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Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

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Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#161
post #153
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; It's sad that most cultures understood the danger and fragility that debt brings, and yet we've all somehow how forgotten it. We even have terms like "good debt".

Yep. We created a society where everyone pays 150%-250% for everything over time just to fund a parasitic banker class

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you aren't promoting it, but to answer your question: > Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? Because the entire country is going to implode. 2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis

2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis 2020: deadly pandemic, inducing a financial crisis, while also collapsing the real economy, on top of four years of political crisis

Political crisis? Yeah I'll pass

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#163
post #25

I think it's time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not "bundled in" to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable. We need to remove all of the "excess" stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things…

There are schools without all those things. They are just not the ones students choose to attend.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#164
post #159

Any time you make money easily available for a certain good, whether through debt or direct subsidy, the cost of that good is going to increase proportional to the amount of money made available. This is what happened in the housing market and with college tuition. I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without n…

> I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.

Big optimist you. They'd find all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the enrollment, which is the statistic colleges care about (at least indirectly, to the extent that it correlates with tuition).

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80%…

>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors. It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they…

It's more complicated, and a deeper problem than that.

For example, I'm one of those former psych majors, and though those majors are full of people who aren't good at math, there's also a lot of them who know more computer science and math than some of the comp sci majors I've worked with. In fact, a common problem for psych majors and other students is to take the first couple of psych courses, think it's a breeze, and then hit advanced courses with cognitive modeling, neuroscience, epidemiology, and genetics, and realize it is basically STEM.

The problem with this is that everyone who took those first couple of classes, or didn't, has this stereotype of psych as all involving people laying around on couches discussing past lives or something. So you might have a psych major who did a thesis involving neural network models and cognition, maybe with some imaging involving a cutting edge system in the imaging center, working with physicists, and they will get looked down on by employers. Meanwhile the comp sci undergrad who barely gets python and did their group final project on some kind of toy webapp is qualified.

I have family who are making significant money in web development who are actually English majors, who just happened to have the right connections at the right time. When I was in undergrad, comp sci was filled with a glut of unmotivated students who just wanted a degree for a job, and we were all being told that there wasn't going to be demand for comp sci degrees because there would be too many grads in it and you could always learn that stuff through different means. My father, who is now in medical administration with an MD, talked me out of biochem and biology degrees because he couldn't find employment with those degrees and had to go on to grad school.

So what do we make of a degree? Does my dad's biochem degree suddenly become more valuable when it's a stepping stone to an MD program? Did that family member with a "worthless" liberal arts degree waste their money when they're making a comfortable income in the tech sector?

The deeper problem is that people are seen one-dimensionally, as equal to some degree, rather than their experiences, like college is some glorified vocational certification program.

Whenever we talk about "worthwhile" versus "worthless" degrees at some level what we're accepting is this idea that someone's skillset is defined by the degree, rather than the degree being an indicator of part of a skillset.

Society used to see things in the latter way, and at some point it transitioned to the former.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood why students would even want the college to be so involved in their student life. If I understand the American system, there is pressure from parents as well. The students might not want the college to be so involved in their student life, but many parents would be unwilling to allow their children to attend an institution that is not highly focused on keeping them safe, to the point of treati…

Does this have anything to do with 21 being a significant age? I understood that from 18 in the U.S. you were legally an adult but there seemed to be a bit of a blurry period up to 21. That seems less of a thing in the UK.

21 is the legal age to drink alcohol in the United States. Yes, really. The management of 18-21 year olds as if they were children is primarily to keep them from having a beer or two.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#167
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r... ). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.

If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Demo…

"Educated people become liberals" isn't the knock against liberals, or education, that you seem to think it is.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#168
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting r…

> My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. Drop the "humanities major"--it's true even for STEM majors as well. There's a pretty consistent career track from college to junior to senior positions, and if you fall off that track, it is quite hard to get back in again. There are very few majors for which demand is high enough to let you get back on…

CS major graduating in June from a top 3 institution, here. Last fall, my application-to-callback rate was like 80-90+%. I had to stop applying to jobs to make my workload and interviewing manageable.

My current rate is like 15-20% after I lost my full-time job. About 10% in software and engineering vs. 30% in finance.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#169
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, my university does do this. The college of engineering here publishes a yearly report that breaks down statistics about the graduating class (post-graduation plans, salary statistics, etc.) for each major.

This is wonderful. I checked your profile and couldn't tell where you go. Would you mind sharing?

University of Michigan

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#170
post #25

I think it's time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not "bundled in" to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable. We need to remove all of the "excess" stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things…

No, especially not football. At my college the football team is essentially a separate corporation. The college gets nothing from the arrangement. In fact they have to rent parking from the football folk. Fat deal were made to coaches over the years, until its all pork-barrel dealing and nothing left for the school. The students can't even go to games, the ticket prices are a semester's tuition.

Pre-1990 I read this quote from a college president: "College administration boils down to sex for the students, football for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."
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