| abecode wrote:
| I heard an interesting analogy that universities are more
| like religions than businesses. If you factor out all the
| beliefs/rituals in religion and knowledge/education in
| universities, they are both human organizations that seek to
| prolong/maximize their existence, rather than to grow or
| maximize shareholder value like in companies.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >They don't work like a normal market, there best company
| grows theur production, and supplies millions with the best
| goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a
| fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to
| unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
|
| This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
| dpoochieni wrote:
| I agree, the unwashed masses do destroy most of everything.
| Granted Harvard is not what it used to be, same as an MS is
| not what it used to be, a Phd is not what it used to be. In
| the past the quality was even higher, more akin to an
| artisan workshop than whatever mass-anything you could
| conceive of.
| fossuser wrote:
| Relatedly I read the top colleges try to get students they
| know they'll never admit to apply, because the more that
| apply, the more they can reject and the more selective they
| become.
|
| Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as
| possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or
| are they best because they pick brightest students and they
| contribute nothing special?_ "
|
| They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I
| do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in
| turn attracts the brightest students.
| aarongray wrote:
| The best researchers are rarely the best teachers
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They won't be stumped by a question from a smart
| undergrad. The best teachers might fail to make it a
| teachable moment.
| phabora wrote:
| You can't use teacher as a synonym for researcher, they're
| two completely different things.
| tryonenow wrote:
| >A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on
| this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-
| sum principle.
|
| Unless you recognize that human ability is not equally
| distributed. In which case colleges need to be exclusionary
| to maintain prestige. And that prestige is an important
| signal in a universe where success is dependent on
| competence.
|
| Conversely, when prestige signals are eroded, there are
| gradual, self-reinforcing downstream effects, wherein all of
| our institutions - industry, media, government, academia -
| are gradually populated with cohorts of reduced competence,
| and society at large becomes less capable of recognizing
| merit, particularly given that when once clear signals like
| alma mater are no longer accurate, laypeople are more drawn
| to the nonsensical belief that all humans are equally
| capable.
|
| And slowly the withering of these institutions, and
| recognition of/appreciation for competence, lead to a
| withering of society and, I think, this phenomenon is one of
| the drivers behind the ongoing collapse of the American
| Empire, for better or worse. The intent behind lowering
| standards for entry is amiable but based on a faulty and
| ultimately dangerous assumption.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >They don't work like a normal market, there best company
| grows their production, and supplies millions with the best
| goods.
|
| If it was currently possible to take a group of 18 year olds,
| and transform them into highly motivated, highly intelligent
| people, I assume it would exist for sale.
|
| Unfortunately, the construction of a person seems to be
| highly complex, and is subject to genetics, home life and
| parental wealth, childhood experiences, peer and other
| influences, etc.
|
| Until then, humans will continue to use shortcuts for
| assessing the probability of one's future ability to
| "succeed" (however one wants to define it), one of which is
| attaining admittance at certain institutions.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| In many other countries, top academics and researchers are at
| large public universities.
|
| Maybe it would be money well-spent for the public-sector to
| poach top academics from private intuitions.
|
| It would lead to salary inflation, but might be the most cost
| effective way to sap prestige and inject into good public
| universities.
| phabora wrote:
| > In many other countries, top academics and researchers
| are at large public universities.
|
| But that's not even terribly relevant to the average
| student. An undergraduate won't benefit from going down the
| same hallways as the world's foremost expert on Nigerian
| guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having
| studied at the _top_ university (in terms of research, not
| teaching) matters a lot.
| ghaff wrote:
| It happens. University of Texas. At least parts of the
| University of California system. UMass Amherst is a pretty
| good school. At least main campuses of the upper tier of
| state universities can provide good educations. What's
| probably also true is that you can go to Ohio State and
| either take advantage of it or cruise through partying and
| taking X for jocks courses.
| keiferski wrote:
| The funny thing is how people constantly bemoan the state of
| politics, yet consistently argue for evaluating degrees
| entirely based on their financial outcome. As if an educated
| citizenry will just appear from the ether.
|
| The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.
| labcomputer wrote:
| 1. Before the post-WWII GI bill, which sent an enormous
| surge of young men to college in the 1950's, the percentage
| of Americans with a college degree was measured in single
| digits (Bachelor degrees then were as common as Ph.D.s
| today). And, yet, we still somehow managed to have a
| functioning democracy[1].
|
| 2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome
| simply because there is no other way to justify spending a
| quarter million dollars on a degree. That is an order of
| magnitude more than it costs to deliver a high quality
| education[2].
|
| If college were _truly_ just about learning, you could
| start cranking out college-educated citizens for $20k a
| pop. At price it 's an easy decision to make. Instead,
| colleges have become luxury resorts with a classroom as one
| of the amenities. They compete on things like best food,
| recreation and nightlife. It's not (necessarily) a problem
| to bundle education with fun, but you have to justify the
| expense to your customers. Colleges have chosen to
| highlight the differences in earnings between those with
| degrees and those without.
