Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead. • Hacker News Board

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#41

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:08 AM UTC

johnnybgoode wrote: post #25

possibilistic wrote: post #22

I couldn't have learned necessary hands-on chemistry and biology from a library. Good technique can't be read about; it must simply be learned in the laboratory from repeated mistakes. After the hand-holding freshman year, half of the chem/bio curriculum is dedicated to working independently, in the lab, under time constraints and pressure. Theory can be learned from a book, but it's not necessarily easy for everyone…

I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the s…

People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.

They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz.

What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge.

We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education. This is the main thing that will allow innovation in education - people need to buy the credential, and since it's bundled with education, they have no choice but to buy unnecessary education.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#42

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:13 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #30

This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN. Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher. This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving…

Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Yes it does. Please learn about signalling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#43

Post by firefoxman1 » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:17 AM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #33

firefoxman1 wrote: post #26

Yeah, higher tuition is exactly what I wanted. There's a reason state schools are so much cheaper than private: state funding. As much as I love libraries, I hardly visit one thanks to the thousands (millions?) of public domain books I can get free straight to my Kindle. The only thing I would want to visit a library for would be books like O'Reilly books, but my college pays a subscription to Safari Books that allow…

>state funding Indirect state (and federal) funding, in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans, is one of the reasons tuition is so high in the first place. If student loans weren't so plentiful colleges wouldn't cost 10-50k a year, because no one would pay.

That is a very good point. Yeah, I completely agree with you that the easy access to such high sums of loan money for students has led to the high inflation of college prices, but we don't need anything to raise those rates even higher.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#44

Post by microarchitect » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:28 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42

microarchitect wrote: post #30

This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN. Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher. This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving…

Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others. Yes it does. Please learn about signalling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the sign…

Interesting link but you seem to be missing the point.

I agree there may be an argument to be made that in cases, under certain circumstances, provided you can measure certain variables, the best action that results the "most public good" would be reducing university funding. If that's what you want to argue, then you'll need to do the legwork of gathering data that supports this conclusion.

The OP has not done that and is not even attempting to do so. He's made some overly simplistic arguments against university funding that are utterly lacking in depth.

EDIT: Can the downvoters please explain themselves?

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#45

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:38 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #30

This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN. Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher. This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving…

  > terrible article
  > Awfully muddled thinking
  > right-wing propaganda
  > laughably poor argument
  > propagandist rant

All of the above were unnecessary. I'll address the rest of your comment now.

  > First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".

Typically, when cuts are being made, people across the political spectrum prefer to cut services for the middle class before cutting services for the poor. Most people agree that cutting services for the poor is a last resort. I am not arguing here that this is necessarily correct or that you have to agree, but that is the reason for the emphasis on "serving the poor" when discussing cuts to government programs.

  > Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?

Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?

  > And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.

They are part of the same system. The connection between the increase in student loan limits and the increase in student tuition has been noted many times. See elsewhere in this thread.

  > Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

In addition to what monochrome and yummyfajitas have said, anywhere you look, you can find job listings for relatively simple, entry-level positions that unnecessarily require university degrees. Ever since we started pushing the idea that everyone should go to college, we've seen a signaling arms race where you'd better get a college degree or face being passed over for someone else who did -- whether or not the job really needed someone with a degree. This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

  > Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

  > would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades

You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#46

Post by Volpe » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #16

rdl wrote: post #13

I think a lot of the argument for public funding of universities (and for K-12 education, even) is that public goods are created by having a highly educated population (workforce, voters, etc.) To the extent that university education produces private goods (specific career training, credentials, etc.) there is a lot weaker argument for public funding. The argument for public funding of universities is mostly not abou…

Ironically, what do the best libraries traditionally contain? Works created by highly educated individuals. Yes, you will always have your pulp fiction, but if a library's job is to disseminate knowledge to the masses, doesn't that make libraries reliant on a source to develop that knowledge?

True... that would be relevant if the world began and ended on the borders of california...

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#47

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:46 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #41

johnnybgoode wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the s…

People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge. They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz. What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge. We really need to separate cert…

We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education.

Agreed. I was giving possibilistic the benefit of the doubt. If some need access to a lab to fully learn a subject, that's something that should be addressed. If not, great.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#48

Post by microarchitect » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:48 AM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #39

microarchitect wrote: post #30

This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN. Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher. This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving…

>Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views. >I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda. You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on? Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided. I don't think you'l…

I didn't respond to that argument because of multiple reasons.

First, this is the same argument that many creationists, followers of intelligent design and other religious nuts use to discredit evolution. In fact, if you look up the wikipedia page for Expelled: No intelligence allowed, you'll see that the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP and in fact, my instinctive response when I read this bit, thanks to having heard this so many times from creationists was to immediately assume assume the OP was one. I didn't want this to color the rest of my response so I decided to ignore this bit.

Also, it's seems like flamebait to me. I suspect the OP threw it in there to antagonize those who disagreed with that idea while simultaneously enlisting the support of everyone who was once slighted for his/her political views by a professor.

Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding? I must be missing something because this makes no sense.

Also, the OP's made a very broad claim that most university departments are rife with ideology and hostile to conflicting views. You are referring to some instances of ridicule relating to the specific subject of political views, which is a much much weaker claim.

PS. I believe there's research that shows that the political leanings of professors has little effect on the political views of students. And I'm sorry that you were ridiculed and I think this is unacceptable behavior.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#49

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:50 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #40

moonchrome wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/fo…

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, geology, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the experience (or even a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can d…

...I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

If you reduce subsidies for wasteful signalling, people will do less of it. Employers will then find signal based discrimination more difficult and expensive, and will reduce their dependence on it.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#50

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 4:54 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #48

learc83 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views. >I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda. You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on? Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided. I don't think you'l…

I didn't respond to that argument because of multiple reasons. First, this is the same argument that many creationists, followers of intelligent design and other religious nuts use to discredit evolution. In fact, if you look up the wikipedia page for Expelled: No intelligence allowed, you'll see that the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP and in fact, my instinctive response when I read…

  > the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP
  > immediately assume assume the OP was one

Come on. This is an obvious case of unwarranted guilt by association. For the record, I've never seen Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and from briefly looking up what the film is about, I don't think I'd agree with it at all.