12 ms·

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself? The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we'll get back to something sustainable and affordable.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
matchbok 7y ago
Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It's so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for "residence life", plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.
- irishcoffee 7y ago
  The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k/year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k/year to attend instead of 30k...
  - lumost 7y ago
    One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts. Why weren't state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents? Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r...). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.
      - wincy 7y ago
        If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator. There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat. (Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
- hnburnsy 7y ago
  My anctedot... My daughter at college has three academic advisors; a general advisor, honors advisor, and her chosen major advisor. Geeesh.
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    And how much "advice" to they give? When I went, the only time you had to talk to your advisor, was once a semester for them to rubber stamp your approval for major-only classes (which the official advisors would defer to in-major professors). Beyond that, you were free to talk to advisors on an as needed basis. There role was essentially to be a primary point of contact for students. Why shouldn't a student have multiple advisors. If she has a problem/question with her honors program, ask the honors advisor. If she has a general administrative question, go to the general advisor. Our entire math department was served by two advisors who likely also had non advising administrative duties. My honors advisors were just the main faculty of my honors program. I don't think I ever spoke to my official CS advisor.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      I found my CS advisor repeatedly very helpful. I would not have graduated in four years without her advice. So, just because you didn't get value out of it doesn't mean that's true for all students.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    As a professor who is also a major advisor, I cost nothing, because I'm not paid separately to advise. On the other hand, given the corresponding emphasis on training and evaluation of advising (not much, although our department and college are working to get better at it), my advising is probably worth about what I'm paid for it.
- MattGaiser 7y ago
  How many students? As residence is basically a hotel with 4000-10,000 students, so 6 people seems low if anything.
- burfog 7y ago
  How exactly is it "so easy to get huge loans" for college? My kid needs that, but we see only $5500 available for the first year. Did you instead mean loans that the parent takes on, perhaps as cosigner? I'm seeing nothing beyond $5500 that can be obtained by a student.
  - jimbokun 7y ago
    I think if you're low income, you qualify for a lot more loans.
runawaybottle 7y ago
I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable. No sympathy here for the college industry.
- vidanay 7y ago
  Gotta pay for those basketball and football programs somehow. (Yes, SOME athletics programs are net positive - most are not)
  - mgav 7y ago
    I didn't realize that. Do you have a source for this, please?
    - vidanay 7y ago
      This article is a few years old, but I don't think the situation has changed radically. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
    - notyourwork 7y ago
      It depends on the school which means maybe some schools should not have sports teams? How crazy is it to think that a school should be focused on education and not go into debt to finance extracurriculars. Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - krn1p4n1c 7y ago
    Big sports inside universities are usually structured as a separate corporation for maximum tax effect.
  - czinck 7y ago
clairity 7y ago
maybe the dept of education should stipulate that 80% of college operating budgets be direct teaching/research costs, lest their fed loan largess be taken away. and progressively tax endowments, particularly targeting above a threshold of $100K/student or something like that. currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-oriented institution.
- johncalvinyoung 7y ago
  Honestly, those endowments are part of why some schools like my alma mater are able to offer a no-loan commitment for need-based aid. Now, those calculations are still awfully rough on many middle class families, they tend to overestimate family contributions, but they're still really helpful for a lot of students.
  - clairity 7y ago
    that's a tried-and-true sales trick--inflate the price and then offer a discount. calibrate your discount to extract maximum economic value from each customer individually. it's best if schools have to compete on price vs. value, and for students to leave school with a little debt to know the value of what they bought. it's when both price and debt are unconstrained that you need such tricks in the first place.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Relatively few people can go to a school with endowment subsidized tuition. The ivys only started doing it because it looked bad for them to be sitting on piles of money and only allowing wealthy elites to attend.
- secabeen 7y ago
  Which of these expenses do you think they should eliminate? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
  - 7y ago
sandworm101 7y ago
>> The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans This is where the education industry can learn from the law schools. They are certainly ivory towers, but part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach. My first year contracts prof was also the school dean. Law school deans remain largely 'first among many' rather than a separate profession, the 'professional administrators'.
- wtvanhest 7y ago
  Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. Only a small percentage of law students end up at big law where the salaries can support the debt load, but almost everyone leaves law school with a mountain of debt.
  - OldHand2018 7y ago
    > Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. They also are some of the best too. My wife went to a top-tier school and I remember the controversy when it was discovered that almost 50% of the tuition was actually given to the medical school. The justification was that they were a top school, they would charge what the other top schools charged, and they had a moral imperative to make the medical school as cheap as they could make it. They also guaranteed (in writing) that if any graduate had difficulty paying off student loans, the alumni network would step in and make the payments.
    - wtvanhest 7y ago
      Top-tier law schools get the majority of big law slots and are usually a pretty good balance. Anything outside the top 8-10 law schools and the % of graduates who go on to big law is VERY, VERY, VERY small.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach At my Uni, the administrators taught bullshit courses on personal development et cetera. Law schools have a unique culture. Teaching requirements are a product of their "first among equals" attitude, not a cause. Porting the mechanism without the culture is unlikely to solve the problem.
basch 7y ago
>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too." tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.
- DataDaoDe 7y ago
  I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/ https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge. To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out. Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.
jseliger 7y ago
If you want a book that will further erode sympathy towards colleges, try Paying For the Party https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
amiga_500 7y ago
No, it's led by the other end. Funding is created for college places. Enough to "educate" 30% of people. People start to go. Employers for very basic jobs notice that 50% of applicants have degrees. They stipulate on their next job advertisement "degree required". The bar has been raised. You now cannot get an interview without a degree in many jobs. You have to get a degree. The financiers start to loan more and more for this now essential ticket. Universities start charging more. Student's entire working lives are financialised, as the debt will take a lifetime to repay. University is not set by the cost to deliver, it's set by the available credit. Same for housing. But hey keep on focusing on your "right to free speech" that every single other nation has but without a brutal police force that Europeans look upon with horror.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