|
| [1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should
| strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing
| the opposite could easily point out that the increasing
| political discord is correlated with the increasing
| fraction of degree holders.
|
| [2] The cost of the primary input has decreased: Faculty
| salaries have been stagnant for 40 years--for a given
| "level". But faculty salaries have actually decreased when
| you account for "title deflation". Colleges increasingly
| rely on "adjunct" faculty and delay the promotion from
| assistant to full professor. It is now common for PhDs to
| do two or even _three_ post-docs (which can include
| teaching duties) before getting a first appointment. Thus,
| a 40 year-old academic today has a lower title and costs
| less to employ than a 30 year-old academic from the middle
| of the 20th century.
| fossuser wrote:
| > "[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we
| should strive for a better educated electorate, someone
| arguing the opposite could easily point out that the
| increasing political discord is correlated with the
| increasing fraction of degree holders."
|
| I read somewhere, but unfortunately can't remember where.
| That disaffected highly educated people stir up a lot of
| political trouble - so these things might be related in a
| causal way (though I'm a little skeptical).
|
| I also wonder how much university just has people
| exchange one cultural belief system for another based on
| who is around them rather than learning how to think
| critically and independently.
|
| My personal experience leads me to think that most people
| will just start to believe what everyone around them
| believes, I worry how much I'm affected by this too.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "1950's, the percentage of Americans with a college
| degree was measured in single digits (Bachelor degrees
| then were as common as Ph.D.s today). And, yet, we still
| somehow managed to have a functioning democracy"
|
| You could argue the world in 1950s was totally different,
| and today that education is necessary.
|
| Alternatively you could take a view that the world was
| comparable enough to draw conclusions. But then, 1878 was
| 'equidistant' to 1950's, as 1950's is to today. That's
| the year US had witch trials. Lynching was still
| happening, and continued untill 1960's. Now I am willing
| to bet that folks here do not want to descend into
| barbarism, and that education has a huge role to play
| here.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| That is a good observation, but one that I see very few
| people make.
| lhorie wrote:
| > Those schools that are providing substantial negative value
| to their students ought to go under
|
| I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there
| is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad
| quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of
| whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in
| supply.
|
| I think a better alternative is having more schools have
| tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some
| programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount
| of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to
| teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset
| in the real world.
|
| Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are
| good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but
| they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing
| can pay reasonably well.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's always the option of doing a little bit of basic
| research before spending a significant amount.
| fspeech wrote:
| So long as the top tier universities are not expanding
| enrollments I fail to see what real change would come from more
| applications. Maybe they will get a bit more diverse. The lower
| tier schools will get their enrollment so long as the total
| demand is still there.
| pisteoff wrote:
| > people are learning how to value educational degrees based on
| what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions
| accordingly.
|
| So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and
| culture when instead we should be learning about how to make
| the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to
| maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the
| bottom line that matters! Got it.
|
| Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree.
| I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically,
| and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data
| structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the
| same degree.
|
| I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is
| easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds
| boring as fuck.
| Camillo wrote:
| But many of the PhDs minted at first-tier colleges have no
| career prospects but to teach at second-tier ones, and so
| forth. You need lots of students down the chain to keep them
| employed; it's basically a Ponzi scheme.
|
| So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting
| into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected
| pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| The market is heavily subsidized, to the tune of the annual
| $120+ billion in Federally guaranteed grants and loans that the
| DOE boasts of being provided every year in its public letters.
| The loaning of such large sums to teenagers who don't yet
| understand basic financial cost/benefit analysis severely
| distorts the market.
|
| When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing
| to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more
| luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger
| party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's
| easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of
| money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair
| sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on
| administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow,
| desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of
| decades of compounding inflation by subsidy.
|
| https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-repo...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/kMl8f
| swiley wrote:
| Maybe if they charged reasonable prices they'd have more
| applicants. The university I went to let you go for free if you
| kept a 4.0 GPA and had high SAT scores.
| showerst wrote:
| Then you've created an extreme incentive for grade inflation,
| since professors know an A- could lead to a promising student
| getting kicked out over finances.
| jseliger wrote:
| Incentives for grade inflation are already pretty extreme:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-
| profess...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I hate GPA incentives because a lot of classes are subject to
| interpretation over whether you comprehend the material.
| Physics and math you can't lie. Programming has enumerable
| variations to a correct answer. General education classes are
| 100% up to how the instructor feels about your assignment that
| day.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder why nobody wants to go to a shit college.
| seibelj wrote:
| > _Even before the pandemic, Dr. Baldridge said, "the rich were
| getting richer and the poor were getting more and more
| challenged, in terms of institutions."_
|
| Framing this as "rich" vs. "poor" is ridiculous. These "poor"
| institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper.
| There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of
| unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants
| to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I'm
| happy it's finally happening.
| musicale wrote:
| Given the incredible scarcity of academic jobs and huge surplus
| of Ph.D. graduates, I'd be surprised if even relatively unknown
| schools in the middle of nowhere couldn't attract hundreds of
| highly qualified applicants.
