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Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

nytimes.com

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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#361

Post by souprock »

grepthisab wrote: post #231
jaykru wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the information available and advertised to most 17-year-olds (back when I was browsing: US News, College Confidential) isn't much of an improvement. In my case the former relies on a bunch of bunk data and weird metrics for evaluation, while the latter mostly revolved around very coarse word-of-mouth reputation.

I have a hard time believing this. Information was murky and information asymmetry was a big reason lots of people seemed to just apply to a flagship state u rather than look at more far flung or prestigious options, though the state u is prestigious in it's own right. There's certainly more noise now, but there's also a lot more signal (maybe the ratio is the same though). I suspect there's really fantastic info out…

The info was available to me back in 1992. Somebody at your high school, typically called a "guidance counselor", would have it. It was available in a thick paperback book. I could also use an Apple II program if I preferred.

From there I picked: Rice, Rutgers, MIT, Worchester Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Virginia Polytechnic. Clearly, that was not just one state.

After picking, phone the schools. Ask them to send applications. More applications may arrive by surprise if you do well on the SAT or ACT.

When an application arrives, put it in a typewriter and carefully type into all the fields in the form. Send it by mail, physically, and wait to get mailed a response.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#362

Post by imtringued »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #113
gonehome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop u…

>There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine."

The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden.

Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#363

Post by imtringued »

mavelikara wrote: post #245
mitchdoogle wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US education is hardly "life-destroyingly expensive". It's more than the rest of the world, but it is definitely manageable to pay for it yourself with student loans. If you have financial aid (billions of dollars in aid is out there for good students in financial need). More cost-conscious folks can save thousands more by splitting an undergraduate degree between a low-cost 2-year college (community college, junior…

Availability of credit does not make a purchase less expensive.

Yeah, it actually gets more expensive because colleges can overcharge you.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#364

Post by imtringued »

neonological wrote: post #187
gonehome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices…

>This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.

What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.

Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action.

If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#365

Post by imtringued »

mywittyname wrote: post #263
gonehome wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can substitute it for English, Communications, or Literature if you prefer.

Elite colleges are weird. At state schools, usually the technical programs are the most rigorous. While elite colleges offer largely identical technical degrees, their most difficult or prestigious course might be something obscure like Philosophy, Politics & Economics. It's almost like a shibboleth: only those who actually went to the school will recognize the prestige.

This is why managers/bosses prefer hiring people from the same university as them. Those graduates went through the same "hazing" they did.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#366

Post by chrisseaton »

chongli wrote: post #352
chrisseaton wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is largely free if your means are limited. What 18 year olds have any means at all? Surely everyone passes this means test?

They include your parents’ income in your means test, unless you’ve been out of high school for >7 years.

> They include your parents’ income in your means test

I wonder what happens if your parents are wealthy and you're on good terms with them and not estranged... they just don't happen to want to fund your education.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#367

Post by imtringued »

lumost wrote: post #98
tzs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases? I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.

Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the price increase. The current loan program was introduced to stem increasing government direct grant expenditures. Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spen…

>It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.

That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#368

Post by imtringued »

VLM wrote: post #198
gonehome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree. It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much…

Are there no kids interested in reading classics on their own? Shouldn't the barrier be even lower since those classics aren't protected by copyright? All you'd need is a kindle with internet.

What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#369

Post by imtringued »

labcomputer wrote: post #275
keiferski wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is how people constantly bemoan the state of politics, yet consistently argue for evaluating degrees entirely based on their financial outcome. As if an educated citizenry will just appear from the ether. The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.

1. Before the post-WWII GI bill, which sent an enormous surge of young men to college in the 1950's, the percentage of Americans with a college degree was measured in single digits (Bachelor degrees then were as common as Ph.D.s today). And, yet, we still somehow managed to have a functioning democracy[1]. 2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome simply because there is no other way to justify spending a…

>[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.

Hitler had extreme disdain for academics. It's definitively a driving for polarization since it's so easy to draw the line. People who drop out/never enroll have a lot in common with each other and people who graduate have a lot in common with each other but once you compare college educated and high school educated people the overlap starts shrinking.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#370

Post by imtringued »

selimthegrim wrote: post #303
aarongray wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best researchers are rarely the best teachers

They won’t be stumped by a question from a smart undergrad. The best teachers might fail to make it a teachable moment.

Why would I need a world class researcher for e.g. linear algebra? Lots of students struggle with it because of bad teaching, not because it's difficult to understand.
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