10 ms·

Even during a crisis, colleges abuse their economic and reputational privileges

62 points by nreece 6y ago

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
No, not a ponzi scheme. Inflows aren't funding outflows under an illusion of value creation.
- RhysU 6y ago
  The article claims that, pre-covid, an increasing number of bureaucrats were being funded by an increasing number of increasingly ill-prepared freshman. Those freshman were not receiving value. If one accepts the article's perspective, why was that condition not a ponzi scheme?
samizdis 6y ago
> Almost no college is considering a tuition rebate, which implies that online learning should be valued at the same rate as an on-campus class. Students and their parents may start to ask why they should pay astronomical fees for a campus experience if they can get the same instruction over the web. Prof Scott Galloway's blog (No Mercy, No Malice) recently took a swipe at higher-ed fees and the ever-increasing financial burdens being placed on students - and younger people in general. It considers this in a post-Covid-19 world: https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed
- notechback 6y ago
  Insane to do an online masters for 30k. I see the ads everywhere and I just can't imagine who really wants or needs that - and then you apply for jobs and get refused because it's "just" an online masters...
- DailyHN 6y ago
  Online classes at the same university cost more than in-person classes. At least that's been the case atmoublic universities here in Florida for the last 10+ years.
- no_mercy 6y ago
  Apparently, if one engine of a four engine airplane stops working, the airplane flies 10% slower. But this doesn't mean if all four engines stop working, the airplane will fly 40% slower. What I am saying is: if a large number of the newly unemployed are not satisfied with their life circumstances in a few months, there could be a complete breakdown of society. It is unlikely the "everything will be the same, but only accelerate" model will play out when the acceleration also depends on the "cooperation" of 10s of millions of suddenly unemployed people. Here is my counter prediction to the entire article: A lot of prediction makers are going to go back to the drawing board and come up with better models for their predictions, because no model can adequately capture the chaos which is almost guaranteed to ensue now.
- non-entity 6y ago
  I've effectively given up tbh. I would honestly really like to get my bachelors at least, but it seems like I have two choices: Good or Cheap. Now certain circumstances make my situation rather unique, but all the research I've done seems to point to non traditional students in general being tossed aside. I've wanted to write about it, but i imagine it wouldn't be very well appreciated because it is, in part a rant.
aurizon 6y ago
Yes, a true racket in Ponzi style, and in Ponzi style, the crash will be huge...
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  Tech is gonna get hit hard just like every sector, so you better learn how to say that phrase too, buddy.
  - DeathArrow 6y ago
    Every non essential sector will be hit. Tech by large is essential. Beaurocrats are not.
    - battery_cowboy 6y ago
      A bunch of tech is advertising and shit, there's a lot of techies working in that and other areas. Not all of us have jobs at places where they can weather the storm, remember that. Also, there is a lot of required essential work outside of tech and science, and your narcissism has blinded you to thise workers' value.
axel6665 6y ago
University is a joke in Australia. Anything for Chinese dollars, Chinese students don’t need to know English, barely contribute to the forced group assignments. I completed degree and masters and ensured many Asians passed with minimal effort because no one cared, domestic students were told shut up or fail. My life goal is to never employ any international student from Asia. No problem with Aussie Asian students they worked and contributed, they were also pissed off at the internationals. I learned more on udemy then in my IT masters. $15 programming python course
jimhefferon 6y ago
The article seemed to me to be a mix of two things, railing against the costs (blamed on the rise of administrators), and railing against the existence of diversity administrators. I'm a professor employed at my present institution, a small liberal arts school, since 1990. I am not an administrator of any kind, don't read the Chronicle, and don't understand where all the money goes. I will say though, that when I started we had very few students who were not white. Very few, particularly if you omitted athletes. But today a good chunk, 40% maybe, of the student body is, to my eye, nonwhite. I don't know how much of that can be ascribed to the diversity officer but it is IMHO a very good thing.
- shard972 6y ago
  Is it good when minorities are over-represented? meaning some white students are being discriminated against?
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  There certainly seemed to be an over-abundance of jabs at Diversity and Inclusion programs and staff. They’re surely a very small minority of the admin bloat, and they pursue a noble goal. It wasn’t that surprising to see Jared Taylor being recommended in the comments, given the subject matter and conservative angle this piece has.
- fastball 6y ago
  The US is 72.4% white. You would then expect there to be 27.6% non-white students at any particular institution, assuming no racial discrimination, etc. So then why is 40% non-white a desirable outcome? I thought the point was to compensate for exclusion / marginalization / discrimination, in which case the target should be that aforementioned 27.6%. EDIT: since many people are replying to me saying that using the national demographic stats is a bad thing to do, I will use the stats for GP's state, which appears to be Virginia. Using these stats (94.2% white), you would expect the school to have only 5.8% non-white students, assuming a complete lack of racial discrimination compared to the state population. I personally still think using the national stats is a better idea, as the goal of a college / university should not be to only educate people from the state it is located in.
blargmaster33 6y ago
