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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

#441

Post by CodeBrad »

beloch wrote: post #424
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 type…

Pretty similar to my experience TA'ing at a researched focused school.

My first semester teaching a lab I was told "No one is remembered for being a good TA" and encouraged to do the absolute bare minimum to get paid so that I could focus on research.

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

#442

Post by neon_electro »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #393
wolverine876 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you study? I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.

I studied mechanical engineering and a bit of CS, though I didn't complete the degree. I work as a SWE now. Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university. University felt extremely intellectually r…

This is precisely why I'm glad I was able to choose (Management) Information Systems instead of Computer Science for my major. There are key courses in CS that I missed, but I feel like I also avoided a good number of courses (deeper math, specifically) that I ultimately never needed to establish my career in Web development. I've picked up the rest learning as I go.

Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.

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

#443

Post by ddddfdohvsyknn »

epicureanideal wrote: post #213
mike00632 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on the entry level salary for California tech workers being six figures whereas the wage for farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage.

> farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage. I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it. Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.

> I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.

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

#444

Post by xeromal »

xyzzyz wrote: post #214
wolverine876 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations…

Do you think Americans were less adult in, say, 1930s, when only small fraction of them went to college?

In the 1930s, I'm sure the majority of children worked hard lives on farms and other jobs so they were well on their way to realizing the troubles of adulthood.

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

#445

Post by Sparyjerry »

gjvc wrote: post #346
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. You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified,…

Saying we need to pay them more doesn't change the laws of supply and demand. Besides, as of right now none of the careers you mentioned pay poorly, they are in very high demand and most live very comfortable lives. Are they getting Google software engineer type salaries? No, unless they branch off and start their own business. You can't just say "these people deserve more" because it's just not true. If the path to a STEM job was just as easy as becoming a plumber then literally everyone would do it just for the pay. They don't because it is actually harder to become an expert and you don't have a secure base of customers. Plumbers are needed in every single building and for every person to live. Tech is mostly non necessary and you literally have to improve upon those before you to make it. It is actually much much more difficult to succeed to tech.

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

#446

Post by wpietri »

mgh2 wrote: post #124
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why on HN saying "intelligence matters" seems like an uncontroversial opinion. Under the right circumstances and ceteris paribus, it can help. But it doesn't always. Indeed, as a person who is officially very smart, that has often been a problem for me. E.g., the way smart people can easily learn to perform smartness rather than doing the long-term smart thing. Or our tendency to value theory over experience an…

Show some proof, otherwise it is just an opinion

I've already showed some proof. Why don't you take a turn?

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

#447

Post by rahimnathwani »

roughly wrote: post #410
rahimnathwani wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, definitely, there might be an alternate explanation that's closer to reality, than what I proposed. Any ideas?

Well, at a first pass: Labor market negotiating power is unbalanced; owners of capital are loathe to give it away under any circumstances; workers, especially poor workers, don't have a lot of flexibility to shop around for jobs when they need one; and by and large modern business thinking & planning is incredibly short-term and liable to walk itself into stupid and avoidable situations like not being able to stock s…

It seems like the explanation you're putting forward is: farm owners are suffering from too few farm workers but, because they are bad businesspeople, they don't realize that raising offered wages would allow them to hire enough people.

Have I understood correctly?

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

#448

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

roughly wrote: post #372
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there. Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes…

> Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there. I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented. > Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that w…

> I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.

This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.

> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.

If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.

Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?

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

#449

Post by bachmeier »

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…

Important to note that you have a STEM perspective. Nothing's changed in that respect, since that's always been the case in grant fields.

However...that's not at all a good representation of the rest of the university. Maybe the very best research universities don't care about teaching. There aren't many though if you're not in a grant field.

> That thing the actual customers are paying us for

If you're in a grant field, the grant agency is the customer, not the students. Teaching is something you do on the side. And not very much compared to non-grant fields.

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

#450

Post by bradleyjg »

noobermin wrote: post #433
bradleyjg wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student debt has exploded because notwithstanding their outrageous tax advantages colleges are demonstrably profit maximizing firms. They induce unlimited demand for ever more credentials though a process of continual devaluation and then charge as much as the market will possibly bear through extremely sophisticated price discrimination. Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the publi…

Let me explain a line of reasoning that would refute the explanation you provide for the ballooning debt. Universities have not generally changed the way they do things, universities have always been the four things OP listed since forever, even when you likely got your degree (assuming you did, or at the very least most of hacker news did), they were those four things too! Therefore, there is no inherent thing to un…

What’s the ratio of tenured professors to total staff from, say, 1970 to today?

Colleges were captured by professional administrators. That’s what’s changed, and the results are entirely predictable.

See, also, hospitals.

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