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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

#791

Post by lr4444lr »

davemp wrote: post #498
bcrosby95 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home improvement is a crazy market. A lot of people seem to quote based upon what they think you can afford, which is easy to figure out since they usually do it while standing in your house.

Home improvement is pretty cancerous right now. I get quotes with ~$5k in labor for work that would take me a week to do in the worst case. That’s literally double my rate without considering that working for yourself is tax free. It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself…

The unknown unknowns aren't worth it when you're risking the asset of your house. Yeah, you could spend hours on YouTube watching how to videos, spend a dozen hours on basic tools and safety skills, etc., but you're likely only gonna do this job once in 15+ years. And even then, you might still make it looks aesthetically ugly, not have the institutional knowledge of the best brands for parts that last, etc... it's really not worth it for the average home owner who can afford a house to take time away from his likely more lucrative work hours to learn this stuff, other than in really depressed areas.

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

#792

Post by lesam »

pca006132 wrote: post #777
LeroyRaz wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a physist who is at the leading edge of their field you very much do want them teaching. How do you think you get the next generation of great physists? It is similar to how when growing crops, like wheat, you should take the best of your harvest and use it for seed. Historically that is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things to teach farmers. + Many of the greats have loved teaching…

Some great researchers don't teach very well, and some great teachers can't do great research. Even if some of the great researchers can teach very well, you have to consider the opportunity cost of that. This is what specialization is for...

They shouldn’t be teaching undergrads.

They should be teaching a few grad students.

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

#793

Post by stingraycharles »

newsclues wrote: post #787
shafyy wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He leads OpenAI And OpenAI has strayed away from their initial "vision" considerably. > Why do you think this is a bad idea? Because it's a very libertarian and capitalistic view of how life and society should work. It's very one dimensional. 18-year-olds should not be put in an environment where their goal is to make money for a sicko in Silicon Valley who then takes a percentage of their future earnings. 18-year-…

“ Because it's a very libertarian and capitalistic view of how life” Why that bad? Is a very socialist or communist view on life better? Seems like a bias rather than factually supported.

> Is a very socialist or communist view on life better?

For what it’s worth, it’s not as binary as you suggest: if one doesn’t like a capitalist idea, it doesn’t automatically imply a communist alternative.

I think at the very least, Sam’s suggestion here is fairly capitalist: students are considered resources to be invested in, with a certain ROI, and capital would automatically be allocated to just those students that are the brightest of all, and/or have the best connections.

This implies that only a very narrow group of students would receive this funding, and it’s (ideally) based purely on their potential financial contribution to society. But for a country, there are lots of other reasons why you would want better educated students: crime reduction being a good example.

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

#794

Post by Fomite »

beambot wrote: post #494
mattkrause wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grants are even crazier than that. Most of the actual work is done by trainees who are a) learning how to do for the first time and b) may never actually do it again because they're going to move onto something else. The profs are, at best, managing them and even that's often a bit iffy. Everybody's obviously got to learn somewhere, but universities and research funders are oddly weird about experience and expert…

The professor job is an absurd ask: - Enterprise sales rep with a $500k-$1M annual quota (aka grants). - R&D manager of a team comprised almost entirely of junior employees - Lecturer and administration for teaching. - Administrator & volunteer within the department, chair roles for key academic conferences, and editor on major journals -- all to check the "service" box for tenure. - Because they aren't a proper CEO,…

As has been previously noted, HN seems to be convinced 50% overhead means that 50% of the grant is taken to cover overhead.

This is inaccurate. That would be 100% overhead, which is vanishingly rare (I've only encountered one institution above that rate, and they have to maintain research ships).

50% overhead means that the indirect costs of a grant are 50% of the direct costs, i.e. 1/3rd of the total grant. Notably, a lot of grant mechanisms (i.e. NIH R01s) are discussed at the direct cost rate, instead of the totals, so this doesn't "sting" nearly as badly as you all seem to think it does.

Additionally:

- I've seen private industry overhead rates. They're not lower. Indeed, many of them are quite a bit higher.

