I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by holdenc » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:16 AM UTC

While I agree that 200K in debt for a BA in English is not a wise choice, there's a whole class of families that can afford the 200K out of pocket, and will happily pay it for a top school. I have a child, and will do it for the following reasons:

- You only get one chance to be 18 - 22 years old. College is a great way to improve your appreciation of culture, society, and build social skills, prior to taking a full time job.

- I know many youngsters here will likely have a problem with this -- but the average 18 year old has some intellectual and emotional maturing to do. This can happen via the social and academic challenges of college. In fact, the best colleges will sell this over any practical skills.

Work life can be a grind, even for someone with their dream job. When was the last time you had a chance to try your hand at literary criticism, or game theory, or learning a new language? How did it go the first time you had to ask for help with an intellectual problem? (Probably a distant thought in the minds of the average senior developer). How about the last time you had to cooperate with several people you dislike? College is a good place to get started with these things.

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

#592

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:16 AM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #557

throwoutway wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not doing research doesn’t mean they are decades out of touch. What gives you that conclusion?

If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published. I'm sure there are some professors who don't do research who make it a point of personal pride or something to keep themselves updated, but there's zero pressure to do so.

No, there is tremendous pressure to be up to date with your teaching because if you’re not, then your students don’t get accepted to highly ranked graduate programs, and that is a significant factor in undergrad college rankings.

> If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published.

Only within the boundaries of your particular field of study, which in most cases is far narrower than the scope of undergrad classes.

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

#593

Post by lanstin » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:16 AM UTC

coderenegade wrote: post #291

koolba wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs". That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income work…

This is exactly right. Here in Australia, the borders have been closed for two years, and surprise surprise, we now have some of the lowest unemployment figures in the country's history. And for the first time in a generation, wages are starting to increase. For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to…

And don’t forget helping the workers in low wage places to organize and get their fair share of revenue from the multinational corps. Long term, a more level income landscape world wide is needed to protect even domestic workers power/income.

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

#594

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:16 AM UTC

crackercrews wrote: post #456

skybrian wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than saying "the SAT is discriminatory," maybe ask which questions on the SAT's are discriminatory, and why? And how could you fix them? This will be more revealing of what the problem might be. I believe a lot of problems that the SAT's used to have were fixed over the years? It's somewhat of a moving target. And if you can't make any standardized test that's fair, why is that?

A prominent researcher noted that the following question was tested by the ETS but never made it onto the SAT: The actor's bearing on stage seemed ______; her movements were natural and her technique _____ A. unremitting...blasé B. fluid...tentative C. unstudied...contrived D. eclectic...uniform E. grandiose...controlled Apparently 8% more black students answered this question correctly than white students, and it wa…

To be clear, the thesis of the article you quoted from is the following:

Every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.

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

#595

Post by biztos » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

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…

Once you have tenure, what’s stopping you from just getting off the grant treadmill?

A friend of mine got on it after tenure (art school) because he could finance cool projects of his own design that way.

But even in a research university isn’t tenure supposed to protect you from being pushed around by the administration?

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

#596

Post by smugma » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:18 AM UTC

My roommate freshman year at Cal was on the football team (and later went to play in the NFL). He took a physics “for poets” class by a great professor (George Smoot) and he’d talk about how awesome it was. A couple of years later I had a different roommate who did some research for the same professor. Smoot later went on to win a Nobel. I had two different roommates with very different abilities both benefit from having this world class professor as part of their lives.

Many of my CS and physics professors were “famous” but also great professors. In contrast, I thought most of my math professors were terrible. As they were bad at teaching, I simply assumed they must have been good at research.

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

#597

Post by seibelj » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:19 AM UTC

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.

No, it would be extraordinarily funded, but the money would not go to the students. NYC now spends over $30k per year, per student https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ny-school-spendi...

Public education in the US is the most well-funded per student you can find anywhere. Yet somehow it doesn't translate into top-tier teachers nor top-tier outcomes. It's almost like giving huge amounts of money to unaccountable bureaucrats doesn't solve problems.

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

#598

Post by jessaustin » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #267

lordnacho wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so? What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

Lots of people might say this, but no one believes it.

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

#599

Post by ghiculescu » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #590

In reading further down that thread, I had a question about one of the tweets - why would a "zero discrimination" admission environment result in 65% of admitted college students being Asian-American? Assuming a completely unbiased and equal opportunity environment from birth until college (which obviously is not the situation, this just a hypothetical), wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demogr…

> wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation?

No, even if you took out all wealth disparities. Different demographics (this is a big generalization but that’s literally the question) value different things. And so those that value college would be overrepresented in college - same would apply in other competitive areas eg sport.

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

#600

Post by smugma » Mon, Mar 21, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

fakethenews2022 wrote: post #546

beloch wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

UC Berkeley CS has teaching professors who no longer do research and solely teach. They introduced this well after I graduated but I did take classes with some professors who became teaching professors. They were research professors when I took them. I found the experienced professors competent even if some were uninspired. On the other hand, I generally had negative experiences with the graduate assistants and new p…

Weren’t Mike Clancy (I think he only had a bachelors) and Brian Harvey (I think he got a PhD but maybe in education) around when you were there? I took both their classes and I thought Clancy was there in the 70’s and Harvey maybe 80’s?