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Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

economist.com

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Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#51

Post by yequalsx »

16s wrote: post #47
yequalsx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at a community college. The price is quite low (and my pay). Society does not want to pay for knowledge. It does not see a benefit in having people who appreciate art, literature, culture, music, etc. It only sees a benefit from electrical engineering and other such subjects. It's a problem of society and it's short sighted goals.

Liberal Arts is a luxury that many cultures cannot afford. When you're just starting out or trying to survive as a culture, you need engineers, hard-core scientists and business people. Take China and Israel for example. The upper class can go for Liberal Arts at any time, but the culture as a whole will lean strongly to hard science until they're established enough to enjoy that luxury. Times are bad now (but gettin…

This is a most unenlightened point of view. Music, art, story telling have been part of human cultures for thousands of years. One of the finest aspects of being human is enjoying these things. Literature, art, and music are always needed. They make life worth living.

Some societies don't have the money to make these things available to everyone. That's a shame. The U.S. and EU are societies that can afford to make these things available to everyone.

Why downvote me when you agree with my original post. You yourself say that "soft majors are not wanted". Indeed, they aren't wanted but they are needed and it's a shame that they aren't wanted. There's a reason dictatorial governments always control the arts, music, and literature. They fear the ideas, the progress that these things bring to a country.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#52

Post by yummyfajitas »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #37
timwiseman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to a…

You seem to think that these are independent issues. I.e. if we just throw more money at basic literacy, road-maintenance, and policing, then society will be better. If we throw money at art and cultural education, then we're losing out on money for the above. The fact is that a lot of social problems stem from cultural problems. You can keep throwing money and teachers at those kids down the street, but it won't get…

I find this "don't spend my tax dollars on anything that doesn't directly benefit me" attitude to be mean-spirited,...

He advocated spending money to educate illiterate people rather than already-educated people. I think it's pretty clear he isn't illiterate, so how is he advocating only spending money that directly benefits him?

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#53

Post by WilliamLP »

It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup.

This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#54

Post by oiuygtfrtghyju »

psranga wrote: post #38
timwiseman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to a…

IMHO, this is shortsighted. Art is of almost zero practical use. Investing a tiny fraction of society's resources in art is a sign of a society that has evolved beyond the starvation stage. Are you saying that all art should only be commissioned by rich private interests? No investment in art by the public? You would demolish the National Mall, Statue of Liberty and other such art works? Or do you draw the line at ho…

No he is saying that there is a slight flaw in the logic that:

1, An educated population is good for society.

2, Education happens by going to university

3, People that don't want to study hard and become doctors/engineers/scientists can go to university and do media studies.

5, Since they have been to university they are educated and therefore good for society - see 1.

6, Since more people want to do media studies than chemistry the chemistry depts are be shut down to increase funding for media studies.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#55

Post by GBKS »

I do agree with this in some points.

My main complaint with US universities (from my experience) is lack of focus on producing the brightest people possible. It's simply too easy to be "undecided" for 3 years and end up with a wishy-washy degree that doesn't prepare you for much.

Once I realized that grades were a low standard, I started setting my own standards and put in a lot of extra time and effort that ended up getting me a good job right out of college.

So the comparison of universities (at least undergrad) being lazy, like the car companies, I can agree with (again, from my experience). Higher standards and expectations of student performance are needed.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#56

Post by yummyfajitas »

sprout wrote: post #50
yummyfajitas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand what a public good is. A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not. Further, research subsidizes teaching at most research universities, not the other way around. Universities take almost half of the NSF's budget in the form of "overhead", most of which is subsidizing teaching and general university waste. The…

>A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not. As I said, the merger of the two is a public good. It makes research a fundamental part of our notion of learning, and it makes undirected research possible. I'm firmly in the teachers should do, and doers should teach camp. Society as a whole is better off if there is cross-pollination betwee…

Undirected research is quite possible outside the university system. Perhaps you've heard of Bell Labs? When the government still subsidized them [1], they did plenty of undirected research. In the university system, about 50% of the money the government has earmarked for research is actually used for that purpose. At Bell Labs, the number was close to 100%.

Most grant supported research groups do plenty of undirected research, and the NSF rarely objects when a project makes discoveries not listed in the grant proposal.

You are telling me that (roughly) doubling the amount of money devoted to research will harm research? I really don't understand the mechanism by which that would happen.

"If you can only do, no one will benefit from your knowledge."

Let me be very precise, since you seem to want to misinterpret what I wrote.

A researcher's skill set: generating new knowledge and spreading it to other researchers, and eventually practitioners. This is done through published papers, presentations at conferences, conversation and source code. Generating new knowledge is the primary skill here - other researchers will usually go to great effort to understand it.