Commies runs higher education... What did you expect?
martin_a 6y ago
One can only shake his head when you hear about how things work in America. Why are you so hostile against each other and/or the weaker/younger/non-wealthy people? In most of Europe, education is free. You'll obviously have to take care of your own cost of living, but there are no real fees where you come out of your education and have 100k in debt. Why do things in America work so different? It's not (yet) a third world country, it could probably easily finance things like these for its residents. But instead you milk your youth, leave them with debt and shrug your shoulders about things like these? Why? (free = Universities in Germany have what is called "Semesterbeitrag". This varies but for my university it was like 700 €/year and you would get free transportation in NRW with that and more benefits.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- simfoo 6y ago
  My guess: It is politically wanted to have graduates that will take any job because they are deep into debt with no chance of getting rid of it through bankruptcy. This pressure keeps wages down and "motivation" up.
  - delusional 6y ago
    From a purely free market perspective, it makes sense. getting educated takes resources, that education then has to earn you more resources in the long run, meaning you can pay off the loan. That ignores all the sociatal benefits from having a more well educated poopulous, and I like free education, but you can't deny there's some internal logic there.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  I don't agree with this sentiment and I believe it's based on a big lie, but here's what some of the "average" Americans might think: "I'm an American, my ancestors for generations have pioneered the frontier and could only rely on themselves. I don't like the idea of helping some lazy bum get their art degree on my dime, so I'm against free college. I'm a working man, and my son will be too, or he'll get a degree as an engineer or scientist and be able to make enough money to pay his loans. My daughter will get married and have babies. That's the way it's been and America has been awesome forever, so I don't see why we should follow Europe, who has so many countries in debt crisis that couldn't pull themselves up like America did."
dstola 6y ago
Makes me sad for the fall and discarding of meritocracy in favour of filling enrolment and diversity quotas
- dlp211 6y ago
  Meritocracy is the lie we tell ourselves to justify inequality. There has never been a meritocracy.
  - dstola 6y ago
    I think you have that other way around
johndoe42377 6y ago
The better analogue would be a paid admission into a high-society "priest" social class. For the money one have to pay one would receive a certificate of belonging. Exactly like some priest after passing through some selective religious school. Arguably, aside from a STEM degree from a few top technical schools, like MIT, CMU, Caltech, and Yale, as an exception, the social value of a degree is exactly like that of being a priest. Not so smart children of upper middle classes have to go somewhere. Liberal arts "education" is exactly for them.
0xddd 6y ago
I can't help but suspect some bias in an article that defines neoliberalism as "academic-speak for capitalism". No mention of public university tuition rising in response to cuts in state funding?
- andrenotgiant 6y ago
  > After the 2008 recession, colleges made up for the drop in state support by raising fees. Tuition jumped nearly 30 percent nationwide from 2007-2008 to 2014-2015, while real median income fell roughly 6.5 percent, according to Paul Friga of ABC Consulting.
plausible 6y ago
For a while I thought it was about bureaucracy, but it's just someone annoyed by seeing non-whites at American universities. Nothing to see here.
linguae 6y ago
As someone who has planned on returning to grad school this fall to finish my PhD in computer science in hopes of becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university, I am worried about the future of the occupation of being a university professor, particularly from the standpoint of being able to do research. One of the things I wonder about the post-COVID-19 world is what's going to happen to research as a career, whether it's in academia or in industry. In computer science I've noticed these two trends occurring in the past 30 years: 1. Industry has largely moved away from funding long-term blue-sky research, increasingly shifting toward short-term, product-driven research projects. We have moved from places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers had a large degree of freedom to places like Google today where researchers are assigned to product teams (see the paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" which describes how research at Google is operated: https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/ https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/). 2. Academia has its own challenges: (1) the competition for a professorship due to the fact there are more PhD graduates than there are professorships, (2) the competitive environment for obtaining research grants from the NSF, and (3) the increased reliance on adjunct faculty members, who don't have tenure. The economic effects of this COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly lead to universities reducing their hiring. Some universities may even face closure. The sudden shift to online teaching may also have permanent effects on the future of university education. I believe that there are many opportunities for students that will become available if online education becomes the new normal, especially if online education leads to reducing the cost of a university education, which is a serious problem in the United States given the student loan crisis. However, I'm concerned that a move toward online education will accelerate the trend of adjunctization occurring across academia and may even lead to the concept of tenure disappearing at all but the most competitive schools. I believe places like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard will emerge from the post-COVID-19 world just fine. I also believe that public research universities like UC Berkeley and University of Washington will emerge fine. But what about regional comprehensive universities such as the California State University system? What about small private universities that don't have the prestige of places like Caltech or Harvey Mudd? It's these types of universities that will face the most pressures to adapt to a world of compelling online educational choices. I'd like to still be able to pursue a career in research, ideally with autonomy and the ability to pursue long-term projects, but between the trends that have been occurring for the past 30 years as well as the challenges of a post-COVID-19 world, I might not be able to pursue such a career.
