21–30 of 149 posts
U. of Waterloo has an innovative model of alternating 4-month coops and then 4 months of school. By the time students graduate they've made some money and have a good amount of work experience. I really this was a model accessible to more people.
This site is blocked in the EU. :-/
yeah, sure
Site blocks access from EU, here's a snapshot of the content https://archive.ph/qamYz
Even today, if you go to a Ashram/Japanese Zen temple, you're expected to go and clean stuff. The surrendering of the ego is itself quite therapeutic, if you come from a Western culture where the ego is so massively magnified/glorified.
Sadly, Indian culture is itself being choked off by vestigial-British Govt. in India, so won't be long before someone writes the equivalent of the "Darkening Age" for Asia.
> Our European visitors are important to us.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Besides the irony of "being important" and GDPR [0] not having been solved for a simple website, this is the first time in a long while that I see something like this, and it made me think (again!) how weird, unfair, and strange the world is, in relation to laws and regulation.
[0]: https://gdpr.eu/
U. of Waterloo has an innovative model of alternating 4-month coops and then 4 months of school. By the time students graduate they've made some money and have a good amount of work experience. I really this was a model accessible to more people.
I'm a huge fan of waterloo's model as well for students but I think it's really hard to replicate without the prestige of a University like Waterloo.
The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.
The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.
Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.