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Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

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Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#51

Post by Joakal »

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.

Some more parts of the equation; deregulation, unemployment pressures, some job degrees aren't helpful, heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#52

Post by learc83 »

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…

>Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding?

No. I don't even know if it could be fixed. It could be something inherent to academia for whatever reason.

>specific subject of political views

Political views tend to encompass a large portion of a person's identity. A suppressive atmosphere towards a particular political belief can have a much larger stifling effect (outside of mere political discussion).

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#53

Post by moonchrome »

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…

>If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

Sorry it should have been private R&D investment. I'm saying that there is evidence that suggests that public grants to R&D crowd out private investment, that public R&D doesn't correlate with GDP growth, that private R&D does and that grants are inferior to market approaches such as tax breaks for R&D. I think that video I linked overstates the strength of the evidence and it's conclusiveness but it's still a valid point and goes against the accepted view. Also the argument that the Internet is here only because of public R&D is very hard to make because at every instance I've looked at where public R&D gets credited (eg. CERN) there is similar work done separately in the private sector (eg. Xerox PARC). I'm not saying that the evidence is definitive, that all public science funding doesn't generate GDP growth, that GDP growth is a good metric of the value created by public R&D or that public funding is inferior to private, those are all empirical questions (or even unanswerable/subjective) and can't be generalized. I'm just saying that the position you seem to take - without public funding it wouldn't get done - isn't true both historically (eg. check out Nobel prizes from IBM and Bell labs in pure research) and you can make a theoretical argument why that is the case.

As for the authors post, yeah it's a rant but I get where he's coming from.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#54

Post by microarchitect »

johnnybgoode wrote: post #45
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 cl…

Hmm. I think is a poor article because it lacks depth and simply makes a bunch of assertions many of which don't even follow from the premises in the article itself. I might have refrained from saying so explicitly had I thought you were actually interested in exploring the question and were gathering information, but it seemed to me that you've made up your mind and are working backwards from your conclusion.

You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.

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

My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?

Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

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.

This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

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

No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

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.

That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.

If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.

I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.

[1] http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem... [2] http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college-u... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approv...

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#55

Post by microarchitect »

moonchrome wrote: post #53
microarchitect wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard? Sorry it should have been private R&D investment. I'm saying that there is evidence that suggests that public grants to R&D crowd out private investment, that public R&D doesn't correlate w…

Fair enough, this is a viewpoint I can agree with. I don't think this is what the OP had in mind, though. Or if he did, he didn't do a good job of articulating it.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#56

Post by learc83 »

Joakal wrote: post #51
learc83 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Some more parts of the equation; deregulation, unemployment pressures, some job degrees aren't helpful, heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education.

True.

>heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful

I think the cultural emphasis on degrees was in large part pushed from the top down. I.e., once more people started going to college (because of loans/scholarships), college became a necessity for jobs where it previously wasn't.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#57

Post by microarchitect »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49
microarchitect wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The assumption here is that education has a significant component which is "wasteful signalling". If this is true, and that's a pretty big if, what you say follows. If the assumption is not true, reducing funding would result in a poorly educated populace which could spell economic disaster.

My point is: (1) this is not an issue we can decide without looking at the data and (2) making a claim one way or another without carefully looking at the data is not justified.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#58

Post by microarchitect »

johnnybgoode wrote: post #50
microarchitect wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I said, this was my instinctive response and I'm sorry about that. I'm glad you're not a creationist. :-)

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#59

Post by firefoxman1 »

Joakal wrote: post #51
learc83 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Some more parts of the equation; deregulation, unemployment pressures, some job degrees aren't helpful, heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education.

"heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education."

Wow, I'm glad there are others that realize this. I guess hacker news would be the place to find independent thinkers like yourself. One other I would add is:

Lack of school counselors, teachers, parents, etc. that believe entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#60

Post by learc83 »

firefoxman1 wrote: post #59
Joakal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more parts of the equation; deregulation, unemployment pressures, some job degrees aren't helpful, heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education.

"heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education." Wow, I'm glad there are others that realize this. I guess hacker news would be the place to find independent thinkers like yourself. One other I would add is: Lack of school counselors, teachers, parents, etc. that believe entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

>Lack of school counselors, teachers, parents, etc. that believe entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

Excellent point. Since kindergarten, when I tried to sell some crafts I made during play time to the other kids, I've been pulled towards entrepreneurship, but going through school you are eventually led to believe that running your own business isn't an option.

It's not that anyone ever sat me down and told me that I couldn't be an entrepreneur, but it's never discussed as a possibility.

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