9 ms·

Modern universities are an exercise in insanity (2018)

120 points by elsewhen 6y ago

zamalek 6y ago
The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. That's a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college - which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so forth). There is no justification for the cost, it's a very expensive printing press. While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  Can I ask where you attended? Honest question. I attended a large well known public university and even though most of it was wasteful, I did learn plenty I wasn’t aware of before.
  - zamalek 6y ago
    I went to the University of Pretoria. More than happy to name and shame. At the time, both their IT department and administrative systems were in shambles. We had to calculate our own class schedules (which is all good and well), but we found that an easy class (that most had already completed in high school) conflicted with the only (I really do mean only) hard and interesting class. The easy class lecturer demanded attendance, the dean did nothing, and we were told to "fail it and retake it the following year." A hostile business; not an institution of learning. To make matters worse, the degree was supposed to be game development. On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). On the other hand, having already written games, I miraculously identified that designing websites wasn't exactly what you'd expect from a game development degree.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      >>On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). Just wanted to throw in my two cents - I know it's uncommon, but not impossible. Where I work(Ubisoft) the anti-crunch culture is incredibly strong, to a point where we're told that if you see someone doing overtime make sure it gets reported higher up as no one should be doing it and if anyone is then there are problems elsewhere(after all we have tonnes of producers specifically to make sure it doesn't happen). I personally feel like I have a great work life balance, work from 8-4 every day, never on the weekends, and I'm a lead programmer.
      - zamalek 6y ago
        That is really awesome to hear!
- kgin 6y ago
  In many industries, a college degree (especially from a "name" school) is essentially used as an outsourced HR screening. It's not about specific knowledge, but being able to start the process knowing that this person has certain attributes that impressed the admissions department of a selective school enough to let them in. Therefore, the HR department of company X can start with a base level of vetting already done.
  - zamalek 6y ago
    At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that). If you're talking about expertise, I've got two teams with 80% degrees. I spend far more time mentoring people with degrees. People without degrees tend to spend a few minutes asking questions, after which they become autonomous and possibly come back with really meaty questions. People with degrees tend to require pair programming. Definitely not a rule, but a trend. Degrees are a valuable signal, but they are treated as a rule.
    - lalaland1125 6y ago
      > At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that). The most "difficult" part of college is paying for it (or "getting" your parents to pay for it.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I have studied computer science as master in Germany (Diplom) with the best possible final exam score (1,0) in databases, distributed systems, etc. That didn't help me very much with my career. I've worked on the side in startups. That experience helped me found my first VC funded startup and helped my career later on as CTO in several companies. I'm now working as a CTO coach and looking back, my university days didn't have much impact, if any at all. Have I've learned anything useful? Yes. Was the outcome worth 6 years? No. I would have learned the same things watching excellent Youtube (Standford, MIT, ...) videos for one year. EY [1] has shown several years ago that university had no impact on the career of their employees and dropped that requirement. As someone who hired and managed many people I never looked at university degrees. And I never saw a difference. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...
  - linza 6y ago
    I work in hiring and people/performance management. In my experience, people with a formal education in average outperform the ones without. There are outliers on either side of course. We investigate the reasons for this but so far couldn't pin point it to anything specific. We too don't look at degrees when hiring, but we do see a correlation of education and promotions.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      It's the reading and writing. Highschool doesn't teach reading like it used to. They are getting promoted because they are better at learning and then expressing themselves on paper, something all proper university programs still teach. Ask the average highschool grad to read a 100-page manual and thier eyes glaze over. But a BA history major could probably do it over lunch.
      - linza 6y ago
        It's not that simple, but it could be a factor, in my experience. It's probably not one single thing. Overly generalized, formal education seems to give one more self awareness. Lesser educated peers overestimate their abilities which helps them getting hired and be successful through the first few years. Then a promotion would require a different skill set and they cannot appreciate the complexity of learning it, so they fail. Peers with a degree often are not confident enough, and overthink. But they can adapt quicker.
- avmich 6y ago
  > The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. I didn't think colleges are necessary, then a met a person who after a high school really didn't reach his potential. So I concluded colleges would ensure almost everybody "woke up" to looking into world. Then I met another person, who decided to skip college, for material reasons; but who's comfortably at an undergraduate level of knowledge, if not more. Now I'm not sure. Seems like there is risk... both ways...
- ghi5goio3qno4i3 6y ago
