7 ms·

All true, but it slides by the main issue: what are all these Ph.D.'s going to do? In the post-WW2 era, when the percentage of high school graduates was going

• yostrovs 7y ago
  Do we really need to teach French to undergraduates that won't ever use it nor remember anything from these courses? My university also had a swimming requirement. Seems like more than half of the courses were not terribly useful or mind opening. Certainly since something valuable isn't being produced, the pay for producing that will be low.
  • trianglem 7y ago
    Yes, I believe a well rounded education is important for a good populace.
  • jimbob45 7y ago
    We don't need to dance around the fact that swimming and French courses are just moneymakers for universities. Sure, they may hold some value to the careers of some people, but it's hard to believe that the motivation for foisting them upon each student was wholly altruistic.
    • hindsightbias 7y ago
      With numbers like these, we should be foisting PE and nutrition on young adults: https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/ https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/
    • tzs 7y ago
      How is a swimming course a moneymaker?
  • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    FWIW, I feel like being able to fall in water without dying is a useful skill Though college sounds like an odd place
  • veilrap 7y ago
    Honestly, I think both foreign language training, and physical fitness ARE useful for keeping one's mind plasticity up and in turn having valuable downstream effects. The goal for university courses shouldn't be strictly specific skill training, but also requirements that force people outside their comfort zones, encouraging them to think it new ways and adapt their problem solving faculties to new domains.
    • coredog64 7y ago
      Foreign languages are harder to pick up the older you get. Starting one in college seems like a waste, and requiring it raises the bar unnecessarily. Physical fitness isn’t going to come from a swimming class. If you’re an adult, you’ll take care of your body because it’s the right thing.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • mumblemumble 7y ago
        > Foreign languages are harder to pick up the older you get. I don't buy that. I know plenty of people who've picked up languages all up and down the age range. What I do think is true is that people are more likely to pick up their first additional language at a younger age. And I think that that's probably just an result of selection bias: If you actually need to for some reason (e.g., one language spoken at home and another in public), then those conditions will apply more-or-less from birth, so you'll learn it at a young age. And if you enjoy language learning, then you'll probably figure that out at a fairly young age, and so you'll have learned your second language at a fairly young age. The people who're looking to learn their second language in their 30s or 40s, on the other hand, are likely to be less motivated in the first place, and therefore more likely to give up, or to be unwilling to put enough work into it to make consistent progress. There's also a sort of. . . I don't know if it's immortal time bias, but it's similar: You don't see as many people who learn a language at an older age exhibiting near-native levels of proficiency simply because the timeline doesn't work out that way. You just aren't going to be speaking like someone who's been using the language 16 hours a day for 20 years if you've only been using it 1 hour a day for 5 years. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is probably selling something with a subscription pricing scheme. I can also say, as a recreational language learner who is rapidly approaching middle age, that the real impediment to learning languages as you get older is not that you don't have a 6 year old's or teenager's brain anymore. It's that you have one or more 6 year olds or teenagers, and spending time with them is probably more fulfilling (or at least more important) than spending time with a pile of flashcards. Such is life. As far as the value of requiring them in university. . . Offer, yes, require, no. Not because 18 is too late to start learning a language, but because nobody who's only taking classes in a 2nd language because a few credits in such a class is required for graduation is going to get any real value out of the experience.
  • Pete-Codes 7y ago
    I did Spanish at university and it's a skill I've got for life now.
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      Only in uni? I and many others did Spanish for 6 years from junior high into college, and remember barely any of it. Foreign language perhaps more than other topics, schooling is nearly useless compared to immersion.
      • trianglem 7y ago
        I really feel like schools should concentrate on conversational language skills before delving into any sort of grammar rules. A lot of the grammar rules end up sorting themselves out by “not sounding correct” when you speak the language.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    So why choose to go to a university that does have more general classes if that's not what you want? Certainly the course (and indeed the university) I went to had no classes outside maths/CS/electrical-engineering and I sometimes think it would have been nice to have a bit more rounded education at that level.
