10 ms·

Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

85 points by cwan 16y ago

DannoHung 16y ago
Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?
- kurtosis 16y ago
  I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere. So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.
  - dragoon 16y ago
    "Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day. What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      "For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day." No, but it does mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.
yef 16y ago
I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.
kmfrk 16y ago
But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims? The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?
- carbocation 16y ago
  This happens because the rankings cited are a function of the academic output of the faculty. In contrast, this article is largely worrying about undergraduate-specific issues. In other words, I think you've identified a non sequitur committed by the author.
  - geebee 16y ago
    I agree, these are only vaguely related issues. An undergraduate gets into Univ A and Univ B. Which one does he choose? A highly promising young researcher is recruited as a faculty member by univ A and univ B. Which does he choose? The difference between these questions also explains why some ratings place large, public research universities in the top few spots, and why in others (like us news), none of them crack the top 20. Of course, top faculty and research can be a draw for undergraduates, so they aren't totally unrelated, but grad (especially phd) students are far more influenced by the second question as well.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    There are many rankings, including acceptance rates, graduation rates. This causes its own problems, with the admissions process now skewed so heavily toward propping up these pointless figures (acceptance rate anyway) that High School Juniors are being asked to commit in writing.
carbocation 16y ago
In contrast to what this surprisingly uninformed piece claims, the top universities do compete on price. In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. There actually is downward pressure on price, but this is because it's coming from the top schools, not from any disruptive force. Why? Because the top schools don't make most of their income from tuition, so they can afford to lose it.
- dragoon 16y ago
  In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on nondischargeable debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening. Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.
  - carbocation 16y ago
    What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon. > Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles. Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.
dragoon 16y ago
These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars. With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be). Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.
- silvestrov 16y ago
  This can change quickly. American cars in the 60'ies were not commodities, design was much more important back then. There is nothing intrinsic in education which makes the university's prestige the most important. Look outside USA, e.g. at northern Europe where the prestige of the university is not important, but the grades and (esp.) the person are. For some professions the university and grades is all that's considered when employing someone. But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.
  - enko 16y ago
    > But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is. In many small programming shops I know of, whether or not you even have a degree is irrelevant for pretty much this exact reason. A healthy GitHub portfolio & a blog with some reasonably insightful articles > any CS degree you can name (including MIT). If a 16-year-old asked you, sincerely, what the best past forward for a programmer was for them, would you unhesitatingly recommend uni? I have my doubts. I have felt for some time that the best education in CS is a macbook pro and a 2 year backpacking holiday and this conviction is only growing over time.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  In the UK, the prestige of the car one drives is at least as relevant as the degree one has. Really, and I don't see how the US is any different. A few years back (when I lived at home) my Dad's company prevented him getting a Renault Espace as a company car. He wanted it for reliable transportation and to get children and stuff around. But he wasn't allowed one, because it wasn't professional enough. So we got an enormously long Volvo instead, which was great because the rearmost seats faced backwards -- anyway, I digress. The point is, social signalling is very important in both cars and degrees, and if I had to rank them, I'd say car prestige could even matter more than car quality, whereas education is the other way around.
goodwinb 16y ago
Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect? They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money. I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor. What business model in the future should universities follow?
- noelwelsh 16y ago
  The idea is that the experts pass on their knowledge, gained from research, to the students. Sure there are a large number of people who can teach, say, Calculus 1, but there are dramatically fewer who can teach the higher level courses. This is one of the attractions of top universities -- you have the leading experts in the fields teaching their specialities. Thus it isn't clear to me that teaching and research should be separated at the highest level. At the University of Phoenix level, yes, it makes sense.
- sprout 16y ago
  The merger of research and teaching is a public good, for multiple reasons. One, it makes it easier for teachers to spend some time doing. (naturally apprenticeship programs could serve the same goal) Two, it makes the public bankroll research they might not otherwise see the importance of (having very poor understanding of how progress works.)
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I don't think you understand what a public good is. A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not. Further, research subsidizes teaching at most research universities, not the other way around. Universities take almost half of the NSF's budget in the form of "overhead", most of which is subsidizing teaching and general university waste. There is also a major harm - most people are not good at both research and teaching. By merging teaching with research, you force people to perform two tasks, only one of which they are well suited for. The job "professor" is about as nonsensical as "ninja developer"; if we merged assassination and development, the result would be pasty white nerds getting shot by bodyguards and sneaky Japanese guys providing endless material for DailyWTF.
whyenot 16y ago
