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I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

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Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#111

Post by blagie »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #33
itake wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.

Research grants pay for research equipment. They do not cover student labs in any way.

Yes, they do.

(1) Many grants have a mentorship / training / giving-back component. This is one of the merit-based criteria NSF reviews on.

(2) Research grants have overhead which feeds back into general budgets. At elite schools, this is about 2/3 of the money. A typical split might be 1/3 to the department, 1/3 to the school, and 1/3 to the project. It's kind of a financial scam. Nominally, these cover buildings and admin time. Practically, these feed into general budgets which do include labs and teaching. Corruptly, a lot of the money gets funnelled in creative ways to improve professor's lives through fancy faculty clubs, get-aways, and in some cases, creative (but legal) embezzlement with money ending in people's pockets.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#112

Post by mgh2 »

wpietri wrote: post #91
mgh2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it pedigrees that matter or what these signal? Ethics aside, I rather have a smart person in charge rather than the opposite

What they signal? Like generational wealth and elite connections? [1] I have definitely seen hiring managers lean very hard on pedigree so they didn't have to do the actual work of evaluating candidates. It was basically the same deal with a lot of certifications, like Scrum/Agile and Java certs. I also think that your bucketing people such that Harvard = smart and state school = "the opposite" is a great example of…

Nope, intelligence matters at the end if that person works hard too, there is no ceiling unlike the opposite. Intelligence or/and hard work alone can only carry you so far, there are so many other factors that lead to success (ex: luck)

As a business, you bet your risks against the person who has been vetted vs. the unproven one.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#113

Post by moab »

mulcahey wrote: post #35
moab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of prognostications /opinions are easily falsifiable by talking to your coworkers that went to other universities. Most of the top-25 schools have upper-div CS classes that are nothing like what you're taking about, with both faculty and TAs putting in enormous effort to make sure that courses are accessible and intellectually stimulating.

I went to a top 25 CS school. Half my upper div lectures had ~5% attendance.

Strikes me as very anomalous. 5% attendance? Anyway, bad idea to draw conclusions from one university…

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#114

Post by webmaven »

frogperson wrote: post #105
Tretiotrr wrote: post #57

In Germany you study for free. There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer. You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people…

If they made college free in America it would be severely underfunded and suffer all the same problems as American high school. If there is no money in something, then it's assumed there is no value. It's the American way.

> If they made college free in America it would be severely underfunded and suffer all the same problems as American high school.

You would only get those same problems if you made college mandatory, as well as free.

A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#115

Post by tough »

belltaco wrote: post #99
tough wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs... It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

In that case, this statement would become false: >We really need farm workers

We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways, as we have done by thousands of years.

But point maken

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#116

Post by AnimalMuppet »

okaram wrote: post #96
blakesterz wrote: post #51

"But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense." That's one thing that never made any sense to me. I get it. I really do. But I've never seen any compelling, realistic answer to "And then what?". This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people w…

> This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. That's a big problem solved. We can also solve other problems. Nothing requires us to solve all of them at the same time.

But if solving this problem takes a huge amount of money, and the problem is going to keep coming, then actually solving it takes more than money. It takes changing things so that the problem quits showing up.

You might get everyone to pony up the money to bail everyone out who is currently mired in college debt. It's a much tougher sell to get us to pony up the money forever.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#117

Post by shinjitsu »

itake wrote: post #12
zdragnar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price and value are decoupled for college degrees. STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students, and many liberal arts degrees are not, by themselves, economically valuable (I said this as someone with just such a degree).

> STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.

This works fine for research universities, but in teaching universities (couldn't find the statistics, but there are a lot of them out there) someone has to subsidize the new STEM programs until the alumni start giving grants. In my experience, a lot more STEM alumni give large donations than humanities and social sciences. But that does mean a bigger initial outlay by someone.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#118

Post by mind-blight »

gruez wrote: post #93
mind-blight wrote: post #58

I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as so…

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspecti…

The labor market - especially the low paid labor market - is a lot less liquid than it needs to be for pure supply/demand to work in the US (that's also taking human suffering caused by poverty out of the equation, which is pretty callous).

Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#119

Post by antholeole »

tough wrote: post #95
gruez wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspecti…

Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs... It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

Not sure about this: everyone else screwed seems kind of a far reach. If you consider screwed “unable to buy luxuries” then maybe, but I consider screwed “unable to buy food” and Macro farms stand to make food substantially cheaper.

How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?

I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#120

Post by Tretiotrr »

boppo1 wrote: post #102
Tretiotrr wrote: post #57

In Germany you study for free. There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer. You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people…

Cool, I got a 2.3 GPA in highschool and college but would love to try again. Where should I apply? I don't mind moving to Germany.

You only need to Google for it.

https://www.mygermanuniversity.com/universities

You are a little bit limited by what you like to study if you don't speak German as not every university offers a bachelor in English but it's doable.

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