plumeria 6y ago
Curious to know what people here think about industrial PhD programs.
liveoneggs 6y ago
> ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating > Before their inevitable withdrawal... > ...even larger pool of likely dropouts... rambling mishmash of concepts and overt racism gets in the way of complaining about tuition and crass lack of support for students during COVID here. Oh well.
- plausible 6y ago
  It's like they couldn't resist saying that those non-white students are inherently less performant. "They're condemned to failure if they get in (look at their slightly lower grades), so it's better not to give them an opportunity at all!" Their barely contained despise, hatred and anger bleed through the lines. It's funny how decades of racial segregation were simply ignored, almost like diversity initiatives popped out of nowhere in a society that has always provided equal opportunities.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I'll zoom in on the diversity point, but I realise it's not the whole focus of the article. Seems to me the real point here is both blindingly obvious, and for some reason never discussed. Education is a pipeline, and everyone is obsessing over the final stage, forgetting the rest. It's short-term thinking that misses the real problems. If you want your society to produce successful university graduates from all demographics, you need to ensure all demographics have access to quality pre-university education. As I understand it, this simply isn't the case in the US today. No-one seems to have any interest in improving the state of affairs. (Perhaps because it's less glamorous than talking about universities?) As it stands, the left-leaning suggestion is to explicitly weight the universities' admissions criteria to ensure an increased number of disadvantaged candidates are able to gain admission, despite falling short of the usual academic requirements (branded positive discrimination). A disproportionate number then fail in their studies, as the article says. The right-leaning suggestion is to do nothing at all, as far as I can tell. Neither is a solution. Solve the pipeline problem. Invest seriously in pre-university education. I'm continually surprised that articles on the topic don't even mention this in passing. Disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not an academic, I'm just a random muppet on the Internet.
- MyHypatia 6y ago
  I agree that the needed work (and hardest work) is access to quality pre-university education. That being said, I find it bizarre that we fret over whether minority applicants are given an unfair boost, while at the same time allowing legacy admissions and athletic preferance admissions to continue. Both of these boost applicants who otherwise would not make it through. We don't fret too much when a spot is taken by a wealthy legacy admit or obscure sport admit, yet we have multiple lawsuits and court cases if the spot is taken by a racial minority. John Hopkins University ended legacy admissions and I applaud them. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-ended-legacy-admissions-johns-hopkins/605131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-end...
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I'm in the UK. I've never heard of 'legacy admissions' happening here, nor admissions in return for dropping money on a university. I get the impression from The Guardian that these things are quite unique to America, and really don't occur in the UK. [0] [1] [2] Similarly I've never heard of someone being admitted to a UK university for the purpose of getting them to complete in university sports. Sports are funded by universities, but generally, few people really care about university sports, the way it should be. It may help in admissions if you have non-academic achievements on top your academic ones, but sports aren't given the special status that they are in US universities. On the race point, the only lawsuit I'm aware of is the one against Harvard for discriminating against Asian applicants. (There's no question that Harvard have higher grade-requirements for Asian applicants.) The courts decided the Harvard admissions policy wasn't unconstitutional. [4] My understanding is that if a similar approach were taken in hiring decisions, that would be extremely illegal. If you'll excuse a tangent: we also don't have 'campus police' in the UK, for which I'm thankful. Universities hire security guards, the way business parks do. The American system is to have police officers on the payroll of a university, expected to follow orders from the university's power-structure [5]. Deans should not be able to issue orders to police officers. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-admissions-process-white-privilege https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-ad... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-schools-ivy-league-legacy-admissions-harvard-wealthier-whiter https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/us-admissions-scandal-oxbridge https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruling-admissions-racial-bias-asian-americans-latest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli... [5] https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police" https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police"
Shinobi881 6y ago
Is this about how D&I efforts are ruining higher ed or about higher ed being a "Ponzi Scheme"? The conversation is starkly different here vs. the Disqus conversation on the article page. Also, authoring "The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture." makes me question the author's motive/bias.