  > The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. Somewhat. At least in our company, my friends in HR say that it's not as really a hard requirement to be successful at the job itself. Customer help desk doesn't need a bachelors. But it might cut down the number of resumes they get from hundreds to manageable number that that they can actually review in a reasonable time frame. It's also why it's an easily waived requirement if you get referred by a current employee (it's also how I got the interview at my current job). Wouldn't surprise me if there's others using the same strategy.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam. Then you either didn't go to a proper school, or you didn't properly take advantage of the time. I went to an oldschool university (in canada) followed by a US law school. I could have slacked off an not learned much, just enough to pass, but I leveraged the resources and learned a huge amount. I used this knowledge every day, and in fields totally unrelated to my degrees. I had to recently read up on some radio frequency stuff for work. I was channeling my astronomy 202 lectures. That class was an outside elective taught by a PHD in a huge classroom, what some people would call a waste of my time. But 20+ years later I still have the knowledge and it makes me a better employee today.
- goatlover 6y ago
  At one point the idea was universities were supposed to produce well-rounded citizens, exposing them to liberal arts, different points of view and what not. But now it seems more to get a good job, which calls into question the entire setup. Wouldn't trade and tech schools or internships be better preparation for a career if that's all society cares about now?
- deanmkenzey 6y ago
  > everyone who is in charge went to one This is an illusion. There are of course people in charge with a degree, but most people I know who have a successful business don't have a degree. They even often dropped out of school because they were too ambitious for wasting their time there. I do see heaps of people with a degree applying for shit jobs though. But that's what most people and parents don't want to hear of.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I feel sorry for you. I got a great deal out of my college experience. It was time and money very well spent. I never would have learned that stuff otherwise, or even have known what to learn.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. Not exactly. I can think of a certain executive working on products at the the Intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology that never graduated from college. But let me share with you the dirty secret of recruiting in America: the college degree is used as a substitute for the IQ test, which is widely believed to be illegal. Which is why college dropout income looks much closer to college grads than those who graduated high school but never went to college -- passing the entrance exams demonstrates something about a person all on its own, regardless of classes taken after. Not that I think something like a CS degree is worthless; there's a ton of useful stuff in there I use on a daily basis. The case is less clear for say, all of business school.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I think the root of the problem is the student loan system. You can get a student loan without any consideration for your creditworthiness, with the general compromise that the debt is rather hard to discharge. This system makes sense because the loan is supposed to provide for an investment in your future. But for any course of study that does not measurably improve your future earning potential, this premise completely falls over. Young students know this, but it seems not to deter them, and nobody ends up winning except the universities that collect their tuition. As far as I’ve ever known, the primary objective of the student loan system was to facilitate social mobility, not subsidize the existence of humanities departments. Because it’s really hard to argue that it’s achieving the former in its current state. I also question how seriously a lot of young students take the obligations of having a student loan. I think it would be condescending to write it off entirely to a lack of maturity, but I really don’t get the impression that most of them are fully considering what the costs actually are. If you cut of the never ending supply of free money, I’m sure the universities would have to put more consideration into delivering value.
- avmich 6y ago
  > I think the root of the problem is the student loan system. I think if you'd solve this problem, you find there are other problems. I don't think loans are the root of the problems, but just one of them. One can try solving problems one by one, or approach them together; I think a more complex review is helpful.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    If you based student loan lending on the “creditworthiness” of the degree the loan was going to pay for, then you’d at least get rid of a lot of the problems that are caused by the student loan system. I guess my hypothesis is that the problems with the very expensive and economically worthless degrees are in fact created by that system. I have a lot of issues with the more economically valuable degrees too, but they do at least leave their victims with a highly increased earning potential. So I’d say the system is still mostly working as intended in that case.
avmich 6y ago
> This conversation would improve greatly if less folks wrote long lists of their complaints about universities and more folks wrote long lists of ideas on how to improve them. It's not a questions of "where we want to be" - there are examples of good education systems which can be used. It's rather a question of "how to get there" - and here America has to figure out the path from here to there, which isn't obvious to some, before it can improve things.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  >> America has to figure out the path from here to there, which isn't obvious to some, before it can improve things. Much like healthcare, there are incumbents who are winning big along the way. I think a lot of the solutions are quite obvious -- it is just there are people who would come out on the losing end and they fight it. And from what I can see, the American people are not sufficiently angry about it to really make it happen (e.g., as they do for more charged wedge issues.)
glangdale 6y ago
