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Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

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Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#81

Post by foenix »

jessriedel wrote: post #74
josh33 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.

Boy, it's hard to answer such a flattering comment without letting it get to your head and sounding like a pompous jerk! I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a unive…

This book got me started: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/?vi...

As a student about to start on the honours portion of my degree, I find solace in analytic philosophy (as opposed to those damn ethical/post-modern philosophers).

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#82

Post by yummyfajitas »

neilc wrote: post #41
Vivtek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. That's a wonderful justification for paying the majority of their actual instructors less than minimum wage with no benefits at all - then they can attract that guy to raise more money than they pay him. Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services; the current model isn't working. It's just taking a very long time to be obvious.

It's not a "justification": the pay of instructors and the pay of university presidents are just two very different things. I don't really see what the point of comparing the two is. Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services Well, this is at least partly the case today: NSF, NIH, and similar funding bodies support research. At most top research schools…

At most top research schools, very little (if any) of the money from undergrad tuition goes to support research.

But a large amount of the money devoted to research goes to support education/administration. Most universities will take about half of a grant as overhead.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#83

Post by harry »

noname123 wrote: post #73
harry wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh this is one of the issues I've heard tossed around - what makes for a successful individual post graduation? How can we measure it? The feds are putting in place systems to track income as the best metric. But... I hesitate to call a 100k$ rockstar EE major ten times more successful than a rockstar chem e doing water purification work in Guatemala for 10k$ as a humanitarian.

Pretty simple answer to that. You don't. Most college grads don't realize that how much you make at a job is a really poor indicator of your self-worth. But you don't realize this until after you've been on the job for awhile - kind of like high schoolers thinking where you go to college is the ultimate determination of your worth.

so how can we defend the money lent and given by the people (from the federal government) is going to a good cause?

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#84

Post by [deleted] »

Vivtek wrote: post #6

Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we'…

[deleted]

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#85

Post by neilc »

jimbokun wrote: post #75
neilc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of t…

"Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of their salary." To what end? The answer does not seem to be "providing a quality education to the university's students." So, regardless of the dollar amounts raised, "contribute nothing whatsoever" may very well be an accurate assessment of value. It depends on wh…

To what end does a university president raise money? Erm, well, it differs, but in general they are raising money for either new projects or the general endowment. Income from the endowment is typically used to support a wide variety of areas, many of which directly contribute to "providing a quality education to the university's students" -- scholarships, maintenance, staff, and so forth.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#86

Post by api »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #32
zeynel1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--

It's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_wo... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_w...

Lasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing.

Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong.

So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan:

1) Fund lots of science.

2) ????

3) Profit!

The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#87

Post by api »

pragmatic wrote: post #45
alexandros wrote: post #4

"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocati…

See another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topi…

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc.

1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world.

My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few hits and a long tail. All papers are not the Church-Turing thesis, and all startups are not Google or Apple.

A lot of academia-bashing amounts to criticism of academia for having the same sorts of failings that are present in equal measure in all other societal institutions public or private. Things like: elitism, know-nothing overpaid leadership, poor quality control, loss of focus, abusive labor practices, perverse incentives, poor success ratios for new ventures, etc.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#88

Post by jseliger »

jimbokun wrote: post #76
jessriedel wrote: post #54

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should priv…

Then why do they have undergraduates? Surely, they could produce more knowledge if they eliminated that distraction from their mission entirely.

A few places do this, or so nearly do it that they might as well; in sciences, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies comes to mind. In the humanities, a lot of Yale senior profs only need to teach three classes per academic year and can get a semester off every third year. That's not quite the same as getting rid of undergrads, but it's close.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#89

Post by api »

jbooth wrote: post #20
alexandros wrote: post #4

"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocati…

It's the WSJ editorial page. Punching hippies is one of their 3 reasons for existence.

Since the Rupertster took over WSJ, hippie whacking seems to have even eclipsed good business and financial reporting over there.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#90

Post by noonespecial »

jbooth wrote: post #62
crystalis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.

/me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke

I appreciate the well placed joke now and again. "Punching hippies" was funny because its truthy enough to be relevant, and relevant enough to be in the thread.

HN goes through a phase every now and again where I think it takes itself a little too seriously. Its for important discussions unlike that red-place with the silly alien (pretentious snorteling and huffing). All attempts at humor are immediately voted down.

I'm not one of the greats, but I've been here for a few laps and I've got some karma so I'm calling it:

Lighten up y'all.

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