A teacher's skill set: understanding existing knowledge and spreading it to people with no background in a classroom setting. The primary skill is motivation and understand people very different from you (e.g., premeds who hate math rather than other math Ph.D.s), and maintaining discipline. The goal is to convey existing knowledge, so creating new knowledge (the primary skill of a researcher) is more or less irrelevant.

There are not that many people who have both of these skill sets. I only had the researcher's skill set, and I know many people with the teacher's skill set.

Also, by "waste", I was referring to general university waste - overpaid and under worked administrators, duplicate offices, etc. If you ever work at a university, you will realize how wasteful they are.

[1] I believe the system was that every dollar AT&T lost at Bell Labs was deducted from their tax bill.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#57

Post by shadowsun7 »

presidentender wrote: post #43
Locke1689 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, this may simply mean that fewer people should be going to college, not that the university system has a deep flaw. If, for example, 100k psych majors are graduating only to work in social services or some slightly related field, should these people be going to college at all? Are these skills necessary for the workforce? It's important to recognize that just because we wish it were so, 50,000 psych and histo…

The deep flaw is that too many people go to college for impractical degrees.

Are impractical degrees that bad, in and of themselves?

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#58

Post by CognitiveLens »

psranga wrote: post #38
timwiseman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to a…

IMHO, this is shortsighted. Art is of almost zero practical use. Investing a tiny fraction of society's resources in art is a sign of a society that has evolved beyond the starvation stage. Are you saying that all art should only be commissioned by rich private interests? No investment in art by the public? You would demolish the National Mall, Statue of Liberty and other such art works? Or do you draw the line at ho…

There's obviously a spectrum between fully investing in arts & culture studies and fully investing in STEM disciplines or public infrastructure, so let's try to avoid superlatives - in an ideal world, all disciplines would be fully funded and productive, but I doubt anyone in this forum is claiming that we should cut off funding entirely for anything, and certainly not destroy(!) existing art.

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#59

Post by timwiseman »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #37
timwiseman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to a…

You seem to think that these are independent issues. I.e. if we just throw more money at basic literacy, road-maintenance, and policing, then society will be better. If we throw money at art and cultural education, then we're losing out on money for the above. The fact is that a lot of social problems stem from cultural problems. You can keep throwing money and teachers at those kids down the street, but it won't get…

Yummyfajitas said it quite nicely, but permit me to say it on my own behalf.

I am not at all saying do not spend my tax dollars on things that don't directly benefit me. I said that we should not spend it on things like art and literature until after we have taken care of things like basic education, infrastructure, law enforcement, and yes even universal healthcare and gaurunteed access to sufficient food.

I am a great lover of America and I think (with perhaps some admitted bias) that it is a truly great country. But I know kids on my own block that can barely read and I pass by a homeless shelter with large crowds outside it on my way to work, and there is an active police officer sitting behind me in law school class because he doesn't make enough to support his family comfortably. I strongly object to spending tax money on art and literature until long after those issues are fixed.

And no, throwing money at those issues won't fix them, but it would be a start. Money is not sufficient for a solution, but I suspect it is necessary (or at least highly helpful).

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#60

Post by timwiseman »

yequalsx wrote: post #48
timwiseman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to a…

Interesting you mention the kids who are barely able to read while saying you don't want to pay for someone else to appreciate art, literature, music, etc. What sort of reading do you have in mind for these kids to learn? Should we just teach them how to read an operating manual for machinery or the instruction set for putting something together? Reading is an essential part of learning to appreciate art, music, lite…

I think they should have the ability to read anything and everything they want or need to. If they choose to read only operating manuals then they will at least be able to. If they choose to read Faust, The Inferno, and Paradise Lost, they should be able to. I am troubled when we want to spend tax money to help people who already have basic education appreciate art and literature when we are not doing enough to make sure everyone learns the basics first.

As to the Socrates quote, I think he was right. But I believe he was talking about introspection, not art, literature, and music created by someone else. And we as a society should be concerned with making sure everyone learns the basics they need to function in modern society before we worry about making sure those priveleged with already having those basics down can appreciate art on taxpayer money.

If we teach someone the skills they need to earn a respectable living they will then have every opportunity to pursue the arts with the money they earn. If we spend taxpayer money supporting the arts for those who are already earning a middle class income, we may very well be short changing those who are not.

I am personally a great fan of literature, theater, and certain types of music. But I purchase my enjoyment of those things with my own money because my father made sure I got a good basic education that enabled me to go to college first then get a solidly middle class job and now pursue law school at night while I work. I went to public school but my parents especially my father provided me his own time and materials bought with his own money to supplement that to make sure I learned well. I want to make sure that children whose parents cannot or simply do not do that still have the same chance I did.

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