I'm not sure I buy the idea that a no-name setup can get away with paying adjuncts to tutor the same as universities can pay them to teach. Even though the prospect of jumping to tenure-track is increasingly remote, I think there is an element of wishful thinking with a lot of adjuncts hanging around the university semester after semester. I'm not sure the magic applies to No Name Brand Tutoring School. That being said, universities are preposterously top-heavy and loaded with insane numbers of overheads - academic superstars who don't teach, layer upon layer of admin (Australian universities are stuffed to the gills with managers and marketers and social media consultants and Deputy Vice Chancellors In Charge of Being Someone's Mate, etc), and lifestyle stuff for the students.
cashsterling 6y ago
I agree... the tuition cost of modern colleges is insane. I went to Cal St. back in the 90's... total cost was under 10k USD including books. I paid for a lot of it working construction and summer internships. I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not "10x the tuition cost" better. I went to Carnegie Mellon for grad school... no tuition plus a livable stipend. Pittsburgh was an inexpensive and fun city to live in as a student. It was a great experience. Nobody cared where I got my BS after I finished grad school. Thing is... now even Cal State in-state tuition is so much more expensive than it used to be. The situation really sucks.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not "10x the tuition cost" better. I went to Caltech in the 70's. I compared course catalogs with Arizona State U. Required undergrad class at CIT were grad level classes at ASU. When I worked at Boeing I found my BS math abilities were at the same level as those with a Masters. As for books, at CIT many of the textbooks required for a class were not actually used. The prof would present his own curriculum, with the class textbook there just for background. To be fair, I didn't take the actual courses at ASU, I just compared the course catalog for topics covered.
  - cashsterling 6y ago
    Yeah... no dig intended against Caltech or MIT. They definitely push their student a lot harder and more consistently than I was pushed in many of my classes in undergrad. I wanted to go to Caltech or Harvey Mudd College out of HS but didn't have the means. I had the privilege to work at JPL for about 3 years and worked with a lot of folks from Caltech and MIT in that time... all brilliant and wonderful people.
zhdc1 6y ago
Universities are and always have been expensive. This cost was hidden in the US and a lot of Western European countries by extremely generous government support. Now that this is going away, more so in some places than others, it sounds like people are suffering from sticker shock. Is this a fair indictment of the modern university? There are definitely ways to lower the total cost of higher education, but how much I don't know. Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that there's anything ok with 50k-70K annual tuition. However, there is a spending floor that has to be met to fund an "ok" no-thrills research university. Examples: KIT, a very good research university in Germany, spends about 35K EUR per student. I wasn't able to find a source, but I remember reading that the University of Maryland in the states spends about 20-25K USD per student. Fu et al., 2019 quotes about 390K NTD (~13K USD) as the average per student spending in Taiwan.
- grecy 6y ago
  > Universities are and always have been expensive Why are they any more expensive than High School? In fact, in Australia until the 80s University was free in the same way High School is free. Many people are angry that it still isn't. And of course it's still free in that way in more than a few developed countries.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    I am guessing professors salaries and a lot of university infrastructure.
  - zhdc1 6y ago
    Free in the sense that the costs were borne by the government and not by the student. I'm totally ok with that. However, now that countries are shifting higher education costs off of their books and people are finding out that universities are, in fact, very expensive to run, it's not fair to blame the university.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    In some cases, supply and demand. In the early 2000s, One of my professors in my MBA program made ~$250,000 USD per year for teaching 3 classes per yer, plus whatever else he did. My understanding is that if you want to attract & retain talent of his caliber, you have to compete with they salary that person can make in the business world, too.
laurentdc 6y ago
I paid zero for my university since EU, but I still kind of feel scammed out of five years of my life. I got a degree only because I was young and family/friends pushed me into it since "that's what everyone does". The networking thing, meh. Maybe if you attend the top 1% of universities that have some barrier of entry for people who're actually talented/determined to achieve a goal and care about what they do. Or expensive private ones with industry connections. Which feels a bit like "easy mode" but whatever :) But in the average public university most students you meet are just coasting through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real life. Professors just don't care and they never have time. Even the job placement events, it's all a bullshit perpetuating machine.
- tgv 6y ago
  I went to a normal European uni as well, although it did cost money (inflation corrected tuition fees were around €700 or so, and there was a room to rent and food to buy; but many courses used a syllabus written by the teachers and printed by the uni, costing a few € each, only a few required an expensive book). Nothing that should make me feel scammed. The networking thing is real, though. It's not everywhere, but if you join the right student society (Am. fraternity), it definitely exists. I worked a (long) while as a researcher and teacher at university, and networking via student societies only seems to have grown in that period. It never felt to me as useless, as killing time or delaying life. It taught me skills I don't think I could have picked up by myself.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > But in the average public university most students you meet are just coasting through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real life. Perhaps that's an unintended consequence of it being free, just like high school. If you're paying the bill, it's a lot less likely you'll be coasting through.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    European countries with free public universities also usually have private, paid colleges. In practice, those are where you really coast through.
