[HN Gopher] West Virginia University to drop 32 majors including...
___________________________________________________________________
West Virginia University to drop 32 majors including all world
language programs
Author : joe5150
Score : 192 points
Date : 2023-08-12 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wvgazettemail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wvgazettemail.com)
| Jellyfish19 wrote:
| I graduated from the CS program in the late 00s and have
| interviewed grads of the program over the years since. The old,
| out of touch professors that were there then are still there
| today. Many of the good professors teaching useful, applicable
| skills moved on to greener pastures. The "reduce staff" guidance
| should motivate the department to cut off that dead weight, but
| it won't. They'll keep the worst and tank the program more.
|
| The program has also taken the position that it's more important
| to teach the theory than any hands on application of skills in a
| modern environment. It's a disservice to the students because
| they graduate not knowing how to use something as pervasive as
| git. The program's faculty and administration - already gainfully
| employed - aren't the ones being turned down for jobs for being
| unqualified after all. They get to carry on with their cushy
| lifestyles existing outside of reality.
|
| Make no mistake - there are quality professors and talented
| people coming out of the program. It's just that the quality
| professors aren't the ones setting the course of the program, and
| the talented students would probably have been as successful no
| matter which school they attended.
|
| It's so frustrating to know that the program could be more, it
| just chooses not to. So goes the story of West Virginia.
| partitioned wrote:
| As a graduate of WVU during the Gee era we all saw this coming he
| is a terrible president, only known for his bow ties. I notice
| that they eliminate majors and cut faculty but no word on the
| admin staff they've been bloating for years. Shame on Gee and
| WVU.
| joe5150 wrote:
| Also being dropped are MS and PhD programs in math.
|
| https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/62ea2c4f-99bd-431d-9e97-7199...
| basementcat wrote:
| The institution is facing a $40+ million deficit. It isn't
| clear if athletic programs will be affected.
| bsder wrote:
| I suspect they could put a big dent in their $40 million
| deficit simply by wiping out their football program.
|
| The head coach gets paid $4 million per year. Extrapolate
| that to the lackeys and you could probably wipe out almost
| half of the deficit.
| dustincoates wrote:
| Athletics is revenue positive for WVU:
|
| > WVU produced $102,684,423 in revenue, which was a
| decrease from the $110.5 million produced by the department
| the previous year. However, it was still more than enough
| to cover the program's $91,807,281 in expenses.
|
| https://wvmetronews.com/2019/08/12/west-virginia-
| ranked-37th...
|
| Football isn't broken out here, but it generally subsidizes
| other sports, so if you wipe out the football program, you
| aren't going to help the deficit.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Aren't most of these athletic programs actually earning
| money for the universities? At least if they are well-run,
| which probably isn't the case here.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's bifurcated. The programs in conferences with big TV
| deals earn money, smaller schools are probably spending
| money on athletics.
| matwood wrote:
| Most of the men's football and basketball programs
| revenue covers the cost for all the other sports and
| typically have some leftover for the university.
| joe5150 wrote:
| WVU is about to become the world's first vocational school
| with a D-1 football program.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Cultural vandalism.
| codevark wrote:
| [dead]
| miek wrote:
| I recommend this website [0] for some details about how they got
| into this situation. Included are comparisons to peers (public
| Big XII schools), which are considerably better off. Hilariously,
| over the past 3 years, WVU was unable to generate actionable data
| on costs & revenues of their academic programs, though they spent
| over $1mm on consultants specifically for this purpose and pay
| $3mm annually on internal roles whose job functions have
| considerable overlap and include doing this type of work.
| Administration hired a second consultancy for the same purpose in
| 2023.
|
| [0] https://wvufacts.wordpress.com/
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| > though they spent over $1mm on consultants specifically for
| this purpose and pay $3mm annually on internal roles whose job
| functions have considerable overlap and include doing this type
| of work. Administration hired a second consultancy for the same
| purpose in 2023.
|
| Is consulting the ultimate late capitalism grift?
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| The people: we need smaller government The government: okay
| we'll fire civil servants and replace them with hiring
| consultants
|
| McKinsey always wins.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The federal government desperately needs fewer people and
| higher pay bands. They use consulting to cover up for that
| crickey wrote:
| Consulting is a way for managers to avoid any kind of
| responsibility.
| Loughla wrote:
| My experience is consulting falls into three categories,
| and this is specific to higher education.
|
| 1. We can't afford the expert we need forever so we consult
| temporarily. Like major IT infrastructure. Colleges and
| universities tend to not attract the massively high quality
| tech workers that private industry does.
|
| 2. We know what is wrong, but internal politics or external
| politics keep us from saying and doing things we need to
| do. In this instance, consultants come in to tell us what
| we already know, but lets managers avoid responsibility for
| damaging relationships/politics.
|
| 3. We got a grant. Let's spend it on consultants because
| the prof that wrote it left last semester and his "notes"
| are like the necronomicon.
|
| I usually work with number 2 when I consult (there is a
| Midwest school that still refers to me as the grim reaper
| because of all the firings that happened after I completed
| my findings report). But I would argue that number 1 is
| more common, in my experience.
| bwanab wrote:
| I would add:
|
| 4. We need plausible deniability in case something goes
| really wrong with the choices we've made so let's hire
| consultants to validate our decisions.
| Loughla wrote:
| Accurate. I forgot that. And in the higher education
| realm, these are always related to discrimination of some
| kind by an employee or department that is a known issue
| that hadn't been addressed.
| ip26 wrote:
| It seems more analogous to a virus or scavenger. A market-
| based force of nature attacking moribund organizations with
| weakened defenses.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I wouldn't even say late capitalism; consulting has been the
| ultimate grift for decades now.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Late capitalism refers to 1940s+, but typically the term
| has no real understanding by the masses that use it online.
| skinpop wrote:
| Late stage capitalism got started started in the
| thirties...
| incongruity wrote:
| It was, arguably, part of the beginning of the end. Most of
| the most harmful strategies have consultants in their
| roots.
| commonlisp94 wrote:
| What would you do to collect this information? Keep in mind
| most of your administrative workers will be uncomfortable
| learning or doing anything new.
| toast0 wrote:
| This style of consulting is usually a performative act
| because the people who should be making decisions don't have
| or don't feel like they have the authority to make decisions.
|
| Paying $X million for an outside consultancy to come up with
| the decision, gives the decision authority. Of course, the
| consultancy is usually guided to the 'right' decision, either
| implicitly or explicitly. Although sometimes you see failures
| of guidance, where against incentives the consultancy
| delivers a good recommendation and then it's usually ignored.
|
| Anyway, this is a grift, but who's going to turn down $1M to
| tell someone what they already know?
|
| IMHO, the more grifty consultancy is systems building, where
| you set up a $10M contract over ten years to build a system
| that doesn't work and doesn't actually replace the old
| system. But maybe that's just performative too: nobody wants
| to say to just keep the old system, so spending time and
| money on something everyone knows won't work and won't be
| ready before you leave makes it look like you're doing the
| right thing?
|
| There's also non-grift consulting. You might pay a real
| expert a reasonable sum for an engineering consult, etc.
| jandrese wrote:
| Or the people in charge just want to deflect blame when
| they make the unpopular action they already decided on. A
| $1m scapegoat.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I've seen it called decision insurance.
| etempleton wrote:
| Closing an academic program, let alone 32, will be
| extremely unpopular among faculty so much so that it might
| lead to a vote of no confidence. Using a consulting firm as
| a political shield is likely necessary if you want to make
| such a move and maintain your position as president.
|
| You pay the consulting firm ~ 1 million, they confirm what
| you already know, "these 32 programs are costing the
| University 10 million or whatever a year with few
| enrollments. The only logical thing to do is to close those
| programs and reallocate those funds." You, as the
| president, hide behind a report from an independent third
| party but still get to make the correct but unpopular
| opinion to cut bloat.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's a great way to siphon money to friends and family and
| then when there's no output you just deflect and gaslight
| until everyone forgets about it
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| I could see the point of consulting if what you were paying
| for was genuine expertise that you lack in house, but often
| consultants are just know-nothings fresh out of university.
|
| So another layer to the consultancy grift is consulting
| agencies who scam and delude the consultants themselves.
| Consultants are often just glorified temps who end up doing
| same sort of of grunt work as employees, but have much less
| job security and therefore potential to unionise. Big
| companies like a workforce that can't organise, and pay
| consulting agencies this for precariousness as a service.
| usrusr wrote:
| A million spent on consulting is a million worth of written
| proof of how seriously they are taking the problem. And
| it's even quantifiable! ("million"), yay! As a convenient
| side effect, it makes the problem you have just proven to
| be in your focus appear more important, what's not to like.
| In the end the consultants are basically paid to send a
| bill.
| LegitShady wrote:
| When you hire a consultant as a public university for a
| contract over a certain amount of money, you need to put
| out a request for proposals and evaluate consultant
| proposals.
|
| As part of that, they can put in requirements for
| consultant staff, require proposals show time allotment for
| staff and tie billing to hours actually put in.
|
| So if you hired a consultant and got nothing but fresh out
| of university know nothings its because you did it on
| purpose, or you are inept both at writing RFPs and also
| evaluating proposals, and maybe at managing consultants as
| well.
|
| That being said, most of the time, outside of a few cases
| where the expertise is hard to find anywhere and you
| literally cannot find it outside of consultants, I'm of the
| opinion that the money spent on consultants would be better
| spent building that specialty knowledge in house.
| commonlisp94 wrote:
| This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.
|
| Professors often approach public debate by assuming everyone
| else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting
| information.
|
| For example, they immediately dismiss the president's claim
| that a demographic change contributes to this issue as "false"
| because the US birth rate may have been very stable. But that
| says nothing about parents in the WVU area, which we know are
| either older or moved to other states.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I lived in a small Rust Belt city, dropped out of college,
| waited tables, built a restaurant management app, sold it, by
| the grace of God made it to a FAANG.
|
| Everything I've learned and surprised me over 7 years there
| fits into exactly what you said, "[smart cloistered people
| without exposure to costs] often approach debate by assuming
| everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through
| conflicting information"
|
| It costs so, so, much, especially when you throw in the rush
| everyone is in.
| muglug wrote:
| > This is essentially written by bitter ex or current
| employees.
|
| I imagine if you worked at a place for over a decade, then
| saw it being run into the ground at speed by people earning
| 5-10x your salary, some bitterness may emerge.
| miek wrote:
| The bitterness of current and former employees, alums, and
| many people around the state, does not detract from several
| excellent points made by the piece. To read it and wholly
| dismiss it is questionnable (especially with a birthrate
| comment).
|
| Birthrate in the "WVU area" should be considered, but
| consider a couple datapoints: Total enrollment overall
| increased [0] year over year for both 2021-2022 and
| 2022-2023, and over half of WVU students come from outside WV
| [1]
|
| [0] To see the increased enrollment, you need to get the
| '21-'22 enrollment from this site:
| https://www.thedaonline.com/news/wvu-continues-to-
| experience... and the '22-'23 enrollment here:
| https://www.wvu.edu/faq/how-many-students-are-enrolled
|
| This year's enrollment was published (news claimed increase);
| traveling and didn't immediately find the source.
|
| [1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/west-virginia-
| univer...
| etempleton wrote:
| Yes, undergraduate enrollment is increasing, but many of
| the programs recommended for closure are graduate programs.
| Depending on the graduate program, the audience may be
| primarily local residents.
|
| Also, if we look at graduate enrollments for WVU they are
| at best flat with some programs ascending and some
| declining. Notably, and this is a national trend, M.S.
| degrees are growing in popularity and M.A. degrees are
| declining in popularity. The recommended program closures
| are almost all in the humanities and so this is all in
| alignment.
|
| The administration and colleges in general could probably
| do better at pointing out how many programs they have
| opened over the past decade as it would probably be a
| similar number. Generally colleges and universities are bad
| about this type of messaging because they do not have to do
| it very often.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm interested for your thoughts on the excellent points.
|
| Exaggerating for conciseness: I put in a good 20 minutes.
| Got left with a dizzied feeling of a gish gallop or perhaps
| motte and bailey, repeated.