Go to a state school. In California, the tuition for a California State University is about $5500 a year. If you can't afford that, you likely qualify for a CalGrant which is awarded based on need and are around $5400 per school year. For example, San Jose State University here in Silicon Valley, doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has, but you can still get a very good education, in some ways better than at a more prestigious school. In California's CSU system, teaching is emphasized over research. Perhaps due to practice or self selection, most professors at SJSU seem to be very good teachers. Professors have few (if any) graduate students so they have more time for undergraduates and there are more research opportunities for undergrads.
- SilianRail 16y ago
  Isn't California bankrupt?
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y ago
  > doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has Thats the problem: The deal isn't go to university and learn stuff. The deal is go to university and you will get a better job, the extra salary you make will pay back the tuition and lost years of income. As more people go to uni the more the market segments - it becomes go to Harvard/Yale, you will pay 10x as much in tuition but earn 100x as much in salary. But go to nowheres ville U and your extra salary is 0. The problem is that for this (and the previous) generation the extra salary no longer pays back the costs.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    Actually College is different from Trade School. Its not clear salary is the goal. Becoming a person better able to function and contribute is the goal. Sometimes that means, yes, gender study papers.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
nanairo 16y ago
I must admit that I am always a bit prejudicial when I hear an business person (or a business magazine like this) talking about universities. They seem to view Universities as a business proposal: "How much do we invest? How much do we get out of it?", which it shouldn't be. Take this quote: "If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”. My feeling is that the person who said it is thinking of streamlining it, removing subjects which bring little profit, and increasing those with profit. So out goes "geography" but also "gender studies", and instead more money is put into "pharmacy", "genetics", "economics and MBA". The result would be great from a business perspective, but that's what companies and business are for. If there's plenty of money many companies will be investigating in those subjects just as well. Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded, more knowledgable even of things that may not bring money, and should let professors study subjects despite there being no monetary advantage. Where has the passion for knowledge gone? Let the student have a place to get knowledge, and the professor have a place to expand it.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  I teach at a community college. The price is quite low (and my pay). Society does not want to pay for knowledge. It does not see a benefit in having people who appreciate art, literature, culture, music, etc. It only sees a benefit from electrical engineering and other such subjects. It's a problem of society and it's short sighted goals.
  - timwiseman 16y ago
    No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to appreciate literature and culture. I am also quite happy to support the artists whose work I enjoy. But I am not happy to have tax money support it until long after ever child learns the basics well and the local police department is fully funded. [Edit, fixed typo.]
binaryfinery 16y ago
In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D". Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy". Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy". Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsistence living, if you make one at all. But the Alphas live in a magical city, where cocaine and girls are all easily affordable on multi-million pound salaries. The UK once ruled the world. The US couldn't be following us down to ruin better if we'd given them a map.
- imp 16y ago
  Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.
  - binaryfinery 16y ago
    The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect). As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.
patana 16y ago
If university are a source of education, knowledge, research and innovation and not a factory for making cars, why should they be managed in the same way? If people were like a car, you could push the accelerator to make them move quickly, but there is no accelerator to push to achieve the goals of universities.
known 16y ago
American academic system should ideally create employers and not employees
WilliamLP 16y ago
It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup. This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.
GBKS 16y ago
I do agree with this in some points. My main complaint with US universities (from my experience) is lack of focus on producing the brightest people possible. It's simply too easy to be "undecided" for 3 years and end up with a wishy-washy degree that doesn't prepare you for much. Once I realized that grades were a low standard, I started setting my own standards and put in a lot of extra time and effort that ended up getting me a good job right out of college. So the comparison of universities (at least undergrad) being lazy, like the car companies, I can agree with (again, from my experience). Higher standards and expectations of student performance are needed.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  I set my standards early, quit looking up my test scores, got out of college what I wanted and skipped the rest. I figured I knew better than my Professors how well prepared I was, the test score was not adding information, so I refused to look at it. I was honestly wondering if I would graduate, but I did. MSEE Stanford
SkyMarshal 16y ago
It appears that the US's top, world-class universities will survive relatively easily, and the affordable and profitable degree-factories like Phoenix may as well. State Universities will too in one form or another, depending on the finances of their state govt. But the private ones in the middle that charge high tuition & fees, are not particularly renowned, and have come to rely on easy credit for huge student loans are going to struggle.
timr 16y ago
If you're reading this and assuming it means the end of the value of academic credentials, I have some bad news: the Valley is one of the most credentialed places I've worked. And with few exceptions, the people you hear about in the Valley entrepreneurial echo chamber went to great schools, or got advanced degrees from schools with great research programs. In my entire life before moving to SF, I knew only a handful of Ivy League graduates. Here, nearly every other person I meet is an Ivy grad, or a grad from a top-tier research school, such as MIT, Stanford, etc. It's gotten to the point that I'm fairly surprised when I meet people here who went to lesser-known schools. Credentials are still important, even in the so-called egalitarian world of technology. Call me cynical, but if you're reading this and hoping that the imminent collapse of the university system ushers in an egalitarian utopi, you might be waiting a while. Credentials will continue to matter -- they just won't be accessible to anyone but the rich.
- patinador 16y ago
  Reading this one could think that university is a good source for entrepreneurs. Credentials can become a signal that you are a capable people.

