Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

961–970 of 1001 posts

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

#961

Post by tschwimmer »

mywittyname wrote: post #900
stjohnswarts wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student loans aren't a scam , they work just fine. Unlimited student loans are a scam. Unlimited tuition increases and colleges taking advantage of unaware students is a scam. Colleges don't seem to understand "no" or budgets to new, unfunded enterprises and try to go beyond their own means. They'll just raise tuition to compensate. The government has to cap student loans, just like it has to cap medical care costs o…

Government-backed student loans for undergrad are capped . They are capped around $32k total and are distributed on a gradually-increasing schedule. They also have been capped for decades now. So clearly that isn't the solution to the problem.

This is true but paints an incomplete picture. If your parents are eligible, they can borrow an unlimited amount of "PLUS Loan" money which is privately lent but government backed by virtue of the fact it can't be discharged even in bankruptcy. [0]

[0]https://www.investopedia.com/student-loan-limits-how-much-ca...

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

#962

Post by Gollapalli »

selimthegrim wrote: post #272
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…

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)

Your mom might be better off. Look at what's happening with educated American women. They forgo children until it's too late to have them, focusing on career instead of on family, and then find that they can not do both.

My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.

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

#963

Post by p10_user »

mschuster91 wrote: post #769
wubbert wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able. What world are you living? Colleges and "Corporate culture" these days are all about opposing "whiteness."

On paper, yes. Everyone loves their diversity programs. In reality?! Just look at the C and VP level of most large companies. Old white men galore [1] [2], and lower management and the drones aren't much better. And by the time a woman takes the helm, the company has often been run into the ground so hard that the board can't find another man willing to risk his reputation. To make it worse, during the 'rona female r…

How about Mary Barra at GM? Do you consider her a rare exception?

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

#964

Post by Gollapalli »

wolverine876 wrote: post #959
andreilys wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable. I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.

> College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and…

>Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas.

Tell that to Judith Butler.

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

#966

Post by brigandish »

dudeman13 wrote: post #957
brigandish wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues. Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor…

A close to most fundamental factor must survive close to most observations of the real world. That's not the case. Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market. Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices be…

Monopolies are the opposite of a free market. I'm not sure how a critique of using supply and demand to explain how free markets work will apply if you choose a monopolised market as your rebuttal. You may as well say that supply and demand doesn't hold under communist conditions.

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

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

#967

Post by OkayPhysicist »

doom2 wrote: post #886
mordymoop wrote: post #851

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…

How many of them have strong STEM programs though? My partner went to a PUI, but it was firmly a liberal arts school (not that you can't move into STEM with a liberal arts degree). I chose my own undergraduate school because it had a decent engineering program but obviously was a research university. The two I can think of are Harvey Mudd and Rose Hulman.

I think a lot of times, "strong STEM programs" in the public perception is equated with "big research university" which leads to oxymoron when looking for PUI for STEM.

Loyola Marymount University, in LA, fits the description. The STEM program wasn't the most competitive out there (but that's in comparison to nearby schools like UCLA, Cal Poly, etc), but the teaching quality was top-notch and there was a pretty direct pipeline from the engineering school to the big aerospace/defense contractors in the surrounding area.

I don't know anybody from any of my programs who isn't either gainfully employed in their field of study, or at some competitive grad school, and we graduated in the middle of COVID.

Of course it seems to be in a competition with USC to be the most expensive stickerprice university in the country, but the dirty little secret of private schools is that almost no one pays that price. To keep diversity up they shower disadvantaged students with scholarships, to keep academic standards up they shower academically competitive students with scholarships, and that's all paid for by charging the obscenely rich an elevated tuition, who in exchange are put in a situation where they're rubbing shoulders with a mix of talented students and a much higher than average concentration of other rich kids, leading to networking opportunities for everyone involved.

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

#968

Post by jdkee »

ufmace wrote: post #407
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…

FWIW, I think that this factor: > If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was. But then, opera…

David Graeber has a lot to say on this very subject...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

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

#969

Post by MrMan »

SantalBlush wrote: post #813
magpi3 wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he is wrong about many things, but your post comes across as an ad hominem that doesn't respond to any of his points.

Putting this guy's twitter posts on HN is an ad hominem in itself. Why should anyone care what this guy thinks if not for ad hominem?

touche

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

#970

Post by MrMan »

sgustard wrote: post #658
pm90 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If it’s his job at being able to predict, he seems to be doing a bad job by being wrong so many times. 2. There’s so many better ways to spark an interesting conversation than throw bs predictions out on Twitter. If his opinion was informed with facts, he could write a blog or (heavens forbid) a Twitter thread detailing what lead him to the conclusion.

To be fair, his post does lead into a Twitter thread. Unfortunately it's a mess of the usual reactionary takes: white people are asked to feel guilty; Asians are discriminated against; nobody wants to hear whiny conservatives on campus. And so: "nearer to collapse than it appears." That's not a falsifiable prediction, of course: how long does it "appear" to take to collapse? A decade, a century, never?

no matter how close you think it is, it is closer than that!

- altman's paradox

Post reply on HN