62 points by nreece 6y ago

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

No, not a ponzi scheme. Inflows aren't funding outflows under an illusion of value creation.

RhysU 6y ago
The article claims that, pre-covid, an increasing number of bureaucrats were being funded by an increasing number of increasingly ill-prepared freshman. Those freshman were not receiving value. If one accepts the article's perspective, why was that condition not a ponzi scheme?

samizdis 6y ago

> Almost no college is considering a tuition rebate, which implies that online learning should be valued at the same rate as an on-campus class. Students and their parents may start to ask why they should pay astronomical fees for a campus experience if they can get the same instruction over the web. Prof Scott Galloway's blog (No Mercy, No Malice) recently took a swipe at higher-ed fees and the ever-increasing financial burdens being placed on students - and younger people in general. It considers this in a post-Covid-19 world: https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed

notechback 6y ago
Insane to do an online masters for 30k. I see the ads everywhere and I just can't imagine who really wants or needs that - and then you apply for jobs and get refused because it's "just" an online masters...
DailyHN 6y ago
Online classes at the same university cost more than in-person classes. At least that's been the case atmoublic universities here in Florida for the last 10+ years.
no_mercy 6y ago
Apparently, if one engine of a four engine airplane stops working, the airplane flies 10% slower. But this doesn't mean if all four engines stop working, the airplane will fly 40% slower. What I am saying is: if a large number of the newly unemployed are not satisfied with their life circumstances in a few months, there could be a complete breakdown of society. It is unlikely the "everything will be the same, but only accelerate" model will play out when the acceleration also depends on the "cooperation" of 10s of millions of suddenly unemployed people. Here is my counter prediction to the entire article: A lot of prediction makers are going to go back to the drawing board and come up with better models for their predictions, because no model can adequately capture the chaos which is almost guaranteed to ensue now.
non-entity 6y ago
I've effectively given up tbh. I would honestly really like to get my bachelors at least, but it seems like I have two choices: Good or Cheap. Now certain circumstances make my situation rather unique, but all the research I've done seems to point to non traditional students in general being tossed aside. I've wanted to write about it, but i imagine it wouldn't be very well appreciated because it is, in part a rant.

