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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

#491

Post by EGreg »

Colleges, like Intellectual Property, impose artificial scarcity on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in an age where the Internet has allowed us all to publish and discuss like never before. They come from a time when we couldn’t record audio and video and disseminate it so easily. Never mind multimedia, they use heavy textbooks!

There is a concept called “flipping the classroom”, where people can watch the classroom lectures at home at their own pace, and do the homework together in class. And these lockdowns just go to show that people can carry on learning online. They just need a good coach or course.

Lectures are the commodity. Individual attention from tutors and labs is the scarcity.

When even rich Hollywood celebs feel they need to bribe colleges for their kids to get in, we know we have artificial scarcity and an old boys network.

Flipping the classroom is not enough. Here is what we can do to fix the educational situation: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158

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

#492

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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…

The problem is that universities are neither trade schools nor a place to broaden your horizons. It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.

If testing your skills was done outside of school GRE-style, would all these people who pay many thousands of dollars to get a diploma pay so much? I really doubt it.

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

#493

Post by Gollapalli »

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…

About as right-wing as you can get. also studied poetry in college. Let's not make this about left-right, thanks.

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

#494

Post by dschuler »

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…

You write very well, it flows in a way that reminds me of Bukowski.

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

#495

Post by happythomist »

gwd wrote: post #113
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…

> 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; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws.

The Catholic Church condemns usury as intrinsically evil because, in the words of Aquinas, usury is to "sell what does not exist". [1]

Aquinas observed that some goods are consumed by their very use, such as food or drink. Allowing someone to use such a good is equivalent to transferring the ownership. You cannot "rent" a sandwich or allow someone to "borrow" a bottle of wine, at least not if they intend to eat or drink it. Once the ownership is transferred, you have no basis to charge for its use.

He argued that money was an example of such a good. The only way to use money is to spend it, and it is consumed by that use. Therefore, loaning money at interest is an attempt to "rent" money that you no longer own, which is unjust.

Today, there is much greater access to profitable investment opportunities. It is even possible to obtain a guaranteed rate of return on money through CDs and GICs. It is therefore licit to reflect this in the "price" of money that is lent, but this is not usury. The Church cannot change her definitive teachings of faith and morals; usury has always been and will always be a grave sin. [2]

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3078.htm

[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15235c.htm

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

#496

Post by ineedasername »

gonehome wrote: post #421
ineedasername wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming a lot of faith in market forces. In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement (and their rates) or merely a "career services" area that will help you write a resume and point you at some other resources. The fact…

It's not really the same when the school gets the money either way and it's not clear how the placement rates really translate to good outcomes (it puts the rationality burden on the students which is the wrong place for it and less likely to work for the reasons you describe). Schools are incentivized to not have students fail out and to select hard for students already likely to succeed during admissions, but that…

I think it's more of a problem that the economy simply doesn't need as many people with college degrees as are produced. Even if companies need to filter candidates for competence, they'd still have to do that, and we'd still be stuck with a glut of people with credentials that will go unused due to over supply. I don't have an answer to that. (except that apart from the massive debt problem, I still think it's a net positive in society to have slightly better educated people even in low-skill jobs.)

As for free college, countries that have it don't just make it free for anyone: there is a significant filtering process that entails tracking students who don't perform academically into paths more suited to specific trades instead of college. If there's a solution to the above problem, it need to include something like that as well.

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

#497

Post by TuringNYC »

syedkarim wrote: post #134
twomoretime wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Why is this being downvoted? Strange. I graduated in 2007 and your observation is the same as mine. Students go to school without really thinking about what is next. I'm guessing that is a result of a middle/upper middle class upbringing. I noticed international students were a lot more driven, on average. I went to a small, liberal arts college that was not highly selective in admissions. Even with the talented and…

I think lots of it is due to bad biased advice. True story, on my first day of college, at the convocation, the university president told his true story about how he decided to stay at university for an extra year "to study the classics" and what an amazing decision this was for him. He encouraged everyone to seek erudition.

I wonder how many students accepted that as fact. Because it is indeed a great strategy if you are wealthy and have a social-network safety net waiting to bail you out with a nice job after graduation. But for working class students like myself, it is horrible advice. I couldn't have graduated a moment too soon, I need to help my mom with rent, pay loans, etc.

You have wealthy "successful" academics and others giving advice that is noble but unrealistic and downright harmful in some cases.

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

#498

Post by btilly »

irishcoffee wrote: post #484
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is to demonstrate that if a fictional character in a work of fiction does X and it works out, that does not serve as evidence that a real person doing X will work out in reality.

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

#499

Post by SkyBelow »

jedberg wrote: post #179
gwd wrote: 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…

> 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…

>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?

Why is that a bad thing? This pushes choosing a good degree from something entirely on the 18 year old to something the market is deciding, by calculating the risk of a default, and removes much of the penalty from making a bad call from the 18 year old. Yes, not everyone will qualify for a loan, but if the bank who is interested in making money off loans decides your plan isn't worth a loan (and this bank has plenty of money to loan, so it can invest in many and aim at averages) thinks you are too likely to not get a good job and will default... maybe you should consider what that means.

And it puts downward pressure on college prices, like you mention.

>they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.

There aren't enough colleges to survive on just upper class students. So either the colleges will go out of business or they will have to learn how to be in reach of the rest of the population.

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

#500

Post by [deleted] »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #350
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some degrees . I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.

Nearly every EE I graduated with, including me, had to give up on our dream of being a hardware engineer because nearly zero hardware companies will hire an EE grad from a mid-level school. They either refuse to hire new grads or only recruit at CMU/Purdue job fairs. Then you take a software job that's available but not interesting, and you get pidgeonholed into that field. It's not retail but it doesn't seem great f…

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