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They are not idiots. If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. Schools should be free, but seeing how

They are not idiots. If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. Schools should be free, but seeing how they're not, I see nothing wrong with students demanding their money's worth, and some slack if they fall behind on classwork. People should read Freakonomics.

sklogic 11y ago
> They are not idiots. They are indeed. > If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever. > Schools should be free, Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope. Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round? Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.
- valdiorn 11y ago
  > > They are not idiots. > They are indeed. This is blatant ignorance.
- relkor 11y ago
  If we are paying for access to the infrastructure, then why are students boxed into many separate cells staffed by a human "teacher". If you admit the teacher unit is worthless, then why are they there? According to your business plan the tuition does not go to pay the teachers, so then where did these teachers (who have no role what so ever in your view of education) get funding. I want to know. If we were just paying for access to infrastructure, then why are we not packed into large warehouses filled with desks and library books, overseen by a single armed guard on an overhead walkway? That would more efficient, and we all know us evil capitalists love efficiency. Just because you pay money for something does not mean you can invoke the specter of consumerism and then proceed to shame it. You need water, no doubt about it. Is it evil when you pay for clean water?
  - sklogic 11y ago
    Teachers time is a part of this infrastructure. They're paying for it, they're getting their share. How to use that time is 100% their responsibility.
- geofft 11y ago
  No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these institutions. But that's going to go away someday. And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. (And most of the time I did learn that way, better than from lectures.) But I wouldn't have been able to put "MIT graduate" on my resume and I wouldn't have gotten the connections out of it. So that's why I went.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. "Who Dares Wins" Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories. When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can). > Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it. > the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college This is a myth. Stop spreading it. > And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there. > There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone. But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT. Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.
pmontra 11y ago
Maybe they misunderstand the service they're buying. It could be seen as this: the admission to exams that eventually may give them a degree and the assistance of a professional, within some limits, with some rights and some duties. On the other side the career of many professors depends more on the papers they produce than the students they help. The interests of professors and students are in conflict so a clash of this kind is inevitable.

sklogic 11y ago

> They are not idiots. They are indeed. > If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever. > Schools should be free, Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope. Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round? Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.

valdiorn 11y ago
> > They are not idiots. > They are indeed. This is blatant ignorance.
relkor 11y ago
If we are paying for access to the infrastructure, then why are students boxed into many separate cells staffed by a human "teacher". If you admit the teacher unit is worthless, then why are they there? According to your business plan the tuition does not go to pay the teachers, so then where did these teachers (who have no role what so ever in your view of education) get funding. I want to know. If we were just paying for access to infrastructure, then why are we not packed into large warehouses filled with desks and library books, overseen by a single armed guard on an overhead walkway? That would more efficient, and we all know us evil capitalists love efficiency. Just because you pay money for something does not mean you can invoke the specter of consumerism and then proceed to shame it. You need water, no doubt about it. Is it evil when you pay for clean water?
- sklogic 11y ago
  Teachers time is a part of this infrastructure. They're paying for it, they're getting their share. How to use that time is 100% their responsibility.
geofft 11y ago
No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these institutions. But that's going to go away someday. And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. (And most of the time I did learn that way, better than from lectures.) But I wouldn't have been able to put "MIT graduate" on my resume and I wouldn't have gotten the connections out of it. So that's why I went.
- sklogic 11y ago
  > No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. "Who Dares Wins" Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories. When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can). > Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it. > the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college This is a myth. Stop spreading it. > And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there. > There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone. But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT. Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.

pmontra 11y ago

Maybe they misunderstand the service they're buying. It could be seen as this: the admission to exams that eventually may give them a degree and the assistance of a professional, within some limits, with some rights and some duties. On the other side the career of many professors depends more on the papers they produce than the students they help. The interests of professors and students are in conflict so a clash of this kind is inevitable.