ars 6y ago
Universities waste way too much money on fancy food, extravagant halls, amazing experiences. It's like an amusement park for adults. Go walk into one and look at all the things that have nothing to do with learning. Go count how many fancy restaurants they have. People go there for the experience, and it costs. They should instead be about learning. Have your experiences later in life, or just independently instead of expecting the university to do it for you.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  But for a certain kind of person the fancy food etc is the learning. It's a social environment for making social and professional connections and (often) a life partner. Sometimes there's some academic work too. In reality there's no such thing as "university." There are different experiences and different goals for different demographics. They all happen in the same environment, but there will always be [double figured number] of social, economic, and political games going on at the same time - sometimes in the same classes - and the demographics involved in each will often be barely aware of each other.
tkgally 6y ago
The coronavirus crisis and the enforced shift to online teaching might very well lead to major changes in higher education. At the university where I work in Japan, we began teaching all of our classes online a month and a half ago using Zoom. I don't know anyone, teacher or student, who thought that they would prefer online classes, but now that we have been doing it for a while it's clear there are advantages. Perhaps most significant is the fact that teachers and students do not need to live near campus. The students in my undergraduate classes are scattered throughout Japan, and my graduate seminar includes students in Thailand and Indonesia who were unable to enter Japan when travel was shut down in early April. Some of our teachers are also stuck outside the country and are conducting their classes from overseas. Overall, classes seem to be going surprisingly smoothly, and students are able to participate equally in class discussions regardless of their location. What the author of this post presented as a cost-comparison exercise—get a group of people who want to study the same thing and hire a teacher—is much more feasible when the students and teacher do not have to be in the same geographic area. It will be interesting to see how such possibilities change higher education in the years ahead.
_nalply 6y ago
Labor has changed and is still changing. It's getting more and more difficult to get a job that pays. Meritocracy? Meh. It's bullshit being peddled to shut us up. It's just connections and luck. Even the able ones have to be in the right place at the right time and need to jump through a million hoops. It feels like a never-ending captcha session. Bullshit at universities is backpressure from the labor market. Backed up bullshit spills over to education at all levels. Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of the end of the labor era. And now that we can see this laid bare clearer and clearer: What can parents do today for their children? Education doesn't have the primary goal to procure a job. This was never really the thing. And even at this education is failing more and more. So what needs to be done for children and young adults? What is the goal of education? As a father I have been thinking about this for years. I don't have an answer for the material needs of the generation of my descendants. However I know that people need a meaning of life especially if they are poor. I am trying to teach my children to look out for their own meaning of life and to work hard to attain it by themselves. I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the people when there's not enough labor for everybody. And then? What can they do if they don't have a job? That's what I am trying to find out with my children growing up. Humanities are important to create meaning. However one thing is sure: If I detect bullshit permeating an university I am not going to suggest an expensive course to my children!
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the people when there's not enough labor for everybody. There is a very clear answer to this, it's just that people who are not labour are trying very hard to avoid giving it. We should all be working far less for the same money we are getting today. As the productivity of work increases, hours worked should be going down, without affecting wages. Right now, the benefits of increased productivity are all going into profits, that is, into the hands of the very few. We have been here before, and our great-grandfathers and great-grand-grandmothers have fought for reducing the wrok week many times before, successfully. We will probably soon have to fight this fight again.
  - _nalply 6y ago
dorkwood 6y ago
My bachelor's degree was basically a scam. It was from a well-known university in Australia, too. Teachers who barely knew anything about what they were teaching, outdated course material, the lowest bar imaginable to get a passing grade. At a guess, I'd say that 99% of the graduates would not have had the skills to be employed in their chosen field upon completing the degree. I only stuck it out through the whole thing because I was a dumb kid who didn't know any better. Now I'll be paying off the debt for the rest of my life.
- to1y 6y ago
  Are you non-citizen? Would you mind sharing the degree and the amount?
- isubasinghe 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what university did you go to?
  - slantaclaus 6y ago
    Let me guess for him: James Cook University perhaps?
  - dorkwood 6y ago
    The University of Newcastle.
symplee 6y ago
Does anyone have an actual cost breakdown of every expense that goes into running a university? It would be great to see this for any major private college, and/or a public university. In most of these comment sections I see speculation about why universities are so expensive. But have never seen the hard data to back it up. Is it really the luxury dorms? The bloated administration? etc... Anyone have the real numbers? And how has the budget breakdown changed over time?
PeterStuer 6y ago
In the EU I paid 250 Euro per year, so 1.000 Euro total for my graduate degree. The US system is insane. Why do you tolerate such obvious racketeering?
- flowerbeater 6y ago