aurizon 6y ago

Yes, a true racket in Ponzi style, and in Ponzi style, the crash will be huge...

battery_cowboy 6y ago
Tech is gonna get hit hard just like every sector, so you better learn how to say that phrase too, buddy.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  Every non essential sector will be hit. Tech by large is essential. Beaurocrats are not.
  - battery_cowboy 6y ago
    A bunch of tech is advertising and shit, there's a lot of techies working in that and other areas. Not all of us have jobs at places where they can weather the storm, remember that. Also, there is a lot of required essential work outside of tech and science, and your narcissism has blinded you to thise workers' value.

axel6665 6y ago

University is a joke in Australia. Anything for Chinese dollars, Chinese students don’t need to know English, barely contribute to the forced group assignments. I completed degree and masters and ensured many Asians passed with minimal effort because no one cared, domestic students were told shut up or fail. My life goal is to never employ any international student from Asia. No problem with Aussie Asian students they worked and contributed, they were also pissed off at the internationals. I learned more on udemy then in my IT masters. $15 programming python course

jimhefferon 6y ago

The article seemed to me to be a mix of two things, railing against the costs (blamed on the rise of administrators), and railing against the existence of diversity administrators. I'm a professor employed at my present institution, a small liberal arts school, since 1990. I am not an administrator of any kind, don't read the Chronicle, and don't understand where all the money goes. I will say though, that when I started we had very few students who were not white. Very few, particularly if you omitted athletes. But today a good chunk, 40% maybe, of the student body is, to my eye, nonwhite. I don't know how much of that can be ascribed to the diversity officer but it is IMHO a very good thing.

shard972 6y ago
Is it good when minorities are over-represented? meaning some white students are being discriminated against?
thundergolfer 6y ago
There certainly seemed to be an over-abundance of jabs at Diversity and Inclusion programs and staff. They’re surely a very small minority of the admin bloat, and they pursue a noble goal. It wasn’t that surprising to see Jared Taylor being recommended in the comments, given the subject matter and conservative angle this piece has.
fastball 6y ago
The US is 72.4% white. You would then expect there to be 27.6% non-white students at any particular institution, assuming no racial discrimination, etc. So then why is 40% non-white a desirable outcome? I thought the point was to compensate for exclusion / marginalization / discrimination, in which case the target should be that aforementioned 27.6%. EDIT: since many people are replying to me saying that using the national demographic stats is a bad thing to do, I will use the stats for GP's state, which appears to be Virginia. Using these stats (94.2% white), you would expect the school to have only 5.8% non-white students, assuming a complete lack of racial discrimination compared to the state population. I personally still think using the national stats is a better idea, as the goal of a college / university should not be to only educate people from the state it is located in.

blargmaster33 6y ago

Commies runs higher education... What did you expect?

martin_a 6y ago

One can only shake his head when you hear about how things work in America. Why are you so hostile against each other and/or the weaker/younger/non-wealthy people? In most of Europe, education is free. You'll obviously have to take care of your own cost of living, but there are no real fees where you come out of your education and have 100k in debt. Why do things in America work so different? It's not (yet) a third world country, it could probably easily finance things like these for its residents. But instead you milk your youth, leave them with debt and shrug your shoulders about things like these? Why? (free = Universities in Germany have what is called "Semesterbeitrag". This varies but for my university it was like 700 €/year and you would get free transportation in NRW with that and more benefits.)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simfoo 6y ago
My guess: It is politically wanted to have graduates that will take any job because they are deep into debt with no chance of getting rid of it through bankruptcy. This pressure keeps wages down and "motivation" up.
- delusional 6y ago
  From a purely free market perspective, it makes sense. getting educated takes resources, that education then has to earn you more resources in the long run, meaning you can pay off the loan. That ignores all the sociatal benefits from having a more well educated poopulous, and I like free education, but you can't deny there's some internal logic there.
battery_cowboy 6y ago
I don't agree with this sentiment and I believe it's based on a big lie, but here's what some of the "average" Americans might think: "I'm an American, my ancestors for generations have pioneered the frontier and could only rely on themselves. I don't like the idea of helping some lazy bum get their art degree on my dime, so I'm against free college. I'm a working man, and my son will be too, or he'll get a degree as an engineer or scientist and be able to make enough money to pay his loans. My daughter will get married and have babies. That's the way it's been and America has been awesome forever, so I don't see why we should follow Europe, who has so many countries in debt crisis that couldn't pull themselves up like America did."

