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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

#421

Post by avs733 »

wefarrell wrote: post #415
imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

I'd add another role to that: Offsetting racial inequities in the lower education system.

More generally offsetting failures in the lower education system.

(Not saying we suceed but we try almost because we don’t have a choice)

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

#422

Post by WalterBright »

KerrAvon wrote: post #379
WalterBright wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not to be a resource for corporations I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift. Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!

Vomit. Was Tom Swift an self-centered emerald scion who got lucky with money and poured it into his pet projects? News to me. Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do…

> Vomit.

LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.

> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money

I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.

But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:

1. excitement

2. interest

3. drive

4. willingness to try impossible things

5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles

6. a thick skin for being laughed at

7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit

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

#423

Post by mattkrause »

readingnews wrote: post #368
imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

I have worked at three universities. This is pretty insanely accurate. You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year. Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate st…

The grants are even crazier than that.

Most of the actual work is done by trainees who are a) learning how to do for the first time and b) may never actually do it again because they're going to move onto something else. The profs are, at best, managing them and even that's often a bit iffy.

Everybody's obviously got to learn somewhere, but universities and research funders are oddly weird about experience and expertise.

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

#424

Post by beloch »

imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

One thing I was told as a grad student that I've never forgotten is, "Nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students".

At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human typewriter to medical prescription from a meth-addicted doctor. I tried to grade everything fairly and provide feedback about mistakes so students could learn.

My fellow TA's complained to the department that we were well over the hours we were supposed to be spending by a factor of at least 3. We were told to do less. Just to be clear, I wasn't worried about how much I was being paid. The problem was that I had my own research and coursework to do. We simply needed more TA's in that course due to the way lab assignments were designed. The prof teaching the course was apologetic and furnished me with the above quote.

This is teaching at a research focused university in a nutshell. There is no shortage of people who want to do a good job teaching, but the system is designed to force them to spend their time on other things.

Why is an institution of higher learning so hostile to those who want to put an honest effort into teaching? Just as nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students, no research focused university ranks well if they aren't churning out a lot of papers. Teaching competes with that priority.

If we want better educational outcomes for students, we need to do a better job of aligning the incentives governing universities with that goal.

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

#425

Post by georgeburdell »

synergy20 wrote: post #280
rayiner wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-some…

college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it. on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we nee…

I think your views on how kids view their peers who are good at math are outdated. For example, NASA gear has, fairly recently, become a fashion trend [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...

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

#426

Post by hackernewds »

glued wrote: post #307
crackercrews wrote: post #52

Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it for a couple years. But schools are pushing it out further. That makes no sense. It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white…

I was on track to go to a prestigious university in high school when my fundamentalist christian parents kicked me out of the house at the age of 16. I ended up jumping around to live with different friends then eventually my grandparents. I had no money and thought I had no future. The stress was killing me, my grades and SAT score suffered. I ended up at a small state school in rural Georgia because of this. Today…

Although I'm glad it worked out for you, this sounds like a very niche case that would fail every single measure of exampination. Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence.

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

#427

Post by gen220 »

sokoloff wrote: post #204
jameshart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: do elite institution degrees confer any addition to market value commensurate with their cost, or do they simply select for people who already have high market value?

It’s been studied some and there's at least some substantial evidence that it's the latter. (I posted this on another thread last week.) > For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mik…

I'm not familiar with this study in particular, but there's another similar one for the elite NYC public high schools, which have historically had a similar "halo effect" attributed to them. They found that the student cohort that "barely made it" had similar long-term outcomes as students who "barely missed out".

I came away thinking that parental influence is the most important factor. If your child is well-nurtured enough to be within a crap shoot of selection for an elite institution, it probably doesn't really matter if they get in or not, they'll be successful regardless (for mysterious reasons that may be interesting to know, but don't really matter).

As such, it's better not to make your kid focus on "getting in" (which is a suspect goal for many reasons), but instead on trying their best to realize their full potential.

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

#428

Post by adverbly »

snowwrestler wrote: post #377
imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

Your first three bullets are all the same thing. “How to think” and knowledge of culture are marketable skills, as is experience with cutting-edge research. I don’t know where you got the idea that learning about “art” is an essential job of college. I wish it were, but it’s not. And I agree that college sports are too big of their own business. Fundamentally you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet. I…

> you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet

I've heard this phrase multiple times before... and yet, doctors have been studying bio, lawyers studying laws/cases, and engineers math - for hundreds of years. I don't want someone who did 4 years of philosophy and knows how to think deeply about things performing my heart surgery.

The first three bullet points are not the same thing partly because one of those bullet points specifically addresses job training, and one addresses "how to think". You're right that knowing how to think is important, but acting like hard skills don't exist is taking things too far imo.

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

#429

Post by thebigman433 »

synergy20 wrote: post #280
rayiner wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-some…

college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it. on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we nee…

> middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color

Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.

Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.

Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.

And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community

I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.

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

#430

Post by hackernewds »

civilized wrote: post #283
wolverine876 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.…

As the other comment points out, the obsession with the flaws of the SAT completely ignores the fact that every single other method of evaluation is even worse, both at identifying promising students and at equity. If you take it away, colleges will happily admit loads of "well-rounded" students with tons of expensive extracurriculars. They will be racially as balanced as possible, but their family incomes will all b…

This is the same argument supporting capitalism (which I agree with). Capitalism is the worst system, but it's still better than all else.

I think taking away the SAT as criteria will actually enhance racial bias through subjective measures - than the flip

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