matchbok 7y ago

Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It's so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for "residence life", plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.

irishcoffee 7y ago
The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k/year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k/year to attend instead of 30k...
- lumost 7y ago
  One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts. Why weren't state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents? Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r...). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.
    - wincy 7y ago
      If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator. There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat. (Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
hnburnsy 7y ago
My anctedot... My daughter at college has three academic advisors; a general advisor, honors advisor, and her chosen major advisor. Geeesh.
- gizmo686 7y ago
  And how much "advice" to they give? When I went, the only time you had to talk to your advisor, was once a semester for them to rubber stamp your approval for major-only classes (which the official advisors would defer to in-major professors). Beyond that, you were free to talk to advisors on an as needed basis. There role was essentially to be a primary point of contact for students. Why shouldn't a student have multiple advisors. If she has a problem/question with her honors program, ask the honors advisor. If she has a general administrative question, go to the general advisor. Our entire math department was served by two advisors who likely also had non advising administrative duties. My honors advisors were just the main faculty of my honors program. I don't think I ever spoke to my official CS advisor.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    I found my CS advisor repeatedly very helpful. I would not have graduated in four years without her advice. So, just because you didn't get value out of it doesn't mean that's true for all students.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  As a professor who is also a major advisor, I cost nothing, because I'm not paid separately to advise. On the other hand, given the corresponding emphasis on training and evaluation of advising (not much, although our department and college are working to get better at it), my advising is probably worth about what I'm paid for it.
MattGaiser 7y ago
How many students? As residence is basically a hotel with 4000-10,000 students, so 6 people seems low if anything.
burfog 7y ago
How exactly is it "so easy to get huge loans" for college? My kid needs that, but we see only $5500 available for the first year. Did you instead mean loans that the parent takes on, perhaps as cosigner? I'm seeing nothing beyond $5500 that can be obtained by a student.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  I think if you're low income, you qualify for a lot more loans.

