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The Misuses of the University

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Re: The Misuses of the University

#91

Post by DesaiAshu »

141205 wrote: post #85
DesaiAshu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-...

Ideas for solutions here:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf

Re: The Misuses of the University

#92

Post by alexpotato »

A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university.

I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.

From talking to my friend, I realized:

- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job

- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible

- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding

- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc

Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#93

Post by fsckboy »

141205 wrote: post #63
DesaiAshu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very he…

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…

>Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours

I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.

lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.

Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.

at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#94

Post by econ »

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 solution is to hoard ideas, organize them, review them and experiment. I for example suspect that giving students more time for everything would improve results. I have nothing to show for this but it would be good science to run the experiment. Unless of course there are better sounding ideas that should be tried first.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#95

Post by parpfish »

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…

i think the only people that realize this are people that are actively doing research in academia. not even the undergrads at the school realize that teaching undergrads is at best a side-hustle for the institution.

i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#96

Post by bpt3 »

momoschili wrote: post #72
bpt3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article states, the funds came from an external donor. It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).

The federal funds pay for it through the indirect costs funding its maintenance most likely... I suspect that represents a significant portion of the total cost of the building.

Universities are only allowed to include indirect expenses that are related to the research in question, not all expenses incurred by the university (such as a student center, dorm, stadium, etc.).

Re: The Misuses of the University

#97

Post by parpfish »

zer00eyz wrote: post #4

> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants. I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top. Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty…

one conspiracy theory i have been stewing on for years is that the luxuriousness of modern colleges was an intentional move to neuter the political power of the youth following the student unrest of the 60s and 70s.

somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.

and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades

Re: The Misuses of the University

#98

Post by yowayb »

I cherish my UCSD education and (equally, if not more) all the socializing that came with it.

The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.

China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.

Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.

To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#99

Post by eszed »

bpt3 wrote: post #71
Windchaser wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you want a really high quality education, you don't go to a big research school. You go to a small school, like a liberal arts school, where the teachers are both highly trained and really passionate about teaching. I went to a small liberal arts school for an undergrad degree in STEM, and to a R1 research university for graduate work. The absolute best classes at the big-name research university were about a…

Did you go to an elite (or close to it) liberal arts school? I have gone to only R1 schools myself, but my exposure to liberal arts schools would indicate they are a mixed bag, especially in the sciences (not disagreeing with you or saying that R1 schools aren't also a mixed bag in some/many senses). Most undergraduates don't realize it, but the purpose of going to an R1 is access to an alumni network and (for the sm…

Not the poster you asked, but I think their point stands for (at least many) non-elite liberal arts schools. (Heck, I think it stands for some community colleges, too.) Teachers at those institutions have often attended elite programs, and in any case have self-selected into (primarily) teaching roles, and you'll get a lot of their individual attention, which you wouldn't at a big school.

(For the benefit of students reading this: go to office hours, especially early in the term, even if it's just to shoot the breeze. If you don't, you're cheating yourself out of the main advantage of that institutional model.)

Where your take is correct, and even demands greater emphasis, is the value of the alumni network, and the "name recognition" of a degree from somewhere people, well, recognize. As someone who deeply believes in the value of education for its own sake it pains me to be this cynical, but those are the only things that matter in the world at large.

That's the honest take, which, indeed, no one in higher education will ever put so baldly.

Disclosure: graduated from, and also spent five years teaching at a (very) non-elite liberal arts college. The education was good - even great, in some programs / by some professors - but the professional advantages absolutely nil. I will council my own son not to attend a similar school (should any of them even survive by the time he gets there - they're by and large on life-support right now); even tuition-free it wouldn't be (economically) worth it, and at the actual price it's the worst life decision many of those students will ever make.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#100

Post by catgary »

nine_k wrote: post #75
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…

As I understood the grandparent post, the idea is that a highest-level university should 10× its student throughput, and 9 other, lower-level universities would be made redundant by that. This would make sense if all what an elite university did were providing elite-level education. Of course exclusive schools provide other benefits, often more valuable for the target audience than the education proper: a highly filt…

I see the value of the students, it just seems like an odd thing for a government to subsidize via NIH/NSF funding. We don’t really have anything analogous to that in Canada and it just seems awfully weird that it exists in the US without the “it’s older than the country” excuse that Oxford/Cambridge have.
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