Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#2Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#3I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#4But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims?
The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#5Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.
So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#6But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims? The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?
This happens because the rankings cited are a function of the academic output of the faculty. In contrast, this article is largely worrying about undergraduate-specific issues. In other words, I think you've identified a non sequitur committed by the author.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#7In contrast to what this surprisingly uninformed piece claims, the top universities do compete on price. In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. There actually is downward pressure on price, but this is because it's coming from the top schools, not from any disruptive force. Why? Because the top schools don't make most of their income from tuition, so they can afford to lose it.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#8These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars.
With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be).
Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#9Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have be…
"Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day.
What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.
Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
#10Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect?
They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money.
I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor.
What business model in the future should universities follow?