  Just curious, do you think what you paid is the actual cost to provide you that education?
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    No. Tuition fees is just one of 5 money streams that the university relies on. Te others being Research grants, Service provisioning (contract research mostly), subsidies and Assets & Investments.
withinboredom 6y ago
I transferred from a mid-west university to an east coast university in the US. When I got there and was scheduling I couldn't take any of the advanced classes I was supposed to for my major, why? I'd never taken College Algebra, despite taking three semesters of Calculus, Computer Science. At this new school, College Algebra was a requirement that could not be skipped. I wasted an entire semester taking electives and Algebra. I was pretty pissed.
notaphilosopher 6y ago
I went bankrupt around 2016 and am homeless (vehicle dwelling), yet have ~$9000 USD in student loan debt that wasn't dischargeable or forgivable. I spent over $40k on a degree I cannot use as I am now considered disabled (SSDI). Navient is still after me and checks my credit every few months looking to pounce. I bet they'll reach into my online-only bank account and take the little money that I need to eat, buy gas, medications, and pay copays. It took me over 7 years and a lawyer to get SSDI ($1300), and it can be taken away every 2 years. If you're poor or disabled in America, you're automatically a criminal trying to steal and so austerity crumbs are justified.. and delay, hoping you'll just give up or die. For 9 years, I lived on $199/month for food and $149 in cash. There is no out for me because 99.99999% of Americans are either too comfortable, learned helpless cowards, and/or too ignorant to understand how bad we have it and how much we're being screwed. There will be no rebellion even though a calm but determined march of 5 million people to the seats of power could overwhelm any resistance and remove the corruption. The key problem is endurance by separating church and wealth and mass-media and state for the future. Without fixing corruption driven by the elites above the system, nothing can change.. and not preventing them from stealing power some other way again is only a temporary, pyrrhic victory. Work stoppages are reactionary temper-tantrums seeking a few more crumbs from the master. Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are all pointless virtue-signaling onanisms. Why pick rapist 1 or rapist 2.. presently, voting is accenting sheepishly to an inverted totalitarian, pluto-kleptocratic empire, not republican psephocracy. Be like George Carlin and not so.. maybe let's (assuming you're American) dent the universe and fix this bitch.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  Firstly, i'm sorry to hear about your situation. I have met so many people with similar stories about struggles when I lived in the city. I am curious though -- why aren't more people more angry given how desperately so many people have their backs against a en economic wall? Do you think the Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are just appeasement campaigns to make people think they have a choice? How is it people do not see through it eventually? (side note: i've been voting in the US for 21yrs and have only once found a candidate i truly felt inspired to vote for (Bernie))
- vxNsr 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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jerome-jh 6y ago
With the low interest rates, everything that requires a loan sees over-inflation. I think this is what is happening with university tuition.
akater 6y ago
There's a fairly well-known 2018 book on why education (higher and lower) is the way it is now: Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money”
econcon 6y ago
People often forget that one of the biggest value of having degree is the optics that comes with it. Basically if a person has spent time getting a degree this shows a important value - risk averseness. Another value it shows is - being subservient. You are allowing some professor or institution to have significant control over you well past age 18 as an adult. Risk averseness shows that you'll not be duping the company or stealing their secrets and starting a new company as a competitor and you prefer having a stable salary than mega payoff by selling the tech of the company where you work. And being subservient means, you'll listen to all the BS magement wants and also you'll not question the authority or go against them.
- wurst_case 6y ago
  When I'm hiring, these are no the qualities I'm looking for.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
Modern Universities do not teach how to spot equal-but-opposite thoughts, concepts, arguments, and ideas. In other words, they teach students what to think, not how to think... Upon graduation, the new graduate (in addition to their college loans and degree!) has, by virtue of their education, been given a virtual "grab bag" of many small, relative, convenient truths which only relate to special circumstances and corner cases, which all have intelligent and impressive sounding lingo/jargon/buzzwords/"$2 names" attached to them, such that the graduate may then, later on in life, pick and choose from this "grab bag" and selectively apply those small relative truths to any problem (and sound very intelligent in the process!) that they or someone else may be having... ...All while missing the big picture, and/or conveniently ignoring one or more other larger, more important truths that may be present as well. (Error of Omission). When I hear minor truths, by a so-called "Academic", selectively applied to a problem or problems, I think to myself, with respect to what the speaker/writer said: "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it." (With my apologies to the Principal in Billy Madison!) Yes, it is actually possible to dumb things down while appearing smart, and the way this is done is through selective (minor) truth observation, AKA "Error Of Omission". Otherwise known as missing the big picture, putting too much attention on minutiae, making mountains out of molehills, presenting the weaker argument as the stronger, etc., etc. It happens in academic papers, it happens in the news media... "Grab Bags" of small, relative truths, but small relative truths with impressive sounding languaging around them... And yet, there are a lot of good academic papers, and education (the right education!) is valuable from many other perspectives...