|
| The only helpful part was the end, where they clearly
| implicate one person and identify the problem as pushing
| for growth in 2014, failing to recognize it had failed and
| pivot after realizing shrinking was actually the trend
| line. None of this required any of the rest.
|
| The rest seemed to fall into:
|
| 1. Leadership should have looked at
| $SMALL_SET_OF_COMPARABLE_INSTANCES projections to identify
| their projections must be wrong.
|
| 2. $SMALL_SET_OF_COMPARABLE_INSTANCES had a smaller
| shortfall[2].
|
| 3. Confusing long segments recounting slight differences in
| statements made multiple months apart. [3]
|
| [2] Ended up closing it once it felt like #2 had several
| repetitions in a row, it doesn't matter if there's a
| smaller shortfall somewhere else, shortfalls add up to a
| shortfall.
|
| [3] for example, lengthy recountings of Official $X said
| 2025 is where the real trouble is, but they also said next
| 5 years are important, and birth data shows 2006 was the
| start of a new era of lows, and 2006 + 18 = 2024.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Enrolment at WVU hasn't changed, even though WV population
| has been declining since 1950
| commonlisp94 wrote:
| > Gee says that due to the demographic cliff they're
| expecting 20% fewer students 'over the next period of
| time',
|
| > Alsop says that revenues will decrease over the next 4-5
| years 'given the demographic cliff'.
| etempleton wrote:
| The enrollment cliff is well documented and real and does not
| impact all universities equally. A college that has a very
| high acceptance rate, such as WVU will likely feel the impact
| of the enrollment cliff more than others.
|
| Initial enrollment is also not the same as enrollment at
| census. Colleges experience some level of "melt" which is the
| number of students who end up not showing up or otherwise
| leaving in the first couple months of their first year.
| Again, I would imagine that WVU with their high acceptance
| rate would experience outsized melt compared to their peers.
| Communitivity wrote:
| I think the reduction/dropping of technology majors such as
| software engineering will make getting into WV Institute of
| Technology harder, due to more competition. It currently has a
| 68% acceptance rate, which is not low. I would be more ok with
| this is the money was being shifted to WV IT, so they could
| improve programs and support more students.
| paulsutter wrote:
| "dropping 32 majors, ... The cuts will affect ... less than 2% of
| total student enrollment"
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| School shutdowns and scale-backs are required when a nation is
| getting older and the share of youth population decreases.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's exactly wrong. Who's going to take care of the olds if
| the youngs aren't educated? If the young have lower incomes,
| who are the olds going to tax?
|
| School shutdowns and scale-backs are an effective path toward
| insuring a country drives off a cliff with their foot on the
| gas pedal.
| slim wrote:
| Katz said there's been speculation that the school's in-person
| foreign language studies will be replaced by the use of computer
| program
|
| interesting...
| CSMastermind wrote:
| These degrees are not impacted:
|
| Music; Music Business and Industry; Music Education; Music
| Therapy; Conducting; Acting; Dance; Musical Theatre; Theatre
| Design and Technology; Wildlife and Fisheries Resources; Natural
| Resources Science; Genetics and Developmental Biology; Plant and
| Soil Sciences; Natural Resource Economics; Women's and Gender
| Studies; Philosophy; Health Services and Outcomes Research;
| Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences; Epidemiology; Social
| and Behavioral Sciences
|
| These degrees are remaining with reduced staff:
|
| Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil
| Engineering; Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical
| Engineering; Software Engineering; Elementary Education; Literacy
| Education; Music Composition; Music Performance; Law;
| Agriculture; Design Studies; Fashion Design and Merchandising;
| Interior Architecture; Human and Community Development;
| Environmental, Soil, and Water Sciences; Chemistry; Communication
| Studies; English; Secondary Education; Professional Writing and
| Editing; Mathematics; Management; Human Resource Management;
| Communication Sciences and Disorders; Exercise Physiology; Health
| Informatics / Information Management; Human Performance and
| Health; Athletic Training; Occupational Therapy; Speech Language
| Pathology; Audiology; Physical Therapy; Pharmacy; Health
| Administration; Biostatistics
|
| These degrees are remaining with reduced staff and getting merged
| together:
|
| Theatre _with_ Puppetry; Costume Design _with_ Lighting Design
| _with_ Scenic Design _with_ Technical Direction; Energy Land
| Management _with_ Environmental and Energy Resource Management;
| Forest Resource Management _with_ Wood Science and Technology;
| Horticulture _with_ Sustainable Food and Farming; Agribusiness
| Management _with_ Environmental and Natural Resource Economics;
| Public Health _with_ Health Services Management and Leadership
|
| These degrees are remaining with reduced staff but with some
| specializations eliminated:
|
| Art and Design; Art Education; Art and Design; Environmental
| Microbiology
|
| These degrees are being eliminated entirely:
|
| Biometric Systems Engineering; Higher Education Administration;
| Multicategorical Special Education; Art History; Jazz Studies;
| Jazz Pedagogy; Composition; Collaborative Piano; Acting;
| Environmental and Community Planning; Landscape Architecture;
| Recreation, Parks, and Tourism; Energy Environments; Resource
| Management; Creative Writing; MS/PhD Mathematics; Legal Studies;
| Public Administration; Chinese; French; German; Russian; Spanish;
| Linguistics; TESOL; Occupational and Environmental Health
| Sciences
|
| ---
|
| Also note that these are just recommendations not final decisions
| yet.
| [deleted]
| rolisz wrote:
| They're also cancelling Parks and Recreation? :(
| thih9 wrote:
| "Acting" is both in "These degrees are not impacted" and "These
| degrees are being eliminated entirely".
|
| Looks like the former is about BFA Acting and the one
| recommended to be discontinued is MFA Acting, source:
| https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/28d9f865-8d36-4e55-a4d0-475c...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Acting is an interesting example. While it isnt an economicly
| good idea, a large percentage of successful actors do get
| their start there, paticularly make actors who generally
| "break" into the business at an older age than female actors.
| Jim Parsons is the classic example. He had a masters in
| theatre and was in his mid-30s before his breakout on the big
| bang theory. He became the highest-paid male actor on TV.
|
| Compare Kaley Cuoco who broke at aged fifteen (Growing up
| Brady) and i do not believe ever finished traditional
| highschool.
| [deleted]
| busterarm wrote:
| Jim Parsons went to one of the top ten MFA Acting programs
| in the country. It's extremely competitive.
|
| WVU's MFA program doesn't even rate and I don't think has a
| single notable alumni among them.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Well, one university cannot have a "top" program without
| some other universities having bottom or at least not-top
| programs. For excellent people to climb to the top of the
| pile, there has to be a pile of not-excellent on which to
| climb.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Knowing that why would you ever climb into the bottom of
| the pile?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Not everyone who takes acting classes wants to become an
| actor. I'm in the military and I can say that more
| military people should take acting classes. I've seen
| drill sergeants who are totally unable to fake being
| angry and so come out looking just crazy because they
| don't understand how to play a character, and generals
| who cannot make a simple speech without getting people
| angry for no reason. Even a bottom-of-the-pile acting
| class would help.
| PKop wrote:
| Nevertheless, this doesn't sound sustainable for a
| university to fund programs for this limited purpose.
| kiba wrote:
| Improv classes is probably a better choice. It's still
| acting, but you're doing it on the fly, which is a lot
| more useful IMO than being able to prepare precanned
| lines.
|
| It still requires you to warm up and do exercises,
| though.
| jfengel wrote:
| There is a lot to recommend about regular acting as a
| life skill. It requires text analysis as well as
| understanding a wide array of people. It's deeply
| dependent on communicating abstract ideas.
|
| Being able to come up with ideas quickly is great, but
| conventional acting is about considering deeply and
| exploring ideas together. The preparation for those
| "precanned" lines requires a ton of work, work that
| people don't understand or recognize, but they know when
| they connect with a performance, and it's all due to that
| preparation.
|
| In short it's all those "soft skills" that techies both
| deride and bemoan the lack of.
| kiba wrote:
| It takes hours and hours of practice to do improvisation,
| especially at high level, and it can be deep exploration
| of ideas as well though long form improv shows.
|
| It also requires you to observe and listen well.
| jfengel wrote:
| Absolutely. I did not intend to demean improv, which is
| an incredibly useful skill and also great practice for a
| lot of analogous situations.
|
| I just wanted to briefly defend conventional acting as
| well, which is poorly understood. (Partly by deliberate
| choice; actors do like to tell myths about their craft.)
| As both an actor and programmer myself, I find a number
| of overlapping skills.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I suspect a few classes at UCB theater or with the
| groundlings would be a more economical route to improv
| skills.
|
| https://ucbcomedy.com/trainingcenter/course/#1-search=imp
| rov
| Ekaros wrote:
| Legal studies seems most surprising for me. I thought that
| those were the expensive, but cheap to teach subjects. Which
| would make sense from cost perspective. Optimize the cost to
| return.
| public_defender wrote:
| Probably because it's not a very useful exit. The most
| successful law school applicants have degrees like history,
| classics, or math. A degree in legal studies (1) doesn't rank
| for getting into law school (or if it does, it's clearly not
| the what law schools want), (2) Looks a little
| useless/incomplete if you stop after the bachelor and don't
| go to law school.
|
| FWIW people with 2 or 4 year degrees in law or justice and no
| other education seem to become probation officers in my
| experience, so I'm all for WVU sending that one into the
| ocean.
| lanstin wrote:
| At some point I wants to say to these backward states: may it
| be as you ask. Fine, turn your back on the fruits of
| humankind's knowledge and development. But of course, they have
| children; even if they do not care for them, we must.
| auggierose wrote:
| Wow, MS/PhD Mathematics is cancelled?
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| proof assistants have taken over?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah you don't need a PhD in math to calculate the odds of
| getting to tenure with that degree.
| ke88y wrote:
| Well the first and biggest problem is that phd students are
| INSANELY cheap teaching labor. Math PhD programs run at a
| loss in absolute terms, but almost never compared to the
| alternative of having to pay market rate for summer
| instructors and TA/grading labor.
|
| More to your point though: who in their right mind wants
| tenure after doing a useful PhD in math?
|
| Math phds can be extremely remunerative if you focus on
| studying useful topics, avoid abstract nonsense, pick up
| domain knowledge, and stay the heck away from low paying
| teaching jobs like "professor" and "instructor". Finance,
| biotech, and tech all pay good math phds comparable to or
| better than big tech pays mediocre CS phds. Mid six to low
| seven.
|
| It's a surprisingly low bar, since most math phds are
| incredibly romantic about choice of research area.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Math phds can be extremely remunerative if you focus on
| studying useful topics, avoid abstract nonsense, pick up
| domain knowledge, and stay the heck away from low paying
| teaching jobs like "professor" and "instructor".
|
| Yes. Now convince Math PhDs of that ;)
| khuey wrote:
| > Finance, biotech, and tech all pay good math phds
|
| Are any of these jobs actually in West Virginia? Maybe
| the state sees little point in educating people who will
| just move away.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| so math has gone the way of studying history, it only makes
| sense if your entire life is paid for by rent-collecting
| relatives of you.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering;
| Civil Engineering; Energy Land Management with Environmental
| and Energy Resource Management; Forest Resource Management with
| Wood Science and Technology; Agribusiness Management with
| Environmental and Natural Resource Economics
|
| That list is not what I would expect as having a hard time in
| West Virginia.
| joe5150 wrote:
| Not sure how accurate this list is. Acting is both unimpacted
| and eliminated according to this post, for example.
|
| I don't have a hard time believing that mining is not as
| productive a field as it once was. It's a shrinking part of
| the WV economy.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| You can see the recommendations for yourself here:
| https://provost.wvu.edu/academic-transformation/academic-
| pro...
|
| Great call out on Acting, I needed to be more specific.
|
| As you can see here: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/28d9f8
| 65-8d36-4e55-a4d0-475c...
|
| BFA Acting is unimpacted but MFA Acting is being
| eliminated.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Could also just mean that they have some fewer teaching
| personnel or in research positions. Trying to do same job
| with less people.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Isn't this the problem with all teaching positions?
|
| You have to really like academia to go into a role like
| that.