dstola 6y ago

Makes me sad for the fall and discarding of meritocracy in favour of filling enrolment and diversity quotas

dlp211 6y ago
Meritocracy is the lie we tell ourselves to justify inequality. There has never been a meritocracy.
- dstola 6y ago
  I think you have that other way around

johndoe42377 6y ago

The better analogue would be a paid admission into a high-society "priest" social class. For the money one have to pay one would receive a certificate of belonging. Exactly like some priest after passing through some selective religious school. Arguably, aside from a STEM degree from a few top technical schools, like MIT, CMU, Caltech, and Yale, as an exception, the social value of a degree is exactly like that of being a priest. Not so smart children of upper middle classes have to go somewhere. Liberal arts "education" is exactly for them.

0xddd 6y ago

I can't help but suspect some bias in an article that defines neoliberalism as "academic-speak for capitalism". No mention of public university tuition rising in response to cuts in state funding?

andrenotgiant 6y ago
> After the 2008 recession, colleges made up for the drop in state support by raising fees. Tuition jumped nearly 30 percent nationwide from 2007-2008 to 2014-2015, while real median income fell roughly 6.5 percent, according to Paul Friga of ABC Consulting.

plausible 6y ago

For a while I thought it was about bureaucracy, but it's just someone annoyed by seeing non-whites at American universities. Nothing to see here.

linguae 6y ago

As someone who has planned on returning to grad school this fall to finish my PhD in computer science in hopes of becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university, I am worried about the future of the occupation of being a university professor, particularly from the standpoint of being able to do research. One of the things I wonder about the post-COVID-19 world is what's going to happen to research as a career, whether it's in academia or in industry. In computer science I've noticed these two trends occurring in the past 30 years: 1. Industry has largely moved away from funding long-term blue-sky research, increasingly shifting toward short-term, product-driven research projects. We have moved from places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers had a large degree of freedom to places like Google today where researchers are assigned to product teams (see the paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" which describes how research at Google is operated: https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/ https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/). 2. Academia has its own challenges: (1) the competition for a professorship due to the fact there are more PhD graduates than there are professorships, (2) the competitive environment for obtaining research grants from the NSF, and (3) the increased reliance on adjunct faculty members, who don't have tenure. The economic effects of this COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly lead to universities reducing their hiring. Some universities may even face closure. The sudden shift to online teaching may also have permanent effects on the future of university education. I believe that there are many opportunities for students that will become available if online education becomes the new normal, especially if online education leads to reducing the cost of a university education, which is a serious problem in the United States given the student loan crisis. However, I'm concerned that a move toward online education will accelerate the trend of adjunctization occurring across academia and may even lead to the concept of tenure disappearing at all but the most competitive schools. I believe places like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard will emerge from the post-COVID-19 world just fine. I also believe that public research universities like UC Berkeley and University of Washington will emerge fine. But what about regional comprehensive universities such as the California State University system? What about small private universities that don't have the prestige of places like Caltech or Harvey Mudd? It's these types of universities that will face the most pressures to adapt to a world of compelling online educational choices. I'd like to still be able to pursue a career in research, ideally with autonomy and the ability to pursue long-term projects, but between the trends that have been occurring for the past 30 years as well as the challenges of a post-COVID-19 world, I might not be able to pursue such a career.