120 points by elsewhen 6y ago

The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. That's a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college - which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so forth). There is no justification for the cost, it's a very expensive printing press. While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.

epicureanideal 6y ago
Can I ask where you attended? Honest question. I attended a large well known public university and even though most of it was wasteful, I did learn plenty I wasn’t aware of before.
- zamalek 6y ago
  I went to the University of Pretoria. More than happy to name and shame. At the time, both their IT department and administrative systems were in shambles. We had to calculate our own class schedules (which is all good and well), but we found that an easy class (that most had already completed in high school) conflicted with the only (I really do mean only) hard and interesting class. The easy class lecturer demanded attendance, the dean did nothing, and we were told to "fail it and retake it the following year." A hostile business; not an institution of learning. To make matters worse, the degree was supposed to be game development. On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). On the other hand, having already written games, I miraculously identified that designing websites wasn't exactly what you'd expect from a game development degree.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    >>On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). Just wanted to throw in my two cents - I know it's uncommon, but not impossible. Where I work(Ubisoft) the anti-crunch culture is incredibly strong, to a point where we're told that if you see someone doing overtime make sure it gets reported higher up as no one should be doing it and if anyone is then there are problems elsewhere(after all we have tonnes of producers specifically to make sure it doesn't happen). I personally feel like I have a great work life balance, work from 8-4 every day, never on the weekends, and I'm a lead programmer.
    - zamalek 6y ago
      That is really awesome to hear!
kgin 6y ago
In many industries, a college degree (especially from a "name" school) is essentially used as an outsourced HR screening. It's not about specific knowledge, but being able to start the process knowing that this person has certain attributes that impressed the admissions department of a selective school enough to let them in. Therefore, the HR department of company X can start with a base level of vetting already done.
- zamalek 6y ago
  At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that). If you're talking about expertise, I've got two teams with 80% degrees. I spend far more time mentoring people with degrees. People without degrees tend to spend a few minutes asking questions, after which they become autonomous and possibly come back with really meaty questions. People with degrees tend to require pair programming. Definitely not a rule, but a trend. Degrees are a valuable signal, but they are treated as a rule.
  - lalaland1125 6y ago
    > At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that). The most "difficult" part of college is paying for it (or "getting" your parents to pay for it.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I have studied computer science as master in Germany (Diplom) with the best possible final exam score (1,0) in databases, distributed systems, etc. That didn't help me very much with my career. I've worked on the side in startups. That experience helped me found my first VC funded startup and helped my career later on as CTO in several companies. I'm now working as a CTO coach and looking back, my university days didn't have much impact, if any at all. Have I've learned anything useful? Yes. Was the outcome worth 6 years? No. I would have learned the same things watching excellent Youtube (Standford, MIT, ...) videos for one year. EY [1] has shown several years ago that university had no impact on the career of their employees and dropped that requirement. As someone who hired and managed many people I never looked at university degrees. And I never saw a difference. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...
- linza 6y ago
  I work in hiring and people/performance management. In my experience, people with a formal education in average outperform the ones without. There are outliers on either side of course. We investigate the reasons for this but so far couldn't pin point it to anything specific. We too don't look at degrees when hiring, but we do see a correlation of education and promotions.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    It's the reading and writing. Highschool doesn't teach reading like it used to. They are getting promoted because they are better at learning and then expressing themselves on paper, something all proper university programs still teach. Ask the average highschool grad to read a 100-page manual and thier eyes glaze over. But a BA history major could probably do it over lunch.
    - linza 6y ago
