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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

#481

Post by mattkrause »

wincy wrote: post #109
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #37

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…

Can you name a major college or university where "gender and queer studies classes[0] are a requirement to get a computer science degree?"

[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.

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

#482

Post by wutbrodo »

N1H1L wrote: post #227
wutbrodo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…

PhDs though are never self-funded, so almost entirely the loan is from undergrad.

I didn't mention a loan, and was thinking primarily of opportunity cost (and to a lesser extent, undergrad, though the skills gained in undergrad tend to be the ones directly useful for their current work).

I tend to treat opportunity cost like inflation adjustment: in most cases, failing to include it is an error, so I do it by default.

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

#483

Post by wutbrodo »

bradstewart wrote: post #235
wutbrodo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…

"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?

Sorry, autonomous vehicles. We use the term so much internally and in industry-adjacent conversations that I have a blind spot around the fact that it's not an obvious acronym at all.

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

#484

Post by irishcoffee »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #479
irishcoffee wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meat of the below quote: you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library. Quoting the whole thing: """ CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especia…

And in another movie Tony Stark built an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps.

Yes, a comic book hero did comic book hero things in a comic book hero movie. Not sure what point you think you're making.

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

#485

Post by Diederich »

vondur wrote: post #429
Diederich wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here. > some massive college bills In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less. Working at Jack in the Box and la…

At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.

I'm glad to hear that state schools are still reasonably inexpensive.

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

#486

Post by btilly »

jefftk wrote: post #448
btilly wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. And yet somehow banks were happy to do so until 2005. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy. That being said, I actually think that's a good thing, b…

> somehow banks were happy to do so until 2005 Before 2005 most loans were already protected from bankruptcy, and for the others you generally needed your parents to co-sign.

The loans that were protected from bankruptcy from 1978 to 2005 were student loans to the federal government. They weren't private loans to banks.

Therefore before 2005, banks that lent money for student loans did so without that particular extraordinary protection.

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

#487

Post by TuringNYC »

jedberg wrote: post #312
nostrademons wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big WaPo feature story on Hampshire's bankruptcy and the impending demographic apocalypse for colleges: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/21/downfall-... Fertility rates by year in U.S: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... Births per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-... I was wrong about the start date, BTW. I'd thought that fertility started d…

Looking at the first chart tells me that the size of the upcoming cohort will be similar to Gen X -- that is it will be smaller than the previous but not unsustainably small. Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.

Might be similar to Gen X, but remember that college seats have expanded to peak throughput.

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

#488

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #378
teh_infallible wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who majored in English, I assert that the emphasis on STEM and shift away from the humanities is causing serious problems in our society. Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing. If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of mis…

Considering that humanities majors tend to believe in socialism does not burnish their critical reading skills and resistance to propaganda. The reality of the history of socialism is one of failure. And yes, I do understand that everyone thinks that those who disagree with them are ill-informed and susceptible to propaganda, and those who prefer socialism will think that of me :-)

[deleted]

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

#489

Post by Kephael »

N1H1L wrote: post #284
dmoy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The undergraduate students at Dartmouth and Brown are generally much better than the ones at those large publics. The rankings are largely due to the department size and what the professors and their PhD students are publishing.

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

#490

Post by lowbloodsugar »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #451
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…

> 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 an…

OTOH, being able to hit rewind is invaluable. Or hitting rewind, googling a bit, and then continuing. My first online course was Andrew Ngs when he at Stanford, and being able to rewind and google whatever he just said was fantastic. It also meant I could play it at 1.5x speed for the bits I had no trouble with.

If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.

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