|
| Landing a faculty job at any university - public or private - is
| an extraordinary achievement.
| DC1350 wrote:
| A huge generational change is that young people can just google
| "best X" for every life decision instead of caring about what
| they're exposed to organically. What job to do, city to live in,
| how to dress, etc. They can also find a community and detailed
| guides for achieving pretty much anything they want, so the
| special in-group knowledge isn't a barrier anymore. Anyone
| familiar with the whole tech interview prep culture should be
| able to understand that similar cultures exist for everything
| from academia to online dating. The downside is that the upper
| tier of everything is a lot more competitive so it's harder to
| win without gaming the system.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > it's harder to win without gaming the system.
|
| I would argue that the people who succeed at that are pretty
| bright anyway, but are just applying their skill in an
| undesired way.
| logicslave wrote:
| 100% great comment. This even extends to consumer products
| ip26 wrote:
| This comment has a critical undertone but I think it's pretty
| much right. Thinking back, when I was 17 and applying for
| college, deciding what schools you should apply to was a really
| murky process. Most people pretty much depended on reputation &
| word-of-mouth, and nobody even talked about schools outside the
| state. On top of that, a 17 year old has had little time to
| accrue knowledge of various schools. Whereas today you can find
| an endless trove of information from your bedroom to feed your
| decision.
| jaykru wrote:
| the information available and advertised to most 17-year-olds
| (back when I was browsing: US News, College Confidential)
| isn't much of an improvement. In my case the former relies on
| a bunch of bunk data and weird metrics for evaluation, while
| the latter mostly revolved around very coarse word-of-mouth
| reputation.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What is an improvement is information about income and job
| placement from various institutions and degrees.
|
| It's almost trivial to chart one's income possibilities
| based on where you graduate from and what degree you get.
| The knowledge about how to get into a tech job, or a high
| finance job, or get into medical school, or get hired by a
| top legal firm is available to everyone whereas it was
| limited before to those who knew people who knew these
| things.
|
| We know what cities and suburbs of those cities will lead
| to maximal probabilities of "success", we know which
| schools have the highest achieving kids (or the ones with
| the richest parents), etc. It saves a lot of time to be
| able to filter real estate listings by greatschools.org
| metrics before.
| grepthisab wrote:
| I have a hard time believing this. Information was murky
| and information asymmetry was a big reason lots of people
| seemed to just apply to a flagship state u rather than look
| at more far flung or prestigious options, though the state
| u is prestigious in it's own right. There's certainly more
| noise now, but there's also a lot more signal (maybe the
| ratio is the same though). I suspect there's really
| fantastic info out there that's way more than I had
| applying to colleges way back when in 2010.
|
| I'd be interested in doing an experiment to act like I'm in
| high school and want all the info on college applications
| and to see where I end up.
| fossuser wrote:
| This is a really big deal for things like personal finance or
| financial independence that required knowledgeable networks to
| understand important early decisions and the right thing to do.
|
| Now I can read about this stuff on reddit and learn the basics
| of how everything works.
|
| A bright kid with an internet connection can leverage that even
| if they're in a social network or community that doesn't
| understand any of these things.
|
| The remaining problem is unknown unknowns. If you don't know
| what exists, it can be hard to know what to ask. You can't
| search 'Best X' when you don't know what X is. If you're online
| though, you may be able to see someone mention it and go from
| there.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This isn't terribly surprising given the degree of
| substitutability between very inexpensive community colleges (or
| state schools like CSUs here in California) and mid/lower-tier
| privates.
|
| Pre-pandemic, going to college away from home offered a fun
| environment with many amenities. During the pandemic, these fun
| aspects are greatly limited (and parents might not let kids go
| anyway, due to health risks). When you take away so much of the
| fun stuff that goes along with college, it doesn't make as much
| sense to pay $50k/yr in tuition when the experience isn't that
| much different than your local state school (which costs $10k).
|
| Top colleges, on the other hand, still offer differentiation in
| terms of degree prestige. Add onto that the promise of not taking
| standardized tests into account (as the article notes Cornell and
| other schools are doing this), and it's not surprising that
| applications are up.
| musicale wrote:
| Community colleges are the best deal in education (though they
| usually don't offer four-year degrees.)
|
| And given the academic job market, basically any state
| university should be able to pick and choose among hundreds of
| highly qualified faculty candidates.
| akeck wrote:
| Meanwhile, total enrollment (US) has been falling steadily since
| at least 2012: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/925831720/losing-a-
| generation...
| barrenko wrote:
| Wherever you get more value out of the final certificate than the
| education involved, you are participating in systemic fraud and a
| bubble that will eventually pop.
| peter303 wrote:
| The article doesn't mention the demographic bomb in the US. 2019
| births were 3.7 million. boomers were 4 million a year; would
| need to be 7 million to be proportional to the population then.
| 2020 and 2021m births are projected to be as low as 3 million due
| to pandemic nears.
|
| In addition to low births, student immigration has been severely
| restricted in recent years by federal policy.
