391–400 of 457 posts
We need to revamp the system so universities can't charge us these ridiculous rates.
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> This just seems so wrong. Why? Out of all the things to think are wrong, inability to pick a useless major based on financial status is wrong? As opposed to pollution in East Asia, conflict minerals in our supply chain, or slavery in shrimp fisheries in Thailand? > These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. Yes. Those are luxur…
Yes, those things are also wrong. As are decreasing socioeconomic mobility, racially & religiously motivated violence, lack of code hygiene and unit testing, etc... If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect). Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has soci…
I never said arts/humanities are useless. I said they are luxuries, and the fact that people are bemoaning that it costs so much money to enter a non-lucrative profession is the very definition of a first world problem.
> Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic.
It might very well have social/cultural value. If you're not independently wealthy, you'll want it to appeal to a popular and paying audience if you like having food and shelter and toys.
> I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.
They're not perfectly aligned. However, if your "art" doesn't align with a paying audience, be prepared to be a starving artist with huge student loans. Society is not beholden to you to help you self-actualize your life. Get a job that pays money, and then do your obscure art in your spare time.
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But you wouldn't be able to distinguish between "revoked degree" and "lied about a degree" so you would assume the latter.
You'd need documentation to revoke a degree, hence proof you got one beforehand. You can't repossess knowledge.
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You'd need documentation to revoke a degree, hence proof you got one beforehand. You can't repossess knowledge.
That's not how it works. The universities have a software system [1] that employers can (and do) check to verify the degree. All they have to do is return "Not a Valid Degree-Holder", just like criminal background checks will return nothing for convictions that have since been pardoned. [1] https://www.auradata.com/Default.aspx
I don't think you understand how easy it would be to bypass this system, since the actual degree isn't the value, its the knowledge and experience that you gain on the campus. This is akin to repossessing the keys to a car instead of the vehicle itself.
This is another example of the law of unintended consequences. While the idea of helping people become more educated is obviously beneficial to both individuals and the society as a whole, government loans - which are supposed to "help" - are a huge factor fueling ever-raising costs. The loans, in effect, subsidize the higher-education complex, rather than students. Many of us have been brainwashed to think that high…
Alabama pays Nick Saban almost $7M/year. At first blush that seems outrageous. Then we find out that Alabama pulls in nearly $100M/year from football [0]. While not every school is so lucky, most (if not all) that are spending 7 figures on a coach are getting that money back and then some. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbelzer/2016/02/24/the-unive...
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People's inability to service/pay their loans, due to not having enough income, due to the job market collapsing, due to a recession (which is already overdue).
What you've described here is the value of an asset (student loan paper) declining due to a change in the underlying cash flows generated by that asset. This is how asset prices are supposed to work. It's not the busting of a bubble.
Imagine that employers stop caring about degrees, and evaluate potential hires based on other qualities.
This is already happening in tech.
If employers no longer cared about degrees, then workers who don't have them would now suddenly be on equal footing.
The non degree holders would get much higher paying jobs, and conversely the degree holders would get worse jobs. This causes the "value of education" bubble to pop.
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It's hilarious that the one thing that is consistently down voted on hn is economic orthodoxy. This is absolutely no different to the anti vaccination movement. People are simply too lazy and arrogant to listen to what the economics profession has to say, and ignore that fact that the methods, organization and incentives of the economics profession are identical to the rest of academicia.
Which side of economics, the "freshwater" or "saltwater" side? There isn't the kind of consensus in economics that there is in, say, climate change. And economics is much more susceptible to funding-based distortion.
Which side do you think would disagree or are you just trying to bluff me out with technical terms you don't fully understand?
As to funding, can you point to major sources of funding for academic econ research that would introduce bias?
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Yes, those things are also wrong. As are decreasing socioeconomic mobility, racially & religiously motivated violence, lack of code hygiene and unit testing, etc... If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect). Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has soci…
> If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect). I never said arts/humanities are useless. I said they are luxuries, and the fact that people are bemoaning that it costs so much money to enter a non-lucrative profession is the very definition of a first world problem. > Historically important art/music has often been ignored,…
>> inability to pick a useless major
I agree with the sentiment though, that (in general) an Arts degree (or whatever) alone it's not enough to sustain a career.
I just think it's an important part of a balanced education, and that overall society is better off having more engagement with the arts, language, history, philosophy, cosmology, theoretical physics, category theory, linguistics, anthropology, etc.
As I said elsewhere, prioritising vocational education is fine to some extent, but to do so by crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a mistake.
It is a luxury of sorts, but not in the frivolous sense. As I see it, it's not so much a problem of optimising higher education for career payoff, but restructuring/regulating education to make it more accessible (both to encourage participation in a wider range of subjects, and to facilitate career change).
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It's true only the rich could send their kids to art school, but there are lots of things only the rich can do. What makes you define art school in particular as something we should pay for everyone to do, rather than a luxury? Keep in mind that resources are limited -- for a given level of taxation, everything the State spends money on means either cutting something else or increasing the debt (thereby making debt s…
We want to subsidize poor people for art because often the best artists are poor. Hell, it's literally a cliche.
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> But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers). It's funny that a lot of the outliers are the degrees that can actually help you with financial stability later. Universities love humanity courses, exactly for the reasons you point out. It's easy to shoehorn a couple more underg…
> For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms Not for 200 undergrads learning how to bubblesort. For that you need a lab with 50-100 PC's. For grad courses in parallel comp. or AI, you might need a semi-expensive cluster to play around with, but if you want something that just works you could just buy cluster time on AWS, which I'm sure they'd give a discounted ac…