|
| Especially when you can make so much more om money in the
| private sector.
| sailfast wrote:
| Biometric systems engineering cut huh? Looks like that play to
| the FBI to convert miners into biometrics staffers for CJIS in
| Clarksburg didn't play out huh?
| sailfast wrote:
| Trying to imagine graduating with a degree in puppetry. Like,
| JUST puppetry and nothing else.
| morelisp wrote:
| Try to imagine a world without any 3D graphics industry,
| which _within living memory_ grew whole cloth out of
| puppetry, model-building, and related fx work.
|
| (I watched puppeteers at my university giving soldering
| lessons to the freshman EEs. These days I suspect they're
| leading practical 3D printing.)
| joe5150 wrote:
| Looks like there's a lot of emphasis on children's theater
| and education, and it's one of maybe two such majors in the
| US. Sounds like a great program!
| ketzo wrote:
| > Higher Education Administration
|
| Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was
| offering a _college degree_ in this? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat,
| I guess.
|
| I guess maybe that's overly cynical. Post-secondary education
| is important, and it follows that we would want people to
| figure out how to best deliver it. But hard not to judge that,
| just a little bit.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I worked at a university that offer a "PhD" in higher ed.
| administration. In theory I suppose nearly any field could be
| the valid subject of research. In practice, I saw this degree
| used to grant PhDs to existing administrators who didn't
| already have PhDs. I'm guessing that this may be useful in
| gaming rankings.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| It's also that someone working in higher ed, even if
| they're not an academic, needs a graduate degree to get the
| respect of the academics.
| csa wrote:
| > Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was
| offering a college degree in [higher education
| administration]? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.
|
| 1. This is a graduate degree.
|
| 2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research
| methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other
| part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all
| over the map -- finance (including fund raising), policy,
| governance, student development, campus culture, etc.
|
| You can't just take a random professor or a random business
| person and expect them to be a good university administrator.
| It's a topic worthy of research and study, imho.
|
| All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this
| field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of
| shit. I personally think that's due to the folks who are
| shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a
| very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it
| being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed
| itself.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm not surprised that such a degree is available and
| needed, but having it pop up in a list of programs of a
| random university is curious. Surely the need for such a
| degree is limited and those who would seek it out would be
| keen on obtaining it from an institution that isn't
| struggling.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| indeed, the failures described in the article seem to
| only strengthen the case for better training school
| admins
| csa wrote:
| > Surely the need for such a degree is limited and those
| who would seek it out would be keen on obtaining it from
| an institution that isn't struggling.
|
| This is the flagship state school. It's hardly some
| random school. If this program is not at this school in
| the state, it won't be at any school.
|
| If you're not from the US, every state has a "flagship"
| state school. Some have a comparably strong second school
| that usually covers agriculture and engineering (these
| are the A&M schools).
|
| West Virginia only has one major state school, and WVU is
| that school.
| chasing wrote:
| Maybe don't judge it, then. At least not in such a
| condescending way. Especially since we need _more_ people
| thinking deeply about how to make education work, not fewer.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| We have too many administrators bloating up university
| budgets. In my experience, very few people involved in
| academia truly question it or ask how educational systems
| should be built from the ground up. They usually are the
| worst defenders of that system, since they're the ones who
| flourish in it most. I don't think anybody who works in
| academics is truly capable of thinking outside of it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Academics hate administrators, but are too timid/selfish
| to coordinate with other academics across departmental
| lines to undermine the administrative body - not least
| because academics hate administration and don't have a
| good idea for how to deal with it.
| rayiner wrote:
| Judgment is a good thing for society. These fictitious
| fields hurt the credibility of real fields of study. If
| you're a doctor--or anyone else, but especially a doctor--
| you should be publicly, vociferously, and condescendingly
| judgmental towards homeopathy or chiropractic. It's your
| obligation for the good of the public.
| chasing wrote:
| Education is also important -- along with the
| administration of that education -- so when people judge
| things they can do so from a standpoint of understanding
| and not from the standpoint of reactionary politics and
| uninformed gut takes. (Education is how doctors become
| doctors, after all.) Thoughtful and educated judgment
| born of understanding is good for society. Just clouding
| things with dumb opinions -- or pure bullshit -- helps no
| one.
| rayiner wrote:
| If something is obviously not working, or doesn't make
| sense, it's important that the public be able to
| criticize it by reference to common sense and lived
| experience. Otherwise, you're turning over the policing
| function entirely to the same people who are deeply
| invested in protecting the legitimacy of a field of
| inquiry.
|
| Legitimate fields of study usually do not have trouble
| establishing their legitimacy to ordinary people. My
| undergraduate degree is in aerospace engineering. I've
| never had to argue from authority to get people to accept
| that's a legitimate field that produces actionable facts.
| chasing wrote:
| Seems a little naive to believe engineers don't make
| arguments from authority all the dang time...
| bigtex wrote:
| Public schools have been growing the administrative side of
| the business for decades, getting more money than ever
| before per student and it seems children are learning less
| and less. That Doesn't seem like the best track record for
| thinking deeply. They do get paid very well and in many
| states are allowed to retire early which insane pensions so
| maybe too much thinking on salaries and more attention to
| the students.
| chasing wrote:
| Might I suggest that if it's a problem maybe it's a _good
| thing_ to have people study it more deeply?
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe,but it seems like a self perpetuating fraud of the
| taxpayers and students who are funding education costs
| growing faster than inflation to me.
| chasing wrote:
| If you are concerned about spiraling costs and the
| siloing of wealth in this country, let me suggest you
| look elsewhere. Students and educators ain't it.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are many different causes and all need to be
| addressed. Look over there is the refrain of people who
| want to hide their corruption.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Bloating administrations is one of the drivers in the cost
| of education. Throwing more people at the problem will just
| waste more money
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Especially since we need more people thinking deeply about
| how to make education work, not fewer._
|
| I'm not sure that's true. The US system is staggeringly
| wasteful, partly because there are 50 states and thousands
| of school districts all making out that they are unique and
| different and need to find their own ways of doing things
| (a critique which could be leveled at the US more
| generally). This is an invitation to corruption and endless
| politicking.
|
| Amid all the various studies and reports and education
| manifestos, you know what I never hear? Of policies derived
| from surveying students about what they think and what does
| or does not work for them. Generally when I bring this
| point up it gets dismissed with some variation of 'students
| will just ask for more time off and less work and standards
| will crumble' which I don't think has any basis in fact.
| chasing wrote:
| Have you ever taught a class?
| canjobear wrote:
| > Higher Education Administration
|
| This is good as a first step. Better would be Higher
| Education Administration Administration, a PhD-level field
| dedicated to the theory and practice of administrating
| academic programs about higher education administration.
| stodor89 wrote:
| You can do this PhD any number of times, and each time adds
| another "Administration" at the end.
| nunez wrote:
| There is a lot of theory and practical studies involved in
| running a school or university. Also, many schools will
| require their admin to have a background in school
| administration, which tracks like this one help develop.
| bluGill wrote:
| School adminstration should be a sub study of MBA, they are
| mostly the same, or at least should be. Of course MBA
| programs deserve question too.
| chasing wrote:
| Suddenly everyone's an expert in Higher Education
| Administration, that thing they just learned about ten
| minutes ago.
| bluGill wrote:
| Everyone wants to think they are special and thus
| different and better. Nobody is. You are all the evils of
| Trump / Stalin / slave owners but for minor differences
| of situation.
| JackFr wrote:
| Often high school principal jobs, school district
| administrator and university jobs require a graduate degree,
| as a gatekeeping credential. This degree was likely created
| to capture that tuition money by offering the necessary
| employment credential for a relatively low level of academic
| effort.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| Most of these sound more like job titles than degrees. There
| are a few foundational disciplines that are buried in a sea of
| vocational disciplines. What happened to learning the
| fundamentals and gaining the rest through work experience? Most
| of these should not exist.
| detourdog wrote:
| Thanks for posting this list. Makes it seem like practical
| decisions from my point of view.
|
| The list you provide looks to me like a college that believes
| anyone in arts can actual pursue their own path and ambitions.
| The way the arts work this could go unnoticed if the
| instructors do it correctly.
|
| This looks to me like a college that is trying to break out of
| the traditional liberal arts idea into more focused
| instruction. This will work out for students that are focused.
|
| I went to a four year art school and I would have loved the art
| history department being disbanded. I was talking to my
| freshman year roommate and his quote was something like this.
|
| "They knew I choose this school because I can't do that work,
| so why do they make us take art history."
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I wonder how they did their selections. Some of the choices
| surprise me, such as reduction of staff on comp sci, software
| eng, electrical eng. I presume those departments would be where
| people want to go because of the big paying jobs.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| >I wonder how they did their selections.
|
| They published their methodology, the metrics driving
| discontinuation of programs and specialties were:
|
| - Enrollment in the major/program (as of Fall 2022)
|
| - Enrollment trends in the major/program over a five-year
| period (Fall 2018-Fall 2022)
|
| The metrics for reducing headcount were:
|
| - Student credit hour (SCH) production trend from AY 2020 to
| AY 2022
|
| - Full-time faculty headcount and trend from 2020 to 2022
|
| - Full-time faculty-to-student ratio
|
| - Net tuition revenue trends over 2020-2022 (Tuition revenue,
| based on SCH production, minus expenses)
|
| - Total unrestricted expenses trend from 2020-2022
|
| - Net financial position and trend from 2020-2022
|
| Exceptions were made for:
|
| - R1 research contributions - Doctoral programs and
| associated non-terminal master's programs within a unit that
| has annual (FY 2022) external research expenditures of $1
| million are exempted from review.
|
| - State priority program (land-grant mission)
|
| - Areas of distinction/differentiation
| matwood wrote:
| Enrollment overall sounds like the issue, which may be tied
| to WV population demographics. I don't know how many people
| are moving to WV to go to college, but the population of WV
| continues to shrink year over year.
| morelisp wrote:
| Closing a major university will surely be a good route to
| convince the brightest to stay.
| Thlom wrote:
| Do we know why? I've never been there, but Charleston
| looks like a cosy city and there's lots of classic small
| american towns around and the nature looks amazing. Have
| they just not been able to develop any new industry after
| coal mining collapsed?
| torstenvl wrote:
| WV basically has two things going for it: coal and
| natural beauty. And the tourism industry isn't enough to
| support a whole state. So people are leaving quite a bit.
|
| A lot of people coming in, including myself, are not full
| time residents. Some of them are retirees from northern
| Virginia looking for a lower cost of living. Some just
| prefer rural life with a more live-and-let-live vibe. But
| almost nobody is moving out here to raise kids who will
| go to college here.
|
| For the small number who do raise college-bound kids
| here, a fair number of them will gladly take a lower
| ranked school to be closer to the city, e.g., University
| of Richmond.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Tourism is enough to support the state if it is combined
| with amenities that attract year-round residents --
| especially remote workers.
|
| The problem with WV is a pervasive culture of corruption
| among its elites.
| panzagl wrote:
| > The problem with WV is a pervasive culture of
| corruption among its elites.
|
| As compared to where? Senator Byrd did a lot to bring
| federal programs to WV- the FBI, astronomy, interstates,
| various DoD, I don't think anyone has replaced his
| influence for the state.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > Tourism is enough to support the state if it is
| combined with amenities that attract year-round residents
| -- especially remote workers.
|
| Tourism and amenities for remote workers don't come
| across as a universal remedy for addressing the
| challenges of West Virginia.
|
| While certain areas are undoubtedly picturesque and the
| cost of living might be low, similar sentiments apply to
| Montana, the Carolinas, Maine, and so on. Truth be told
| there are many such areas in the majority of states that
| have similar natural beauty and low cost of living
| (barring a handful of distinct cases).
|
| What specific beneficial attributes does West Virginia
| possess that set it apart from other states?
| paulmd wrote:
| Politically this is the classic "rotten borough/pocket
| borough" problem in a nutshell though. People move away,
| and you are left with a seat controlled by a ridiculously
| small number of people who nevertheless control a
| constitutionally-allocated location.