|
| With both factors, the applicant pool is smaller.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| This is absolute correct. Many state universities added
| campuses very actively back in the 1950s and 60s to accommodate
| the boomers who all wanted college degrees.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I sense that the fundamental purpose for going to College has
| changed from "getting an education" to "building your brand" as
| an individual. I don't work in Human Resources, but as a software
| developer I do spend a lot of time around my company's recruiters
| and I'm involved in the hiring process. A candidate's alma mater
| has an outsized impact on the likelihood they will advance to the
| next step of the hiring process.
|
| Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition
| matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of
| applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known
| schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from
| obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a
| proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how
| good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College".
| But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford
| they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure
| university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a
| disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yeah, that's not how it works for a majority of jobs in
| America. I'm 100% sure that's true for top companies in world
| cities, but it just isn't true even in most of the top 100
| cities in the US. And believe it or not, there really are top
| companies that look at actual accomplishments and skillsets and
| not your CV. Incredulous, I know.
|
| You'd be very mistaken if you think there aren't managers out
| there with the power to do their own hiring. It's not hard.
|
| Most companies are lucky if they can even find someone ranging
| from competent to excellent for a given role. It's hard enough
| to do that. And if you land on an excellent candidate, most
| don't know how to retain them, because it's not economically
| feasible to do so. They leave, because they're consistently
| looking to maximize their earnings, or they're smart enough to
| start their own business.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Most people people don't realize just how much name
| recognition matters when sifting through resumes.
|
| I think most people do realize it, which is why we're seeing
| what's being written about in the article. People realize if
| you merely want to be educated, you can do that for cheap or
| free anywhere, but nobody in HR screening resumes cares if
| you're educated. They care that you have name-brand pedigree. I
| remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super smart
| and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier State
| school and not from Stanford and that was the end of it. It's
| very classist and ugly. If I graduated today from the school I
| graduated from in the mid-90s, I wouldn't have a job either.
|
| As we all know, this is not just happening in education: All of
| society is bifurcating into a few winners, and a lot of losers,
| and a shrinking number in the middle. Everything is has become
| a slug-fest where the many compete with each other in a high-
| stakes game for the few viable good opportunities, leaving the
| rest in ruin.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super
| smart and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier
| State school and not from Stanford and that was the end of
| it.
|
| If HR has anything to do with how engineers are selected
| there's something wrong with the company.
|
| They are there to schedule interviews and take care of the
| paperwork.
| lokar wrote:
| Recruiters (part of HR) select the subset of resumes that
| an engineer (IC or manager) will then pick from to have an
| actual (phone) interview.
|
| It really sort of has to work that way. The volume and
| variance in quality is just overwhelming. There is no way
| someone technical could look at every resume.
| RGamma wrote:
| The longer I watch this unfold the more become convinced that
| the US is a giant social experiment to see what happens when
| you apply profit-maximization to literally everything.
|
| Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to the
| pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number of
| losers.
|
| Wonder when this'll fall apart (if ever). I guess it's a good
| thing the majority of people worldwide are not exposed to
| this and therefore potentially get the benefit to observe and
| learn from it. Take care.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to
| the pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number
| of losers.
|
| You forgot the key: Split the "losers" roughly 50-50 along
| some carefully crafted political/ideological lines, and
| have them fight each other rather than unite and fight the
| pimps.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Sims + Battle Royale, this is great
| Animats wrote:
| Well, of course. Going to college during the epidemic is not cost
| effective. Many colleges are trying to charge full on-campus
| prices while delivering "distance learning". Better to wait a
| year and get the full experience.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I prefer distanced learning. It's probably my school but the
| majority of the comp sci students are slackers and drag the
| people who do this stuff down. As shown by the fact that it's
| harder for these lazy students to mooch of the actual hard
| working ones. Really hard to pretend being someone's friend
| with an email versus sitting next to the smart kid.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Which school?
|
| Honestly, it sounds like you should transfer to an
| institution that's a better fit for you.
| twoslide wrote:
| This probably just reflects greater uncertainty in the
| application process due to lack of standardized test scores. In
| other years, have a better sense of where they stand and can
| strategize appropriately (i.e. a few aspirational applications
| and a few safety schools). This year things are much less clear.
| It may not be a long term trend, or may not accelerate a long
| term trend.
| kbos87 wrote:
| As someone who never did well with standardized tests, it's
| frustrating to see evidence like this of how heavily they are
| still weighed in the college admissions process, even though it
| isn't surprising.
|
| If I were applying to universities today and had otherwise good
| credentials but difficulties performing on standardized tests
| like the SATs, I wouldn't feel an ounce of remorse for trying to
| cheat in a rigged system.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| What are your thoughts on standardized tests as the most
| standard (not sure what a better word is here) comparison
| between applicants?
|
| I recognize that a lot has been written about the SAT/etc being
| biased, but high school grades and "experiences" are worse (how
| does one compare what a "B" in Calculus or club president
| actually means, in all high schools across the US??).
| kbos87 wrote:
| I agree with you that comparing applicants objectively is a
| tough nut to crack. I don't know the right answer but I would
| imagine looking at as diverse a set of inputs as possible is
| a good starting point; I could also see universities coming
| up with some means of weighing inputs differently to not let
| any one input (like standardized test scores) be an arbitrary
| disqualifier. But until that's the case, I don't think
| individuals should feel guilt for not letting a flawed system
| run them over, even if that means needing to "cheat".
