Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money • Hacker News Board

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#191

Post by EngCanMan » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #148

save_ferris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer seem to advertise their primary mission as education, but as providing the “college experience.” This was already really noticeable when I enrolled in undergrad 12 years ago at a large public university. I think part of it has been driven by student demand for more parental oversight, but I also think the marketing is what got so many students to take out debt in the first place. So many of my undergrad c…

> So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane. For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to appreciate that when you have no point of…

Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately for the rest of us, this 'wisdom' isn't necessarily true unless you believe it to be. I worked extremely hard during university both in my school work and at multiple jobs, it was far from 'the best years'. Now, most of the people who had all the fun in university agree with you. For me, it just keeps getting better. "The harder you work, the luckier you get" might have been better advice.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#192

Post by burntoutfire » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

EngCanMan wrote: post #191

burntoutfire wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane. For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to appreciate that when you have no point of…

Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately for the rest of us, this 'wisdom' isn't necessarily true unless you believe it to be. I worked extremely hard during university both in my school work and at multiple jobs, it was far from 'the best years'. Now, most of the people who had all the fun in university agree with you. For me, it just keeps getting better. "The harder you work, the luckier you get" might have been b…

You just may be in the group of people who enjoy working!

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#193

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #156

catalogia wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese-raised students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic English. The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. The financial pressure to ignore their cheating makes sense to me, but it's not clear to me how that's related to language skills.

Sorry, there was an implied premise that I probably should have included. These US schools are teaching classes only in English, so the students' inability to speak, write, and (in some cases) read English means that they can't do the work. I've observed them brazenly cheating during tests by looking at other students' papers, but I think it's more common to hire English speakers who know Chinese to do the work for t…

[deleted]

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#194

Post by Robotbeat » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #155

Spin off college sports, cap foreign student numbers, cap acceptance of student loans, and kill off Admin staff. Everyone knows how to solve the college problem. It’s just that colleges have no incentive to do so until they’re forced somehow.

Why cap foreign students (or acceptance of student loans), though?

Foreign students are not a bad thing. There’s not a limit in the number of professors. In fact, we’re graduating way more graduate students than there are slots of tenured teaching positions.

The problem isn’t too many foreign or domestic students or not enough people qualified to be professors, it’s administrations ran by greedy MBA types.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#195

Post by jccalhoun » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

I was in grad school in the midwest of the USA when the 2008 recession happened. States cut funding to colleges so the colleges had to look somewhere for money. The next year I noticed a lot more students from Asia. Even when the economy was good, most states didn't increase funding significantly.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#196

Post by Melting_Harps » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

chrstphrhrt wrote: post #174

aikinai wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is the best four years of life for many (maybe most?) Americans at least. But I think that speaks to exactly what people are saying in this thread. It's not about education anymore, it's evolved into a four-year time-of-your-life experience that through a fluke of history gets supported by guaranteed loans.

It should be completely free for everyone but regulated to jettison all that non-education stuff (except for some "soft" services like healthcare, therapy/counselling etc). The soft services should be 100% controlled by student unions so as not to be pillaged by rent-seeking vultures. Then there can be a whole economy for luxury experiences for those who want it, but it should be firewalled off from everything essent…

> It should be completely free for everyone but regulated to jettison all that non-education stuff (except for some "soft" services like healthcare, therapy/counselling etc).

What do you think made the CSU/UC system the most affordable and attractive option in the Country?

The thing you need to accept is that the unfettered administrative bloat was by design, and will always lead to this; the CSU/UC system was essentially tuition-free if you were local and extremely low cost for most of its History because it didn't offer what the others did and we Californians funded that with extremely high local/state/property taxes and our family and by extension our economies were rewarded for it, so we put up with.

It wasn't until the bureaucrats made Industry impose a mandatory University degree for most entry-level jobs well into the 90s that many of those same people migrated to academia and start to shift it to the sordid mess you see today.

Honestly, I say keep in place: let it fall into disrepute crippled by its own malaise once and for all but have legislation in place that it cannot be bailed out when it does. Its the only way I think this has any chance of reform.

Personally, one of the silver linings of the Shutdown in California is showing just how much unnecessary bloat their is in Universities (and in Industry) to deliver on its MVP: accredited completion of courses to issue degrees. If this doesn't disrupt academia and make it shift to a having mainly an online-learning direction for most of its programs then it should rightfully walk into its own demise.

I just registered for a bunch of Coresera and Udemy courses on ML, Sustainability and Supply Chain analytics with accreditation from Industry and University alike for what amounts to what cost less than what I paid for 1 or maybe 2 textbooks while I was in University--that I can complete at my own pace on my terms.

If the goal was to foster an environment for those with the drive to acquire useful skills, then I'd say we already have evolved past the archaic University system and are only forced to be burdened by it solely because of convention.

Apprenticeships are pretty much the backbone of the Germanic countries' Economic and Industrial might, and University is pretty much just an affectation or continued learning component; we need to learn that lesson considering just how much of the US 'education system' is based on Prussian Pedagogy and Ideology.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#197

Post by burntoutfire » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #181

burntoutfire wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane. For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to appreciate that when you have no point of…

I fucking hate schoolwork though, it always made me significantly more miserable than job-work ever did

For me it wasn't nearly as bad. For one thing, there was so much less schoolwork than job-work. And, while in school, you never had to pretend to the other children that you cared. Also, in school, there weren't many layers of management, product owners etc. all giving unclear and contradictory directions - schoolwork was downright trivial compared to a serious project in a large corp. And this is all coming from a privileged software worker - my family members (the ones saying that childhood and adolescence are the best) were all semi-skilled manual workers. In their cases, I just don't see how sitting at your desk 40 hours a week doing the same thing (say, routine testing methane analysers) over and over again for 40 years, while worrying about making ends meet or being fired, can be better than some school work and oceans of free time.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#198

Post by anifow » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

sago wrote: post #84

Traster wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a New Statesmen article about UK universities[1], which point out university attendance has gone up 500% since 1990 and First class honours went from being awarded to 7% to being awarded to 29% of students. Either universities figured out a way of being 4x as effective teaching 5x as many students (with measurements for average intake attainment basically flat) - which would be a miracle. Or the ma…

Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate. But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.

This is not a revolutionary idea. Several professional programs (law, accounting, etc.) have certification exams that do just what you are describing. It seems to require a fairly healthy, non-profit professional body in order for this to work, and you can only ever assess a fairly slim chunk of the 4-year experience, so they end up pairing in a credit-hour requirement as well.

I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#199

Post by foldr » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

seeTheAstroturf wrote: post #89

sago wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate. But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.

The only thing I can say I learned from Engineering school is math. 4 years of my career completely changed my mind about what Engineering is. I didn't know I would be solving problems. Good that they teach math, but there's a giant disconnect between academia and industry.

The weird thing is that people always seem to blame academia for the disconnect.

If an industry wants its employees to receive a specific kind of training, it should pay for it.

Re: Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

#200

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

fock wrote: post #93

lbeltrame wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't see international travel restrictions to Australia being relaxed until a vaccine is developed Honest question: Australia wants to seriously lock its borders for 18-24 months? And what if a vaccine is not successful (despite tens in development, just two are being currently tested on humans)?

better question: do you really think that all these digital nomad/consultant types (most of them > 30) will just go out merrily, when the first 2,3 healthy people in their big number of acquaintances are dying?

Probably not right that second, but I expect within months they'll be ready again. People really enjoy international travel.