Wherever you get more value out of the final certificate than the education involved, you are participating in systemic fraud and a bubble that will eventually pop.
Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
21–30 of 410 posts
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#22Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
How much worse off is someone going to UMass by your calculation?
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#23I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…
Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking, etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-colleges).
In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#24Maybe if they charged reasonable prices they'd have more applicants. The university I went to let you go for free if you kept a 4.0 GPA and had high SAT scores.
Then you've created an extreme incentive for grade inflation, since professors know an A- could lead to a promising student getting kicked out over finances.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#25I sense that the fundamental purpose for going to College has changed from "getting an education" to "building your brand" as an individual. I don't work in Human Resources, but as a software developer I do spend a lot of time around my company's recruiters and I'm involved in the hiring process. A candidate's alma mater has an outsized impact on the likelihood they will advance to the next step of the hiring process.
Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College". But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.
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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.
I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your own passion and determination. It's the same reason companies have much more innovation in offices compared to remote working.
The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#28I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…
Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university.
Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting.
And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top colleges have very complicated pricing schemes and are basically free to middle and lower income students, for example a student to MIT only pays if their family earns more than $90k a year which is above the median household income of $68k.
When I was there, less than 8% of the students were paying full tuition (of which a good chunk were international students). At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
iirc, it was even lower when I went. And this is probably the most common mistake I see made about MIT, etc.; the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top schools runs deep, which simply isn’t as true for smaller or less popular schools.
Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to jump through, or anything else, but that’s a different argument.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#30I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…
There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…
Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.