      It's not that simple, but it could be a factor, in my experience. It's probably not one single thing. Overly generalized, formal education seems to give one more self awareness. Lesser educated peers overestimate their abilities which helps them getting hired and be successful through the first few years. Then a promotion would require a different skill set and they cannot appreciate the complexity of learning it, so they fail. Peers with a degree often are not confident enough, and overthink. But they can adapt quicker.
avmich 6y ago
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. I didn't think colleges are necessary, then a met a person who after a high school really didn't reach his potential. So I concluded colleges would ensure almost everybody "woke up" to looking into world. Then I met another person, who decided to skip college, for material reasons; but who's comfortably at an undergraduate level of knowledge, if not more. Now I'm not sure. Seems like there is risk... both ways...
ghi5goio3qno4i3 6y ago
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. Somewhat. At least in our company, my friends in HR say that it's not as really a hard requirement to be successful at the job itself. Customer help desk doesn't need a bachelors. But it might cut down the number of resumes they get from hundreds to manageable number that that they can actually review in a reasonable time frame. It's also why it's an easily waived requirement if you get referred by a current employee (it's also how I got the interview at my current job). Wouldn't surprise me if there's others using the same strategy.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam. Then you either didn't go to a proper school, or you didn't properly take advantage of the time. I went to an oldschool university (in canada) followed by a US law school. I could have slacked off an not learned much, just enough to pass, but I leveraged the resources and learned a huge amount. I used this knowledge every day, and in fields totally unrelated to my degrees. I had to recently read up on some radio frequency stuff for work. I was channeling my astronomy 202 lectures. That class was an outside elective taught by a PHD in a huge classroom, what some people would call a waste of my time. But 20+ years later I still have the knowledge and it makes me a better employee today.
goatlover 6y ago
At one point the idea was universities were supposed to produce well-rounded citizens, exposing them to liberal arts, different points of view and what not. But now it seems more to get a good job, which calls into question the entire setup. Wouldn't trade and tech schools or internships be better preparation for a career if that's all society cares about now?
deanmkenzey 6y ago
> everyone who is in charge went to one This is an illusion. There are of course people in charge with a degree, but most people I know who have a successful business don't have a degree. They even often dropped out of school because they were too ambitious for wasting their time there. I do see heaps of people with a degree applying for shit jobs though. But that's what most people and parents don't want to hear of.
WalterBright 6y ago
I feel sorry for you. I got a great deal out of my college experience. It was time and money very well spent. I never would have learned that stuff otherwise, or even have known what to learn.
jldugger 6y ago
> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary. Not exactly. I can think of a certain executive working on products at the the Intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology that never graduated from college. But let me share with you the dirty secret of recruiting in America: the college degree is used as a substitute for the IQ test, which is widely believed to be illegal. Which is why college dropout income looks much closer to college grads than those who graduated high school but never went to college -- passing the entrance exams demonstrates something about a person all on its own, regardless of classes taken after. Not that I think something like a CS degree is worthless; there's a ton of useful stuff in there I use on a daily basis. The case is less clear for say, all of business school.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I think the root of the problem is the student loan system. You can get a student loan without any consideration for your creditworthiness, with the general compromise that the debt is rather hard to discharge. This system makes sense because the loan is supposed to provide for an investment in your future. But for any course of study that does not measurably improve your future earning potential, this premise completely falls over. Young students know this, but it seems not to deter them, and nobody ends up winning except the universities that collect their tuition. As far as I’ve ever known, the primary objective of the student loan system was to facilitate social mobility, not subsidize the existence of humanities departments. Because it’s really hard to argue that it’s achieving the former in its current state. I also question how seriously a lot of young students take the obligations of having a student loan. I think it would be condescending to write it off entirely to a lack of maturity, but I really don’t get the impression that most of them are fully considering what the costs actually are. If you cut of the never ending supply of free money, I’m sure the universities would have to put more consideration into delivering value.

