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I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

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Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#521

Post by bradleyjg »

ModernMech wrote: post #492
bradleyjg wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the ratio of tenured professors to total staff from, say, 1970 to today? Colleges were captured by professional administrators. That’s what’s changed, and the results are entirely predictable. See, also, hospitals.

This is sort of true but also at the same time I rely on a lot of staff to make my job a lot easier. Yes we could cut down on those administrators but it would mean that professors have to do more, taking away from research agendas. Universities have been optimized to make doing researcher easier and I appreciate that. I'd have to pay a lot more attention to my students' personal lives if we didn't have a dean of stu…

but by and large the University I work at gets the job done. Day in and day out for 10s of thousands of students.

The students get their piece of paper that employers use as a free-to-them proxy for intelligence and diligence. I won’t cry at all when this exploitative business model is disrupted and lots of administrators have to find honest work.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#522

Post by sdenton4 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #517
sdenton4 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ratio of tenured staff only tells /part/ of the story. The problem with this ratio is that there's a massive oversupply of people to do the work (new-minted phds) compared to the number of available prof positions. ie, Supply >> Demand, which has made it trivial to convert what would have been tenured jobs a couple generations ago into rotating assistant prof positions. It may be that the increasing admin staff has t…

Meanwhile, states have pulled back or failed to increase university funding, and the universities fill the gap with greater tuition. Here's the story+graph for the University of California system: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapt ... This is the GP's point, and completely spot on. If this is the primary factor we should expect student debt load for private school graduates to have grown mu…

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Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#523

Post by a257 »

hackitup7 wrote: post #420
jameshart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: do elite institution degrees confer any addition to market value commensurate with their cost, or do they simply select for people who already have high market value?

One dimension: In my experience one of the most valuable aspects of attending an elite institution is that many of the most prestigious, high-paying, career-accelerating jobs in the US recruit primarily or exclusively at top colleges, and this creates numerous opportunities for their students.

On one hand, the exclusive job opportunities are providing value to students which can allow students to increase their value. On the other hand, the employers are benefiting from the fact that the universities themselves are selectively gathering people with high market value. Exactly how much of whether it's the former or the latter is an open question. Whether or not a university is an expensive platform to pass a corporation's gatekeeping is questionable.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#524

Post by [deleted] »

beloch wrote: post #424
imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

One thing I was told as a grad student that I've never forgotten is, "Nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students". At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human type…

[deleted]

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#526

Post by lanstin »

nostrebored wrote: post #499
jerojero wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think access to education is a human right? I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is m…

European elite go to American schools. Just like the elite from all around the world. The premise is faulty from the onset. Most ‘top’ European schools are mediocre outside of liberal arts degrees.

I spent one year as an undergrad reading maths at Oxford and the curriculum, teaching and students were all far superior to the same at Duke University (1988)

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#527

Post by giantg2 »

stale2002 wrote: post #470
giantg2 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my limited knowledge, it's the small time farmers that commit suicide (so owner that works), and generally in the older population. What else are you going to do if you've been doing that your whole life, you're 50, no college (or it was for agriculture)? You likely can't stay where you are because many of the areas are depressed and they'll take your land if you can't pay the taxes, are foreclosed, etc.…

Yes, people agree that farm works sucks and have low wage. But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.

And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?

The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.

The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#528

Post by throwoutway »

jhbadger wrote: post #438
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are schools that don't allow grad students to teach.

Primarily at what is known as PUIs (primarily undergraduate institutions), colleges and universities that either don't have grad students or have such a tiny graduate program that relying on them for teaching roles is unfeasible. In theory this is better for the students because the professors just care about teaching, but the down side is such institutions do little to no research and so the professors may be decade…

Not doing research doesn’t mean they are decades out of touch. What gives you that conclusion?

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#529

Post by kube-system »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #387
kube-system wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberal arts schools will provide you with a liberal arts education in the topic you choose. Liberal arts schools are not and never have been vocational training institutions. They are academic in nature.

I'm saying liberal arts schools fail to provide you with a liberal arts education. You do not learn how to write better nor do you dive deep into the works that you study nor do you learn how to think. Instead, you learn surface level facts about random things without any pressure to go deeper and actually understand what you're studying. Very rarely will you actually analyze a primary source in depth and you definit…

Ah, yeah. I think there has been a shift to this as 'customer demand' has tilted in that direction.

In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"

At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#530

Post by judge2020 »

4oo4 wrote: post #158

Really surprised no one has brought up that admissions are dropping (especially among men), and that almost all universities are built on the poverty labor of captive educators. Meanwhile administrators take all the money. Case in point: https://futurism.com/the-byte/university-professor-unpaid

This is capitalism in general as of the last ~30 years. Profits are continuously rising, with investors and senior management taking the largest checks home so they too can become small time accredited investors of their own 8,9-digit net worths. To add, covid was the perfect scapegoat to shifting liability to in order to move tons of wealth higher up and away from the lower and middle classes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/business/ceo-pay-compensa...
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