5 ms·

This is great. We need to destroy the academia scam.

by harmlessposter 9y ago

Fomite 9y ago
By penalizing the people in academia who are the most vulnerable.
- harmlessposter 9y ago
  Destroy the pyramid scheme by ripping out the base of the pyramid. Sounds good to me.
  - Fomite 9y ago
    It sounds cruel, petty, and ultimately pointless to me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lovich 9y ago
  While I agree with you on who has the lack of power here, it's unfortunate that government garuntee of loans has let the academic industry grow so out of control. It means that any way of changing this status quo is going to hurt students when it happens, but it's necessary to prevent greater pain down the road. At this point it's a band aid that needs to be ripped off
  - Fomite 9y ago
    This has nothing to do with addressing that problem. Literally zero. It's an obscure bit of accounting for an administrative process, that's being used because many people (like you) will nod sagely about "Academia being out of control" without understanding what the mechanisms actually in place are.
    - lovich 9y ago
      What mechanisms are there then. What is stopping the massive increase in tuition? There is a nearly inelastic demand for higher education now because we as a society have decided you can't have a good life without it, there is no risk on student loans because they cannot be discharged via bankruptcy, the government is subsidizing tuition rates by injecting more money with government loans, and when we start getting to the extreme ends of costs where even the highly inelastic demand is starting to bend we give out more subsidies! This is helping no one but the academic industry and I say industry because it's the schools and their administrators benefiting, not professors. Students aren't getting a benefit, they are just running in place. As early as 2011 I was working in a call center paying 11/hr that only took employees with bachelor's. It's the new high school degree. Masters are next on the list as institutions decide they need to have "the best" and higher degrees are the only way to prove that. There are less jobs in academia as universities push for more and more adjunct professor who get paid peanuts and have no chance at tenure, and the salary is driven down by the tons of students going through school who can't find a job to pay off their loans in industry and spill over to academia to try and make a living. Student loan debt is larger than any other debt now and there are zero market mechanisms to make sure the risks of it reflect reality. We need to let the air out of the bubble early and in a sustained manner or eventually there will not be enough resources to keep pretending that sending a bunch of kids to the same building for 4 years to learn zero skills that will help them pay off the massive cost of college, and the whole charade will collapse quickly and with disastrous effects. I think that everyone should go to college because a higher education leads to better citizens, but we cannot artificially inflate the demand to infinite without constraining the price
      - Fomite 9y ago
        You raise some excellent points - many of which need to be addressed. But this doesn't do that. It's the "We must do something, this is something, therefor we must do this thing" fallacy. The function of these waivers is entirely to offset the fact that graduate students working on their research projects need to be enrolled for a number of reasons, but it doesn't actually make sense for them to pay the same tuition as students who are taking up classroom space, instructor time, supplies, etc. So their tuition is waved. It's entirely a book-keeping exercise. One that the student largely never sees - except now we're proposing to tax them for it. The problems are not related to each other save for the fact that they both involve the word "tuition". As for mechanisms? The first thing I'd address is state level funding of universities. Many public universities have seen their state support vanish, especially after 2008, and during the recovery, that money didn't come back. At the same time, grant success rates have (at best) remained both low and flat over the past decade or so, making it hard to make up that money on the research end of things. When you take away state support and federal support, literally the only revenue dial left available is tuition increases. I'd also be all for a merging of practical and liberal arts education such that you can learn practical, profession-oriented skills but also read Chaucer. We have those universities - they're land grant institutions - but I'd like to see an emphasis in that increased. We also need to address the pipeline from graduate school to jobs outside academia - in my own lab I treat students intending to pursue careers outside academia the same as I do those who want to continue on, and I'm pretty unapologetic about job prospects. I think it's my moral obligation to do so, but it will put me at a competitive disadvantage to larger labs. Addressing that starts at the Chair/Dean level. You know what solves none of these? Taking a few thousand dollars from doctoral students for an administrative process.

