10 ms·

That Old College Lie

97 points by robg 17y ago

jgg 17y ago
Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?
- yequalsx 17y ago
  Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly corrupting influence on the university. EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Citation or definitions needed. For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets. The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports. Yes, including the newish football stadium.
    - yequalsx 17y ago
      Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures. Your perception is almost entirely wrong.
      - anamax 17y ago
        I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports. And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.
    - yequalsx 17y ago
      OK, I'll be generous and give a link. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/college_sports_a_money_loser/ http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/college_sports_a_m... Do you have sources for the belief that sports pay for themselves?
      - smallblacksun 17y ago
        Repeal title 9, kill the women's sports that produce no revenue but have large costs, and the problem is solved.
        yequalsx 17y ago
        You have not the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Research sports spending at colleges and you will find that except for a few schools football programs do not support themselves. Few sports program anywhere or any type pays for itself.
  - jgg 17y ago
    > It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. Sadly, you're probably right about this. Sports seem to have become so ingrained in the popular paradigm of what you do at a university that it would be impossible to change. Oh well.
  - jdminhbg 17y ago
    "People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility." Really? It appears to me anecdotally that the run-up in tuition has been accompanied by a run-up in university building programs. My alma mater, a large state-related research school with a big sports program, is nearly unrecognizable ten years after I graduated, with a new IS building, a new science building, a new business school building, and a new law school building.
    - jimbokun 17y ago
      I read that Harvard spent tons of money on building projects they could no longer afford when the market tanked. None of them had anything to do with sports, if I recall correctly.
  - yardie 17y ago
    It might be the case for your school but the funding for sports at my school came from alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom were former athletes from the school. The university did charge an athletic fee. This was to cover the publicly accessible tennis courts, basketball courts, football, baseball, and soccer fields. They also provide buses for the intramural teams. And part of it went to subsidize student football tickets to the nationally ranked football team, played in a stadium the football boosters paid for. I've watched the college next door to me transform from a small community college to a full fledged university. And they got there by having a serious athletic program.
    - yequalsx 17y ago
      It's the case for almost all schools. Sports does not lead to increase in enrollment, generally speaking. Sports do not pay for themselves except at a few schools.
      - yequalsx 17y ago
        Wow, the ignorance here is amazing. Why is my comment being down voted? Only around 20 division I schools have their sports teams making money. All of the rest are subsidized by the general academic fund. Ignorance is bliss.
- pmichaud 17y ago
  Sports is a profit center for the schools, which is why they get so much focus.
  - jgg 17y ago
    Right, but to some degree it seems self-perpetuating: the schools get big because they get money for sports, which causes to them to get bigger, so they put more money into sports, etc. My question is, I guess, why aren't schools founded around the idea of education? It's the same feeling I have towards fraternities and sororities. I find it incredible that most people tout school as a place to learn, and yet it's quite obvious that a lot of people attend for any reason but that.
    - robryan 17y ago
      Maybe the answer is more aggressive pruning, I don't know what it's like in America but in Australia someone can probably spend 5 or 6 years barely trying before they would get kicked out.
    - jimbokun 17y ago
      I don't think that playing a sport or living a fraternity/sorority prevents someone from getting an education at the same time. For the people that do those things to the exclusion of their education, they deserve to flunk out and lose their place at school.
      - jgg 17y ago
        My point was that so much extra time and money that could be focused on improving academics is spent by the university (and by donors to the university) on irrelevant activities. I don't really care what someone does in their free time.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Certain sports are a profit center for certain schools. Football at U-Texas, yes. Football or rowing at Rutgers, no. They receive a disproportionate focus even when they are not. The main reason is academic politics: a physics professor is busy doing research, while the athletic department has time for lobbying.
- mrduncan 17y ago
  Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from? I'm not totally sure (so please correct me if I'm wrong), but here are my best guesses: - Money for sports complexes, stadiums, etc. mostly comes from donors who want to help make their alma mater more competitive and/or get something named after themselves. - Conferences and the NCAA pay schools with money from sponsorships, TV contacts, etc. - Schools are willing to spend some money on sports because it brings exposure to schools. For example, I'd be willing to bet that Butler's applicant pool is much larger next year due to their recent success in the NCAA tournament.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Sports appear to help a university have an overall positive reputation with the general public, http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/Harvard-Number-One-University-Eyes-Public.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/Harvard-Number-One-Universit... so it may be that even in the Ivy League, which is on top of just a few sports, the sports generate more applicant interest in the universities, and thus help them recruit stronger (both physically and mentally) students.
- philwelch 17y ago
  The same place funding for professional sports comes from--ticket sales, sponsorship, TV deals, etc. The reason a university pays the football coach more than the president is because the football coach can bring in more money. (So can the players, incidentally, but there are NCAA regulations--in other words, a cartel agreement--that you don't actually pay the players, aside from giving them a generous scholarship.) At schools where sports are profitable, the profits are indeed taken in by the university and used for academics, facilities, etc.
  - davidw 17y ago
    I've always wondered if it might make sense to hive off college sports into "minor leagues", wholly owned (at least initially) by universities. They get to keep their revenue stream, and could actually hire players for their market rates. I guess it wouldn't have the emotional attachment or something like that that I don't really get about college sports.
    - jdminhbg 17y ago
      All of this has basically already happened except for the part where the teams pay players market rates, so you can see where the universities would be reluctant to change anything.
- robg 17y ago
  The recent TV contract for NCAA basketball is $10.8 Billion over 14 years. http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Signs-108-Billion-Deal/65219/ http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Signs-108-Billion-Deal/652... The Rose Bowl (one college football game) alone is $300 Million over eight years. Basically basketball and football subsidize the other sports. Shift that funding into academics and you lose the other sports.
  - RK 17y ago
    Depends on the school. I went to one of the smallest schools with a D1 football team and it is my understanding that the football team there only survives due to funds alloted by the conference, which are collected as dues from the other universities.
- dantheman 17y ago
  Schools don't have a funding problem. Look at the massive building campaigns they embarked on -- money is not the problem.
  - jbooth 17y ago
    Depends on the school. One thing about speaking in absolutes is that you're guaranteed to be some % wrong. Harvard doesn't have a funding problem. Many universities do right now, though, including nearly all public schools due to the state budget crunch.
- smallblacksun 17y ago
  If you eliminated sports, alumni giving would drop significantly, almost certainly by enough to offset the small gains you got from eliminating sports.
  - yequalsx 17y ago
    This is completely wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to support your statement here. Sports programs do not pay for themselves and almost never give money back to the general academic fund.
rick_2047 17y ago
"If everyone knows that what is happening is wrong, then why doesn't anyone fix it?" This question is hogging me for the past couple of years or so. I find it impossible to answer.
- pmichaud 17y ago
  You just need to step back and look at the incentives. The vast majority of college students are there to be "certified impressive", and socialized to cooperate in the workforce, NOT to learn. If learning were the goal, the system would look radically different. As it stands, students get their certification, employers get their pre-socialized workforce. The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire. Unfortunately for those of us who would like to see the system improve, the required level seems to be dropping as technology allows corporations to automate a lot of tasks, and make other tasks nearly fool proof (think customer service flow charts). For those roles that require actual acumen and responsibility, training for those will continue as it has since time immemorial: passed directly from family member or family friend to eager young adults, which is a primary force creating and maintaining class boundaries.
  - epochwolf 17y ago
    The one problem is the professors think that college is for learning. I'm one of those in college solely to get "certified impressive".
    - robryan 17y ago