|
| In the UK this got down to some districts having
| literally single-resident or single-family districts. And
| it's super easy to influence the residents when there's a
| single master who controls the borough... kinda like coal
| in WV.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_borough
| s
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The nature is nice. Harper's Ferry is one of the most
| beautiful places I've ever been in my life. But it's not
| much nicer than any other Blue Ridge state all the way
| down to Tennessee and Georgia. Meanwhile, the town life,
| at least as of 20 years ago, is _desolate_. My best
| friend from college grew up in West Virginia, and I spent
| a week with him there before he moved to LA to become a
| television writer back in 2001. I don 't know that I've
| seen a place more falling apart. Houses collapsed,
| abandoned. Weird paint splotches that looked like blood
| stains on houses that were still occupied. _Every single_
| lawn had a Camaro body with no engine and no tires
| propped up on cinder blocks. Other than coal mining, the
| only employer in this guy 's town, which is where he
| worked, was some kind of direct mailing marketing
| operation that paid minimum wage.
|
| The only upside, if you're truly poor, is you could rent
| a reasonable sized place for $100 a month.
| eitally wrote:
| I grew up in semi-rural Virginia and recently watched
| Peter Santenello's Appalachia[1] series on YT. The
| reality is that WV is nearly entirely rural (like
| Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas), but there's little oil or
| gas to backfill the coal, and it's absolutely not flat
| enough (and is almost entirely forested) for either
| meaningful factory/ranch farming or much else. It doesn't
| benefit from interstate commerce and there's no river
| running through it, either. Beyond all the
| topographical/geographical challenges, the cities are
| shells of their former selves, and since both the
| educational attainment and financial independence of West
| Virginians is low, the potential for breaking out of this
| death spiral seems low.
|
| All that ... and then add the fact that WV is perhaps the
| worst hit state by the opioid crisis.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0&list=PLE
| yPgwIPkH...
|
| Tons of natural beauty and I think the state should
| continue investing in tourism along the lines of what
| Tennessee has done for decades with the Smokies.
| stodor89 wrote:
| Looks like an amazing place for remote workers. Sadly,
| the internet connection is probably dogshit.
| jwells89 wrote:
| My hometown is in semi-rural WV as well, and this is all
| true.
|
| Furthermore, because the lack of opportunity and things
| for young people to occupy themselves with, many young
| people with means (and many who don't, via college loans)
| move elsewhere to build a life for themselves. I did,
| because if I hadn't the path ahead of me had a ceiling
| I'd hit by my late 20s or early 30s.
|
| This contributes to the cycle of decay that much more.
| Fewer young people - shrinking working population - no
| interest from employers - no jobs.
|
| And the opioid cross has made it all that much worse.
| It's sad. My hometown wasn't exactly bustling when I was
| a kid in the 90s, but it still had some life to it. Now
| it's barely hanging on.
| xemdetia wrote:
| This is part of what I hoped would evolve as part of the
| full remote pandemic stuff. I left my home area because
| it was obvious my salary ceiling would be about a third
| of what I am making now, and I still have room to grow
| where I am where I would otherwise be stuck. With full
| remote it would have been possible to at least move back
| home, but attitudes seem to have shifted for the worse in
| a lot of cases so being within an hour commute of a tech
| hub (US) is the only way to get the salary parity.
| Thlom wrote:
| Started watching that series now. Brilliant. Thanks.
| RhysU wrote:
| As someone brought up in Appalachia with family who made
| good money via coal mining, I believe the phrase is
| "...after coal mining was killed" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/obamas-war-
| on-coal which is a partisan source but the opposite side
| made no bones about what they were doing.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| I'm curious about the mindset behind your statement. The
| article you linked is very clearly a political propaganda
| piece, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
| with it.
|
| Does the local population really see the coal industry as
| purposely killed off by government, and not an industry
| that's been long in decline, with the final nail in the
| coffin being provided by the rapid expansion of natural
| gas via fracking?
|
| https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-
| brief/what-ki...
| RhysU wrote:
| I am making the point that Obama's energy policies were a
| deliberate, concerted disaster for coal mining far in
| excess of any gradual market changes.
|
| Anecdata, but this was common knowledge in the region at
| the time. Retroactively, the broader public thinks the
| industry faded away. But no, it was shived.
| [deleted]
| RhysU wrote:
| Wow. No one remembers even the NYT coverage of this exact
| thing
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/us/politics/obama-
| coal-mi.... I am not saying anything not agreed to by
| both parties at the time. The only difference was whether
| or not a politician cheered it.
| morelisp wrote:
| Obama did not "cheer" it and did not kill it. The coal
| industry had already been dead for years. He was the
| first president to refuse to commit to continuing the
| political fiction it wasn't, and to offer an actual
| alternative.
|
| We could have debated the alternative - it had problems!
| - but instead the argument formed, and still forms,
| around the outright lie that coal mining could have
| continued. Even as it was already not employing people
| anymore!
| ke88y wrote:
| The decline of coal was hastened by public policy, but
| was inevitable. Also, other parts of Appalachia haven't
| met West Virginia's fate because the states successfully
| diversified their economies and don't rely as heavily on
| extractive industries.
|
| West Virginia's issue -- as a state - is a deep seated
| cultural unwillingness to adapt or change. The decline of
| goal is the trigger, not the problem.
| tzs wrote:
| > West Virginia's issue -- as a state - is a deep seated
| cultural unwillingness to adapt or change
|
| As illustrated by the 2016 election.
|
| One candidate said coal had played a vital role in making
| the US what it is but it is in decline due to both the
| need to address climate change and falling demand due to
| advances in other forms of energy production. That
| candidate proposed a $30 billion dollar plan to "ensure
| that coal miners and their families get the benefits
| they've earned and respect they deserve, to invest in
| economic diversification and job creation, and to make
| coal communities an engine of US economic growth in the
| 21st century as they have been for generations" [1].
|
| The other candidate said he would reverse the decline in
| coal and bring back the jobs and mines that had gone away
| over the previous decade. He offered no hint at how he
| would accomplish that, and nearly all analysts and even
| more coal mine owners said that because of the shale
| revolution and the rapidly falling prices of wind and
| solar coal would remain in decline no matter what the
| government did
|
| West Virginia overwhelmingly voted for that second
| candidate giving him a larger percentage of their vote
| (68%) than any other state.
|
| [1] https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8
| d6340f1...
| jwells89 wrote:
| As someone who was born and raised in WV, I'll say that
| though the coal industry had been the state's lifeline
| for over a century, the relationship was toxic at best.
| Appalachian coal miners are among the most used and
| abused groups of workers in modern history. The pay is
| good for the area yes, but it requires trading away your
| health and risking death. Coal companies are shameless
| when it comes to workers' rights and that traces all the
| way back to their origin point. They're part of the
| reason that governmental worker protections exist now.
|
| Realistically the state government should've started to
| seriously try to attract alternative industries decades
| ago, because the state was always going to spiral if it
| relied on coal... the only difference is the speed of the
| spiral.
| paulmd wrote:
| Yup, things like "portal to portal" rules for Amazon
| warehouse workers have their origin in _the subterranean
| portals of a mine_ , because coal companies didn't want
| to pay their workers for the hour ride down or up the
| mineshaft. Which is the analogy Amazon drew to their
| frisk lines at the exits, even if they require it it's
| not "part of the job" etc.
|
| Coal companies were the Uber of their time, "innovating"
| in a space and time when the law hadn't kept up with
| industrial progress, and obviously one of the places you
| can extract value is from the welfare of your workers.
| RhysU wrote:
| If I defenestrate a frail 80-year-old that they were
| eventually going to die naturally is not a murder
| defense.
|
| If a robust 80-year-old lived next to the frail one it is
| also not a murder defense.
|
| If the frail one was a stubborn old mule it is likewise
| not a murder defense.
|
| Maybe the neighborhood is better without the dead one,
| but that doesn't change that they were murdered.
| [deleted]
| ke88y wrote:
| This sort of victim mentality is endemic to the region.
|
| WV could have taken the path of western PA. Not perfect,
| still some deep scars, but a flourishing new economy that
| can help pay for long term recovery and provided youth
| with some sort of future.
|
| WV chose victimhood over adaptation, for decades, and
| here we are. The article isn't just about cutting
| humanities departments. WV is so thoroughly hollowed out
| that it can't even afford to keep its flagship Computer
| Science department fully staffed. It'll be left out of
| the great onshoring because there is not sufficient human
| capital or infrastructure.
|
| It's the state government version of a private equity
| "strip mine the assets and wind it down" operation.
|
| Constant victimhood is a self fulfilling prophecy.
| Opportunities were there. WV was too busy being obstinate
| to take them.
| pirate787 wrote:
| It's not victimhood, its corruption and incompetence in a
| massively centralized state government system.
| paulmd wrote:
| Realtalk, one of the biggest problems with the United
| States is that there's no mechanism to adjust or reboot
| states after statehood.
|
| In some of these cases the state would simply go under
| and be reformed or reabsorbed into neighboring states,
| but thanks to the federal mechanism this cannot happen.
| The US taxpayer will always be injecting federal money
| into the state and that's enough to stave off total
| collapse, it is unpossible for even a natural disaster to
| push even the shittiest corrupt state under or anything
| else. And in many casss that means these corrupt
| ineffective states continue to linger on far past their
| actual shelf life and after they would have been reformed
| into a more stable one under any other system.
|
| This also has the effect of crippling the federal
| government with a lot of "pocket boroughs/rotten
| boroughs" that have constitutionally-allocated voting
| rights yet have almost no residents and potentially no
| economic activity. And there is no mechanism to reform
| this without the consent of the states, which will never
| be given for political reasons even if the states
| themselves wanted it (which they don't).
|
| It is also not a coincidence that when the Slave States
| left that the north got a bunch of regulatory stuff
| passed while they were gone. The marriage is really not a
| happy one and part of that is that these state
| governments continue to be set up in an undemocratic
| fashion which continues to promote and empower these same
| folks over and over - like the 1910s/1920s and
| 1950s/1960s flareups of the Klan. But again, we rebuilt
| the same antidemocratic (by design, to suppress threats
| to oligarchic slaveholder power) government structures
| after the war and expected a different outcome somehow.
| And there just is no mechanism for reform without another
| war and re-admission to the union as being a club to
| force reforms.
|
| This lack of a reform mechanism for state allocation and
| structure is going to be the thing that kills the union
| for good, I very much feel this is the singular
| underlying issue that's been rattling around the untied
| states for almost 250 years now. Fix the state allocation
| and the senate or presidency aren't as undemocratic a
| structure.
|
| And yes, I understand full well that the slave states
| would never have joined the compact if such provisions
| were included. They should have been, and the slave
| states would eventually have collapsed or initiated a
| fatal war and been assimilated into a more stable
| structure. The economic collapse of the south in the
| 1840s/1850s as they missed the industrialization wave due
| to the Resource Curse of slave labor would have pushed
| them under in the alt-history timeline too.
|
| (and yes West Virginia was the loyalists who stayed with
| the union, but, culturally and economically they have
| weighed with the rest of Southern Appalachia more in the
| intervening era, and suffered similar resource-curse
| economic failure due to coal rather than cheap slave
| labor.)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_borough
| s
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
| RhysU wrote:
| Heh, this family is in Western PA which I left in the
| early 2000's for greener pastures outside of PA entirely.
| I love the area and the people, but pretending things are
| economically rosy in Western PA in the extraction areas
| undercuts your credibility. Leave Pittsburgh once in
| awhile.
| morelisp wrote:
| No one's saying things are economically fine in western
| PA. But, they can still easily afford to teach French.
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| Getting rid of an industry that literally is killing
| people world wide is not the same as killing a person.
| It's the opposite, it is saving lives.
| RhysU wrote:
| I am not arguing about any greater good. Killing is
| killing.
|
| My favorite joke here (SMBC?) is that the robbers that
| killed Batman's 2 parents did not save N-2 people because
| Batman saved N people.
