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The Misuses of the University

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Re: The Misuses of the University

#81

Post by DesaiAshu »

nablaxcroissant wrote: post #70
141205 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. I…

Pretty much agree but may I also add that Santa Clara County would probably not allow Stanford to increase its student body by any real sizeable amount due to restrictions in traffic, building, parking, etc, etc.

It would require building public transit and higher density residential housing over the next two boom/bust cycles

Re: The Misuses of the University

#82

Post by mghackerlady »

markus_zhang wrote: post #57
mandevil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland l…

Yeah I can see this enshitification occurs everywhere, not just in Disney land. It is sad. But at the same time it gives me some reflection about my choice of entertainment -- like, do I really need those things? Do I really need Netflix/Youtube/etc. that badly? Should I sit down with my kid, before an offline computer and a paper manual, and program in QBASIC together, or run some typing games altogether, just for f…

please teach your child how computers work

-signed someone baffled a 16 year old stared at me like I had 3 heads when I asked them to open a folder

Re: The Misuses of the University

#83

Post by linkregister »

PaulHoule wrote: post #66
RGamma wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)

1970 or so. There is this version of it https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.

The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was decades in the making.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#84

Post by moab »

gowld wrote: post #41
djoldman wrote: post #27

Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and c…

R1 Research University. Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty. Not a "college".

Are you a professor at a R1 school? All the faculty I know at R1s (see CMU, MIT, etc) are doing quite a lot of teaching in addition to their research.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#85

Post by 141205 »

DesaiAshu wrote: post #80
141205 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. I…

Stanford has a $40 billion endowment for 8k undergrads. UCLA has a $10 billion endowment for 34k undergrads. Naturally, the class sizes will be much larger. The UC system does not put 100% of students at UC Berkeley and UCLA, they distribute it across several campuses and distance education and maintain a leveling system that helps promising research talent be in the room with experienced researchers Despite rising c…

"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure"

I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#86

Post by hibikir »

moab wrote: post #84
gowld wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R1 Research University. Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty. Not a "college".

Are you a professor at a R1 school? All the faculty I know at R1s (see CMU, MIT, etc) are doing quite a lot of teaching in addition to their research.

I think he is mostly explaining the experience of many a student, which finds themselves, especially in the first few years, with very large class sizes and minimal interactions with professors. It's not that the professors don't do any teaching, but that your first two years probably feel like a scam, especially if there are many general requirements not tied to your major.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#87

Post by underlipton »

linkregister wrote: post #83
PaulHoule wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1970 or so. There is this version of it https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.

The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was de…

Speaking completely out of my ass in the interest of stimulating thought on the matter: the fall of the Bretton Woods system was not inevitable, and the trade imbalances of the 1960s were mere symptoms of the true source of the collapse of our ability to maintain the peg.

Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the labor and time costs of American life across the board, both in the short and long terms, and made monetary inflation a necessity in order to forestall an economic collapse. The most prominent of these are the creation and expansion of suburban America and the car and consumer cultures required to make it possible, and the expansion of the military-industrial complex in the midst of the Cold War.

An America that had spent the 40s, 50s, and 60s continuing to build densely (reaping the benefits of efficient servicing of public needs), and focusing industry on export-ready products and services (preempting trade imbalances), would not have incurred the ever-rising costs of creating and maintaining sprawl, and would have benefited from pro-trade spending that actually delivered a return rather than falling into a black hole.

If I might be slightly hyperbolic: American hubris and intolerance blew up the American experiment about 80 years ago. It's just been exploding very, very slowly.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#88

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

underlipton wrote: post #87
linkregister wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was de…

Speaking completely out of my ass in the interest of stimulating thought on the matter: the fall of the Bretton Woods system was not inevitable, and the trade imbalances of the 1960s were mere symptoms of the true source of the collapse of our ability to maintain the peg. Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the…

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Re: The Misuses of the University

#89

Post by tempacct2cmmnt »

rd wrote: post #30
bonsai_spool wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university. I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.

This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.

Many of them are prime real estate locations in large part -because- the old institutions are there.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#90

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35
impendia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006. I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off. But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

Probably they got a donation. I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building. They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they…

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