8 ms·

Woah, I was all ready to come back here and discuss the article when I figured, what the hell lets give the comments section on the WSJ a chance. Maybe I'm out

• CalRobert 9y ago
  I have little love for an institution that profits off dreams and naivete and destroys lives with un-dischargeable debt. But hey, at least the football coach is rich and the gym is fancy! Also in retrospect I learned almost nothing useful in college. Loads on my own time, though. Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive when the people teaching classes are paid 12 bucks an hour because they're "adjuncts"?? where tf is the money going?? (see above) Exception: my local junior college was great, and reasonably priced. If you want to do uni, go to jc and then to europe. Oh. Also there's a whole university cargo cult. It made some baby boomers wealthy so obviously the solution is for EVERYONE to go to college.
  • nickthemagicman 9y ago
    I feel like you have a bit of an extreme take by saying 'profiting off dreams and naivete'. Uni is excellent for people for so many reasons. The price has gotten out of hand thats for sure. College and education are wonderful things. We just have to make sure it's within reach for everyone
    • amorphid 9y ago
      A crushing amount of student loan debt stinks, and so does a low quality degree that teaches little if actual substance. These are not wonderful things.
      • nerdponx 9y ago
        Not every degree is low quality. I and most of my school friends benefited immeasurably from college education.
        • notyourday 9y ago
          Universities make a boatload more money peddling basket weaving degrees in social sciences, psychology, athlete nutrition, literature of forgotten tribes of Egypt, history of hair weaving vs. engineering because the prices charged are nearly the same while the outlay needed to "train" a person for b.s. degree is smaller. This means that universities are incentivized to peddle b.s. degrees.
        • busterarm 9y ago
          I don't know...I still see plenty of STEM grads, even CS grads and even from good schools, doing developer bootcamps.
    • CalRobert 9y ago
      My stem grad friends are doing well. My music and archaeology friends are not. Unfortunately, the cult runs so deep that some were convinced the solution to being unemployed was a master's. True, they signed the papers, but a whole industry exists to deceive them. So, you have 50+k in debt, are in your mid-late 20's, and you: will not qualify for a mortgage (so you keep paying rent instead of at least buying something with SOME value for that money) Cannot start any sort of enterprise because you can't save, because your disposable income goes to loans/rent (see above) Cannot reasonably save for retirement And god help you if you want a kid or want to save for their college education. We made sure ours is an EU citizen so she doesn't have to deal with quite so much of this bullshit (hopefully).
      • nickthemagicman 9y ago
        The problem you're having is not with education itself. But with education AFFORDABILITY. Music and Archaeology would be incredible majors if the students didn't have to go into debt. Education, university, and all of the social connections, experiences and knowledge gained are wonderful for a kid in their early 20s and really makes for a well rounded person and betters society by making people good educated citizens. However the affordability is an issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  • eurticket 9y ago
    to the top
    • sctb 9y ago
      Would you mind please posting substantively? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • AznHisoka 9y ago
    Most of the teachers are also more occupied with doing research than actual teaching.
    • HarryHirsch 9y ago
      At the Tier 2 regional colleges that people here tout as the alternative to Ivy League universities with astronomical tuition? That's preposterous, you don't even get teaching assistants! Most people here went do university, and they still have no notion how the sausage is made. Why is that?
    • privong 9y ago
      > Most of the teachers are also more occupied with doing research than actual teaching. This varies wildly across colleges/universities, faculty position, and department. There's enough variation that it's much more nuanced than your statement indicates.
  • tenpies 9y ago
    > Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive when the people teaching classes are paid 12 bucks an hour because they're "adjuncts"?? where tf is the money going?? (see above) A non-trivial portion goes to legal expenses and risk management. It started with the concept of in loco parentis (in the place of the parent). University students stopped being adults and became children. Obama's interpretation of Title IX was also catastrophic for expenses. All of a sudden you had to set up your own internal pseudo-court system and have an entire mechanism for handling even the most dubious of accusations. These things are not free. This has snowballed into other pseudo-legal aspects and the social justice movement is just monumentally expensive to deal with. It's not a question of if a #metoo incident happens on your campus, it's a matter when. What steps did you take to prevent it? What staff do you have in place to react? And the worst is that once you've hired these staff they're there forever. There will never will a point of mission accomplished, perfect equity, or an environment sufficiently free of even the smallest of nano-harassments for a university to rid itself of this burden. Don't get me wrong, there's a country club and sports team aspect to a lot of university expenses, but the primary purpose of most universities is not education, research, or anything along those lines - it's to avoid getting sued into oblivion.
