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Some interesting questions arise from these observations. * Other comments in this thread rightly point out that US higher education loan policy is largely the

Some interesting questions arise from these observations. * Other comments in this thread rightly point out that US higher education loan policy is largely the cause of unsustainable growth of college tuition. However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students, like at Yale? Or allocate to competitively recruit and retain proven professors with observable education outcomes (or invest in establishing metrics to identify such outcomes)? Is there a herd effect at work in how colleges decide to spend the largesse, and if so, where did it roughly originate from? * I find it interesting that the standard investment is effectively an S&P 500 index fund. If your slow collective consciousness meme is on point, then pointing more working and middle class towards indexing with big life goals like children's higher education could have big ramifications for the financial industry, as one of the large institutions supporting the industry---pensions---starts eroding away in the future, and now another source of funding in 529 plans might open up more to indexing. How likely is indexing going to replace pensions, and when will most 529 plans shift to indexing? * It is common for US employers to note that colleges are producing graduates that do not hit the road running at the workplace. There are quantified lists of skills that are observed missing in the graduates [1] [2]. Why aren't there "finishing schools" set up to teach these skills? [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-skills-that-new-graduates-lack https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-sk... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these-are-the-skills-bosses-say-new-college-grads-do-not-have/#7b5a10f35491 https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these...

throwawayjava 9y ago
The Fast Company story is weird. It lists Scala and Go as "MOST SOUGHT AFTER" skills. First, IMO it's weird to consider particular languages as "skills" when talking at a sort of macro level about educational preparedness. "Go schools" and "Scala schools" won't fare much better than "Java schools", and we'll be having this same conversation but replacing Scala with Haskell and Go with Rust (etc. -- you get the idea). (And if you need to go to a finishing school to learn Scala or Go after college, the college has fundamentally failed at its primary task.) Second, Ctrl-F for Scala in the latest Who's Hiring thread -- some Javascript frameworks are more in demand. And I'd imagine Who's Hiring threads are more representative of the sort of companies hiring FP programmers than a generic jobs board. The Forbes article is more interesting -- communication, interpersonal skills, teamwork, data analysis (which, if we step outside the zeitgeist and generalize across several generations of in-demand technical skills, we should really just read as "mathematical maturity" and "ability to self-learn"). Those are all the sorts of things you don't simply teach in a single course. They require prolonged situational exposure, of the sort that colleges readily provide. The problem is that students don't avail themselves of challenging course work and extra-curricular activities, and universities don't demand it.
Fomite 9y ago
"However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students, like at Yale?" Investing implies that the tuition increases are not to make up for current budget shortfalls. This is often not the case. Many states, for example, cut the budget for higher education in 2008-2009 by the high double digits, with no real way for the universities in question to make that up. "Or allocate to competitively recruit and retain proven professors with observable education outcomes (or invest in establishing metrics to identify such outcomes)?" Honestly, because if they were doing it strategically to make up for the shortfall, they'd be competitively recruiting and retaining proven professors with a track record of funded research projects. Which is what they're doing, but that too is becoming more difficult as federal research budgets stagnate.

throwawayjava 9y ago

The Fast Company story is weird. It lists Scala and Go as "MOST SOUGHT AFTER" skills. First, IMO it's weird to consider particular languages as "skills" when talking at a sort of macro level about educational preparedness. "Go schools" and "Scala schools" won't fare much better than "Java schools", and we'll be having this same conversation but replacing Scala with Haskell and Go with Rust (etc. -- you get the idea). (And if you need to go to a finishing school to learn Scala or Go after college, the college has fundamentally failed at its primary task.) Second, Ctrl-F for Scala in the latest Who's Hiring thread -- some Javascript frameworks are more in demand. And I'd imagine Who's Hiring threads are more representative of the sort of companies hiring FP programmers than a generic jobs board. The Forbes article is more interesting -- communication, interpersonal skills, teamwork, data analysis (which, if we step outside the zeitgeist and generalize across several generations of in-demand technical skills, we should really just read as "mathematical maturity" and "ability to self-learn"). Those are all the sorts of things you don't simply teach in a single course. They require prolonged situational exposure, of the sort that colleges readily provide. The problem is that students don't avail themselves of challenging course work and extra-curricular activities, and universities don't demand it.

Fomite 9y ago

"However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students, like at Yale?" Investing implies that the tuition increases are not to make up for current budget shortfalls. This is often not the case. Many states, for example, cut the budget for higher education in 2008-2009 by the high double digits, with no real way for the universities in question to make that up. "Or allocate to competitively recruit and retain proven professors with observable education outcomes (or invest in establishing metrics to identify such outcomes)?" Honestly, because if they were doing it strategically to make up for the shortfall, they'd be competitively recruiting and retaining proven professors with a track record of funded research projects. Which is what they're doing, but that too is becoming more difficult as federal research budgets stagnate.