runawaybottle 7y ago

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable. No sympathy here for the college industry.

vidanay 7y ago
Gotta pay for those basketball and football programs somehow. (Yes, SOME athletics programs are net positive - most are not)
- mgav 7y ago
  I didn't realize that. Do you have a source for this, please?
  - vidanay 7y ago
    This article is a few years old, but I don't think the situation has changed radically. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
  - notyourwork 7y ago
    It depends on the school which means maybe some schools should not have sports teams? How crazy is it to think that a school should be focused on education and not go into debt to finance extracurriculars. Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- krn1p4n1c 7y ago
  Big sports inside universities are usually structured as a separate corporation for maximum tax effect.
- czinck 7y ago

clairity 7y ago

maybe the dept of education should stipulate that 80% of college operating budgets be direct teaching/research costs, lest their fed loan largess be taken away. and progressively tax endowments, particularly targeting above a threshold of $100K/student or something like that. currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-oriented institution.

johncalvinyoung 7y ago
Honestly, those endowments are part of why some schools like my alma mater are able to offer a no-loan commitment for need-based aid. Now, those calculations are still awfully rough on many middle class families, they tend to overestimate family contributions, but they're still really helpful for a lot of students.
- clairity 7y ago
  that's a tried-and-true sales trick--inflate the price and then offer a discount. calibrate your discount to extract maximum economic value from each customer individually. it's best if schools have to compete on price vs. value, and for students to leave school with a little debt to know the value of what they bought. it's when both price and debt are unconstrained that you need such tricks in the first place.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Relatively few people can go to a school with endowment subsidized tuition. The ivys only started doing it because it looked bad for them to be sitting on piles of money and only allowing wealthy elites to attend.
secabeen 7y ago
Which of these expenses do you think they should eliminate? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
- 7y ago

sandworm101 7y ago

>> The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans This is where the education industry can learn from the law schools. They are certainly ivory towers, but part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach. My first year contracts prof was also the school dean. Law school deans remain largely 'first among many' rather than a separate profession, the 'professional administrators'.

wtvanhest 7y ago
Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. Only a small percentage of law students end up at big law where the salaries can support the debt load, but almost everyone leaves law school with a mountain of debt.
- OldHand2018 7y ago
  > Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. They also are some of the best too. My wife went to a top-tier school and I remember the controversy when it was discovered that almost 50% of the tuition was actually given to the medical school. The justification was that they were a top school, they would charge what the other top schools charged, and they had a moral imperative to make the medical school as cheap as they could make it. They also guaranteed (in writing) that if any graduate had difficulty paying off student loans, the alumni network would step in and make the payments.
  - wtvanhest 7y ago
    Top-tier law schools get the majority of big law slots and are usually a pretty good balance. Anything outside the top 8-10 law schools and the % of graduates who go on to big law is VERY, VERY, VERY small.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach At my Uni, the administrators taught bullshit courses on personal development et cetera. Law schools have a unique culture. Teaching requirements are a product of their "first among equals" attitude, not a cause. Porting the mechanism without the culture is unlikely to solve the problem.

basch 7y ago

>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too." tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.

DataDaoDe 7y ago
I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/ https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge. To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out. Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.

jseliger 7y ago

If you want a book that will further erode sympathy towards colleges, try Paying For the Party https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

amiga_500 7y ago

No, it's led by the other end. Funding is created for college places. Enough to "educate" 30% of people. People start to go. Employers for very basic jobs notice that 50% of applicants have degrees. They stipulate on their next job advertisement "degree required". The bar has been raised. You now cannot get an interview without a degree in many jobs. You have to get a degree. The financiers start to loan more and more for this now essential ticket. Universities start charging more. Student's entire working lives are financialised, as the debt will take a lifetime to repay. University is not set by the cost to deliver, it's set by the available credit. Same for housing. But hey keep on focusing on your "right to free speech" that every single other nation has but without a brutal police force that Europeans look upon with horror.