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Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

nytimes.com

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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#91

Post by 908B64B197 »

offtop5 wrote: post #50
awillen wrote: post #7

I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…

I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't…

> For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language

Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#92

Post by 908B64B197 »

mrweasel wrote: post #56
minitoar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.

The article is about colleges in the US, so I have no reason to doubt you. It’s just a ready bleak observation for someone who is raised to pursue a career that would make me happy, and be lucky enough to live in a country that allows me to do that. More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.

> More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.

And yet the country is attracting talent more than it exports it!

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#93

Post by 908B64B197 »

Beaver117 wrote: post #13
DC-3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.

I think there's a value in being immersed in a subject, with peers equally passionate about it.

You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#94

Post by the_only_law »

DC1350 wrote: post #85
kop316 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this actually. Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class). Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching cl…

The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career

Another problem is wildly varied quality. I’ve seen course material from some community colleges that made me think “wow, this seems to be a high quality resource” in all sorts of interesting subjects, but most community colleges in places I’ve lived near or been too have limited programs and often low quality ones at that.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#95

Post by lumost »

leetcrew wrote: post #61
colinmhayes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of middle class families making low to mid 100k but not contributing to their children's tuition bill because they live in HCOL area. But yes, low income students don't pay.

$100k is not enough to totally phase out financial aid from top schools, but sure, there are some families that could afford to pay but refuse to. still, no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner. if you have rich parents who won't pay and the school considers you a dependent, you're pretty much SOL.

> no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner.

This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no risk loan from the loan providers perspective.

Schools almost never totally phase out financial help, but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500 work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial aid stats healthy while still getting paid.

This type of affect will only show up when viewing the percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great way to draw down the average.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#96

Post by the_only_law »

curiousllama wrote: post #23
DC-3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking, etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-colleges). In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?

I imagine for many subjects, great benefit comes from the probably millions of dollars worth of equipment you get access to.

EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#97

Post by tzs »

gonehome wrote: post #17
awillen wrote: post #7

I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…

Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases?

I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#98

Post by lumost »

tzs wrote: post #97
gonehome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…

Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases? I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.

Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the price increase. The current loan program was introduced to stem increasing government direct grant expenditures.

Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.

Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#99

Post by offtop5 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #91
offtop5 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't…

> For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?

That's the admission requirement. You also have to take a language in college.

In ether case this isn't easily doable for people who come from unstable homes.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#100

Post by gonehome »

908B64B197 wrote: post #89
gonehome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand. > Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) e…

> "Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand."

I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.

> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.

This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.

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