- A funder can specify a cap on overhead costs, and as long as that's public and known, every university I've ever been at has accepted it. The Gates Foundation is notorious for this, as are most charities. Hell, I had a grant from Merck that didn't pay "full freight".

- We push back on overhead costs all the time. Faculty are wily creatures. We have lots of ways.

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

#795

Post by Fomite »

Plasmoid wrote: post #649
beambot wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The professor job is an absurd ask: - Enterprise sales rep with a $500k-$1M annual quota (aka grants). - R&D manager of a team comprised almost entirely of junior employees - Lecturer and administration for teaching. - Administrator & volunteer within the department, chair roles for key academic conferences, and editor on major journals -- all to check the "service" box for tenure. - Because they aren't a proper CEO,…

> (ie 50%+ of grant contracts going to university overhead!). This is why a lot of grants are made in-kind rather than in cash. Give the research $750K in equipment instead of $1M in cash where the university pockets $500k of it.

As noted elsewhere, that's not how overhead works, and vanishingly few grants are in-kind.

Also, expressly, large capital expenditures like equipment are exempt from indirect costs at most universities.

HN's notion of how universities work is probably about as accurate as my notions of how VC funding works.

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

#796

Post by _aavaa_ »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #663
uncomputation wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article on HN a few weeks ago talking about the slowing pace of “innovation” in the modern world, the lack of an Einstein or a Bohr or a Feynman. I have no evidence of this and maybe the entire notion is unfounded in the first place but I think this framing: - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture is part of the problem. When you go…

Unfounded. There are billions more literate people than in Einstein's day.

To their point, it doesn’t matter how many literate people there are if there aren’t more Einsteins.

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

#797

Post by Fomite »

gwd wrote: post #773
ethbr0 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember (this would have been in the 90s) my father getting crap from his peers because he listed his grad students before himself on research papers. In his words, "Why would I not? They did most of the work."

That must depend on the field. In my field (operating systems), the primary professor was always listed last; so you knew the first author was the grad student who did the most work, and the last author was the prof who oversaw the whole thing.

This. It depends very much on field. Pretty much every paper I didn't solo write in the past three or four years has had my grad students first (Epidemiology).

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

#798

Post by lesam »

uncomputation wrote: post #608
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…

There was an article on HN a few weeks ago talking about the slowing pace of “innovation” in the modern world, the lack of an Einstein or a Bohr or a Feynman. I have no evidence of this and maybe the entire notion is unfounded in the first place but I think this framing: - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture is part of the problem. When you go…

I think the problem with innovation is more the incentive structure. There are too many people trying to p-hack stuff that just doesn’t work well and spin it to get the next grant, and not enough people actually breaking new ground.

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

#799

Post by Fomite »

bachmeier wrote: post #449
readingnews wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked at three universities. This is pretty insanely accurate. You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year. Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate st…

Important to note that you have a STEM perspective. Nothing's changed in that respect, since that's always been the case in grant fields. However...that's not at all a good representation of the rest of the university. Maybe the very best research universities don't care about teaching. There aren't many though if you're not in a grant field. > That thing the actual customers are paying us for If you're in a grant fi…

At my institution, arguably my customers are the People of $State, followed by my grant funders.

Indeed, "The student is the customer" is the source of a lot of really pretty flawed reasoning about how universities can and should work, including things like "Am I obligated to pass you because you really, really want to go to med school?"

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

#800

Post by Fomite »

ModernMech wrote: post #452
readingnews wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked at three universities. This is pretty insanely accurate. You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year. Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate st…

> Teaching? Never heard of it. This view is starting to become outdated. Plenty of schools now have a role known as "Teaching Professor" that focuses on teaching, with no research expectation. They have all the same qualifications as any faculty hired for the role, like a Ph.D. in the field. At UPenn at least they can even get tenure.

Indeed I have a position without a teaching obligation (though I do teach a bit because I want to), and it's vanishingly rare to find one of those in my field outside of a medical school.
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