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Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

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Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#101

Post by ModernMech »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #78
supernova87a wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you hint at, I think you would quickly find that the university would look like it's run by a bunch of slumlords, with things falling apart, and no one responding when the toilet gets clogged or the wifi goes down.

Why is it that people think it's okay to give 18 year old a machinegun and a granade and to send them to kill, or trust them with a 40 ton vehicle, but they can't be trusted at basic everyday life? Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right

I don’t think many people who run universities are the same who think it’s okay to send kids into war. The people making the laws and starting the wars which necessitate giving 18 year olds machine guns are not actually interacting with or involved in the lives and development of those same 18 year olds.

Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally?

I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#102

Post by mold_aid »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #65

A number of people have commented on how this model of work-study is unrealistic because it relies on endowments for it to work. I think the argument can be flipped. The problem is that of incentives and the wrong culture dont allow the debt-free, work-study program to be more widespread, by leveraging endowments. Take for example a place like harvard. Consider that the objective of a harvard portfolio manager is to…

Right, but your primary example - and this is a condition (as in "symptom") that dominates most media coverage of US higher ed - is Harvard. Harvard is not a good example, as it's not representative. A "culture of misaligned incentives?" OK, what concrete connections between endowment, culture, and the "alignment" of "incentives" do you think apply to, say, UMass?

_Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?_

All universities have a debt-free path to students (these are not kids, they are adults). It is called "paying up front" or "paying when you receive a bill." We obviously know that is not feasible, but I don't look for changes to the dealership model because Subaru does not provide "a debt-free path to car ownership."

I'm not sure I accept that work-centric universities prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal. The story is an advertisement for a college. It is published by a news source that seems to have a lot of stories critical of colleges.

The story does not say specifically that all students graduate debt-free; for students who graduate Hard Work U (I think the "you" is misplaced) and take loans, the average debt at graduation seems to be no different than some CUNY universities. Hard Work U forbids federal loans - not "offer a path to debt-free" but forbid it. Federal loans may be subsidized - and gosh, wonder why they started with the fed before moving on to private loans? Wonder how their revenue streams work?

You will notice also that there is no graduate program, where a considerable amount of student debt is held.

Also, from what I can tell, CotOzarks' annual tuition is considerably higher than the in-state tuition charged at the state school I work at, which has been consistently defunded at the state level. We service nearly 10,000 secular students; "Hard Work U" (this is branding, dude) services 1.5k deeply religious students and still advertise as a liberal arts college! Land-grant unis, regional comprehensives, small liberal arts schools, cannot at all replicate their...unique business model.

But we can call ourselves universities. I wonder why it's not "University" of the Ozarks? They're accredited by HLC, so I don't think there's a quality issue. But they do advertise as a liberal arts school and seem to have a lot of these "jobless majors" I keep hearing about.

The historical and material conditions that cause students to accrue debt are not going to be answered by "just offer summer jobs." The idea that "too many" universities (how many, precisely?) have some "debt-free" option that they could just flip a switch on...I mean, yes, If I were a university, I would simply provide a debt-free option for students! C'mon. Most of my students have jobs during the semester; do you assume they would drop them if we offered private work against their tuition? Would you be surprised if the answer was "no"?

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#103

Post by ghaff »

godelski wrote: post #41
laGrenouille wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight agai…

> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is…

>There's more growth than that

There has been an almost unprecedented ten year period of growth in the equity markets. And the big endowment which I keep my eye on at least has done significantly better than the market. It's prudent not to count on that continuing--not that the school could turn on a dime with respect to their revenue mix anyway.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#104

Post by gruez »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #69
laGrenouille wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Harvard as an example, they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 [1]. In order to cover that, they would need to be having a consistent rate of return around 9% on their ($54 billion) endowment. That a fairly good estimate of the rate of return for the stock market over the past 25 years, so not unreasonable. Though, this ignores that most of the endowment consists of restricted funds that can only…

I admit I don't know about university endowments, so the question is: what are those $40+ billion dollars sitting there for every year? Does a university really need a balance that may be larger than some nation's GDP?

>Does a university really need a balance that may be larger than some nation's GDP?

This comparison makes no sense.

1. GDP is a per-year measure, but an endowment is accumulated over multiple years. Therefore durectly comparing them doesn't really make much sense.

2. "some nation" includes some pretty small/poor countries. Should it be a surprise that an organization in the US is bigger than a country like Liechtenstein?

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#105

Post by jeffwask »

godelski wrote: post #35
supernova87a wrote: post #27

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…

This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if…

Endowments allow colleges to operate like they are a business between the sheets and a non-profit on the streets.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#106

Post by dhosek »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7

Another is Deep Springs College, about 30 miles from Big Pine, CA. This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman. The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engin…

One of my friends from grad school went there. I was very tempted when I got the recruitment brochure as a high school senior (because I lived in Chicago, but wanted to go to California, I had to check the anywhere in the country box on the SAT/ACT results and ended up hearing from about half the colleges in the country—I was a big nerd and crossed them off the list in the back of the SAT booklet).

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#107

Post by huachimingo »

There is no explicit incentive in Universities to make innovations(or work) at the current state-of-the-art of Eng. in software. At least where I live (Chile), we have outdated courses, filler courses that even some teachers say they could be shorter, we have not "a big and fruitful community" of programmers, and so on.

You are NOT rewarded for knowing more info, techniques or anything that are not in the courses. Do you know Linux/Unix? Fine, no one cares. Do you know X language with Y framework? That doesnt give you more grades or be able to skip courses (you cant skip). Do you know about cross-compiling, new shiny things about the field that could be INTERESTING? No one cares.

At least they could make a club or especial program, but nope.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#108

Post by el_nahual »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7

Another is Deep Springs College, about 30 miles from Big Pine, CA. This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman. The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engin…

I met a couple Deep Springs transfers at the University of Chicago and they were some of the smartest, chillest, most well-rounded kids. Very impressive and it made me wish I had studied somewhere like that.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#109

Post by LudwigNagasena »

troupe wrote: post #94
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 Isn’t that a crazy number? How much of it goes to a bloated bureaucracy?

You are probably under-estimating the size of Harvard. That isn't to say that large organizations tend to be ... well large organizations, but Harvard is huge.

You are probably over-estimating the size of Harvard. It’s not that huge for an R1 institution. Obviously, they have to pay huge money for cutting edge equipment and high salaries for top talent. But I don’t think that Harvard is protected from any administrative bloat so endemic in higher education. And since Harvard commands so much money the problem can theoretically be much worse than with state universities and LACs.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#110

Post by MisterTea »

supernova87a wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job.

Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.

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