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| There are a lot of people in this thread talking about how
| important a big name college is. As a counterpoint... If you are
| not trying to work for a FANG company within your first ~3 years
| of graduating I don't think a big name college with a great CS
| program matters at all.
|
| A Carnegie Mellon degree may help you get more interviews and
| therefore land your first job if you are struggling otherwise but
| its likely the person with the Kent State CS degree and the
| Illinois Urbana Champaign CE degree are not applying for the same
| jobs right out of school.
|
| After the first few years education becomes less important and
| actual skills become far more important. Again this is more true
| at non FANG/SV/Start up type companies. Which is where most
| engineers will work for the majority of their career.
| lumost wrote:
| Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At
| present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of
| state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to
| the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially
| matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a
| better life.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of
| 150-300k
|
| unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student
| is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of
| those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just
| taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools
| offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the
| average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like
| $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public
| universities.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Plenty of middle class families making low to mid 100k but
| not contributing to their children's tuition bill because
| they live in HCOL area. But yes, low income students don't
| pay.
| borski wrote:
| "Plenty," sure. But not a majority or anything. The median
| family income in the US is something like 68kb
| colinmhayes wrote:
| What about the median income of people who attended
| college?
| borski wrote:
| "For 25- to 34-year-olds who worked full time, year round
| in 2018, higher educational attainment was associated
| with higher median earnings. This pattern was consistent
| from 2000 through 2018. For example, in 2018 the median
| earnings of those with a master's or higher degree
| ($65,000) were 19 percent higher than the earnings of
| those with a bachelor's degree ($54,700), and the median
| earnings of those with a bachelor's degree were 57
| percent higher than the earnings of high school
| completers ($34,900)."[1]
|
| None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy'
| category.
|
| [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cba.pdf
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Close, but still not the data we need. What schools are
| looking at it family income of the students which means
| the 25-34 range isn't going to cut it. No need to do
| further research as I agree with your premise, but I
| think the number of students who receive minimal aid and
| family help might be higher than you expect.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Not too big a fan of screwing over children for their
| parents making too much money personally.
|
| There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids
| education, yet the way the system is set up, you'd think
| there was.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids
| education
|
| There's no (as yet generally accepted) obligation for
| anyone else to pay for young adults higher education.
| Society has generally chosen to subsidize some costs for
| young people who seek such subsidy using formulas which
| assume that parents of means will also do so, but this
| does not reflect an obligation of parents to do so.
| leetcrew wrote:
| $100k is not enough to totally phase out financial aid from
| top schools, but sure, there are some families that could
| afford to pay but refuse to. still, no one is writing $40k+
| loans each year for students with no cosigner. if you have
| rich parents who won't pay and the school considers you a
| dependent, you're pretty much SOL.
| borski wrote:
| Yeah, the last part sucks. It's not completely
| impossible, but it is certainly not easy if your parents
| will not help: https://www.quora.com/My-family-is-upper-
| middle-class-160-00...
| lumost wrote:
| > no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students
| with no cosigner.
|
| This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible
| to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no
| risk loan from the loan providers perspective.
|
| Schools almost never totally phase out financial help,
| but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500
| work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial
| aid stats healthy while still getting paid.
|
| This type of affect will only show up when viewing the
| percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a
| bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great
| way to draw down the average.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| I don't think anybody thinks going is expensive, the
| expensive part is getting in, something fundamentally out of
| reach by design for 99.9% of the population and 95% of the
| applicant pool.
|
| Something is really rotten with this country if the only
| tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a "better life" (though
| people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter
| factual outcome if you don't get into an elite institution).
| lumost wrote:
| I left Umass Amherst with ~75k in debt in 2010. At the time
| the list price was 30k.
|
| If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for
| various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are
| going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the
| time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them
| with a $12/hr job at graduation.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| How does that happen? I come from a time where my private
| university tuition (before grants, financial aid, etc) was
| around $25k/yr, and I understand things are different
| today.
|
| I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan
| options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across
| 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is
| around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of
| what recent college grads with English degrees make? I
| mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury
| themselves in that much debt without a _very clear_ path
| out of it.
|
| I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM
| degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a
| writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English
| degree is required, you can get that at a much more
| affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who
| did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a
| successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They
| did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew
| they would have a really hard time paying that off...
| lumost wrote:
| There's a big sunk cost falacy at play. English is one of
| the most common majors at Umass, and the university isn't
| exactly forthcoming about the job prospects for this
| major. This person was the first to go to college in
| their family - but their parents had become modestly
| successfuly in the trades meaning they made ~100k
| combined in the Boston area. 100k is enough to push you
| out of substantial financial aid, but is not enough for
| your parents to afford a significant portion of your
| college costs in a high CoL area. A 3 bedroom and 2 kids
| gets expensive.