      Well they think that because that is meant to be their role, it's not their fault that industry at some point imposed a lot of artificial degree barriers so people that don't want to be at university need to be there to stand a chance. I think in software dev the trend is going the right way, you see a lot of degree helpful but not required. There is a lot of benefit in the degree but there are many paths to a goal and they should be objectively compared in hiring.
    - snth 17y ago
jackfoxy 17y ago
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon. Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not to be personalized. The purpose is twofold: * Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture. * Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information. In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
Some thoughts: 1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education. 2. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable. 3. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is not the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions while slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable. We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work. 4. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it. Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.
anonjon 17y ago
When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year. These numbers don't seem to be adjusted for inflation. If you adjust them for inflation the price increase for expensive colleges is only about 340%. (178% inflation, 5600 = 10k). Colleges are also offering a lot of financial aid. If you look at NYU, for example, it offers about 26,000 in financial aid on average (vs a 38,000 tuition). So it would cost about 12,000 on average. Other colleges give much more financial aid (ex. hamilton college costs 41k, but offers something like 38k in financial aid). So from my random sampling, at least, it seems that college prices would be right in line with what they were in 1980. (http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=3186&profileId=2 http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j... Numbers are similar for other high-end schools.) I am not a statistician/economist, but really, this doesn't seem to be the price of college per person really increasing, it seems more likely that the wealth is being distributed differently. The relatively wealthy are being asked to pay sticker price, while the less wealthy are getting a huge discount or free ride. This makes sense, because it is people who write columns like this one that would really feel it in their wallets (the middle and upper middle class). Whether this redistribution is a good thing is another question entirely, also it would be nice to know if our young adults are actually learning. I'm of the opinion that College is a garbage in garbage out sort of situation. There is no way to make sure that students will put in the effort, high achievement has to be a cultural thing.
epochwolf 17y ago
> A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in "prose literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. Well shock and awe, people can't do a college compare and contrast assignment after they leave college. Just ask them what's different in the articles. > More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue. A skill that isn't strictly needed if those people can use a calculator, it's good enough. Stop measuring how effective school is by having people retake tests they took in school.
- nkohari 17y ago
  I think you're missing the point by a wide margin. Determining the difference between two articles and ordering supplies are two very common tasks -- if people with a college degree lack the ability to do them, we really are in trouble. If they were testing something that was obviously very college-centric but not a commonplace in a regular job -- say, integral calculus -- I would agree with you. However, if someone graduated with a degree in physics and they couldn't do calculus, I would say there was a problem also. It sounds like they just tested the bare minimum of skills.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    I work in construction and I work with guys who haven't graduated high school, but they can easily perform the basic arithmetic required for the latter of the tasks, and they're frequently doing the former when discussing everything from radio stations to movies and video games. For anyone who graduated college and can't accomplish these thoughtless tasks, all I can say is that they wasted way too much money to essentially get dumber than your average high school dropout. Similar procedures can be performed for a much more reasonable price and involves taking a hammer to the flattest part of a persons skull . . . although I'm unsure even a major concussion and amnesia could make someone dumb enough to forgot how to do 1 + 1 + 1
yequalsx 17y ago
In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc. when thinking about higher education. Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large division I teams do no pay for themselves. Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for 'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding university sports. Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.
mkramlich 17y ago
I too think there's a problem with higher education but I am doing something about. More details here on HN when ready.