  • neuland 7y ago
    I agree with your point; there’s a lot of stuff taught in school that has limited or no usefulness to the average person. But swimming is not one of those. Everyone needs to know how to swim. Granted, college is a bit late to do it. There’s a good chance in your lifetime that you may involuntarily end up in the water. Say your car crashes into a lake. You fall off a bridge or dock. Your ferry or duck boat sinks. Etc. Learning to swim doesn’t take a ton of time and may very well save your life. Also you’re missing out on a bunch of possible fun / rewarding water activities.
  • ng12 7y ago
    If I could re-do my college degree I would have taken as few computer science courses as possible. Most of the important stuff I picked up along the way anyways. It's the random classes like Japanese Lit and Organizational Behavior that have really had an impact over a decade later.
    • DamnYuppie 7y ago
      For me some of the most life impacting and eye opening courses were very random. My Islamic studies class was a view into another world and ignited my desire to travel. A child development course really drove home who we as adults are shaped by things that happened when we were very young and what impact and when parents have on their children.
  • yardie 7y ago
    > Do we really need to teach French to undergraduates that won't ever use it... As most US universities and colleges currently teach? Certainly not. If we were to teach it as most language schools and most european universities teach it. Then, yes. It would be another skill. I took courses in Mandarin. While my spoken language is certainly rusty at this point it gave me an insight into East Asian history and culture that I would not have today.
• chrisseaton 7y ago
  > what are all these Ph.D.'s going to do? Get a job like anyone else would? Why must academia or industrial research be the only plausible options? After doing a PhD you can be a high school teacher, a soldier, an actor, start a company, go into politics, do whatever you want. Nothing’s stopping you! Most jobs just want capable educated people, and many vary diverse educational backgrounds.
  • rb808 7y ago
    > After doing a PhD you can be a high school teacher, a soldier, an actor, start a company, go into politics, do whatever you want. Most PhDs dont want to do that stuff which is why they got a PhD in the first place.
    • blairbeckwith 7y ago
      That's tough. Not everyone who wants to be an actor gets to be an actor either. People have to settle for not fulfilling their dreams every day.
      • papito 7y ago
        Not to take this off track, but imagine how much more prone to taking risks we would be if we had guaranteed health insurance. No one wants to risk financial ruin and death in poverty. The "winners" usually come from old money and then just play with VC billions, never risking a dime, or at least not much.
        • blairbeckwith 7y ago
          I'm very fortunate to live in Canada, and can't imagine how much harder it would be to take risks in the states. When I left my stable job to pursue my own small business, my health wasn't even one of the factors I considered. I have never asked for details about health insurance prior tom accepting a job.
          • 7y ago
• asdf21 7y ago
  I feel like with the growing popularity of Online Courses these ratios will get even more skewed... What happens when the majority of courses at a University are pre-recorded sessions from years ago, with only minor updates from year to year?
  • lazyguy2 7y ago
    If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore. There really isn't even any need to attend K-12 schools. It may be better to go to formal physical schools, but it's no longer necessary. Not by a long shot. It's just going to take another few decades for society to adjust to the fact that university degrees are no longer really that valuable and figure out new ways to evaluate individual competency.
    • ImaCake 7y ago
      >If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore. I think people underestimate how difficult it is to self study well enough to get an education like you can get from a (good) university program. Studying is hard! Maybe it is not so hard to learn a little bit. But to learn something with rigour and focus takes a lot of effort, especially if you have other problems to deal with as well. Aside from the value signalling of a degree, paid courses provide a strong motivation to do the uncomfortable and often unrewarding activity of studying. Source: my own experiences with self-study and a recently started Masters in Biostatistics by distance education, all while working casually or full time.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        The value of a school (or alternative study arrangement) is in its reputation for educating students well, in the eyes of the students and employers. When reputable schools burn reputation faster than new schools build reputation, it's a broad social problem.
    • throwawaymath 7y ago
      For most people, a university is the most time-efficient method of gaining education in any given technical topic. It's not guaranteed to be the most cost-efficient, but I don't see a defensible argument that the resources of a university don't make it possible to learn faster than self-study, for the modal student. Discipline isn't the only obstacle for autodidacts. If nothing else, at a university you have professors, adjuncts and TAs with office hours who can help you learn something in a fraction of the time it would take to learn by studying a textbook or watching lectures online alone. For example, vanishingly few people manage to teach themselves an undergraduate math curriculum without going through university.