|
| If you realize 2 years in that you're down ~60k, and a 5
| year program will cost an extra 40k then you aren't going
| to change majors.
|
| Umass Amherst is only ~25% more expensive than Umass
| Dartmouth on paper ( or at least was when I was attending
| ).
|
| For myself, I got a physics degree and flipped into
| software engineering - I went bust in my first 2 years
| out of school but I was able to put things together and
| paid off my debt comfortably. The debt did ensure I
| stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math
| became impossible to justify.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| > The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for
| physics as _the math_ became impossible to justify.
|
| I appreciate that this comment can be read two different
| ways.
| thehappypm wrote:
| UMass Amherst is a great school, and state schools kind of see
| out-of-staters as cash cows. What's worse is third-tier private
| schools charging MORE than MIT.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| How much worse off is someone going to UMass by your
| calculation?
| lumost wrote:
| Umass opens doors, MIT opens more - in 2010 when I graduated,
| my friends who went to MIT and did _ok_ landed at 90k /yr in
| comp-sci fields, my friends from Umass who did _ok_ made
| 40-70k in comp-sci fields.
|
| Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and
| the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The
| MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable
| income at graduation. Meaning their debt burden was _much_
| lower.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1
| public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed
| am I?
| lumost wrote:
| I specifically mentioned doing 'ok' as a frame of
| reference. Those who do 'well' in a comp sci program tend
| to cluster in the top companies straight from college and
| the top companies only negotiate ~20k on a 150-250k entry
| level offer.
|
| I did ok in college and very well in the private sector.
| I started as a sysadmin for a small finance company and
| am now a senior software engineer at Amazon Alexa working
| on ML for search. Hard work always pays off as long as
| your in the right field ( comp-sci is a great field ).
| polka_haunts_us wrote:
| Let's put it this way. I couldn't find a job out of
| college, despite having a CS degree. I ended up settling
| for a very shit job that pays 21 hourly, 40 hours a week.
| Because the dev team is very small, I ended up with my
| hands in literally every piece of the programming pie. I
| put all that info on my resume and took even more lessons
| from this crap job to interviews in the past couple of
| weeks, and I just signed an offer from a lucrative tech
| company for about $140k annually, over a 200% raise.
|
| Once you've done something in the industry, almost no one
| is going to give a hoot about what school you went to,
| they're going to care about what you've done in the
| industry, but at the start at least, you may have to
| settle for something a little shittier.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A huge fraction of the college educated people in MA have
| been to Umass. It's not an exclusive club.
|
| Umnass opens doors in MA the way smoking pot makes it
| easier to make friends in college. You instantly have some
| token thing in common with a sizeable minority of the
| people around you and that gets you a head start on
| developing relationships.
| jawzz wrote:
| Not the OP, but as I'd say that subjectively speaking, you're
| better off going to MIT, but only if you have the passion and
| drive to succeed at a place like that (which you probably do
| if you got into MIT).
|
| But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern?
| You're probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get
| an education that's indistinguishable from UMass, quite
| possibly worse in some respects.
|
| What people have been saying in this thread is not incorrect
| (though should be nuanced): the ivy leagues are worth it for
| the caliber of the student body and reputation; otherwise, go
| to a (Tier 1) public school.
|
| Unless, of course, you don't want to and can easily afford
| otherwise.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1
| public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed
| am I?
| borski wrote:
| You're fine. There are a ton of reasons MIT and UMass
| Amherst would help, but they are not for everybody, and I
| saw plenty of folks struggle at MIT and gain nothing out
| of it (even not graduating).
|
| What matters a lot more than the name of the institution
| on your degree is experience; getting that experience may
| be a bit tougher at a small school (you don't have FAANGs
| or huge biotech firms recruiting there), but it is
| certainly not impossible.
|
| Three of the last four engineers I hired had no formal CS
| degree (but they had gone to bootcamps).
| thehappypm wrote:
| BC, BU, and Northeastern are all excellent schools. Boston
| is a weird place.. any of those three schools would be a
| top tier private school in just about any other city in the
| country, but in Boston they're seen as second tier just
| because of the ludicrously good schools in Massachusetts.
| They're all in the top 50 according to US News.
| bsder wrote:
| > Northeastern
|
| Isn't Northeastern still a big cooperative education
| school?
|
| I assure you that those of us in engineering know the
| difference between a student with work experience and one
| with only academic experience.
| pkaye wrote:
| The average student loan debt is around $33k. Median debt is
| around $17k.
|
| https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt
| sct202 wrote:
| The top colleges have very complicated pricing schemes and are
| basically free to middle and lower income students, for example
| a student to MIT only pays if their family earns more than $90k
| a year which is above the median household income of $68k.
| a-posteriori wrote:
| When I was there, less than 8% of the students were paying
| full tuition (of which a good chunk were international
| students).
|
| At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly
| price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the
| highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price
| ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal
| ability to pay.