97 points by robg 17y ago

jgg 17y ago

Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?

yequalsx 17y ago
Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly corrupting influence on the university. EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility.
- anamax 17y ago
  > Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Citation or definitions needed. For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets. The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports. Yes, including the newish football stadium.
  - yequalsx 17y ago
    Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures. Your perception is almost entirely wrong.
    - anamax 17y ago
      I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports. And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.
  - yequalsx 17y ago
    OK, I'll be generous and give a link. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/college_sports_a_money_loser/ http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/college_sports_a_m... Do you have sources for the belief that sports pay for themselves?
    - smallblacksun 17y ago
      Repeal title 9, kill the women's sports that produce no revenue but have large costs, and the problem is solved.
      - yequalsx 17y ago
        You have not the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Research sports spending at colleges and you will find that except for a few schools football programs do not support themselves. Few sports program anywhere or any type pays for itself.
- jgg 17y ago
  > It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. Sadly, you're probably right about this. Sports seem to have become so ingrained in the popular paradigm of what you do at a university that it would be impossible to change. Oh well.
- jdminhbg 17y ago
  "People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility." Really? It appears to me anecdotally that the run-up in tuition has been accompanied by a run-up in university building programs. My alma mater, a large state-related research school with a big sports program, is nearly unrecognizable ten years after I graduated, with a new IS building, a new science building, a new business school building, and a new law school building.
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    I read that Harvard spent tons of money on building projects they could no longer afford when the market tanked. None of them had anything to do with sports, if I recall correctly.
- yardie 17y ago
  It might be the case for your school but the funding for sports at my school came from alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom were former athletes from the school. The university did charge an athletic fee. This was to cover the publicly accessible tennis courts, basketball courts, football, baseball, and soccer fields. They also provide buses for the intramural teams. And part of it went to subsidize student football tickets to the nationally ranked football team, played in a stadium the football boosters paid for. I've watched the college next door to me transform from a small community college to a full fledged university. And they got there by having a serious athletic program.
  - yequalsx 17y ago
    It's the case for almost all schools. Sports does not lead to increase in enrollment, generally speaking. Sports do not pay for themselves except at a few schools.
    - yequalsx 17y ago
      Wow, the ignorance here is amazing. Why is my comment being down voted? Only around 20 division I schools have their sports teams making money. All of the rest are subsidized by the general academic fund. Ignorance is bliss.
pmichaud 17y ago
Sports is a profit center for the schools, which is why they get so much focus.
- jgg 17y ago
  Right, but to some degree it seems self-perpetuating: the schools get big because they get money for sports, which causes to them to get bigger, so they put more money into sports, etc. My question is, I guess, why aren't schools founded around the idea of education? It's the same feeling I have towards fraternities and sororities. I find it incredible that most people tout school as a place to learn, and yet it's quite obvious that a lot of people attend for any reason but that.
  - robryan 17y ago
    Maybe the answer is more aggressive pruning, I don't know what it's like in America but in Australia someone can probably spend 5 or 6 years barely trying before they would get kicked out.
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    I don't think that playing a sport or living a fraternity/sorority prevents someone from getting an education at the same time. For the people that do those things to the exclusion of their education, they deserve to flunk out and lose their place at school.
    - jgg 17y ago
      My point was that so much extra time and money that could be focused on improving academics is spent by the university (and by donors to the university) on irrelevant activities. I don't really care what someone does in their free time.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Certain sports are a profit center for certain schools. Football at U-Texas, yes. Football or rowing at Rutgers, no. They receive a disproportionate focus even when they are not. The main reason is academic politics: a physics professor is busy doing research, while the athletic department has time for lobbying.
mrduncan 17y ago
Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from? I'm not totally sure (so please correct me if I'm wrong), but here are my best guesses: - Money for sports complexes, stadiums, etc. mostly comes from donors who want to help make their alma mater more competitive and/or get something named after themselves. - Conferences and the NCAA pay schools with money from sponsorships, TV contacts, etc. - Schools are willing to spend some money on sports because it brings exposure to schools. For example, I'd be willing to bet that Butler's applicant pool is much larger next year due to their recent success in the NCAA tournament.
tokenadult 17y ago
Sports appear to help a university have an overall positive reputation with the general public, http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/Harvard-Number-One-University-Eyes-Public.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/Harvard-Number-One-Universit... so it may be that even in the Ivy League, which is on top of just a few sports, the sports generate more applicant interest in the universities, and thus help them recruit stronger (both physically and mentally) students.
philwelch 17y ago
The same place funding for professional sports comes from--ticket sales, sponsorship, TV deals, etc. The reason a university pays the football coach more than the president is because the football coach can bring in more money. (So can the players, incidentally, but there are NCAA regulations--in other words, a cartel agreement--that you don't actually pay the players, aside from giving them a generous scholarship.) At schools where sports are profitable, the profits are indeed taken in by the university and used for academics, facilities, etc.
- davidw 17y ago
  I've always wondered if it might make sense to hive off college sports into "minor leagues", wholly owned (at least initially) by universities. They get to keep their revenue stream, and could actually hire players for their market rates. I guess it wouldn't have the emotional attachment or something like that that I don't really get about college sports.
  - jdminhbg 17y ago
    All of this has basically already happened except for the part where the teams pay players market rates, so you can see where the universities would be reluctant to change anything.
robg 17y ago
The recent TV contract for NCAA basketball is $10.8 Billion over 14 years. http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Signs-108-Billion-Deal/65219/ http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Signs-108-Billion-Deal/652... The Rose Bowl (one college football game) alone is $300 Million over eight years. Basically basketball and football subsidize the other sports. Shift that funding into academics and you lose the other sports.
- RK 17y ago
  Depends on the school. I went to one of the smallest schools with a D1 football team and it is my understanding that the football team there only survives due to funds alloted by the conference, which are collected as dues from the other universities.
dantheman 17y ago
Schools don't have a funding problem. Look at the massive building campaigns they embarked on -- money is not the problem.
- jbooth 17y ago
  Depends on the school. One thing about speaking in absolutes is that you're guaranteed to be some % wrong. Harvard doesn't have a funding problem. Many universities do right now, though, including nearly all public schools due to the state budget crunch.
smallblacksun 17y ago
If you eliminated sports, alumni giving would drop significantly, almost certainly by enough to offset the small gains you got from eliminating sports.
- yequalsx 17y ago
  This is completely wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to support your statement here. Sports programs do not pay for themselves and almost never give money back to the general academic fund.