85 points by cwan 16y ago

DannoHung 16y ago

Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?

kurtosis 16y ago
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere. So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.
- dragoon 16y ago
  "Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day. What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    "For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day." No, but it does mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.

yef 16y ago

I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.

kmfrk 16y ago

But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims? The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?

carbocation 16y ago
This happens because the rankings cited are a function of the academic output of the faculty. In contrast, this article is largely worrying about undergraduate-specific issues. In other words, I think you've identified a non sequitur committed by the author.
- geebee 16y ago
  I agree, these are only vaguely related issues. An undergraduate gets into Univ A and Univ B. Which one does he choose? A highly promising young researcher is recruited as a faculty member by univ A and univ B. Which does he choose? The difference between these questions also explains why some ratings place large, public research universities in the top few spots, and why in others (like us news), none of them crack the top 20. Of course, top faculty and research can be a draw for undergraduates, so they aren't totally unrelated, but grad (especially phd) students are far more influenced by the second question as well.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  There are many rankings, including acceptance rates, graduation rates. This causes its own problems, with the admissions process now skewed so heavily toward propping up these pointless figures (acceptance rate anyway) that High School Juniors are being asked to commit in writing.

carbocation 16y ago

In contrast to what this surprisingly uninformed piece claims, the top universities do compete on price. In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. There actually is downward pressure on price, but this is because it's coming from the top schools, not from any disruptive force. Why? Because the top schools don't make most of their income from tuition, so they can afford to lose it.

dragoon 16y ago
In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on nondischargeable debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening. Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.
- carbocation 16y ago
  What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon. > Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles. Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

dragoon 16y ago

These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars. With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be). Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.