| fossuser wrote:
| The price is so high that even if you're not paying full
| price, it's often still extremely expensive.
| borski wrote:
| iirc, it was even lower when I went. And this is probably
| the most common mistake I see made about MIT, etc.; the
| lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top
| schools runs _deep_ , which simply isn't as true for
| smaller or less popular schools.
|
| Going to a "top tier" school can, depending on your
| financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state
| school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to
| jump through, or anything else, but that's a different
| argument.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid
| within top schools runs deep,
|
| I think you're confusing depth and breadth. It's like the
| Harbor Freight coupon. Everyone gets 20% off with a few
| exclusions. But the people paying less than 80% (to
| continue the Harbor Freight metaphor) are few and far
| between.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| No; that's completely wrong. For example, the _median_
| value of scholarships for Yale 's class of 2023 with
| family incomes under $65,000 was $76,925.
|
| https://admissions.yale.edu/affordability-details
| borski wrote:
| No, I understand precisely what you're trying to say.
| Based on my (admittedly anecdotal) experience applying to
| colleges and working (however briefly) in Financial Aid
| at MIT, it was not a 20% blanket by any stretch; each
| case was treated individually and there was an explicit
| focus on ensuring students were not saddled with insane
| amounts of debt.
|
| There were exceptions, particularly for wealthy folks and
| people who were 'on the line' income-wise, but the
| majority got significant financial aid.
|
| Just to give you an idea, from MIT's stats[1]:
|
| * Average need-based MIT scholarship: $47,593
|
| * Students awarded a need-based MIT scholarship: 59%
|
| * Students attending tuition-free: 31%
|
| * Class of 2019 graduates with no student loan debt: 76%
|
| * Average student loan debt for those who borrowed:
| $23,226
|
| The trope that the expensive schools are the cause of the
| massive student loan debt problem is just that; a trope.
| When only 24% of the class graduates with _any debt at
| all_ , I'm not convinced MIT (and similar) are the
| problem. This is largely due to MIT and similar schools
| having massive endowments from which they can draw for
| Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but
| they have coffers that are less deep (referring to
| private schools), meaning students end up having to take
| more debt.
|
| [1] https://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html
| grepthisab wrote:
| You kind of buried the lede in your last paragraph:
|
| This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having
| massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial
| Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have
| coffers that are less deep (referring to private
| schools), meaning students end up having to take more
| debt.
|
| It is reality that expensive schools cause the massive
| student loan debt problem, but expensiveness isn't
| totally buried in sticker price but total cost of
| attendance. Schools like HYSM don't saddle attendees with
| as much debt despite their high sticker price perhaps
| because of endowments.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I always think about how absurd these pricing models are. Ah
| yes, if you're living lavishly at $90k per annum you, too,
| earn the privilege of paying for your education.
|
| I suppose at some point someone has to pay. But you're not
| rich at $90k. And I just don't see many of those households
| earning between $90-250k a year wanting to pay for such a
| privilege.
|
| From my perspective, you've got to be either very rich, or
| very poor going into those schools, because there's no
| reasonable room for those in-between unless you're taking out
| significant life-changing debt to do so.
|
| And after it's all said and done, you're overwhelmingly
| statistically unlikely to be making so much that the debt
| didn't even matter.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| As I understand it, financial aid isn't all or nothing.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You need to look at this from the perspective of someone who
| has little to no familial safety net and cannot rely on
| family resources to help them out when things get tough.
|
| Boston area schools being "basically free on paper" to middle
| income families is a reflection of the fact that a student
| from a ~100k income family has better options for getting
| ahead in the world than attending these institutions at any
| cost but these institutions would lose legitimacy without
| "economic diversity" tokens so they have to reduce the price.
| Going to Harvard (or similar) if you're not from the kind of
| people who go to Harvard is a high risk, high reward gamble
| with years of your life. These schools have to reduce the
| potential downside in order to get the quality of candidates
| they want to get from the demographics they want to get them
| from (i.e. they want to be able to pick the very best people
| from the "can't afford to attend" demographic). Also it's
| good PR.
|
| If you're the son of a plumber and your options are going to
| MIT for CS, or UMaine's "we match your local in-state
| tuition" deal paired with their crappy CS program the Maine
| one actually looks attractive because you're going to be
| surrounded by people a heck of a lot more like you (on a life
| experiences level), you're not gonna be bottom of your class
| and you won't be running the Boston rat race when it comes to
| housing, a part time job, commuting, and all the other "life"
| stuff". If you're the kind of high-achieving individual who
| goes to Harvard from a middle class background you're all but
| guaranteed to live more comfortably than your parents and
| retire comfortably regardless of the choice you make. Rolling
| a degree from a lesser state school into a stable job at
| BigCo isn't something you're worried about. The networking
| value add from Harvard or MIT isn't as much of a value add
| because you have no frame of reference for it and won't be
| making the kinds of life choices where it can be most helpful
| anyway (remember, no safety net, you're gonna be the one that
| builds it). So if you're gonna "win" no matter what you
| choose why add the additional risk of Harvard, MIT or some
| other program you could wash out of?
