The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

haha u have hit the nail on the head re: our bad pr problem..usually people go for indentured servitude rather than all the way to slavery though haha...

we think equity>debt for students because a) in bad times your debt is lower (% of income vs flat payment) and b) longer time scale allows transfer consumption from middle-age to years immediately after graduation

re: western government interest rates that's probably true, the uk has lost a lot of money on their loans which have very nice terms & conditions.. the US market still has a large private loans component which we think we can beat (for reasons above). to be honest though we are probably thinking more about the developing world (india, china etc.) where student loan financing isn't as available (particularly true at a graduate level)

finally, the x-factor is on the investor side where we can allow investors to bet on industries without having to be on a specific company because the income stream of someone working in a given industry is a better long-term proxy than a company in that industry (particularly if it's a new industry)..

as he admits, per capita funding has indeed fallen. the problem is an over expansion of higher education. what proportion of the population can really benefit from a full time residential degree course? much less than 50%

I'd certainly consider you for an interview (you show actual development ability and an understanding of some important concepts in your work, which is much more than many interviewees), but speaking frankly, the profile is a little weak - it consists mostly of experimental or toy stuff without any kind of evidence of real-world application, no tests, nothing that's been packaged up for use by other people. These aren't bad, by any means, but by themselves they aren't something I'd look at and say "I want this guy working for me".

You don't have a lot of collaborative work (read: contributions to existing projects) or original work that others are using, which is one of the things I look for in candidates. I'm not just interested in a candidate's ability to write code, but in how they write code in the context of large projects, how they produce deliverables for consumption by other developers and stakeholders. Your Github profile isn't just a chance to showcase your ability to write code, but a chance to showcase how you write code with other people involved. A candidate who is actively contributing pull requests to other projects is very interesting to me, because they demonstrate an ability to collaborate with other people on a codebase they didn't originate, which is obviously necessary in business.

Your commits are clean, though, which is very good. I see way too many candidates with message after commit message like "stuff" and "changes" (anecdotally, I've found this to be pervasive in newly-minted CS majors and academic repositories). That's a major negative for me, because it suggests a lack of desire or ability to communicate the essence of your work.

A strong history of open source participation and/or a strong history of development of a personal project that is actively used somewhere are the biggest things I look for, because they speak not just to your ability to write code, but your ability to ship deliverables. After that, I look at code quality (cleanliness/use of idioms/lack of obvious bugs or errors) and commit quality (how disciplined are you in your commits, how well do you communicate what each change is for). The lack of those things isn't a "no" for me, but their presence is a big "yes".

For the older generation, ha, but the younger generation has higher expectations.

No quantitative idea, but as disgusting as the salaries for football coaches (N.B., depending on the school, it may be a budget separate from the academic enterprise), university presidents, &c. are, I would be willing to bet that they are dwarfed by the army of bureaucrats handling what I termed regulatory compliance.

On the research side, off the top of my head you've got grant administrators, institute review boards, research integrity office, postdoc affairs. You've also got "Title IX administrators". Accepting federal funding takes a lot of work.

The worthiness of the services the bureaucrats are providing I leave as an exercise to the reader, but I think it's problematic that the people making the regulations are not the ones paying the bills when it comes time to comply with the regulations.