silvestrov 16y ago
This can change quickly. American cars in the 60'ies were not commodities, design was much more important back then. There is nothing intrinsic in education which makes the university's prestige the most important. Look outside USA, e.g. at northern Europe where the prestige of the university is not important, but the grades and (esp.) the person are. For some professions the university and grades is all that's considered when employing someone. But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.
- enko 16y ago
  > But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is. In many small programming shops I know of, whether or not you even have a degree is irrelevant for pretty much this exact reason. A healthy GitHub portfolio & a blog with some reasonably insightful articles > any CS degree you can name (including MIT). If a 16-year-old asked you, sincerely, what the best past forward for a programmer was for them, would you unhesitatingly recommend uni? I have my doubts. I have felt for some time that the best education in CS is a macbook pro and a 2 year backpacking holiday and this conviction is only growing over time.
Robin_Message 16y ago
In the UK, the prestige of the car one drives is at least as relevant as the degree one has. Really, and I don't see how the US is any different. A few years back (when I lived at home) my Dad's company prevented him getting a Renault Espace as a company car. He wanted it for reliable transportation and to get children and stuff around. But he wasn't allowed one, because it wasn't professional enough. So we got an enormously long Volvo instead, which was great because the rearmost seats faced backwards -- anyway, I digress. The point is, social signalling is very important in both cars and degrees, and if I had to rank them, I'd say car prestige could even matter more than car quality, whereas education is the other way around.

goodwinb 16y ago

Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect? They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money. I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor. What business model in the future should universities follow?

noelwelsh 16y ago
The idea is that the experts pass on their knowledge, gained from research, to the students. Sure there are a large number of people who can teach, say, Calculus 1, but there are dramatically fewer who can teach the higher level courses. This is one of the attractions of top universities -- you have the leading experts in the fields teaching their specialities. Thus it isn't clear to me that teaching and research should be separated at the highest level. At the University of Phoenix level, yes, it makes sense.
sprout 16y ago
The merger of research and teaching is a public good, for multiple reasons. One, it makes it easier for teachers to spend some time doing. (naturally apprenticeship programs could serve the same goal) Two, it makes the public bankroll research they might not otherwise see the importance of (having very poor understanding of how progress works.)
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I don't think you understand what a public good is. A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not. Further, research subsidizes teaching at most research universities, not the other way around. Universities take almost half of the NSF's budget in the form of "overhead", most of which is subsidizing teaching and general university waste. There is also a major harm - most people are not good at both research and teaching. By merging teaching with research, you force people to perform two tasks, only one of which they are well suited for. The job "professor" is about as nonsensical as "ninja developer"; if we merged assassination and development, the result would be pasty white nerds getting shot by bodyguards and sneaky Japanese guys providing endless material for DailyWTF.

whyenot 16y ago

Go to a state school. In California, the tuition for a California State University is about $5500 a year. If you can't afford that, you likely qualify for a CalGrant which is awarded based on need and are around $5400 per school year. For example, San Jose State University here in Silicon Valley, doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has, but you can still get a very good education, in some ways better than at a more prestigious school. In California's CSU system, teaching is emphasized over research. Perhaps due to practice or self selection, most professors at SJSU seem to be very good teachers. Professors have few (if any) graduate students so they have more time for undergraduates and there are more research opportunities for undergrads.

SilianRail 16y ago
Isn't California bankrupt?
oiuygtfrtghyju 16y ago
> doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has Thats the problem: The deal isn't go to university and learn stuff. The deal is go to university and you will get a better job, the extra salary you make will pay back the tuition and lost years of income. As more people go to uni the more the market segments - it becomes go to Harvard/Yale, you will pay 10x as much in tuition but earn 100x as much in salary. But go to nowheres ville U and your extra salary is 0. The problem is that for this (and the previous) generation the extra salary no longer pays back the costs.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Actually College is different from Trade School. Its not clear salary is the goal. Becoming a person better able to function and contribute is the goal. Sometimes that means, yes, gender study papers.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

