881–890 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying that higher education is (yet another) public good that fails when turned in to a for-profit enterprise?
The exact opposite actually. It's a good for-profit enterprise that fails when it's narrative twists it into a public good. The problem isn't that university doesn't work. The problem is that the federal government has propped it up with so much poorly underwritten debt that the prices have ballooned beyond value delivered. That would be fine if the audience taking the debt was rational. But the discourse around univ…
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…
Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A given college can only accept a certain number of students each term. Giving a slot to a less-qualified student necessitates dropping a more-qualified student, making it zero-sum. I'm not talking about Harvard specifically (I don't even know what case you're talking about), this is just the normal state of colleges in the US.
They’re not less qualified, that’s the whole problem. There is no stack rank of qualified candidates for a collegiate cohort, because it is not a precise or accurate process. There are more students who apply to Harvard each year with perfect SAT scores and who are valedictorians than there are openings in a given Harvard cohort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t find out until many years after graduating that the US is sprinkled with what are known as Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), including a large number of well-regarded 4-year colleged which don’t have graduate programs, the professors don’t do (much) research (but do have PhDs generally) and the hiring and evaluation decisions are 90% based on teaching. These institutions are usually on the small s…
Fascinating. I’ll look into these - never heard of them!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is so refreshing to see this take. I was on a path to be a history Ph.D candidate - I wanted to teach, and archive diving is basically my own personal drug. The problem is it’s “publish or perish,” as we all know. My higher priority, i.e. teaching, was essentially an obstacle. You know how I know that? My own advisor and other department members told me not to get my doctorate (after writing a 60 page thesis mind…
I didn’t find out until many years after graduating that the US is sprinkled with what are known as Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), including a large number of well-regarded 4-year colleged which don’t have graduate programs, the professors don’t do (much) research (but do have PhDs generally) and the hiring and evaluation decisions are 90% based on teaching. These institutions are usually on the small s…
The two I can think of are Harvey Mudd and Rose Hulman.
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…
My 19 year old mother in Pakistan might have been a lot more adult because she had me, but I'm sure having to forego her career for a marriage with a Rs 10000 mehr was something she would have liked to have had a few more choices about. Get a grip on yourself, man. (And yes, she went to college there too)
But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.
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,…
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…
The SAT's past racial bias is still echoing through the nation. There were still test questions based on Very White Things like cotillions and yachting as recently as 40 years ago. The repercussions of those things could be that some person barely missed getting admitted to a university, took a lifetime earnings hit, lived in a poorer town with worse schools, and now their kids who may be very smart and talented also…
Yes, that's all we ever did in the trailer parks.
The crisis in US college education is a crisis of elite overproduction, along with a concurrent increase in economic inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. A college education is a requirement to enter or stay in the professional-managerial class (PMC), and avoid the increasing immiseration of the working class in the US. That's why people are willing to spend so much money on it. The problem is that the PMC is shrinking as their jobs are gradually eliminated and replaced with proletarianized ones: doctors with nurse practitioners and PAs, tenured professors with adjuncts. So the higher education system is overproducing PMC candidates who will either never work in their field, or will work in its non-PMC roles, and struggle to pay off the debt on a gamble that didn't work out. This, of course, makes PMC parents desperate to get their children into elite colleges, to make them competitive for the declining slots. This is, of course, over time, a losing strategy, but it's one that is short-sightedly rational.
I don't think we're actually going to see a decline in credentialism, as @sama suggests is going on. I expect it to intensify, if anything. For the education pyramid scheme to collapse, there will have to be a fundamental reorientation of the economy and power structures in the US, which is to say, a collapse thereof.