This is great. We need to destroy the academia scam.

Fomite 9y ago

By penalizing the people in academia who are the most vulnerable.

harmlessposter 9y ago
Destroy the pyramid scheme by ripping out the base of the pyramid. Sounds good to me.
- Fomite 9y ago
  It sounds cruel, petty, and ultimately pointless to me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lovich 9y ago
While I agree with you on who has the lack of power here, it's unfortunate that government garuntee of loans has let the academic industry grow so out of control. It means that any way of changing this status quo is going to hurt students when it happens, but it's necessary to prevent greater pain down the road. At this point it's a band aid that needs to be ripped off
- Fomite 9y ago
  This has nothing to do with addressing that problem. Literally zero. It's an obscure bit of accounting for an administrative process, that's being used because many people (like you) will nod sagely about "Academia being out of control" without understanding what the mechanisms actually in place are.
  - lovich 9y ago
    What mechanisms are there then. What is stopping the massive increase in tuition? There is a nearly inelastic demand for higher education now because we as a society have decided you can't have a good life without it, there is no risk on student loans because they cannot be discharged via bankruptcy, the government is subsidizing tuition rates by injecting more money with government loans, and when we start getting to the extreme ends of costs where even the highly inelastic demand is starting to bend we give out more subsidies! This is helping no one but the academic industry and I say industry because it's the schools and their administrators benefiting, not professors. Students aren't getting a benefit, they are just running in place. As early as 2011 I was working in a call center paying 11/hr that only took employees with bachelor's. It's the new high school degree. Masters are next on the list as institutions decide they need to have "the best" and higher degrees are the only way to prove that. There are less jobs in academia as universities push for more and more adjunct professor who get paid peanuts and have no chance at tenure, and the salary is driven down by the tons of students going through school who can't find a job to pay off their loans in industry and spill over to academia to try and make a living. Student loan debt is larger than any other debt now and there are zero market mechanisms to make sure the risks of it reflect reality. We need to let the air out of the bubble early and in a sustained manner or eventually there will not be enough resources to keep pretending that sending a bunch of kids to the same building for 4 years to learn zero skills that will help them pay off the massive cost of college, and the whole charade will collapse quickly and with disastrous effects. I think that everyone should go to college because a higher education leads to better citizens, but we cannot artificially inflate the demand to infinite without constraining the price
    - Fomite 9y ago
      You raise some excellent points - many of which need to be addressed. But this doesn't do that. It's the "We must do something, this is something, therefor we must do this thing" fallacy. The function of these waivers is entirely to offset the fact that graduate students working on their research projects need to be enrolled for a number of reasons, but it doesn't actually make sense for them to pay the same tuition as students who are taking up classroom space, instructor time, supplies, etc. So their tuition is waved. It's entirely a book-keeping exercise. One that the student largely never sees - except now we're proposing to tax them for it. The problems are not related to each other save for the fact that they both involve the word "tuition". As for mechanisms? The first thing I'd address is state level funding of universities. Many public universities have seen their state support vanish, especially after 2008, and during the recovery, that money didn't come back. At the same time, grant success rates have (at best) remained both low and flat over the past decade or so, making it hard to make up that money on the research end of things. When you take away state support and federal support, literally the only revenue dial left available is tuition increases. I'd also be all for a merging of practical and liberal arts education such that you can learn practical, profession-oriented skills but also read Chaucer. We have those universities - they're land grant institutions - but I'd like to see an emphasis in that increased. We also need to address the pipeline from graduate school to jobs outside academia - in my own lab I treat students intending to pursue careers outside academia the same as I do those who want to continue on, and I'm pretty unapologetic about job prospects. I think it's my moral obligation to do so, but it will put me at a competitive disadvantage to larger labs. Addressing that starts at the Chair/Dean level. You know what solves none of these? Taking a few thousand dollars from doctoral students for an administrative process.