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Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

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Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#181

Post by cableshaft »

gwd wrote: post #113
nimbius wrote: post #64

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed…

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…

Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life').

I made it through relatively okay because STEM and some scholarships, but I'm not even sure I'll recommend my children go to college. Especially with online courses (not talking about college, just courses) becoming more viable and useful.

I definitely won't for some pursuits, like art. I'd rather they live at home with me for four years, doing self-study and putting their art out there online and developing a following rather than spend $200,000+ on college that will likely not result in anything afterwards (hell, as a semi-professional game designer myself, I'd happily work with them to get their art into published games).

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#182

Post by MattGaiser »

zarkov99 wrote: post #157

This situation is exposing colleges as the scam that they are. Families are getting indebted up to their eyeballs, thinking are paying for education. In reality the education can be had for free. What they are really paying for is a sorting function, something that could also be had for free with national exams.

> something that could also be had for free with national exams.

That just causes the money to be poured into national exam test prep like in South Korea or China.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#183

Post by cousin_it »

ryeights wrote: post #124
cousin_it wrote: post #86

Tech companies should take the lead on this. Say loud and clear: we no longer ask about education, and no longer take education into account when hiring, starting today. Devalue the sheepskin.

How else do you propose companies should assess new hires, especially young ones? And while the cost of tuition these days (IMO) outstrips the value of a college education, that’s not to say that value is zero.

The question is rather, how do you think degrees help assess new hires?

1) Programming skills? These are easy to assess with programming exercises. If someone has a degree but can't solve a programming exercise, I won't hire them.

2) Interpersonal skills? But a tech degree doesn't certify those, you need to assess them the hard way anyway.

3) Culture fit? But if you use degrees for that, it's simple discrimination, "let's hire this guy because he's from MIT like us". Not sure why this should be defended.

So in the end, degrees don't seem to help tech hiring in any way. I think tech companies could stop looking at degrees with very little loss.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#185

Post by Retric »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123
Retric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the number of people graduating with a collage degree significantly outstrips the demand for collage degrees. Otherwise you would not see people with collage degrees working retail etc.

For some degrees . I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.

It’s a fair point, but colleges also adjust program sizes based on what students chose to study. Just compare CS graduates in 1990 and how fast that grew and shrunk over time.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#186

Post by MattGaiser »

matchbok wrote: post #4
xhkkffbf wrote: post #2

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself? The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazil…

Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It's so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for "residence life", plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.

How many students? As residence is basically a hotel with 4000-10,000 students, so 6 people seems low if anything.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#187

Post by wutbrodo »

nimbius wrote: post #64

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed…

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining.

This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has been a consistent secret weapon of mine: they're often written off as unproductive, but it's not difficult to turn someone that smart into a solid engineer with a few months of guidance, as long as they're willing to learn. In specific domains, a subset of their actual skills are a good fit (they tend to be great at math), but it just signifies an unfortunate and fairly significant misallocation of resources.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#188

Post by Loughla »

zwieback wrote: post #95
geogra4 wrote: post #20

This is where the continental european model of the university is so much better than the anglo-american one. Universities should be about coursework and research, that's it. Dorms, dining halls, gyms, social clubs, sports etc. are not part of the university's mission

I went to university in Germany (ME, Stuttgart) my kids are attending public universities in Oregon. I get exactly what you're saying, when I walk across the OSU campus I'm amazed at how beautiful everything is made for the students life. THe flipside is that many labs are underequipped. We have to face the fact that colleges in the US are providing lifestyle at least as much as education. However, when kids and pare…

Many, many students choose those schools specifically because of the 'lifestyle' they offer. You are solidly correct.

What everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that those things only exist because people want them. I work for a bare-bones community college. We're less than 1/8th the cost of the closest large state school. And people choose to go there, and pay 8x more than they would at our institution because of dorm life, student life, and club opportunities.

Like it or don't, schools are only responding to what students want. There is obviously bloat in administration at schools - anywhere with a bureaucracy will (in my opinion) have that. But all of the other 'fun' things are because some students made a stink about wanting them.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#189

Post by dsfyu404ed »

jedberg wrote: post #179
gwd wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…

>colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.

If you let that run its course for a couple years then either the employers will have to relax their degree requirements or colleges will have to relax their price requirements. It'll be a game of chicken.

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