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| You keep equating killing an industry with killing people
| - this is a false comparison.
|
| Ending the use of coal saves human lives and does not
| take any human lives. The batman comparison is
| irrelevant.
|
| No longer using asbestos saved lives and didn't take
| lives. Removing lead from consumer products saves lives
| and didn't take lives.
|
| I'm sure you there were people in the asbestos industry
| who weren't happy about the change and they would have
| gladly gone on giving people cancer. Just like people in
| the coal industry still bemoan the fact they can't keep
| killing as many people.
| RhysU wrote:
| If I kill a car's engine or kill the music or kill this
| conversation do you understand what I mean?
|
| The executive branch killed the coal industry. It was a
| swift action to bring something to a close.
|
| That people in this thread can't disentangle one sense of
| "kill" from another is disappointing. My "murder"
| examples probably didn't help but I figured people might
| enjoy the nuances (All of them could have been written
| about turning off, or killing, a bad radio station vs a
| good radio station and the arguments hold). Lesson
| learned.
|
| My point has never been about the extent to which coal
| usage ends the life of humans. Frankly, that doesn't
| matter to anything I have said.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The entire world is transitioning off of coal. Here are
| some charts on how England coal mining/use has also
| deeply fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/death-uk-coal
|
| Pure economics are driving its demise.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I wonder if those who exploited child labor talk about
| the times before and after child labor was "killed", or
| drug companies talk about the times before and after
| thalidomide was "killed"
| RhysU wrote:
| Clearly, I am morally equivalent to child labor and
| thalidomide by attempting to correct that coal mining
| didn't collapse on its own but rather it was explicitly
| killed by executive action. </sarcasm> Next.
| kalverra wrote:
| As a WVU grad who grew up there: ya, pretty much. Outside
| of some select towns and cities, WV is poor as shit, and
| it's only getting worse. Lots of abandoned towns,
| homelessness, and very few jobs. Even when coal mining
| was big, it wasn't exactly a thriving area. The movie
| October Sky is a great rendition of what it was like in
| the 50s, the coal company owned everything, and was the
| only source for anyone's income. Now imagine that 70
| years later with all the coal companies gone, and tons of
| painkillers.
|
| Its a very sad state, anyone I knew with half a brain who
| grew up there wanted nothing but to leave. Even those in
| good situations were all looking to move far away after
| college.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Maybe the computer engineering is vastly underpaid compared
| to computer science but, I guess they can't attract computer
| science professors and or students ??? It seems very odd.
| samspenc wrote:
| Yeah was surprised to see Computer Science and some other
| 'hot fields' in the list of programs getting downsized as
| well, wonder if there just wasn't that much demand for these
| majors in this particular college?
| pimlottc wrote:
| Or perhaps there's a competiting school that already covers
| those majors successfully.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Not in West Virginia...
| candiodari wrote:
| Because despite all high paying jobs being in STEM or
| economics fields, the enrollment is actually dropping in
| those directions. And yes this is very confused by
| recovery from COVID, but the reality is that there was a
| dropping trend that started long before COVID, and today
| CS (or Math, or Physics, or economics for that matter)
| enrollment hasn't even recovered to the point it would
| have been at had the drop continued without COVID
| happening.
|
| But yes last year we saw an increase, for obvious
| reasons, and the speed at which enrollment is currently
| dropping is lower than it was before COVID, but there's
| still less STEM graduates every year. Not just in the US,
| essentially everywhere.
|
| On top of that young people are still running away from
| STEM degrees to liberal arts degrees of various kinds
| (but that doesn't work as well as you'd think because
| there's other problems there). Not even to all of liberal
| arts, just a few core directions.
| [deleted]
| spamizbad wrote:
| I have a theory as to why: Most other departments get to
| enjoy the "PhD glut" allowing them to score candidates from
| top graduate programs and then pay them around $60K/year,
| and then filling things out by with adjunct professors who
| are often paid in the range of $1500-$4500 to teach a class
| for a semester. It's why it's not unheard of for adjunct
| profs to be on some form of welfare to make ends meet.
|
| I suspect it's far more difficult to recruit Computer
| Science PhDs who will work at these prices, so they
| probably have to rely on more expensive full-time, tenure-
| track faculty who likely are paid more than their peers. If
| you're passionate about teaching or your area of research,
| you'll probably cope with the lower pay - but that greatly
| narrows the pool of applicants, especially when FAANGs will
| pay you 5x more to work for them.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| Avshalom wrote:
| Clicking through to WGS
| https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/ce4522bc-
| ed40-4c71-a402-4bdf...
|
| show that it's being merged under soc/anth and self-
| submitted a plan to cut their costs by 63% and has already
| gotten rid of one instructor.
| jxf wrote:
| That's not true; computer engineering is represented in the
| list of degrees that the administration has.
| joe5150 wrote:
| This is nonsense. WGS and philosophy probably cost nothing
| and just aren't on the radar. They want to eliminate the
| higher ed administration program.
| [deleted]
| CSMastermind wrote:
| These are the degrees that the members of the committee
| that made the recommendation hold:
|
| Chemical Engineering; Journalism; Computer Engineering;
| Sport and Exercise Psychology; Mechanical Engineering;
| History; Finance; Biological Science; Chemistry; Creative
| Writing; Technology Education; Exercise Physiology;
| Industrial Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Zoology and
| Psychology
| dehrmann wrote:
| Apparently they rank 139 in CS.
|
| Barring significant open-source contributions or stellar
| leetcode skillz, the path to an entry-level tech job in the
| valley or NYC will be a challenge.
|
| I went to a top-25 CS program in a flyover state without tech
| jobs, and only the top 5-10% of the graduating class made it
| to a major tech hub within 5 years. Granted, there a personal
| reasons to not leave, but still.
| dh5 wrote:
| I'm guessing it's more about the faculty being hard and/or
| expensive to retain for those majors.
| DFHippie wrote:
| For linguistics? I can't speak for the others, but I know
| that linguistics departments are pumping out a lot more
| PhDs than there are positions in the field. I expect that
| is true for all of them. Because these fields don't tend to
| bring in grant money, I expect professors can't demand rock
| star salaries.
|
| But if your ratio of professors to students is poor, your
| department is going to be a money drain even if its demand
| in salaries and facilities is low.
| xcxcx wrote:
| ChatGPT
| lionkor wrote:
| is a result of comp sci, no?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| We don't know about previous cuts, so it could be that
| unaffected programs were cut to the bone already. Also, they
| might not just be competitive in those programs to attract
| students and teachers needed to run them, so it's better to
| focus on other things. Not every school can run a viable
| world class computer science program.
| fatfingerd wrote:
| > Not every school can run a viable world class computer
| science program.
|
| This is a consideration, but for WV residents it is better
| to have a mediocre program with in-state tuition than no
| program and this will eventually affect the WV economy as a
| whole..
|
| There's a short term logic in shutting down everything that
| isn't competitive to attract out of state students, but the
| resulting function of the public system wont fulfill any of
| the goals of a state system.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Surprised by the elimination of all those language programs.
| Surely, there has to be demand for Chinese and Spanish, at the
| very least?
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| What does one do with a DEGREE in Chinese? As opposed to not
| getting a degree in Chinese but spending 4 years learning it
| while getting a degree in, I dunno, materials science or
| something.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Professional translation and teaching. For real world use.
| Then there is research and other such cases.
|
| For teaching you want better understanding than just
| learning it with self-study and probably for some pedagogy
| included in the degree.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at
| chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just
| starting in your late teens?
|
| I feel like one would never stand a chance against
| someone who was raised in a bilingual house.
| magpi3 wrote:
| Yes. I have lived in China for about five years, and
| while I myself am not yet fluent, I have met several
| foreigners who started learning Chinese in their twenties
| and who are completely fluent and can speak like native
| speakers. I have almost met Chinese people who have never
| lived abroad, started learning English in their teens,
| and who speak English as fluently as a native. I think
| it's all about the immersion and the willingness to keep
| up with it.
| kaashif wrote:
| If you're not fluent in Chinese, how could you tell if
| someone speaks Chinese like a native?
|
| I'm only a native speaker of English, but I know vast
| swathes of native Chinese speakers who have been in the
| US for decades and sound nothing like native English
| speakers. I know ones that do sound like native speakers
| too, but it's rare in my experience.
|
| I don't think immersion is anywhere close to sufficient
| to guarantee native-like proficiency, there's something
| else.
|
| I don't know what the something else is.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| There can be big benefits to being white in Asia for
| these kinds of jobs. They want to employ a
| foreign/"exotic" businessman to give them credibility. If
| you were raised bilingual, odds are you're Chinese and
| just fit in there.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Bilingual could allow you to work in some capacity. But
| in teaching those people really don't always know why.
| Why is something correct or why is something wrong. What
| is probably a good learning path. Just think of average
| native speaker. They can tell that something is wrong,
| but they can't always explaining in common framework why
| is it wrong.
|
| And then if you get money involved, you probably want
| version in both languages or even more. And those have to
| be correct exactly.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at
| chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just
| starting in your late teens?
|
| Yes.
|
| (Classroom teaching/formal teaching is not gonna matter
| much -- consuming lots of Chinese content at just the
| right level will be much more effective.)
|
| > I feel like one would never stand a chance against
| someone who was raised in a bilingual house.
|
| Actually, you might. A lot of them are not raised with
| Mandarin -- or if they are, a heavily accented form of
| Mandarin. You can go straight to Mandarin.
|
| You might also have another advantage. If you put in the
| work, you will learn how to read and write. A lot of the
| bilingual types raised outside of China have not put in
| the hours and are basically illiterate in Chinese.
|
| And finally, your ability to communicate in Chinese -- or
| any foreign language -- is not just a question of fluency
| or having as little accent as possible. It is very much a
| matter of _how_ you choose to express yourself. IQ
| matters a lot here. Donald Tusk (former PM of Poland,
| former President of the European Council) is a great As
| an example of someone who was able to express himself
| very well, despite a poor grasp of English.
| csa wrote:
| > Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at
| chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just
| starting in your late teens?
|
| Yes... sort of.
|
| First, folks who have learned the language as adults are
| often better at teaching _early_ stages of language
| learning. Bilingual folks may know what is right or
| sounds right, but they may not know why.
|
| Second, folks who are bilingual mostly by speaking the
| language in their home often have a very limited scope of
| knowledge of the language. The range of language needed
| to teach at a university or to a higher level of
| proficiency (beyond tourist level) requires a much wider
| range of target language knowledge.
|
| Third, for folks who want to become a _professor_ , their
| research will matter much more than their ability to
| teach the nuts and bolts of the language.
|
| Lastly, at most universities that teach Chinese, you have
| mostly if not exclusively grad students from China
| teaching the pure language stuff. Someone who has a major
| in Chinese will be teaching literature, linguistics,
| culture, or something similar.
| golem14 wrote:
| maybe chatgpt can translate adequately for low end jobs
| in the space?
|
| More important jobs can be filled with candidates from
| more well-heeled colleges?
| Ekaros wrote:
| MTL with some editing is probably enough even without gpt
| for the lowest end.
|
| Then you can get some hobbyist or Chinese person for next
| tier.
|
| But you will probably always want professional for legal
| and contractual work, translating international treaties
| and interpretation at high level. We might get somewhere
| close, but I think for situations like UN you will always
| want live person at least some of the time.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| And probably for literary translation as well... Although
| I'm not so sure in the long term, in light of the
| progression of the GPTs.
| ke88y wrote:
| In theory it makes perfect sense to cut the degree programs
| and keep (perhaps smaller or at least lower overhead)
| departments as pure service depts.
|
| The problem is that, in practice, tiny majors use of very
| few resources for non-service courses. As a result, the
| savings from cutting the major are much lower than expected
| and realizing those savings requires gutting the
| departments service capacity as well.
|
| Plus you lose all your half decent faculty -- and
| especially the ones who aren't already senile and/or
| retired in place.
|
| Usually, if you really do need the service courses, it is
| better to keep the major but adjust compensation and
| resource allocation for under-subscribed upper division
| courses. See math departments as a case study.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I would reckon lot of jobs such as teaching or translation
| have that as a requirement.
| csa wrote:
| > What does one do with a DEGREE in Chinese?
|
| 1. Teach Chinese
|
| 2. Translation and interpretation
|
| 3. Dual degree with any number of degrees (e.g., business,
| art, etc.) that have natural pairings due to demands in the
| labor market (although not sure how much demand in West
| Virginia specifically).