rick_2047 17y ago

"If everyone knows that what is happening is wrong, then why doesn't anyone fix it?" This question is hogging me for the past couple of years or so. I find it impossible to answer.

pmichaud 17y ago
You just need to step back and look at the incentives. The vast majority of college students are there to be "certified impressive", and socialized to cooperate in the workforce, NOT to learn. If learning were the goal, the system would look radically different. As it stands, students get their certification, employers get their pre-socialized workforce. The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire. Unfortunately for those of us who would like to see the system improve, the required level seems to be dropping as technology allows corporations to automate a lot of tasks, and make other tasks nearly fool proof (think customer service flow charts). For those roles that require actual acumen and responsibility, training for those will continue as it has since time immemorial: passed directly from family member or family friend to eager young adults, which is a primary force creating and maintaining class boundaries.
- epochwolf 17y ago
  The one problem is the professors think that college is for learning. I'm one of those in college solely to get "certified impressive".
  - robryan 17y ago
    Well they think that because that is meant to be their role, it's not their fault that industry at some point imposed a lot of artificial degree barriers so people that don't want to be at university need to be there to stand a chance. I think in software dev the trend is going the right way, you see a lot of degree helpful but not required. There is a lot of benefit in the degree but there are many paths to a goal and they should be objectively compared in hiring.
  - snth 17y ago

jackfoxy 17y ago

At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon. Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.

ubernostrum 17y ago
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not to be personalized. The purpose is twofold: * Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture. * Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information. In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

Some thoughts: 1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education. 2. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable. 3. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is not the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions while slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable. We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work. 4. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it. Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.

anonjon 17y ago

When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year. These numbers don't seem to be adjusted for inflation. If you adjust them for inflation the price increase for expensive colleges is only about 340%. (178% inflation, 5600 = 10k). Colleges are also offering a lot of financial aid. If you look at NYU, for example, it offers about 26,000 in financial aid on average (vs a 38,000 tuition). So it would cost about 12,000 on average. Other colleges give much more financial aid (ex. hamilton college costs 41k, but offers something like 38k in financial aid). So from my random sampling, at least, it seems that college prices would be right in line with what they were in 1980. (http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=3186&profileId=2 http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j... Numbers are similar for other high-end schools.) I am not a statistician/economist, but really, this doesn't seem to be the price of college per person really increasing, it seems more likely that the wealth is being distributed differently. The relatively wealthy are being asked to pay sticker price, while the less wealthy are getting a huge discount or free ride. This makes sense, because it is people who write columns like this one that would really feel it in their wallets (the middle and upper middle class). Whether this redistribution is a good thing is another question entirely, also it would be nice to know if our young adults are actually learning. I'm of the opinion that College is a garbage in garbage out sort of situation. There is no way to make sure that students will put in the effort, high achievement has to be a cultural thing.

epochwolf 17y ago

> A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in "prose literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. Well shock and awe, people can't do a college compare and contrast assignment after they leave college. Just ask them what's different in the articles. > More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue. A skill that isn't strictly needed if those people can use a calculator, it's good enough. Stop measuring how effective school is by having people retake tests they took in school.

nkohari 17y ago
I think you're missing the point by a wide margin. Determining the difference between two articles and ordering supplies are two very common tasks -- if people with a college degree lack the ability to do them, we really are in trouble. If they were testing something that was obviously very college-centric but not a commonplace in a regular job -- say, integral calculus -- I would agree with you. However, if someone graduated with a degree in physics and they couldn't do calculus, I would say there was a problem also. It sounds like they just tested the bare minimum of skills.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  I work in construction and I work with guys who haven't graduated high school, but they can easily perform the basic arithmetic required for the latter of the tasks, and they're frequently doing the former when discussing everything from radio stations to movies and video games. For anyone who graduated college and can't accomplish these thoughtless tasks, all I can say is that they wasted way too much money to essentially get dumber than your average high school dropout. Similar procedures can be performed for a much more reasonable price and involves taking a hammer to the flattest part of a persons skull . . . although I'm unsure even a major concussion and amnesia could make someone dumb enough to forgot how to do 1 + 1 + 1

yequalsx 17y ago

In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc. when thinking about higher education. Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large division I teams do no pay for themselves. Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for 'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding university sports. Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.

mkramlich 17y ago

I too think there's a problem with higher education but I am doing something about. More details here on HN when ready.