    • didgeoridoo 9y ago
      Yep. I know several college administrators who have complained that their departments have exploded in size — in one case from five “student life” admins to over 100 — over the past 10 years. This is caused by external forces like Title IX compliance, but also by the expectation that, since students are now essentially the consumers of a luxury good, they expect impeccable and instantaneous “customer service”.
    • adamson 9y ago
      I'm not sure how much I buy most of what you're saying beyond in loco parentis causing a ballooning in staff and legal costs. Title IX related activism is a relatively new phenomenon, and I don't think we can attribute older trends in college cost growth to something so nascent (at least in its current form).
    • davidmr 9y ago
  • michaelt 9y ago
    Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive when the people teaching classes are paid 12 bucks an hour Lack of effective price competition. Imagine I'm the boss of a university, and I push through across-the-board budget cuts of 10%, and cut tuition by 10%. I drop the out-of-state annual price from $25,000 to $22,500. Am I going to be widely praised for my radical move? Probably not, the price remains extremely high. Are sales going to skyrocket, offsetting the price drop? Probably not, most good universities fill 100% of their places. Are loads of the colleagues I see on a daily basis going to be mad at me? Quite possibly! Did I take this job because I love slashing budgets for libraries and arts education? Probably not. Is there a risk, due to different departments' abilities to raise funds externally, that some departments will be disproportionately impacted? Absolutely. If I'm a university boss and I want an easy life, much easier to turn a blind eye to increasing costs.
    • PakG1 9y ago
      Hah, that reminds me of the scene in The Wire when a mayoral candidate asks a popular former mayor why he didn't run again. The guy replies that all he did was eat bowls of shit that various constituents brought him every day. One day, it was the police union, then it was the teachers, then it was the ministers, and on and on. By the time his term was up, he realized he didn't mind just being a downtown corporate lawyer with a nice salary. Some jobs are truly thankless jobs.
      • pixl97 9y ago
        This is partially why the people that do run end up being the ones that can profit from being corrupt.
    • CJefferson 9y ago
      Worse, in the UK universities with lower prices often have trouble filling their places, as applicants assume there must be something wrong with them.
  • ashooner 9y ago
    The typical comparison of college to today to that from 20 or 30 years ago is just poorly considered. "Where does the money go?" Consider the things that didn't exist at many colleges 30 years ago: - IT - Any type of student welfare services. - Title IX and any other regulatory offices. - Diversity offices and other efforts. - Disability services. - Dedicated police departments. - Advising, Counseling, and Academic support (because more and lower-qualified students than ever are going to college). - In the case of state schools, typically significant budget cuts from the state. I'm not saying these rationally explain the increase in cost, but it's a significant expansion in responsibility and functionality that brought with it administration and bureaucracy.
    • toasterlovin 9y ago
      In theory, at least, IT should represent cost savings.
      • ashooner 9y ago
        I can't see how having to support the network infra for 25k students' Netflix addiction is possibly a cost savings.
        • toasterlovin 9y ago
          IT is more than internet connections. It's also, for instance, reducing your need for employees by having class registration done entirely online.
          • ashooner 9y ago
            I definitely see the potential for cost savings in some areas, but there are whole sectors of technology activity in a contemporary university that aren't offsetting some pre-digital expense; they're just a reflection of the increased technical cost of instruction and lifestyle.
            • 9y ago
  • ocschwar 9y ago
    > Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive It's a positional good, and the buyers are bidding for it using borrowed money, and bidding from a position that is underinformed and cannot be anything but underinformed. It's the epitome of a bubble.
• olympus 9y ago
  There is self selection going on in the comments of just about every article. In general people with strong feelings are more likely to comment, and on the internet strong negative feelings seem to be more common (and especially in an article about failing institutions). In this case, people that hated going to college (or hated the idea of going) are more likely to comment. People that were pleased with their experience probably don't care as much about the article so they either don't comment or don't read it at all.