|
| On a more real but anecdotal note, I know many language
| majors who have moved to the/a target language country for
| a year or more after graduation, and they learned more
| about what types of bilingual jobs were available. That led
| them to either get a job in one of those areas or skill up
| in some way (typically going back to school) to get the
| skills and/or credentials they needed to get the job they
| wanted.
|
| On a personal note, even though I wasn't a Japanese major,
| I went to Japan after college to learn Japanese better. My
| idea was to learn Japanese and become an "international
| lawyer" with a focus on Japan.
|
| I met a few folks who did that exact job in Japan, and most
| of them were miserable. Needless to say, I changed the
| direction of my career.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I met a few folks who did that exact job in Japan, and
| most of them were miserable._
|
| Interesting. What was the source or cause of their
| misery, and how sure were you that the correlation wasn't
| spurious?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Many attorneys are miserable. It's easy to get stuck with
| awful, dreadfully boring work.
| csa wrote:
| > What was the source or cause of their misery, and how
| sure were you that the correlation wasn't spurious?
|
| Great question!
|
| In their words, the legal work wasn't _that_ interesting,
| the business side (rain making) could be infuriating due
| to cultural differences, working in Japan wasn't that
| interesting after the honeymoon period, and living in
| Japan wasn't something they wanted to do long term with
| their family.
|
| I will add that some ambitious folks who worked in firms
| that had locations back in the US kind of felt like
| second class citizens in their own firms, even though
| they were driving quite a bit of revenue at the time.
|
| Having worked in Japan myself (since I spoke with them),
| I can add some things that they probably thought but
| didn't say:
|
| 1. Trying to explain American anything to someone who
| thinks that the Japanese way is the best way _and should
| be the only way around the world_ gets old after a while.
| These folks existed in Japan in droves at that time
| (90s). It's better now, but they still exist. Note that
| this knife cuts both ways -- trying to explain Japanese
| ways to Americans who think the American way is the best
| and only way gets old as well. I've done both. If you
| want to get technical, it usually boils down to the
| "international" person being at a higher stage of adult
| cognitive development than the local (see Robert Kegan
| for an example of what these levels look like). Given
| that some US legal concepts seem counterintuitive or even
| unfair _even to Americans_ , you can imagine how added
| layers of a different culture and a different legal
| system might meet some resistance from Japanese clients.
|
| 2. Raising a family in Japan, even in Tokyo, can present
| challenging issues. Even if everything is covered in
| terms of cost (housing, schooling, travel, etc.), there
| is still the issue of the constantly rotating cast of
| characters of your co-workers, friends, classmates (for
| kids), etc. Also, some spouses get very antsy and/or
| dissatisfied for a variety of reasons. If costs are not
| covered, it takes a lot of money or a lot of compromise
| to make things work.
|
| 3. I'm fairly certain that one or more of the folks I
| spoke with actually didn't speak much Japanese -- they
| were top notch legal practitioners who had interpreters
| do whatever speaking needed to be done. While one could
| live in Tokyo fairly well without speaking a word of
| Japanese, it would be a very shallow experience, imho.
|
| There are a lot of things I could say about the legal
| profession in general. They aren't related to Japan at
| all, but they may have contributed to the misery these
| folks were experiencing.
|
| While certain areas of law fascinate me (Berkman Center
| stuff can be quite interesting), I'm glad I didn't become
| a lawyer in general, and a lawyer in Japan in particular.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Presumably the people coming through these programs are a
| drop in the ocean next to number of Americans fluent in
| Chinese and Spanish, and likely able to teach it at quite a
| high level without a specific degree for that language.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| The radio show _On Point_ had an episode the other day about the
| budget cuts and other challenges rural U.S. colleges are facing:
| https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/08/10/what-a-decline-in-ru...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://tuitiontracker.org/fitness/school.html?unitid=238032
| Merrill wrote:
| It is more efficient to hire a native speaker educated in a
| foreign language who speaks good English to teach the language
| than it is to educate an English speaker in the foreign language
| well enough to teach it.
| kalverra wrote:
| This is sad to see as a WVU CS grad. WVU is pretty much the only
| place to go outside of Marshall and some teeny tiny schools if
| you're in WV.
|
| I suspect a lot of this has to do with bad management by Gee and
| admin bloat, but the state is poor as shit. Most talented
| students go to WVU on scholarship, and get the fuck out of the
| state ASAP. It can't be easy to keep a state school funded when
| nearly every graduate of that school's #1 goal is to bail out of
| the state.
| callalex wrote:
| Isn't this one of the exact reasons every smart person leaves
| the state ASAP? An entrenched royalty class running everything
| with heavy corruption?
| tomohawk wrote:
| They are recommending reductions in faculty even for STEM
| programs.
|
| https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/262cec3c-3098-48e9-a4ed-5061...
|
| It would be interesting to see the admin staff to faculty ratio
| at WVU and if there are any recommendations to trim that. Many
| universities spend more on administration than faculty.
| Jedd wrote:
| Seemingly the president (a weird title, but okay) of that
| university brings in about US$750k / year - and is also
| noteworthy for being one of the highest paid public university
| presidents for some time[1] - netting US$6m for 2013 from Ohio,
| while stepping down from there after making some inappropriate
| comments.
|
| My point is slightly tangential to the above - one might expect
| one of the most highly paid professionals in this role to be
| highly skilled, and to avoid this kind of oversight or
| blindsiding.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/05/19/the-
| highe...
| [deleted]
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Seemingly the president (a weird title, but okay)
|
| That's what the title is all across the US.
| rblatz wrote:
| I was at Ohio State while Gee was President. He was very good
| at fundraising, that's how he commanded that salary.
| dmix wrote:
| Are we even sure this is a bad thing for the school? Sounds
| like they are streamlining their business, just with a lot of
| the usual useless administrative bloat and incompetence slowing
| it down.
| joe5150 wrote:
| The administrative bloat and incompetence is why they're in
| the position to cut academic programs in the first place. You
| seem to think the tail is wagging the dog.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Expecting to see an announcement that administrative staff will
| be increased to manage the transition.
| rblatz wrote:
| This is interesting, Gordon Gee is their current President. He
| was the president at Ohio State while I was there he was well-
| loved by the students and would routinely make appearances at
| off-campus parties and pose for photos with students. He also had
| a razor-sharp memory for people and recognized me multiple times
| when I bumped into him. But that wasn't his strongest suit, he
| was a fund raising machine, that man brought a lot of money into
| the university from alumni and other donors. I'm shocked to hear
| that WVU is having financial issues under his leadership.
| kalverra wrote:
| My freshman year at WVU was the year Gee took over as
| president. That was definitely his thing to ingratiate himself
| to the students. The whole frost couple weeks he would go up
| and down frat row, and through all the big house parties and
| shake hands, pose for pictures, etc. He quickly got this vibe
| as the "cool dad" with his cute bow ties. This won the student
| body over easily, so we were confused when our professors were
| really bummed about it. Apparently word gets around on your
| management style and spending habits.
|
| The dude ripped through money he didn't have, hired a ton of
| bloat, and is now cutting staff in nearly all the programs I
| held dear.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > that man brought a lot of money into the university from
| alumni and other donors.
|
| He did or urban meyer and the buckeyes did?
|
| > I'm shocked to hear that WVU is having financial issues under
| his leadership.
|
| He forgot to bring urban meyer and the ohio state football
| program with him.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| if that's truly the case then i imagine there might have been
| problems with how wvu has been operating, and this may be an
| overhaul to remove bloat.
| gilbetron wrote:
| While they have many skills, connections being one of the most
| useful to their employer, my theory is that the greatest skill
| of executives is the ability to gain credit and avoid blame.
| They hone that razor sharp and wield it constantly to achieve
| their positions.
| dchuk wrote:
| I've always been fascinated by the idea of speaking multiple
| languages, but the basic fact is that technology is clearly going
| to make the idea of speaking different languages completely
| irrelevant in the next few years. We'll all have real time
| Rosetta stones in our pockets, at which point why not just
| everyone speak the same language going forward?
|
| I get that there's something romantic about the idea of regional
| dialects, but practically speaking in a global world with
| advanced tech, it's simply only a point of friction.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Language eradication was and still is one of the major methods
| of genocide. Of the remaining 8000 or so human languages still
| extent, one or another dies every few weeks... and those are
| just the ones we know about.
|
| There's nothing romantic about this. The proper genre is horror
| or maybe post-apocalyptic dystopia.
|
| There's something of a control freak thing going on when one
| who would never want to speak to the people who use these
| minority languages still insists that they speak the same
| language as he does.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think that's not at all the point being made. In fact it's
| quite the opposite. With a real time bi directional universal
| language translator pervasively available and ergonomically
| adapted it would be relatively irrelevant which language you
| spoke. This would in fact be a boon to minority languages or
| languages outside the language of business and science (today
| English). It would allow minority languages to flourish
| without extrinsic pressure to assimilate into more
| influential languages because its relatively toll free to be
| monolingual. Most of the pressure outside of planned cultural
| eradication is economic, and making the economic cost of
| speaking your native language close to zero is the best way
| to preserve native languages. Dreaming of mass literacy of
| minority languages won't work - its impractical to expect
| everyone to learn hundreds of languages to meet people at
| their native tongue, especially in a multicultural society
| like modern western societies. That's not a horror; that's
| human nature. But technology has the chance to make it
| irrelevant, allowing people to communicate without
| assimilation.
|
| That said people will still learn languages to do comparative
| analysis and out of personal drive. That's great too.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > With a real time bi directional universal language
| translator
|
| Those aren't being developed for most languages of the
| world, only the fairly large languages where corporations
| see financial interest. Moreover, due to poverty or
| censorship that has hindered publication of books and
| internet content in most languages, most languages do not
| have a sizeable electronic corpus with which to train MT.
|
| The OP is right, anyone active in this field knows that
| your MT dream would actually result in massive language
| loss, as bilingual users of MT technology feel forced to
| switch from their mother tongue to the regionally powerful
| language in order to access that MT technology.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Actually GPT-4 is at least marginally capable at almost
| all languages, and I expect LLMs being as nascent as they
| are, will become more proficient at more and more
| languages. The thing is that training a LLM is
| fundamentally simpler to train than prior NLP translation
| models. For example, I can carry on a reasonably good
| conversation with ChatGPT in the ancient dead language of
| Pali and have it translated into cuneiform, then Chinese,
| then Esperanto, and to English in a new session and the
| translation is almost flawless from the original. (I have
| in fact done this)
|
| If it weren't for this I would have agreed with you last
| year. But I see fairly clearly the way to preserve native
| tongues is to take a base LLM like Llama 2 and fine tune
| it with your native language. As people are invested in
| their native language this doesn't seem unreasonable. As
| things develop and sharing LLM LoRa becomes easier, I
| think we will find that universal translator for all
| spoken languages forthcoming.
|
| But I challenge the notion that not having a translation
| device assures native languages survive. The same
| pressures exist. You simply can't tell the regionally
| powerful speakers to learn the minority languages and
| expect them to actually do it. And you can't expect it to
| not be a stigma. Humans just don't work that way, and
| never have. "When in Rome" applied in Roman times, in our
| time, and in all times. The only way to eliminate that is
| to make it not an issue.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > For example, I can carry on a reasonably good
| conversation with ChatGPT in the ancient dead language of
| Pali and have it translated into cuneiform
|
| ChatGPT's ability to translate into Pali or cuneiform is
| limited by the size of the corpus. As I said, most
| languages of the world do not have a sizeable electronic
| corpus, and what has appeared in writing is only a
| limited portion of those languages. ChatGPT cannot
| magically guess words or idioms that it was never trained
| on.
|
| This is well known to anyone working in corpus
| linguistics. Do you have any formal background in the
| field?
|
| > As people are invested in their native language this
| doesn't seem unreasonable.
|
| Outside a few relatively privileged languages, people are
| much less invested in their native language than you
| assume. Due to the pressures of poverty, political
| oppression, and social stigma, it can be difficult for
| linguists to even find speakers willing to answer some
| questions about their language, let alone train MT.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Then it's up to those that care to preserve languages
| they care about. I for one am not an advocate that there
| be no one preserving languages or dedicating their lives
| to preserving languages. That's a wonderful thing to do,
| and we have a tool that they can use to encode those
| languages for all time in a way that is functionally
| accessible to all for all time.
