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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

#451

Post by Wowfunhappy »

basch wrote: post #66
xhkkffbf wrote: post #2

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself? The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazil…

>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out th…

> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.

I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls.

But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking.

I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me.

---

† College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.

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

#452

Post by JadeNB »

thomashobohm wrote: post #436
JadeNB wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.

Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.

My point was specifically about studying math.

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

#453

Post by dnautics »

take_a_breath wrote: post #269
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…

==philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students== Is this true? It seems some tech companies disagree: CA Technologies [1], Y Combinator [2], Google [3]. Is it possible that you are not well versed in what philosophy majors actually study and how well that might translate to a working environment? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/tech-talent-gap-loo…

If that's the case then the philosophy department should have no trouble bankrolling their program with accessibility for all on a combination of some wealthy kids and some majors who snag a job at well-paying tech companies. Or did you miss the class on inductive reasoning?

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

#454

Post by thelean12 »

clairity wrote: post #261
thelean12 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, total cost, as that's the truer measure.

Certainly not an option for everyone, but a ton of people in my state school class still lived at home. A good percentage could have lived at home but chose not to.

It's also hard for me to include housing because you'd need housing no matter what path in life you choose.

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

#455

Post by craftinator »

kingaillas wrote: post #126
craftinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some sources for this? Let's assume minimum wage, calculate average living expenses, hours spent in class and doing HW vs hours working. I know I spent at least 70hrs a week doing school.

I'm GenX, went to college in the late 80's, in state tuition in TX was $2000 per semester as I recall. I knew people who worked a part time 20 hours/week job that paid $8 an hour. (graveyard shift sorting boxes at a local shipping company). I knew many others who did some program where they worked at the college and made $5 an hour IIRC). I was a grader/TA/proctor for the first year engineering course and made the pr…

Ah my brain did a flip flop, mixed up genX with millennials. Yes, that was a very different landscape than we have now. I recently went back to school for an EE degree, and the costs were insane, even for someone with a good job and middle class wealth. An interesting thing I noticed was the the time cost for classes. I would spend a HUGE amount of time doing homework, maybe double the time it took during my CS degree. A lot of that time was fighting against the online homework system; what I could do on paper in 10 minutes would take 20 minutes to do, and the sheer load of homework was much higher. I can't imagine trying to hold a decent job and still keep my grades up. College seems a pretty poor option modern day.

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

#456

Post by Misdicorl »

mywittyname wrote: post #103
basch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out th…

I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for f…

The difference is the other students. For most, your peer group is what motivates you. A peer group which values excellence in X will motivate you to become excellent in X.

The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.

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

#457

Post by dnautics »

jedberg wrote: post #415
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other country works this way, yet they have college. So this argument doesn’t pass the smell test.

The US dug themselves into a hole in the 70s when they disallowed bankruptcies on school loans. That opened up a flood of money to 18 year olds going to college, which in turn led to the colleges massively expanding their offerings. Colleges in the US don't just educate. They are also the minor league sports programs for most sports in the US, and they provide luxury benefits like gyms and movie theaters and so on. T…

I think the US also did some strange things like giving GIs free tuition (not necessarily a bad thing) then artificially supporting those GIs by requiring a college degree as gatekeeping for bureaucratic jobs. If you look around places where there's lots of bureaucracy (like washington dc) there's tons of strange billboards and the like on public transit advertising graduate school (MA and PhD) targeted at beaurocrats that need to check off that box for a pay/rank/retirement increase. IIRC one of them was called "Graduate School", as in you would go to a graduate school called "Graduate School".

In any case not-in-DC it's more focussed on the BA segment of the population, but artificial gatekeepering is a thing (even in tech! I know many candidates that I wanted to hire but were turned down because they didn't have a BA in CS)

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

#458

Post by darkerside »

nimbius wrote: post #64

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed…

I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college.

> the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway

You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.

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

#459

Post by dnautics »

CydeWeys wrote: post #237
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.

Well ... You can. A lot of things will change and there'd be much disruption and churn in academic institutions, but it is possible.

Think of all of the bureaucrats in the colleges that will lose their jobs.

Also think of all of those low and middle class students who we'll turn down since we're not willing to do wealth redistribution with our endowment (, that's the government's job).

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

#460

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #409
abnry wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It brings up the old joke about being a philosophy major: "Two things to do with a Phd in Philosophy: 1. Teach. 2. Pose the question: ‘But do you know why you want fries with that?’" College is an investment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you invest that much money, you should expect a ROI. If you can't even put roof over your head or eat with that investment, then it is really hard to say it was a…

Philsophy majors are a common target for ridicule, but the fact of the matter is that corporations go out of their way to hire Philosophy majors to be problem-solvers of various types because they essentially have a degree in critical thinking.

They'd be better off hiring people with engineering degrees (non-software). That's applied critical thinking and creative problem solving all in one.

I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.

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