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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

#801

Post by illusivesaint »

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…

Stop worrying about the drinking aspect of school. Socializing/networking is one of the golden nuggets of academia, the orgs and clubs really do improve the quality of life and experience of everything else. Just because you're not into it doesn't make it detrimental. Otherwise, the ecosystem is decent, it's all about profit and marketing in the age where you can be self taught and many are complacent of having trades because bachelor's don't really offer much in terms of salary for some. Intl. students still strive a d see the merit in education/academia's quality but: 1. Raise the wages of professors/teachers 2. Give the athletes salaries 3. Reduce the inflation of job market qualifications *4. Make higher Ed. Free (in NA+)

If they don't solve these things, then yeah you might see lower admission rates + quality of students' work.

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

#802

Post by Fomite »

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…

This.

In 2008, state funding dried up, and has not returned, even in places with booming economies.

Federal funding via research grants has been, at best, flat over the same time period.

That leaves only one dial left to universities.

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

#803

Post by davemp »

jessaustin wrote: post #588
davemp wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home improvement is pretty cancerous right now. I get quotes with ~$5k in labor for work that would take me a week to do in the worst case. That’s literally double my rate without considering that working for yourself is tax free. It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself…

It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed. If you don't want to get screwed, you have to start doing this work yourself. (Or maybe someone in your family could do it? Do you have a 19yo nephew?) Not everyone is capable of some of the manual or cognitive tasks involved, but not everyone you could hire would be, and most of the work is of the simple-yet-laborious variety. In th…

> It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed.

It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.

It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.

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

#804

Post by Fomite »

seneca wrote: post #607
bradleyjg wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Colleges were captured by professional administrators. This is, as I understand it, correct. Administrators as a percentage of university staff has ballooned. The explanation I've seen for this is that they are needed to handle ever increasing amounts of regulations. This is the same problem faced by hospitals.

One of the great problems with this is that "Too many administrators", like "Too many regulations", is easy to say, but hard to implement. There's a reason each of those positions was created - often a fairly good one.

As an exercise, I sat down one day and listed the administrators that if I was suddenly president of my university should begin considering updating their resumes. Each one was a problem as a person, but the position was one I would want refilled - indeed, at least one of them was currently running a badly understaffed office.

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

#805

Post by nsonha »

wolverine876 wrote: post #726
nsonha wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not what "adult" means, you've chosen the wrong word, and now you are changing the definition of "adult" to an activist who has to have opinions about grandiose things in the world. Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to cel…

Only activists have opinions about "grandiose things in the world"????!!!

You kept ignoring the more important point and cherry-pick a bikeshedding topic (the definition of some word) to reply.

> Only activists have opinions...

That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.

Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.

Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?

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

#807

Post by Fomite »

foobarian wrote: post #241
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…

I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.

Or Biology.

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

#808

Post by booleandilemma »

foolinaround wrote: post #477
BadCookie wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/researc…

> There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually. In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced? I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself…

This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.

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

#809

Post by sergiosgc »

ufmace wrote: post #640
jerojero wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think access to education is a human right? I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is m…

I don't like the idea of "positive rights" at least as applied to human rights. I don't think it makes sense to consider something a "right" when it requires the active participation of others to provide. Education is good, but it should be as cheap and simple as possible. Putting it in universities that cost more than the per-capita GDP to attend is about as far from that as it gets. If we take that system and call…

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with positive rights. The right to physical safety involves active participation of others, and you'd be bonkers to say it isn't a valid right. No society functions without police.

What we do with positive rights is bundle them up into government provided services, so the load gets distributed evenly through society. These tend to work well, at least in Europe. I really can't understand the US view that anything that is state-provided is inefficient.

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

#810

Post by vasco »

pm90 wrote: post #626
WoodenChair wrote: post #605

Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…

He and others like him really need to just get off Twitter. Get someone to build a VC only Twitter clone, put their garbage opinions there and satisfy the need to post.

That was done and called App.net. It's pretty good startup lore from ~2012. Worth giving a look if you're interested. It solved both biggest VC issues around that time. It was paid and it had more characters than Twitter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
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