• hashkb 9y ago
  > where did that overwhelming hate for higher education come from? Same place the racism comes from. Ignorance and fear. Anti-intellectualism must be at an all time high; and is encouraged by many prominant public figures
  • jerf 9y ago
    Intellectualism isn't just a set of privileges, it's also a set of responsibilities. There's a lot of good reasons to question whether intellectuals at universities are correctly discharging their responsibilities to be worthy of the traditional privileges that go with it. It's, if not "anti-intellectual" then at least a betrayal of the basic principles, to assume that just because forms are maintained that substance must therefore be present. Accusing people who ask these questions willy-nilly of "anti-intellectualism" itself helps the decay of the intellectual system, because basic human nature is that if you allow someone an easy way to accrue privileges while failing to discharge their responsibilities, they will, and I see no reason why being "an intellectual" provides even the slightest resistance to that. If you care about the intellectual system, the correct move is to hold their feet to the fire even moreso than the "anti-intellectuals", so than when the latter come calling, no fault can be found. Blindly protecting them in the long term will hurt them.
    • freeone3000 9y ago
      Privileges and responsibilities based on what? What privilege does a professor have, the ability to have a job even if he says something dumb? It ain't the pay, and it sure isn't the social respect, so what exact privileges, and for that matter, responsibilities, do you expect "intellectuals" (which you're using to encompass universities and their staff, instead of people who happen to have degrees) to have?
      • jerf 9y ago
        In this particular case, the privilege of getting people who are angry at your conduct slimed with the argument-ending slur "anti-intellectual" is all the privilege I need for my case to hold. I would love to be able to leap to the defense of the intellectuals against the "anti-intellectuals", but part of the responsibility that comes with that privilege includes partaking of and propagating a certain culture of intellectual openness and freedom, which the academy has abrogated in toto. The only people left who think that the academy is free and open are the people who happen to espouse the exact philosophy and political beliefs that have closed the academy down; literally nobody else is fooled anymore. If you believe otherwise, you can prove me wrong by scheduling a talk about a politically-sensitive topic that deviates from the dominant leftist beliefs in some way at a major university, and show me that you were accepted and treated respectfully. It will not even remotely do to convince me I'm wrong to just spray some words at me in a text box; at this point the evidence that the academy has become intellectually closed is so overwhelming that only the willful blindness granted to those on "your side" can fail to see it.
• chockZ 9y ago
  I see you haven't read a lot of right wing media over the past 20 years.
• jseliger 9y ago
  1. College costs have been outstripping inflation for decades. This is well-known and obvious: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rising+college+costs+decades&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rising+college+costs+decades&ia=we... 2. It's not clear that most colleges are actually teaching much most of the time: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo10327226.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo103... 3. Related to #2, it seems that most colleges have evolved non-educational tracks for those who want them: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... 4. See Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education, which argues that most of education system is about signaling, not human capital education. If that's true, we ought to work harder to find other ways to signal. 5. It's not clear where the money for college is going. It's not going to instructors or instruction. So where is it disappearing into? Many blame administrators, sports, Title IX, bureaucracy, Baumol's Cost Disease, etc., but I'm not sure what the real answer is. 6. The logical arguments are mostly in books, not online.
  • Slansitartop 9y ago
    I don't subscribe to the WSJ or its comments, but I suspect there's also an additional reason: 7. Colleges and universities are ground zero (and a symbol) of a (newish) culture that loudly, strongly, and explicitly rejects and condemns much of the rest of America; and especially the type of American that stereotypically would read the WSJ. Conservatives, libertarians, and increasingly classical liberals are not going to have very warm feelings towards things that they perceive are openly hostile to their values.
    • dsacco 9y ago
      > 7. Colleges and universities are ground zero (and a symbol) of a (newish) culture that loudly, strongly, and explicitly rejects and condemns much of the rest of America; and especially the type of American that stereotypically would read the WSJ. Do you read the WSJ? I can’t really take your point seriously if you’re using it as an example of what the “left intelligentsia” condemns. Yes, it’s not the NYT, but the WSJ is mostly consumed by people in the group you’re talking about. In fact, they are the WSJ’s primary readership.
• pjc50 9y ago
  > where did that overwhelming hate for higher education come from? Culture war. Same place Trump came from.