Deny student loans to major that has low ROI?
This could solve a lot of problem.
I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's extremely difficult for me to pinpoint when / where the tendency to flatten (as in no more disparity) started. It's super weird. Everything is flat. I sense some kind of rejection of it from fear of potential dominance. But it's still odd to me.
You’re not the only one who notices this. I think you would be interested in Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1], a great short story related to this topic. [1]: https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVo...
This was an assigned text when I was in high school.
Any teacher who puts this on the syllabus today would be fired for doing a racism.
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's plenty of examples of universities being run as not-for-profit and doing just fine. Pretty much all of Europe since the concept of a University has existed, for example. Sure, you can nitpick problems with European universities and they are not perfect. But nobody is going into debt slavery in Europe from getting a degree and nobody is talking about the collapse of European universities. So maybe the problem…
The problem with the European model is that it creates an economically regressive system. The less affluent citizens who didn't attend higher education are paying for us who did attend. This is usually motivated by the idea that society as a whole benefits from us educated people so much that they should pay for it. I find this idea a bit offensive. I would actually prefer a system financed purely by student loans. I…
Why do you assume folks who don't go to university are less affluent? If anything, that should be the offensive notion.
> It does put a lot more responsibility on the prospective student to judge the quality of an education programme and the opportunities it affords.
Children cannot make this estimation, which is why we partially subsidise it. It's already a ton of pressure to know wth you're going to be doing later, let's not make that even worse just to satisfy some weird notion that higher education should be hard to reach. It's going to disproportionately impact folks without a social safety net, which is the one thing you wanted to prevent in the first place.
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, you must have that special type of clairvoyance that allows you to look at a person and determine both their income and the cost of their phones and clothes. Do you make your money teaching this skill or do you do web apps?
i have google. it shows how much iPhones cost.
According to Google the iPhone 7 I use as my daily driver is worth around $100. Not exactly breaking the bank.
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#745Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…
Perhaps he is wrong about many things, but your post comes across as an ad hominem that doesn't respond to any of his points.
I thought about that perception before posting. However, I think when a public figure who people look to for “where things are going” consistently makes poor predictions, they should be called out for it. If not here in a thread about another prediction then where?
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#746Higher 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…
> Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. You forgot the most important one for companies: use college or the preference for "ivy league" institutions which is on its own a neutral requirement as a proxy to weed out "undesirables" without violating the ADA and other laws: people with mental health issues and many physical disabilities don't stand a chance for the top grades,…
>It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able.
What world are you living? Colleges and "Corporate culture" these days are all about opposing "whiteness."
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Schools have been doing these things for years and yet half of HN have their degrees and have a start-up or two that have a direct line from connections developed at the unis they got their degrees in. Come on, universities doing morethanonething isn't what changed which caused student debt to explode. I'm not saying these are not problems but there literally is no through-line, it doesn't make sense as an explanatio…
Student debt has exploded because notwithstanding their outrageous tax advantages colleges are demonstrably profit maximizing firms. They induce unlimited demand for ever more credentials though a process of continual devaluation and then charge as much as the market will possibly bear through extremely sophisticated price discrimination. Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the publi…
> notwithstanding their outrageous tax advantages colleges are demonstrably profit maximizing firms
Agreed. See the recent UCLA TA position opening. The unpaid position.
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#748Neither his tweet thread nor the primary level comments mentioned the real reason for collapsing in higher education: broadly speaking, as a culture, we've lost any confidence that truth exists and should form us as persons, that knowledge is fundamentally unified across academic disciplines, and that the purpose of university is to educate people in true knowledge.
Universities were largely started by people with convictions that there is universal knowledge or truth, and that the pursuit of that truth shapes people in ways that are highly beneficial to society. This is where the idea or peer review originated---no person can grasp the truth fully or comprehensively, thus to advance human knowledge peer review was necessary (Peer review, like higher education, is deeply broken). Today western culture has lost confidence that truth exists or can be found. One can see this by looking at some of the oldest universities' mottos, particularly by paying attention to how the mottos have changed and/or the informal mottos in use.
Harvard Motto [1636]: Veritas ("Truth"), but historically it was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae ("Truth for Christ and Church").[1]
William & Mary [1693] (Who knows the original and current mottos - I didn't find them with a quick search), but the charter calls for founding "a certain place of universal study" for training Christian pastors and to educate youth.[2]
Yale University motto [1701]: Lux et veritas (Latin) אורים ותומים (Hebrew) Motto in English: Light and truth[3]
Princeton Motto [1746]: Dei Sub Numine Viget On seal: Vet[us] Nov[um] Testamentum Motto in English: Under God's Power She Flourishes On seal: Old Testament and New Testament Informal motto. In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity[4]
So, I would say that university education has already collapsed, in the sense that its devolved from a mission of education in formative truth for life to its current amalgamation of gaining job/career skills, academic research, sports, elite networking, or party-years paid for by debt or parents.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_Universit...
[2] William & Mary's charter begins,
"Forasmuch as our well-beloved and faithful subjects, constituting the General Assembly of our Colony of Virginia, have had it in their minds, and have proposed to themselves, to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God; to make, found and establish a certain place of universal study, or perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences..."
https://web.archive.org/web/20080919125611/http://www.swem.w...
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe has cheap high quality colleges, I believe part of the difference is European colleges exist mainly to teach, while American colleges are a mini city with expensive sports teams and stadiums, large bureaucracy with many layers of admin, fancy facilities not directly related to education, etc, all to attract students to pay high fees.
European style colleges exist in the US: They're community colleges. The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc). I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.…
Community college doesn't let you get a bachelors degree. You can't say that is equivalent to European universities that can take you all the way through a post-doc. You map them based on how far you can progress on the academic ladder, 2 year colleges aren't a big thing in Europe. In Europe being a university means it at least graduates phd's, and most students study at universities since they are so large.
Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the European model is that it creates an economically regressive system. The less affluent citizens who didn't attend higher education are paying for us who did attend. This is usually motivated by the idea that society as a whole benefits from us educated people so much that they should pay for it. I find this idea a bit offensive. I would actually prefer a system financed purely by student loans. I…
Why do you assume folks who don't go to university are less affluent? If anything, that should be the offensive notion. > It does put a lot more responsibility on the prospective student to judge the quality of an education programme and the opportunities it affords. Children cannot make this estimation, which is why we partially subsidise it. It's already a ton of pressure to know wth you're going to be doing later,…
I don't have to assume anything, I can just look at the facts which show that people who attended higher education on average earn much more (in my country at least, if you know of a place where the opposite is true please share)
You seem to be assuming that higher education is something obviously good, that everyone would want if they knew what was best for them. I don't think this is true.
I think student loans (if done right) can be a good thing. They can let anyone from any social setting afford a higher education. But why the people without higher education should foot the bill for it, I have never understood.