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How America's universities became debt factories

anandsanwal.me

341–350 of 564 posts

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#341
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not generally true. I attended a state university, and the department simply didn't have the funding to pay for its graduate students. However, I did in fact receive some TAships and lectureships while I was there, and even a dissertation fellowship. They didn't pay well though.

>That's not generally true. I attended a state university, and the department simply didn't have the funding to pay for its graduate students. I mean, maybe? I know a number of state schools, certainly not all of them, but plenty that can afford paid spots for PhD students in the humanities that are certainly enough for someone to support themselves on. It doesn't pay as well, nearly as well, as jobs that humanities…

Some departments have money, and some don't. Simple as that.

I find it very odd that people are trying to deny my experience here.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean for fucks sake we were pushing 18 year old teenagers into tens of thousands of dollars of debt! I dunno about most people but at 18 I had absolutely no clue about anything, especially the concept of money nor career. How the fuck does an 18 year old comprehend why taking $60,000 to get a degree in “Latin Dance” is not a good idea (and we all know many people who fall into this bucket too!). And yet parents, co…

You are being downvoted but that was exactly my experience. It wasnt hyperbole. I was told my entire time in k-12 you need to get a college degree by everybody. Parents, teachers, counselors. Additionally they said, with no exaggeration, to get any degree, at any school, and take out as many loans as you need. So yes an entire generation of kids were told the $60,000 in debt for a latin dance degree at a no-name scho…

I don't know when that narrative started, but it was not what I heard (high school in the 90s). I at one point thought out loud about majoring in Art in university, and everyone, parents, teachers, guidance counsellors said, "Buddy, not if you want an actual career! Major in engineering or something." Maybe the later generations got the bad "Major in anything" advice but I sure as heck didn't.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#343
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to these debts, by definition , do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.

Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Instead, all I was told was to go to college. So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me. Seriously, they made huge changes to the…

> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.

I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and then forget about it, and that was the good students!

A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I don’t think many of the teenagers in high school are in a place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it to be relevant many years later.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#344
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct except for one word: "lucrative". To this day, almost two decades after I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student loan debt. Even if I had completed my degree, though, philosophy PhDs aren't particularly lucrative. Tenured professors at major universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad students. I…

> It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a shortage of medical doctors. That's a pipeline problem. What the U.S. actually has is a severe bottleneck in available places at medical schools and for residency training.

In addition, you must complete a four year degree in whatever before going to medical school.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#345

I don't know if this is some kind of heresy, but here we go. I don't think universities provide much value at all to the common student who is not going to be a PhD. I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one on one. I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in…

Not a heresy at all. I went to two of the top 5 CS schools in the US and I barely recall anything I learned in there, almost everything I know ended up being self-taught later in a much more efficient manner than being student n.200 in a class taught by a researcher who barely speaks English and doesn't want to be teaching. The main upside was associating myself with those two brand names which later got me jobs and cofounders, but that's about it.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.

You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't. Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.

English is the global lingua franca. It’s how we interact with and transmit information, including ideas about accounting, engineering, etc.

It’s very fair to argue about the ROI of the average undergraduate English degree given the outrageous prices that universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see the tangible value in English language expertise, I don’t really know what to tell you.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only because doctors collude to limit the number of available residency places. I programmers were smart, they would: 1. Lobby the government to prohibit anyone from practicing programming without a license. 2. Limit the number of licenses granted each year

Fortunately, we don't have the social skills to make that happen.

Also, the vast majority of software bugs are annoying at worst, with no death potential. Powers that be would react a lot more aggressively if stack overflows routinely led to bodies on the pavement.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#348
post #191
post #6

We should be way more willing to straight up kill multi-billion dollar industries. Without that willingness, most modern problems are impossible for governments to solve, and such industries and even their potential competitors are incentivised mostly to exacerbate the problem. I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are problems markets will never solve

We should do (at least) three things: 1. Provide a counterbalance to private industries by having the government player to be a significant player in that market. That means a free or near-free high-quality state higher education system like the California system used to be until it was made an explicit political goal to avoid an "educated proletariat" [1]. It also goes for housing, hospitals, banks, ISPs and so on;…

> 2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.

I kind of agree with this, but as a taxpayer, I don't necessarily want the government to have an equity stake in a failing or horribly-run business.

We need the government to grow a backbone and allow large businesses and even entire sectors of the economy to FAIL when they suck. I hate the narrative "We have to keep ShittyCo alive because it provides 10,000 jobs!!" as if those jobs would just disappear if ShittyCo got flushed down the toilet like it should be.

Taxpayers should not bail out GM and Chrysler and AIG and US Airways and these shit companies. We should have let them fail, let their careless shareholders eat it, and created a regulatory environment that allowed better-run competitors to spring up.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#349
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a shortage of medical doctors. That's a pipeline problem. What the U.S. actually has is a severe bottleneck in available places at medical schools and for residency training.

In addition, you must complete a four year degree in whatever before going to medical school.

This is really a weird requirement and most other places in the world don't have it, without suffering any setbacks when it comes to outcomes of treatments.

Imagine that every programmer would have to study, say, Latin for 4 years before being allowed to code.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.

You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't. Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.

You don't think about things from the perspective of someone who actually owns or starts a business, you think about things as someone who is an employee and wants to promote skills that help others get employed: accountant, engineer. Something great about engineers and accountants is that they don't ask too many questions, because many have bad social skills: many of them would never, on their own, be able to run a business or make deals or do the most important things involved in managing relations between large groups of people and making sure a product and/or service is delivered to happy customers and shareholders get paid off. Therefore, they don't constitute a threat to a business owner.

A student who studies English, on the other hand, is given skills specifically to critically engage with a text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of questions about why they are doing what they are doing, why they are talking to certain people and not others, why, even, they ought to study one thing or another, why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay check and goes home at the end of the day and never thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if you want to have more in the world, you need to know how to question it.

I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut für Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school, which is a research center whose members feature quite prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at the university level. Not exactly the same, but his education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in English would have. But you wouldn't know that as an engineer; you would just be some employee, entirely replaceable.

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