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

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#61

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 6:06 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #54

johnnybgoode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

  > What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?

I take it you've agreed universities are skewed towards the middle class and higher in terms of direct enrollment (and this is easily verifiable). To counter this, you talked about indirect effects:

  > Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.

How can you prove this? I don't think it's possible, but if you can I'm all ears.

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

I'm claiming one of the reasons university tuition is being increased is that we're in an environment where degrees are seen as being necessary, whether or not they are. In other words, degrees are being treated as an inelastic good. Therefore students are willing to pay whatever they can afford. As student loan limits increase, what students can afford to pay increases, so tuition increases as well. If even part of the tuition increases come from this, and your college president is making $1 million/year, I think it's fair to call that waste.

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

It's a product of the system we live in because we created and subsidized that system. Lowering the subsidy is the first step to solving the problem. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608680

  > You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree

This is completely false. I did not say anything of the kind. In fact, I'm making the exact opposite point, so now I'm wondering if you understood what I was saying at all. I said universities are "fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value".

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

No, I was referring to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608628

yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.

  > That's not what I'm claiming.

No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades".

  > If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting

Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#62

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 6:15 AM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #60

firefoxman1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 m…

It looks like this whole story was manually pushed off the HN front page for some reason (or it was flagged and the sorting algorithm takes this into account?), but I just wanted to say while I'm here that I was really glad to read this particular subthread.

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#63

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 7:00 AM UTC

microarchitect wrote: post #57

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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 witho…

Here is a blog post discussing data. After graduation, the sheepskin effect is about 50% of the value of a degree. (Over time, as a worker builds up a track record, this goes down.)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2a012/01/the_present_val...

Unless you believe human capital jumps massively between 116 credits and 120 credits, this is strong evidence in favor of the signalling model.

Another big chunk of the measured returns to education are merely ability bias.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#64

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 7:10 AM UTC

antics wrote: post #29

johnnybgoode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly clear, I'd love to cut military spending, bailouts, drug war spending, etc. This article was about a state funding issue, but I'm fine leaving that aside, since ultimately it's all government spending. In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has b…

> There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research. > They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated > with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no > reason they have to resemble the current monster. Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that. Even…

I hope you're still here!

  > Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that.
  > Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it.

All I'm getting at here is that today we have a single university system that generally operates a certain way (a policy that everyone out of high school should enter one of them, and at each university, students attend four years of classes graded A-F, then potentially attend grad school, and the university also houses researchers/professors), and there's nothing intrinsic to learning or doing research that requires all of these things. In other words, there could conceivably be a variety of different institutions that lacked one or more of the characteristics I mentioned, but it's hard for that to happen when the current system is so fully entrenched and subsidized. We could see more research-only labs, more teaching-focused institutions that have their own unique approaches (a la charter schools, Montessori, etc. in K-12), more institutions that integrate learning and research in a different way, or other arrangements I haven't thought of.

One example of something like this is simply universities 100+ years ago, when not everyone was encouraged to attend university. We all know about places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. I see no reason more variety is not possible.

And you're right, replacing it would be hard, but one reason for that is all the money going into the system. What you're asking me to do is sort of like starting a car company while General Motors is being bailed out by the government. Still possible, I suppose, but more difficult when the other guy is being subsidized.

  > Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(

Yes, this just shouldn't be controversial at all. In the context of a library, where the whole point is that everything is open, it certainly wouldn't make sense.

  > Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.

I'm sure most professors are aware that not all university research is useful. But in principle, every Ph.D. thesis is supposed to be original and worthy of publication. We know most of them aren't really so great, but in theory they meet a certain standard. When you hear people push for more govt. funding for university research, you won't often hear them say most of it won't be useful. And anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people who are urged to get a Ph.D. without regard to the usefulness of what the student would be doing.

  > It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.
  > And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools.

What I mean is that if we had, for example, plenty of world-class research labs that were able to "hire" people into the country as easily as universities can admit foreign students, they'd still want to come. The bias you mention is understandable, but someone who'd worked in an American research lab wouldn't be affected by the "foreign school research" problem.

  > Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.

You're right that it's often important for people to do research together. I'm just saying there are other ways to bring people together for science. Will your average local library suddenly become a major scientific center? Probably not, but I can envision something like a modern-day Library of Alexandria where great research happens, and I could see something like that being better than today's universities. Why not?

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#65

Post by johnnybgoode » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 11:01 AM UTC

johnnybgoode wrote: post #47

yummyfajitas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Proof that I agree: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788702

Re: Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

#66

Post by wtvanhest » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 5:41 PM UTC

johnnybgoode wrote: post #15

wtvanhest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if universities should have their funding cut but libraries seem very foolish to keep funding. Wouldn't it be better to invest all the money currently spent on libraries in to an online library? Imagine the amount of information we could have easy access to?

The top story on Hacker News right now, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607217 (also the link I start the post with), explains one of the problems with doing that. As many important functions move online, the library is one place someone without a computer and computer skills can use to gain access to the online world. Libraries also provide a meeting place for the community, access to librarians, and many free…

They should at least reduce the size, eliminate the books and just have computers.