|
| Reading the thread I don't notice any proposal of an
| alternative. Without that I will still hold onto the idea
| that we can improve things with the miracles we create in
| our technologies. While corporations might not feel a
| profit potential here, surely the open source world has
| shown we don't need corporations to do amazing things.
| realusername wrote:
| Think of it as an art form, sure language learning won't be
| financially necessary going forward but that doesn't mean you
| won't get personal benefits to learn languages. People never
| stopped learning to play an instrument even if pretty much
| anything can be generated by a computer nowadays.
|
| And unlike what you think, this good translation tech will not
| make languages converge but diverge even more since there's no
| financial need to learn other ones anymore. Language learning
| is hard and less people will likely engage in the activity if
| it only becomes a hobby. The most affected languages negatively
| will likely be the most learned ones at the moment.
| lionkor wrote:
| different languages come with entirely different ways of
| thinking and reasoning about the world - it would be a shame to
| throw that away
| jl6 wrote:
| As someone who learnt a foreign to fluency as an adult, I am
| skeptical of the stronger interpretations of the Sapir Whorf
| hypothesis. I believe a second language is primarily a source
| of cultural richness (mutual understanding, interesting
| vocabulary, intriguing turns of phrase, and so forth) - but
| not a prerequisite for accessing any novel forms of thinking
| or reasoning, i.e. I can not recall ever feeling like my
| thought processes or understanding of the world were
| fundamentally different to my monolingual colleagues.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| I think it depends on how close the two languages are, but
| also I think that the effect is much more powerful when you
| are a child and your brain is more malleable.
|
| For example, compared to Western languages, Chinese has
| very little grammar and words that are more ambiguous and
| with several meanings. This translates to a way of thinking
| that is more fuzzy, holistic, and high level, relying more
| on connections (intuitively, when you don't have
| grammatical constructs telling you the connection between
| things, you are forced to seek/guess it by yourself)
| xvilka wrote:
| Maybe that explains why it's almost impossible to get a
| straight "yes" or "no" to a direct question to Chinese
| native speakers.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I can not recall ever feeling like my thought processes
| or understanding of the world were fundamentally different
| to my monolingual colleagues.
|
| As a native German speaker I, for example, for consider
| thinking in German (regarding the case system that is
| deeply ingrained into this language) very much like
| thinking about types in a type system in a programming
| language; you have to pass an object [pun intended] of the
| correct type (genus) to a function/predicate so that the
| code compiles/the sentence is grammatically correct.
|
| This kind of thinking does not work in English because of
| its different grammatical structure.
|
| Another example: it is very common in German to analyze
| words part by part to find "sometimes hidden meanings").
| Just one trivial example: "entschweben" [to waft away]: if
| you analyze the construction of this verb, you see that
| this is the verb "schweben" [to hover] that is modified
| with a prefix "ent-" that changes its meaning. This prefix
| thus works like some higher-order function that modifies
| the functionality of some existing function (in
| programming) - or in the given case of language, the
| meaning of a verb. So, one can really say that how I, as a
| native German speaker, think about my native language daily
| often corresponds to quite non-trivial programming
| concepts.
|
| When I attempted a similar analysis of English words to
| English native speakers, they soon cut me off and explained
| to me that "this kind of analysis is not how English works
| or how English native speakers think about their language".
| jl6 wrote:
| The compsci analogy that comes to mind for me is mesh
| generation:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_generation
|
| There are many triangulations, but they approximate the
| same underlying model.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| I agree with the basic premise that having multiple languages
| is an annoying point of friction, and it would be great if it
| could be removed (I have lived in five countries and dealing
| with government, insurance, doctors, etc. is always a big
| roadblock).
|
| However, if you have any sort of international exposure beyond
| holidays, it is abundantly clear that you cannot extricate the
| language that people speak with the culture and history of a
| region. Having everyone speak the same language would mean
| throwing away much of what makes countries unique, because the
| old language would be forgotten over time. And people won't
| like that. Politicians won't like that either, as it becomes
| much harder to push the narrative that "we" are superior and
| "they" are barbarians, when everything is so uniform.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > you cannot extricate the language that people speak with
| the culture and history of a region.
|
| This, to me, is the reason for the diversity of language (and
| the reason for learning foreign languages, and for conserving
| your own language).
|
| Whether or not a speaker is familiar with his own literary
| and historical traditions, he relies on them in the idioms he
| uses, the jokes he makes, and in his understanding of the
| actions and utterances of others. If everyone in France spoke
| only English, they'd struggle to understand themselves.
|
| This is the main reason I consider myself a prescriptivist,
| in lexicographic terms. If you strip your language of what
| some people consider archaisms, you lose the ability to read
| the old plays and poetry, the soil from which your culture
| germinated.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| But a universal translator makes it irrelevant if you learn a
| common language, it'll allow people to speak their native
| language without material friction. IMO that'll be the best
| thing for preserving a rich linguistic body of languages and
| dialects.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a universal translator makes it irrelevant if you learn
| a common language_
|
| We are nowhere close to a proper universal translator.
| Simply transcribing words from one language to another is
| lossy.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Protip: these magic Rosetta stones you hold in such high regard
| are trained on corpora of texts translated by professional
| translators with degrees in translation.
|
| If you think these corpora we have today are enough to power
| the ML forever and ever until the end of time, then you should
| have another and better thought instead.
| mufti_menk wrote:
| As the ML improves the algorithms themselves can be used to
| generate more training data.
| trey-jones wrote:
| Believe it or not, the First Law of Thermodynamics seems to
| apply here!
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| No, they cannot. (At least not in any meaningful sense.)
| This will not create new information you can draw upon to
| improve translations models and keep them up to date.
| mufti_menk wrote:
| The model can generate translations and humans can verify
| that they're accurate enough to be used for training,
| making corrections if needed. Verifying work is much
| faster than creating it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| a) You will definitely need trained and credentialled
| translators to do the verifying.
|
| b) The claim that verifying is faster than creating is
| unsupported. (E.g. reviewing programmer code is tougher
| than writing from scratch.)
| mufti_menk wrote:
| Try reading a book vs writing one
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That's not correct.
|
| Consider a human who can speak both spanish and english. They
| can translate intrinsically. Why? Because language is an
| interface to their knowledge. You do not require a special
| intermediary language that only trained professionals can
| teach.
|
| Language -> knowledge (embeddings) -> Language is fine
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > They can translate intrinsically.
|
| Unfortunately no. If you speak two languages natively you
| know how hard translating can be unless you have training.
| yosito wrote:
| > technology is clearly going to make the idea of speaking
| different languages completely irrelevant
|
| Only in certain contexts. Business, transactions, news and, to
| some degree, science, can all be done with machine translation
| already. You can literally walk into a store right now
| somewhere that you don't speak the language and have a full
| conversation with the staff using Google Translate. But once
| you move beyond straightforward transactional interactions,
| start caring about expressing feelings and experiences, or
| understanding diverse cultures, no translation app is going to
| help you. I'm not sure how relevant this is in West Virginia,
| because it's such a culturally homogeneous and isolated place.
| But in multicultural places and places near cultural borders,
| it's absolutely essential for harmonious relationships between
| cultures. What happens when people from West Virginia move to
| Texas or Florida and start to encounter Spanish in their daily
| lives? Until they learn Spanish, they're going to build
| cultural walls that prevent them from seeing and understanding
| the Spanish speaking culture around them. And that will have
| profound implications on society at scale.
|
| Personally, I think language learning is important if not for
| practical reasons, for reasons of personal development.
| Everyone should become fluent in at least one language other
| than their native one simply for the ability to see and express
| different cultural perspectives.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > start caring about expressing feelings and experiences, or
| understanding diverse cultures
|
| I'd add that speaking in a different language, once you get
| good enough at it, is just plain fun. Google translate isn't
| fun, and I don't think it ever will be.
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A casualty of AI translation trends
| trey-jones wrote:
| Much like Mr. Katz of the linguistics program I have bias because
| of the amount of time that I spent in the Linguistics department
| as well as the departments of multiple foreign languages in
| college. In addition to my linguistics major, I took classes in
| Chinese, Japanese, French, and German. It's also been quite a
| long time since then, and things have surely changed. So, with
| that bias out in the open:
|
| I think that the discussions here generally underestimate how
| much these language programs contribute to university life beyond
| just a degree:
|
| 1. Will international students be attracted to this university
| with no program that represents their native language? My
| experience was that a lot of Chinese students spent quite a lot
| of time in the Chinese department, even if their focus was
| engineering.
|
| 2. In the same vein, what meaningful partnerships will WVU have
| with non-English speaking institutes of higher education in the
| future? Seems like not very many! Even if computers will do the
| translating in the future, we're still talking about a global
| economy and relationships are important.
|
| 3. What about students of all disciplines (history especially
| comes to mind) that are interested in texts that weren't
| published in English. jUSt uSe gOoGlE? I'm rolling my eyes.
| There's still plenty of knowledge for English speakers in non-
| English texts.
|
| Provincial is the word that comes to mind, which I think of as
| the opposite of "Education".
| jccalhoun wrote:
| According to this article, between 2008 and 2018 West Virginia
| cut their funding for higher ed by 25%.
| https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
|
| And according to this pdf, "Between FY 1980 and FY 2001, after
| being adjusted for inflation, federal on-budget program funds for
| [...] postsecondary education funds declined 33 percent."
| https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002129.pdf
| bwanab wrote:
| One might rationally ask if all colleges should offer all things
| for all people. I know they don't strictly do this, but I think
| there is more overlap in functions than there should be.
|
| When looking at colleges for my kids, I was impressed by the
| consortium of schools in western Massachusetts (UMass Amherst,
| Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, Mount Holyoke) that allowed the
| smaller schools to concentrate on specific areas, while at the
| same time giving students the ability to take courses in other
| fields from the other schools in the consortium (mostly at
| UMass). Maybe more schools should do more of this.
| bmitc wrote:
| They're also dropping the mathematics department, getting rid of
| the graduate program and keeping a skeleton crew, I guess to
| teach other majors, somehow. It's unclear how that will work
| given that graduate students often do a lot of teaching and
| assisting.
| causality0 wrote:
| 7% of staff teaching 2% of students seems like a good choice for
| a cutback unless there are even less efficient departments.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| Lol
|
| 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
|
| We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a
| country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including
| the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation
| (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For
| any issues, contact support@wvgazettemail.com or call
| 304-348-5140.
| gpvos wrote:
| It is very ironic that HTTP code 451 was originally added so it
| could be used to mark censorship (i.e., forced upon the
| publisher by legal means), but now it is almost exclusively
| used by sites that want to set cookies in a way that doesn't
| conform to GDPR, and so inhibiting access to information (i.e.,
| chosen because of laws inconvenient to the publisher).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > and so inhibiting access to information.
|
| How's that not censorship?
| [deleted]
| ketzo wrote:
| I wonder how much more of this "middle class" of colleges we will
| see hollowed out over the next few years/decades.
|
| So many of these places are in really serious financial straits.
| Families are more and more unwilling to pay, and students are
| taking the possibility of trade/vocational school seriously.
|
| Harvard will be fine. Stanford will be fine. Prestigious schools
| could last for quite a long while on their endowments alone, and
| besides, the Ivies have _no_ shortage of eager customers. The
| brand value is too strong.
|
| And I actually think 1) biiiiig state schools 2) small community
| colleges will mostly be fine. The government support is there,
| and the bang-for-your-buck is there.
|
| But the middle-tier private university might be a dying breed.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| WVU is a public land grant university no? If trends hold, we
| might see regional instead of "state" public schools.