| stolenmerch wrote:
| Relevant: https://www.profgalloway.com/uss-university
|
| Scott Galloway made a prediction last summer of what colleges and
| universities will thrive, survive, struggle, or face challenges
| given the current situation. Basically, the higher ed market will
| consolidate around more elite schools.
| fossuser wrote:
| I wouldn't give Galloway's predictions much thought - he's
| wrong almost all the time.
|
| https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1180197139101696013
|
| If he had to make bets on his predictions he'd be bankrupt.
| endisneigh wrote:
| per usual I believe the issue here is that the government has
| been subsidizing schools which have created strange distortions.
| if Harvard were strictly private and received no government
| subsidies, funding or advantage a few things would happen:
|
| 1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend
|
| 2) it would be substantially more expensive
|
| 3) the acceptance rate would be much higher
|
| ideally this would result in schools like UMass Amherst (which
| ironically is the best public university in Massachusetts - weird
| considering other states have better state flagships, but that's
| another issue) being able to compete far more effectively.
|
| why would a smart poor kid ever go to UMass when you could go to
| Harvard for free? it has never made sense that you get better
| financial return from say, MIT, even though it costs the same as
| RandomPrivateU.
| nradov wrote:
| Harvard is probably a bad example because their endowment is so
| large that they could afford to give substantial scholarships
| to poor students even without government subsidies. The issue
| is more with the 3rd-tier private schools.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Harvard could easily fund all of their education expenses from
| their endowment, with zero incoming tuition dollars.
| sputknick wrote:
| What could we do with college campuses assuming some proportion
| of them go out of business in the coming years/decades? It would
| make for an immediate walkable city with all the infrastructure
| already built out.
| fossuser wrote:
| Makes sense to me - if you're mostly buying prestige that gets
| concentrated in the top institutions.
|
| If you're trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is what is frustrating about higher education, the wide
| gulf between chasing after a credential and chasing after an
| education.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think a lot of this could be solved by Lambda School style
| ISAs.
|
| If the school isn't actually good at education then it fails.
|
| True alignment of incentives.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is fine for trade schools which can reasonably measure
| success by short term income of new graduates, but this is
| a terrible metric for higher learning in general.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| Not very surprising, is it?
|
| Right or wrong, "top" colleges are considered better equipped to
| get you close to the wealth and power needed to live comfortably.
|
| This isn't much different from travelers going west and buying
| claims in search of gold.
|
| Almost the entire collegiate system in the US is fundamentally
| broken. It is siloed and just as much pay-to-play as the rest of
| this country. The soaring costs, low returns, and behemoth mis-
| allocation of resources towards college football are examples of
| this.
| verst wrote:
| I still don't understand why college degrees are necessary for
| the majority of jobs in the US other than a surplus of college
| educated folks. This is particularly problematic given the high
| cost of education.
|
| The entire post secondary education system in Germany is focused
| on specialization in a given field of study (at universities) or
| vocational training. The advantage here is that there is no
| financial penalty for choosing the wrong path, only missed
| opportunity cost due to time spent.
|
| I completed my secondary school in Germany at a typical Gymnasium
| (the highest tier of the three major secondary school types).
| Note that my parents did not attend college and aren't wealthy.
| Around 8th grade my school curriculum exceeded their knowledge. I
| attended a private liberal arts college in the US as an
| international student where I relied on (private) scholarships
| and (private) loans [international students cannot get subsidized
| loans -- generally interest rates are high and interest
| accumulates even while enrolled in school].
|
| The only reason why I chose to attend university was because I
| wanted to gain an advanced understanding of mathematics and I
| aspired to one day become a college professor (this has since
| changed of course).
|
| Despite my school being very highly ranked and my hard work
| producing good academic results it simply did not have the brand
| reputation to unlock opportunities such as even being invited to
| phone screens. I had to take a roundabout way to get into my
| career and instead work my way up from less desirable positions.
| This focus on brand for academic institution is also something
| you do not generally find in Germany where the criteria is
| typically the binary question of whether or not you have a
| particular degree in a particular subject area (though again the
| vast majority of jobs do not require a degree).
|
| Too often I observed the candidate with a Bachelor's at ~3.0 GPA
| from say Stanford being preferred over the candidate with a ~4.0
| from a lesser known but equally rigorous institution.
|
| Of course this focus on brand continued beyond college. I quickly
| learned that a less desirable / impactful role at a top company
| opens more doors than top positions at unknown companies.
|
| Call me pessimistic, but I do not advise people to attend college
| in the US unless they can attend schools with a very strong brand
| and extensive alumni network in their desired professional field.
|
| Looking back at my education my secondary education in Germany
| was more formative and critical than my college education in the
| US. While I did have the opportunity to take advanced coursework
| in college here in the US it did not prepare me for generic jobs
| not specific to my field of study (and barely even is an asset in
| my profession). I believe we need to improve high school
| education in this country and reverse the trend of requiring a
| college education for the majority of jobs.
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