nanairo 16y ago

I must admit that I am always a bit prejudicial when I hear an business person (or a business magazine like this) talking about universities. They seem to view Universities as a business proposal: "How much do we invest? How much do we get out of it?", which it shouldn't be. Take this quote: "If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”. My feeling is that the person who said it is thinking of streamlining it, removing subjects which bring little profit, and increasing those with profit. So out goes "geography" but also "gender studies", and instead more money is put into "pharmacy", "genetics", "economics and MBA". The result would be great from a business perspective, but that's what companies and business are for. If there's plenty of money many companies will be investigating in those subjects just as well. Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded, more knowledgable even of things that may not bring money, and should let professors study subjects despite there being no monetary advantage. Where has the passion for knowledge gone? Let the student have a place to get knowledge, and the professor have a place to expand it.

yequalsx 16y ago
I teach at a community college. The price is quite low (and my pay). Society does not want to pay for knowledge. It does not see a benefit in having people who appreciate art, literature, culture, music, etc. It only sees a benefit from electrical engineering and other such subjects. It's a problem of society and it's short sighted goals.
- timwiseman 16y ago
  No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems. I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to appreciate literature and culture. I am also quite happy to support the artists whose work I enjoy. But I am not happy to have tax money support it until long after ever child learns the basics well and the local police department is fully funded. [Edit, fixed typo.]

binaryfinery 16y ago

In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D". Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy". Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy". Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsistence living, if you make one at all. But the Alphas live in a magical city, where cocaine and girls are all easily affordable on multi-million pound salaries. The UK once ruled the world. The US couldn't be following us down to ruin better if we'd given them a map.

imp 16y ago
Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.
- binaryfinery 16y ago
  The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect). As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.

patana 16y ago

If university are a source of education, knowledge, research and innovation and not a factory for making cars, why should they be managed in the same way? If people were like a car, you could push the accelerator to make them move quickly, but there is no accelerator to push to achieve the goals of universities.

known 16y ago

American academic system should ideally create employers and not employees

WilliamLP 16y ago

It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup. This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

GBKS 16y ago

I do agree with this in some points. My main complaint with US universities (from my experience) is lack of focus on producing the brightest people possible. It's simply too easy to be "undecided" for 3 years and end up with a wishy-washy degree that doesn't prepare you for much. Once I realized that grades were a low standard, I started setting my own standards and put in a lot of extra time and effort that ended up getting me a good job right out of college. So the comparison of universities (at least undergrad) being lazy, like the car companies, I can agree with (again, from my experience). Higher standards and expectations of student performance are needed.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
I set my standards early, quit looking up my test scores, got out of college what I wanted and skipped the rest. I figured I knew better than my Professors how well prepared I was, the test score was not adding information, so I refused to look at it. I was honestly wondering if I would graduate, but I did. MSEE Stanford

SkyMarshal 16y ago

It appears that the US's top, world-class universities will survive relatively easily, and the affordable and profitable degree-factories like Phoenix may as well. State Universities will too in one form or another, depending on the finances of their state govt. But the private ones in the middle that charge high tuition & fees, are not particularly renowned, and have come to rely on easy credit for huge student loans are going to struggle.

timr 16y ago

If you're reading this and assuming it means the end of the value of academic credentials, I have some bad news: the Valley is one of the most credentialed places I've worked. And with few exceptions, the people you hear about in the Valley entrepreneurial echo chamber went to great schools, or got advanced degrees from schools with great research programs. In my entire life before moving to SF, I knew only a handful of Ivy League graduates. Here, nearly every other person I meet is an Ivy grad, or a grad from a top-tier research school, such as MIT, Stanford, etc. It's gotten to the point that I'm fairly surprised when I meet people here who went to lesser-known schools. Credentials are still important, even in the so-called egalitarian world of technology. Call me cynical, but if you're reading this and hoping that the imminent collapse of the university system ushers in an egalitarian utopi, you might be waiting a while. Credentials will continue to matter -- they just won't be accessible to anyone but the rich.

patinador 16y ago
Reading this one could think that university is a good source for entrepreneurs. Credentials can become a signal that you are a capable people.