University has become an unaffordable luxury
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University has become an unaffordable luxury
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Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#2How do you get college costs to go down? You lower the demand. It's simple economics 101.
Ambitious people not going to college has nothing to do with the price of college. They don't need to go at any price point. The price reflects the value that customers (students) put on the education.
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#3The problem is that a university education has become a necessity in the workplace when it really shouldn't. Most jobs don't need a university education and you don't need a college degree to tell you that you are smart. (If you believe that a college education is what you make of it, then a college education doesn't really prepare you for anything and smart motivated people would succeed without college anyway.) As a result, the demand for a university education outpaces supply. All this combines with the proliferation of student loans to make a university education much more attainable--but much more expensive--than previously in history.
To lower cost we need to lower demand. We need to bring back trade schools and raise their importance. We need to give youths an option of a good job and a good wage without having to go to college. Look at Germany and their Berufsschulen. An electrician is just an important and valuable as an electrical engineer. Hell, most of the IT industry are vocational jobs that shouldn't require a college degree. How many people actually do computer science at work? How many people here on HN learned to program on their own and picked up best practices on the job?
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#4How do you get college costs to go down? You lower the demand. It's simple economics 101. Ambitious people not going to college has nothing to do with the price of college. They don't need to go at any price point. The price reflects the value that customers (students) put on the education.
Also, you have to pay attention to the internal economics of how colleges are funded and the services they provide to truly understand the cost required to run a college. You are assuming the demand delta just means the college is voluntarily increasing its margins in the face of demand. Take the California UC & CalState System, it's structurally broken. Regardless of demand, it simply has no choice but to 1) increase fees, 2) reduce admissions, 3) fire professors. Much of its money does not come from tuition paid for by students, but entirely by the state - what happens when the state is financially strapped? No differently, large private universities also rely heavily on federal funds - same thing, what happens when the feds cut back?
So how do you get costs to go down? You change the paradigm of how a college is run so that they are not paying for unnecessary expenses. Seriously, is there any value to all those publications that professors are expected to publish? I'm certain we can do without 30% of such writings when the real cost is higher tuition to the students.
Yes, demand does play a part, but it's only a part of the equation. There's a huge problem with how colleges are structured and operated that is unsustainable.
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#5The problem is that a university education has become a necessity in the workplace when it really shouldn't. Most jobs don't need a university education and you don't need a college degree to tell you that you are smart. (If you believe that a college education is what you make of it, then a college education doesn't really prepare you for anything and smart motivated people would succeed without college anyway.) As…
With respect to Germany's vocational schools, note that Germany subsidizes all forms of tertiary education heavily, not just their vocational schools. Attending a university in Germany costs you at most a few hundred EUR per semester (and is free aside from administrative fees in several German states). Simply put, a highly skilled labor force is considered enough of a public good in Germany that the government is willing to invest in it (on top of accessible tertiary education being nice to have). And yes, there's actually high demand for computer scientists with a university degree in Germany, too.
Subsidizing tertiary education is in fact fairly typical in Europe; expensive college degrees are largely an American/English thing. For example, here in Scotland, there have been no tuition fees for Scottish students (as well as for non-British EU students) since the Graduate Endowment Abolition (Scotland) Bill. As another example, ETH Zürich charges, I think, around 600 CHF/semester in fees. Both the University of Edinburgh and ETHZ rank among the top 25 universities worldwide, so it's not as though quality is being sacrificed in the process.
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#6The problem is that a university education has become a necessity in the workplace when it really shouldn't. Most jobs don't need a university education and you don't need a college degree to tell you that you are smart. (If you believe that a college education is what you make of it, then a college education doesn't really prepare you for anything and smart motivated people would succeed without college anyway.) As…
Worse yet, it's a tiered system where to get the plum jobs, you have to graduate from Ivy/Stanford/MIT. But the reality is that a passionate hard working kid from UCLA or UTexas is no less qualified to fill the same role as a similarly educated one from Princeton. Employers are simply lazy, and rather than truly vet candidates for talent, they just assume that if the candidate has an Ivy on the resume, that's good enough.
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#7The problem is that a university education has become a necessity in the workplace when it really shouldn't. Most jobs don't need a university education and you don't need a college degree to tell you that you are smart. (If you believe that a college education is what you make of it, then a college education doesn't really prepare you for anything and smart motivated people would succeed without college anyway.) As…
Trade schools are not a panacea. The bigger picture is the economy sucks and there aren't enough jobs, tradespeople included. No amount of education reform is going to fix the jobs problem.
Re: University has become an unaffordable luxury
#8Education is privatizing itself. It's not that public education is inherently bad - it can work beautifully and does right now in some parts of the world. But in the United States, at least, something isn't working. Private universities know that degrees are effectively mandatory so they're jacking up their fees, and many public universities are in states with budget issues. Additionally, standards are so low that I got in. I'm not that smart and I sure as hell wasn't good at being a student.
Depending on where you are, high schools are not graduating large fractions of their students and those who graduate are not always that successful. On the west side of Austin, a rich high school has a $2M jumbo-tron for their football field. On the east side of Austin, I once volunteered at a school with moldy textbooks. 7 mile difference.
There is a push toward private, micro-schooling. It's a natural progression of post-industrialization. We have free materials: Khan Academy, TED, millions of informative blog posts about everything, Wikipedia (needless to say), etc. I think that much is obvious. Why not just get study groups together with good books and free lectures and teach ourselves?
It's a great idea. The only problem I see is that many people who are interested in this are autodidacts, a group in which I include myself. It's not about being better or worse than other students, it's simply a learning style. The problem for many people, though, is that they need a kind of push in the classroom. There are a few startups working on education which focus on making lectures easy to share.
That's great, but interactive collaborative and meaningful projects - projects with depth and which require a thorough understanding of the material - are essential to igniting a students' curiosity. I would dare say that autodidacts are simply people good at coming up with their own projects. A truly good teacher is still necessary in the post-industrial education system I see forming but (at least for STEM) we need teachers who know the Moore method. We need teachers who assign the lectures for homework and can lead three different discussions in three different sections of the class, or who know the material well enough to pivot based on student needs. A good teacher will be just as effective when she is not speaking as when she is (perhaps moreso). Classrooms should be student run but framed by the teacher. That takes way more skill to get right than simply talking about problems in isolation.
I always rant about this subject. I guess my plea to education startups is this: help teachers share ideas and full curricula, help people train in the Moore method, and help create a parallel in-person presence to complement the impersonal digested presence of KA et al. Many bright people simply need socialization and tangible projects to form correct mental models. Skillshare seems to be a good start on this.