• bonoboTP 7y ago
  Why should we assume that all people who can get a PhD are fit to become profs? Arguably it's good that there's a larger pool of candidates from which the best can go further in academia (in fields where industry is not so attractive or existent). Setting aside whether the right criteria are used for career advancements or not, any meritocratic hierarchy is based on having more candidates on a lower lever compete to get into a smaller but higher level.
• jseliger 7y ago
  The universities shouldn't be relying on 2/3 or 3/4 adjunct professors, but they're doing it because they can Exactly: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc... Many humanities and social science academics also show extreme anti-market bias, and it shows up in the essay.
  • dmix 7y ago
    It’s also going to show up in their decision making which filters down to students. Such as widening the already massive disconnect from the economic reality of students (entering or choosing to continue university) and their ability to get jobs to pay for the heavily gov and academia incentivized cheap debt.
• dekhn 7y ago
  This problem happened recently; during the clinton administration the NIH budget was doubled and the number of bio PhDs increased dramatically... while the number of faculty positions did not. Many of those people ended up working as data scientists (because getting a quantitative bio PhD often give you the skills in the area). I certainly went through all this (wanted to be faculty) and ended up doing SWE and science work at a large internet company. In retrospect, though, I think I should have skipped the PhD and gone straight to tech.
• briffle 7y ago
  > The universities shouldn't be relying on 2/3 or 3/4 adjunct professors, but they're doing it because they can, which is because the system as designed produces way more candidates for professorships than there are positions available. And also because the accreditation process lets them. There are a handful of accreditation bodies in the US, and they certify schools. They look at education level of their instructors, but if they changed to also look at the employment classification because they decided it was better for the students to learn that way, you would see a huge change within a few years.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    Adjunct means part time non-research. It doesn't mean bad teacher. Sure, many adjuncts are bad teachers, maybe more than full faculty are, but that should be measured by credentials and feedback metrics, not employment structure. I paid thousands of dollars for several out of touch tenured faculty who were not fluent in the language they taught in, and had some great adjunct professors.
• pjc50 7y ago
  To me the main issue is the wider one: what is the purpose of the university? Well, it's the keeping and reproduction of knowledge, which must be kept alive in the heads of a number of host bodies. But what is this knowledge for? Do we as a society actually want to know things? Because that's looking very much in question recently. There is also the historical (especially 1960s, but really this dates back to the Reformation) role of the university as a political hotbed. It is this which has come into conflict with the wider world, and it is this which has caused heavy commercial pressure to destroy the intellectual independence of the university and turn it into just a training facility.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    We've boomed, in The West, on the back of relatively cheap power, and abundance of resources both of which appeared initially to have little downside compared to the up. Society wants to rest there, not to face the future problems that power/resource usage has created. We'll need to face those problems. And as we progress that need will become ever more stark and ever less ignorable even for the rich. Knowledge will become fashionable again as its results - fixing the power deficit, the population explosion, the unwanted climatic changes - become demanded and crucially if they payoff. Then we'll all grow fat and comfortable again only to realise we forgot the lessons of the past.
    • pjc50 7y ago
      > Knowledge will become fashionable again as its results - fixing the power deficit, the population explosion, the unwanted climatic changes - become demanded and crucially if they payoff. The other alternative involves killing a lot of people, either actively or through neglect, which is far more popular than you might expect. This is the lesson of the global warming discussion, among others. Nobody wants to hear about problems, especially not when the solution involves changing their lifestyle. It's far easier to just deny. Truth in that environment is a threat.
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    In fact I think we entered a new counter-enlightenment. That is, over the last decade the zeitgeist has increasingly shown religious-like behavior and increased support for authoritarianism, rather than the Kant/Descartes style philosophy of thought.
• ssalazar 7y ago
  Academia could do a much better job clarifying expectations for prospective PhD students, for instance what percentage of a department's graduates go to research universities, to teaching colleges, to industry, etc. But there might be fewer applicants when people do the math and realize theres maybe 1 desirable academic job opening for every 10 students. To the point stressed to death in another thread, sure you could go get another job that has nothing to do with your PhD, but many people see graduate education as a career step, not a lifestyle choice.