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I mean they should hollow out, its the employer's deficiency
| that it lazily began screening for college degrees over the
| past 60 years
|
| All these colleges are grifts on that concept
|
| The upper class higher learning of Ivy League and adjacent
| predate this prerequisite, are tone death to the reasons that
| students attend for job eligibility over actual higher learning
| or satisfying a clause in a trust fund, and will survive this
| time period where students are there for jobs. These things are
| 300 years old in the US, the last half century and the tailend
| pushes for inclusion will totally be a footnote in their
| dynasty
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| Honestly good riddance to them. Less universities is bad but
| public colleges are generally cheaper and if equivalent
| quality.
| kstrauser wrote:
| In the US, community colleges general offer 2 year trade
| degrees. WVU is a typical public university offering 4 year
| bachelor (and above) degrees. It's the kind of public school
| we want to keep around and well-run.
| robswc wrote:
| Community College is awesome and should be encouraged more.
| Too many people seem to fall prey to these "resort-style"
| universities where the education quality might be
| marginally better but not worth the 2-4x price difference.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Again, community colleges typically don't offer the same
| degrees as public or private universities. They're great
| for knocking out general education requirements like
| history or bowling, because why pay the full price for
| the requirements outside your major. They're also
| outstanding at trades like plumbing or HVAC. But at least
| in the states I've lived in, you usually can't get a 4
| year degree from them. If you want a bachelor's of math
| or comp sci or chemistry, you'll have to get it from a
| university.
|
| I graduated from a public state-run university and I've
| been completely happy with the quality of my education.
| It was actually affordable. A community college is
| something different.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > the middle-tier private university might be a dying breed.
|
| Given how absolutely awful the bang for your buck is on these
| overpriced private universities, good riddance.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Not only will Harvard/Stanford/MIT/Caltech/Berkeley/Princeton
| be fine, they will continue to thrive as ever before.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Colleges of the humanities may need to completely separate
| themselves from universities. The bloat of college tuition simply
| makes those fields of study uneconomical on a fundamental level,
| and it is only getting worse.
|
| Choose, be in debt for most of the cost of a new house on
| graduation with no employment prospects, or major in something
| more focused? Yeah.
|
| The professors of these programs are generally all old and simply
| riding out tenure to retirement, just like all boomers. And what
| will happen when they retire? I predict there won't be tenured
| professors in huge swathes of humanities, just adjuncts ...
| everywhere. Basically, TAs for whatever classes the revenue
| majors demand for at least SOME depth.
|
| You may need to have entirely new institutions form around
| humanities without labs, housing, football stadiums, etc. Maybe
| they are adjacent/satellite to the main institutions. A throwback
| to basically what higher education used to be without the Oxford
| look. Basically, small cloister of students. And good lord,
| eliminate ALL the goddamn vampire management. Really, the
| professors will need it for getting any decent salary. Get rid of
| all those useless middle managers. Contract out teaching
| humanities to the big-fish university they are nearby.
|
| And is this the hallmark of the breaking point of universities? I
| roll my eyes at humanities as much as another science guy, but
| they are still a living core of real higher education. Hollowing
| out humanities means the soul of a college is dead. It's just a
| bunch of grade-seeking premeds, MBAs, etc.
|
| What does humanities need? A classroom, a blackboard, chalk. Even
| a big library isn't that necessary with internet resources.
| commonlisp94 wrote:
| It's actually the other way around. Universities were
| originally for humanities, and science and engineering got
| attached. Maybe we just need separate engineering schools.
| slt2021 wrote:
| > What does humanities need?
|
| an LLM model soon (if not already) will be enough to provide
| humanities education.
|
| I am not sure humanities research will even survive
| ngetchell wrote:
| AI will never replace in-person instruction.
|
| If I pay to learn something, it needs to be from an expert,
| not from a computer that needs guardrails to prevent it from
| becoming a Nazi.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| An LLM model is as useful in this regard, as Wikipedia could
| be.
|
| Seriously, can't wait for this LLM craze to wind down.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > I roll my eyes at humanities as much as another science guy
|
| Sounds like an opportunity for self-improvement.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Which is horrible, humanities are needed now more than ever. I
| am unable to count the number of tech and business grads who
| have no appreciation for ethics, or art, or community.
| nemo44x wrote:
| No they just don't appreciate the ethics they say are the
| right ones, the art they say are the important ones, and the
| community they say is the better one.
|
| Most this crap is propagandized via the slow walk through the
| institutions. Scumbag grievance studies have bloated the
| humanities and have infected respectable studies like
| philosophy. They've become focused on what to think, not how
| to.
|
| If I wanted moralizing I'd go to church. At least they have
| the ethical decency to make paying optional to hear their
| opinions on how I should live.
| fullshark wrote:
| I don't know about art, I think a lot of these grads you
| speak of are just myopic and ambitious, but ethics and
| community traditionally has been the domain of religion and
| family. Trusting humanity professors and a few college
| credits to serve that role seems like you are asking too
| much.
| robocat wrote:
| So humanities are the only true moral compass for ethics and
| community. You seem to imply that tech and business grads are
| just evil.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Not evil, just ignorant.
|
| I'm an engineer, I work with engineers. As a profession, we
| tend to lack EQ and real understanding of social issues.
|
| A lot of the bad decisions that have had an outsized impact
| on society were naive decisions made by tech companies out
| of that ignorance.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yea, we need to train them that their opinions are wrong
| regarding whatever arbitrary thing the various elite
| classes think today. That their wrong think only gets in
| the way of the things _we_ want.
| flangola7 wrote:
| > whatever arbitrary thing the various elite classes
| think today
|
| No one here has said this. Stop hallucinating.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Uninformed opinion is like an animal instinct -- it means
| nothing.
|
| If your knowledge of philosophy mostly comes from Stocism
| memes, you don't know much. The existence of widespread
| belief in reptilian overlords and other stupid shit is
| evidence of people hungry for understanding, but who lack
| the knowledge to overcome their ignorance.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| The older I get, the more I would agree with that
| statement. Tech and business grads without a classical
| humanities side-education tend to become the worst people,
| hyperspecializinh on things that maximise profits at the
| cost of human suffering and environmental destruction.
| ryan93 wrote:
| How do people not understand selection? Regardless think
| of all the world's warmongers. Almost none were
| engineers. All the colonizers were humanities guys.
| Hitler and his top guys were art and humanities guys.
| Every president who bombs the innocent has been a history
| or poli sci major.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Thatcher?
| ryan93 wrote:
| Thatcher on the one hand Nazis and centuries of
| colonization on the other. I'll take it
| flangola7 wrote:
| Many of them _are_ evil, yes, some horrifically evil. I 'm
| not implying it, I'm stating the fact directly.
|
| _" Your men thought so hard about if they could they never
| stopped to think about if they should!"_
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > humanities are needed now more than ever
|
| Please elaborate
| mkl wrote:
| > The professors of these programs are generally all old and
| simply riding out tenure to retirement
|
| Reality begs to differ: https://worldlanguages.wvu.edu/faculty-
| staff (for posterity: https://web.archive.org/web/2023051918081
| 5/https://worldlang...).
|
| > I roll my eyes at humanities as much as another science guy
|
| Speak for yourself.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I don't want to live in a world without art.
|
| Neither do I want to work in software at a company where the
| engineers are designing user interfaces or writing the
| marketing docs.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| A world without art? There'd still be plenty of art even if
| we didn't saddle gullible teenagers with lifelong
| unserviceable debt to fund the study of art
| pseingatl wrote:
| How many fluent graduates did the programs produce? I would guess
| precious few.
| mobilefriendly wrote:
| Medicaid spending-- driven by huge federal incentives-- is
| crowding out state dollars for higher education. Medicaid
| enrollment has increased 50% in WV in the last decade (while the
| state population has declined). The US is making a policy choice
| to funnel more of GDP into a wildly inefficient health care
| system to support obese and aging populations, instead of funding
| K-12 and higher education.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Medicaid enrollment went way up but federal spending growth
| remained relatively close to the trend. They didn't even
| overhaul the system to combat the price gouging that is going
| on. To me this trial run proves the opposite of your
| conclusion: the US would be able to afford public healthcare if
| it adopted an intelligent model. We need to set the bar higher
| as a society when it comes to social well-being, not pull back
| on our ambitions.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| We're getting the worst possible universal healthcare at the
| maximum cost.
|
| In New York, 8 million people or 40% of the population are
| enrolled.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Or WV's population is getting older and pooree
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In a situation with declining proportion of working age
| population (and lack of sufficient automation to offset it),
| one will lead to the other, as more and more of the share of
| resources from the working population are reallocated to the
| non working population.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| We are screwed on healthcare and most of the proposed
| "solutions" will only make things worse.
|
| We need smart legislation to eliminate global free ridership on
| medication as well as _less_ insurance, not more (combined with
| universal catastrophic high deductible insurance a la Singapore
| 's medishield). We also need occupational licensing reform and
| to decouple healthcare from employment (ie. the politically
| impossible cadillac tax that Obama tried to push through).
|
| Shielding people more from the true cost of healthcare is the
| politically popular option but does not improve health outcomes
| and drives utilization (and thus resource allocation) higher.
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/yczwH
| dankle wrote:
| "451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
|
| We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a
| country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including
| the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation
| (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For
| any issues, contact support@wvgazettemail.com or call
| 304-348-5140."
|
| Sounds like an amazing site
| ajkjk wrote:
| I kinda like this, if only because I already believe that the way
| universities in the US are structured is very ossified and some
| kind of shock is definitely inevitable. I mean.. we'd rather
| everyone be able to take whatever degree they want, learn a lot,
| and still be able to afford life and get good employment after.
| But given that that's not really working and shows no sign of
| changing, some kind of "phase transition" is necessary. Hopefully
| whatever emerges on the other side is better somehow.
| joe5150 wrote:
| That's an...optimistic point of view, especially given the
| departments being threatened are not the source of the
| university's financial troubles and this "transformation"
| process doesn't promise to address the things which are.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah true. I don't mean to argue this is a good end state.
| Just that the threat of 'colleges as we know them are going
| to vanish' might get people to start caring about fixing
| them.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| So music and dance fields are not impacted, but a host of
| enginering and computer science fields are? What? Do these
| departments really not bring in any grant money?
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| A university setting with university-grade tuition prices isn't
| the best place to be learning a language. Something like Duolingo
| is much cheaper and better too. There's no reason to start to
| learn a language from someone with a PhD is some form of
| literature in that language.
| joe5150 wrote:
| I can't understand your last sentence, which is undermining
| your point about the low value of language education...
| commonlisp94 wrote:
| You just don't understand what's in a language degree. Also do
| you know a single person who has ever learned to actually speak
| a language with duolingo?
| mazugrin2 wrote:
| West Virgina is on the vanguard of US states in this sort of
| thing. I'm surprised they beat Florida and Texas though. Ten
| years from now, how many more public university systems will have
| jettisoned their world language departments? Does anyone believe
| it will be a small number?
| pseudo0 wrote:
| World languages majors in some respects seem like an
| anachronism in an age of globalization and machine translation.
| For low-end work, Google translate will do it for free, and for
| the high-end market, why not just hire someone with native
| fluency of both languages? It's hard for a four-year college
| degree to compete with immersion learning.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > For low-end work, Google translate will do it for free
|
| This is a terrible take. Google Translate is really not at a
| level where it can provide consistent and reliable results,
| that convey exactly the same meaning as the original texts.
|
| "Low-level work" is also not a thing. Either you need a
| professional translator, or you don't.
|
| > and for the high-end market, why not just hire someone with
| native fluency of both languages?
|
| So you would only need to find people with native fluency in,
| let's say, Japanese and German, to get official paperwork
| translated?
|
| Genius. Can't wait for a world where there is only one
| translator for every million people.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Having a 4 year degree in Japanese from some random US
| flyover state isn't going to make you fluent enough to
| translate business contracts anyway. I studied 4 years at a
| higher-rated university and could barely get by in the
| language until I studied a lot more on my own
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > Having a 4 year degree in Japanese from some random US
| flyover state isn't going to make you fluent enough to
| translate business contracts anyway
|
| That's not the point.
|
| Random native speakers of two or more languages aren't
| equipped to do that either.
| fghorow wrote:
| While I suspect that your point is indeed valid, I think
| that contracts are a special case.
|
| Heck, I'm a native English speaker with graduate degrees,
| and even I can't understand many legal contracts written
| (ostensibly) in my native tongue.
|
| In other words, hire a bilingual lawyer for that stuff...
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