121–130 of 157 posts
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They are interested in doing some of these things precisely because they are being paid to.
They're interested in a new student union because they're being paid to? What does that mean?
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Johns Hopkins gets a lot of money from vested interests to push whatever suits them.
The early nod to Agora Institute mission of “building stronger global democracy” Followed by bemoaning USAID cuts makes me wonder if the author is deliberately missing one of the most glaring examples of this.
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They're interested in a new student union because they're being paid to? What does that mean?
They get the money for facilities etc off someone, and then do their bidding.
When the means are dropped in their lap, people act on those interests.
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The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the…
>>> The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that…
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The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the…
>>> The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that…
My experience around universities (as an academic) is that, generally, the number of adjuncts scales linearly with overall funding/skill at grantsmanship in the department. That is, the smaller universities I know saddled professors and their graduate students with substantially more non-research work, including teaching and administration.
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They get the money for facilities etc off someone, and then do their bidding.
People, including university administrators, are generally interested in upgrading their surroundings whether or not they have the means to do so. When the means are dropped in their lap, people act on those interests.
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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
I was astonished to learn from my friends that they saw not one, not two, but a percentage of young people who went through colleges but still don't know how to do simple things like printing from a desktop or using a word processor.
My understanding is that they are so used to mobiles and pads, that their parents actually did not buy a computer for them (sometimes it is ignorance and sometimes it is poverty). The kids did take a couple of computer classes in colleges (you know they are everywhere, like basic MS Office or simple programming), but they were not interested enough to make any effort other than getting a D or C, and sometimes they just cheated it through.
I'm still struggling whether I should introduce DOS or Linux to my son. On one hand, DOS is a dead thing and Linux is the present and the future. On the other hand, I really don't agree with the philosophy of Linux cli, and I still think DOS and early Windows (up to XP) presents the best for that P in PC.
Of course, he is going to be 6 when I gift him the box, so I won't teach him programming. Instead, I prepare to go 100% offline with a Rpi 4B + DOSBian (https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/), buy a used QBASIC manual, and program QBASIC completely offline, and invite him to watch. I'll program a typing game and ask his input into it so he might feel some "ownership".
I'm not sure how he will react, because there will not be instant sanctification. I want him to feel my frustration (fake a bit) and know how to handle it. But man, my son is not someone with patience, so I'm not sure...
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People, including university administrators, are generally interested in upgrading their surroundings whether or not they have the means to do so. When the means are dropped in their lap, people act on those interests.
Yeah, a shiny object gets dangled in front of them. The Drew Pavlou case in Australia is very telling. The University of Queensland was pretty much in the pocket of the CCP, including having the local consul on its board. When Pavlou protested on Chinese human rights issues, he ended up suspended for two years. The UoQ obviously relishes Chinese students and investment, but wouldn't allow criticism of the regime.
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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/op…
Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.
For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
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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.
Also, a number of the schools we're discussing are older than the US itself; Harvard predates it by almost 150 years.