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How come nobody asks whether what these people are teaching is actually useful stuff. I mean useful in the sense that someone would voluntarily pay money for i

How come nobody asks whether what these people are teaching is actually useful stuff. I mean useful in the sense that someone would voluntarily pay money for it with full knowledge of the benefits. I have not been impressed with the colleges in the Bay Area and Sacramento. Except for some programs in the UC system and Stanford, the vast majority of educational programs seem to be run for the benefit of administrators. Neither the teachers nor the students reap many benefits. The career offices for many programs practice deception to hide the ball when it comes to the prospects of alumni of their programs. Many programs teach a curriculum that is irrelevant to employers, and when challenged claim they are "teaching you to learn". What a hollow fucking claim. How do we test that claim? They are teaching us to learn INDEED! Why don't they teach themselves how to teach something useful first! As a Senior in college I TAed an intro engineering course at an Ivy League school. A couple decades later a friend of a friend, who was dean of students at a for-profit, needed a teacher at the last minute for a subject I'm an expert at, and so I helped her out by teaching a night class after work, two days a week, for a semester. The latter experience was eye-opening. Most of my students should not have been there. They were paying $25,000 a year or more in fees. They were hardly prepared to tackle high school material, much less 4th year college material. The for-profit institution was happy enough to continue taking their money while delivering nothing tangible. Most of the teachers there were living hand to mouth themselves. Some of them former students. It was a scam through and through. Nothing useful was being taught. There were no employers lining up to hire these kids. Basically, federal student loans are being funneled to "teachers" that should probably not be teaching, because they don't have anything useful to teach. We have to shed this societal delusion that it costs $25,000 per year to read books in a room with a person leading the class. It does not cost that much. It should not cost that much. This is doubly true if the books being read/taught are non-technical. We really need a Universal Basic Income. Most of the people involved in this educational industrial complex are just unemployable. Let's not allow them to pass on the same unemployable skill set to another generation because they need to have a salary to live. They should just be paid off and it should be a separate exercise from education.

contact_fusion 9y ago
I think you're definitely right. Most programs out there are not worth paying anything for in the first place, much less $25,000 a year. The problem, at least in my diagnosis, is that there is a huge disconnect between the "ideal education" and education in practice. Even at elite institutions known for the quality of their teaching, half or more of the work is done by screening their applicants and admitting only those who are equipped to succeed. In other words, the summa cum laude graduate from a state's flagship school would probably be a summa cum laude graduate anywhere. The same phenomenon is seen in charter schools, who pad their statistics by choosing only excellent students, and then claim that their better outcomes demonstrate the superiority of their management. A useful concrete example is my academic department. We are well known for the quality of our teaching, and even provide graduate students with specific and well tested training in pedagogy, which is extremely rare in a STEM field. (This isn't to say we slack in research; this is a top school in the field. In other words, our graduates go to prestigious postdocs almost without exception, though in recent years its been getting harder and harder.) Nevertheless, we are ultimately limited by what we have to work with. If you have motivated students, you can teach excellent classes covering difficult material. If your students are unmotivated and without preparation, there is simply a limit to what you can teach them. People who work in higher ed in less than prestigious institutions do not have the advantages we do. Their students are often (but not universally) less motivated and prepared than ours, so they have to work much harder to teach the same material. The problem is that everyone is already working as hard as they can, so in the end they are probably doomed to fail. They will retreat onto statements like "teaching how to learn." Yes, in theory, that is what the value of a liberal arts education is - you learn not only the curriculum but also acquire the attributes of an educated mind: how to think and reason; how to acquire more knowledge when needed; how to communicate both verbally and in writing. This is the "ideal education." Nevertheless you will simply never acquire this if you lack the tools necessary to do so - and if you have these tools, you will acquire them regardless of where you go. The answer is that, frankly, college is pretty useless for most students. If you can make education work for you, you are very likely to succeed anyway. Personally, I cherish my education. I benefit tremendously from it, and at this point, my education colors my entire existence. Nevertheless, most of my high school classmates - even those who did relatively well in class - were woefully unprepared to take advantage of a college education. A corollary to this is that, no matter how much you value the academic lifestyle, it is extremely irrational to continue working in it unless you are a "winner."

contact_fusion 9y ago

I think you're definitely right. Most programs out there are not worth paying anything for in the first place, much less $25,000 a year. The problem, at least in my diagnosis, is that there is a huge disconnect between the "ideal education" and education in practice. Even at elite institutions known for the quality of their teaching, half or more of the work is done by screening their applicants and admitting only those who are equipped to succeed. In other words, the summa cum laude graduate from a state's flagship school would probably be a summa cum laude graduate anywhere. The same phenomenon is seen in charter schools, who pad their statistics by choosing only excellent students, and then claim that their better outcomes demonstrate the superiority of their management. A useful concrete example is my academic department. We are well known for the quality of our teaching, and even provide graduate students with specific and well tested training in pedagogy, which is extremely rare in a STEM field. (This isn't to say we slack in research; this is a top school in the field. In other words, our graduates go to prestigious postdocs almost without exception, though in recent years its been getting harder and harder.) Nevertheless, we are ultimately limited by what we have to work with. If you have motivated students, you can teach excellent classes covering difficult material. If your students are unmotivated and without preparation, there is simply a limit to what you can teach them. People who work in higher ed in less than prestigious institutions do not have the advantages we do. Their students are often (but not universally) less motivated and prepared than ours, so they have to work much harder to teach the same material. The problem is that everyone is already working as hard as they can, so in the end they are probably doomed to fail. They will retreat onto statements like "teaching how to learn." Yes, in theory, that is what the value of a liberal arts education is - you learn not only the curriculum but also acquire the attributes of an educated mind: how to think and reason; how to acquire more knowledge when needed; how to communicate both verbally and in writing. This is the "ideal education." Nevertheless you will simply never acquire this if you lack the tools necessary to do so - and if you have these tools, you will acquire them regardless of where you go. The answer is that, frankly, college is pretty useless for most students. If you can make education work for you, you are very likely to succeed anyway. Personally, I cherish my education. I benefit tremendously from it, and at this point, my education colors my entire existence. Nevertheless, most of my high school classmates - even those who did relatively well in class - were woefully unprepared to take advantage of a college education. A corollary to this is that, no matter how much you value the academic lifestyle, it is extremely irrational to continue working in it unless you are a "winner."