plumeria 6y ago

Curious to know what people here think about industrial PhD programs.

liveoneggs 6y ago

> ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating > Before their inevitable withdrawal... > ...even larger pool of likely dropouts... rambling mishmash of concepts and overt racism gets in the way of complaining about tuition and crass lack of support for students during COVID here. Oh well.

plausible 6y ago
It's like they couldn't resist saying that those non-white students are inherently less performant. "They're condemned to failure if they get in (look at their slightly lower grades), so it's better not to give them an opportunity at all!" Their barely contained despise, hatred and anger bleed through the lines. It's funny how decades of racial segregation were simply ignored, almost like diversity initiatives popped out of nowhere in a society that has always provided equal opportunities.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

I'll zoom in on the diversity point, but I realise it's not the whole focus of the article. Seems to me the real point here is both blindingly obvious, and for some reason never discussed. Education is a pipeline, and everyone is obsessing over the final stage, forgetting the rest. It's short-term thinking that misses the real problems. If you want your society to produce successful university graduates from all demographics, you need to ensure all demographics have access to quality pre-university education. As I understand it, this simply isn't the case in the US today. No-one seems to have any interest in improving the state of affairs. (Perhaps because it's less glamorous than talking about universities?) As it stands, the left-leaning suggestion is to explicitly weight the universities' admissions criteria to ensure an increased number of disadvantaged candidates are able to gain admission, despite falling short of the usual academic requirements (branded positive discrimination). A disproportionate number then fail in their studies, as the article says. The right-leaning suggestion is to do nothing at all, as far as I can tell. Neither is a solution. Solve the pipeline problem. Invest seriously in pre-university education. I'm continually surprised that articles on the topic don't even mention this in passing. Disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not an academic, I'm just a random muppet on the Internet.

MyHypatia 6y ago
I agree that the needed work (and hardest work) is access to quality pre-university education. That being said, I find it bizarre that we fret over whether minority applicants are given an unfair boost, while at the same time allowing legacy admissions and athletic preferance admissions to continue. Both of these boost applicants who otherwise would not make it through. We don't fret too much when a spot is taken by a wealthy legacy admit or obscure sport admit, yet we have multiple lawsuits and court cases if the spot is taken by a racial minority. John Hopkins University ended legacy admissions and I applaud them. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-ended-legacy-admissions-johns-hopkins/605131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-end...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I'm in the UK. I've never heard of 'legacy admissions' happening here, nor admissions in return for dropping money on a university. I get the impression from The Guardian that these things are quite unique to America, and really don't occur in the UK. [0] [1] [2] Similarly I've never heard of someone being admitted to a UK university for the purpose of getting them to complete in university sports. Sports are funded by universities, but generally, few people really care about university sports, the way it should be. It may help in admissions if you have non-academic achievements on top your academic ones, but sports aren't given the special status that they are in US universities. On the race point, the only lawsuit I'm aware of is the one against Harvard for discriminating against Asian applicants. (There's no question that Harvard have higher grade-requirements for Asian applicants.) The courts decided the Harvard admissions policy wasn't unconstitutional. [4] My understanding is that if a similar approach were taken in hiring decisions, that would be extremely illegal. If you'll excuse a tangent: we also don't have 'campus police' in the UK, for which I'm thankful. Universities hire security guards, the way business parks do. The American system is to have police officers on the payroll of a university, expected to follow orders from the university's power-structure [5]. Deans should not be able to issue orders to police officers. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-admissions-process-white-privilege https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-ad... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-schools-ivy-league-legacy-admissions-harvard-wealthier-whiter https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/us-admissions-scandal-oxbridge https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruling-admissions-racial-bias-asian-americans-latest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli... [5] https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police" https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police"

Shinobi881 6y ago

Is this about how D&I efforts are ruining higher ed or about higher ed being a "Ponzi Scheme"? The conversation is starkly different here vs. the Disqus conversation on the article page. Also, authoring "The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture." makes me question the author's motive/bias.