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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

#281

Post by jackcosgrove »

jedberg wrote: post #239
0xffff2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that bad? Humanities departments are already shrinking without any changes because there's just no demand. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that if you are determined to get a degree in philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students, you have to go do that at one of a handful of schools that carve out a niche for themselves with a philosop…

> Is that bad? It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons? I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci. If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes. Also, there are some majors that lead to professiona…

> Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

The term "liberal arts" means "free arts". The root of this term is that Athenian society was composed of a small class of free families and everyone else was a slave owned by those families. The free families were wealthy enough to afford a liberal education for their free sons.

Everyone else had to work.

Those are the roots of the liberal arts.

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

#282

Post by Auracle »

Macha wrote: post #229
jedberg wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't European colleges the same price as American colleges if you're not European?

Depends where you go. I know we had some Chinese students in my college, they paid €10000 a year, compared to the Irish students who paid €3000 a year. As far as I've heard, US colleges are on the order of $10000+ per semester.

My school was 30,000 a year, and my wife’s state school was definitely less than 10k a year. There’s a really wide variance.

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

#283

Post by colinmhayes »

thelean12 wrote: post #207
clairity wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in states with good public universities, the best value is 2 years at a good community college, then 2 years at the state school. even 2 years at a good state university is getting ridiculously expensive ($60K+).

What state schools are $60k+ for 2 years for in-state residents? Berkeley was my guess for an expensive in-state tuition rate and they're $38k for 2 years. Unless you're including housing/food/etc.

UIUC is 25k a year just tuition and fees. Expensive college town room & board plus opportunity cost of education instead of working easily gets you to 30k a year.

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

#284

Post by N1H1L »

dmoy wrote: post #277
N1H1L wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State schools in US are often the best STEM schools. I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.

Do we include math and physics in there? If so there might be a couple other exceptions there.

Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.

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

#285

Post by CydeWeys »

michaelt wrote: post #122
runawaybottle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable. No sympathy here for the college industry.

> I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable. I believe people who support such things think as follows: 1. $15k a year tuition for 4 years is a great deal if it turns you into a banker or programmer with a $150,000 a year salary and a 40-year career. Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education. 2. Majoring in poetry migh…

It's not unjust if that garbageman went to university too, or at least had the same opportunity. Society is better off with better educated citizens. It's why we have free public schooling up through the age of 18; many other countries simply carry that farther.

On the poetry point specifically, I really think writing degrees in general would be more successful if they were granted by trade schools (i.e. a focus on doing the thing, not a focus on academic scholarship about the thing).

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

#286

Post by [deleted] »

jedberg wrote: post #239
0xffff2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that bad? Humanities departments are already shrinking without any changes because there's just no demand. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that if you are determined to get a degree in philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students, you have to go do that at one of a handful of schools that carve out a niche for themselves with a philosop…

> Is that bad? It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons? I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci. If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes. Also, there are some majors that lead to professiona…

[deleted]

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

#287

Post by jedberg »

staticautomatic wrote: post #260
jedberg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but college could be paid for with a minimum wage summer job. That change in 1976 was actually the cause of the steep rise in tuition. Can't really put the genie back in the bottle now.

I find this attitude disturbing. The only things stopping real change in America are people who don't want it to happen and people who have been tricked into believing it can't.

I want real change, I just don't believe this is the change that makes sense.

Changing the way colleges are paid for would make sense. Capping tuition would make sense. Making you pay a portion of your income back to the college for the rest of your life (or maybe just 20 years) would make sense.

But allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would do more harm than good without other systemic changes.

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

#288

Post by nostrademons »

evolve2k wrote: post #251
nostrademons wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a generation of potential parents who won't be having kids because they can't afford to, largely because of student loan and housing costs. That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed…

Birth rates where? Just the US? Or globally or just Western powerhouse counties? Side note: I remember being shocked the first time I found out that baby boomers and ‘the aging population issue’ weren’t actually global issues and only affected the counties who took the spoils post WW2 (aka western powerhouse countries). Lots of other counties have very different population ages mixes for example Ireland and Turkey.

Developed countries, but it's spreading worldwide. Japan hit their baby bust in the 90s, and then Western Europe in the last 10 years, and now it applies to the U.S. as a whole. China and India have also seen remarkable drops since 1980.

The only continent that still has fertility rates above replacement is Africa:

https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...

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

#289

Post by dudul »

cousin_it wrote: post #86

Tech companies should take the lead on this. Say loud and clear: we no longer ask about education, and no longer take education into account when hiring, starting today. Devalue the sheepskin.

I get where you're coming from, but honestly I would actually prefer the opposite.

Sometimes, when I'm looking and interviewing for a new job, I really wish we had some sort of standardized, recognized certification that companies could see on my resume and think "OK, this guy knows how to code, we don't need to put him through the BS of a take home, or whiteboarding exercise or whatever". After 15 years in the industry, I'm less and less patient with having to prove myself by explaining how I would find duplicates in 2 arrays or how I would process "very large files" or whatever.

That being said, now we kind of get the worst of both worlds where you need the degree for HR to forward your resume, and you need to dance the "coding interview" anyway.

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

#290

Post by lotsofpulp »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #221
jedberg wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…

We treat education as a public good. Employers don't have to pay for their employees' educations, and employees can take their skills around with them. Given that banks know their customers need employees they would get around to giving loans out to keep the supply of talent coming. There would just be far less waste if student loans were dischargeable.

If the US treated education as a public good, then the US taxpayers would pay for education.
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