avmich 6y ago
> I think the root of the problem is the student loan system. I think if you'd solve this problem, you find there are other problems. I don't think loans are the root of the problems, but just one of them. One can try solving problems one by one, or approach them together; I think a more complex review is helpful.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  If you based student loan lending on the “creditworthiness” of the degree the loan was going to pay for, then you’d at least get rid of a lot of the problems that are caused by the student loan system. I guess my hypothesis is that the problems with the very expensive and economically worthless degrees are in fact created by that system. I have a lot of issues with the more economically valuable degrees too, but they do at least leave their victims with a highly increased earning potential. So I’d say the system is still mostly working as intended in that case.

avmich 6y ago

> This conversation would improve greatly if less folks wrote long lists of their complaints about universities and more folks wrote long lists of ideas on how to improve them. It's not a questions of "where we want to be" - there are examples of good education systems which can be used. It's rather a question of "how to get there" - and here America has to figure out the path from here to there, which isn't obvious to some, before it can improve things.

TuringNYC 6y ago
>> America has to figure out the path from here to there, which isn't obvious to some, before it can improve things. Much like healthcare, there are incumbents who are winning big along the way. I think a lot of the solutions are quite obvious -- it is just there are people who would come out on the losing end and they fight it. And from what I can see, the American people are not sufficiently angry about it to really make it happen (e.g., as they do for more charged wedge issues.)

glangdale 6y ago

I'm not sure I buy the idea that a no-name setup can get away with paying adjuncts to tutor the same as universities can pay them to teach. Even though the prospect of jumping to tenure-track is increasingly remote, I think there is an element of wishful thinking with a lot of adjuncts hanging around the university semester after semester. I'm not sure the magic applies to No Name Brand Tutoring School. That being said, universities are preposterously top-heavy and loaded with insane numbers of overheads - academic superstars who don't teach, layer upon layer of admin (Australian universities are stuffed to the gills with managers and marketers and social media consultants and Deputy Vice Chancellors In Charge of Being Someone's Mate, etc), and lifestyle stuff for the students.

cashsterling 6y ago

I agree... the tuition cost of modern colleges is insane. I went to Cal St. back in the 90's... total cost was under 10k USD including books. I paid for a lot of it working construction and summer internships. I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not "10x the tuition cost" better. I went to Carnegie Mellon for grad school... no tuition plus a livable stipend. Pittsburgh was an inexpensive and fun city to live in as a student. It was a great experience. Nobody cared where I got my BS after I finished grad school. Thing is... now even Cal State in-state tuition is so much more expensive than it used to be. The situation really sucks.

WalterBright 6y ago
> I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not "10x the tuition cost" better. I went to Caltech in the 70's. I compared course catalogs with Arizona State U. Required undergrad class at CIT were grad level classes at ASU. When I worked at Boeing I found my BS math abilities were at the same level as those with a Masters. As for books, at CIT many of the textbooks required for a class were not actually used. The prof would present his own curriculum, with the class textbook there just for background. To be fair, I didn't take the actual courses at ASU, I just compared the course catalog for topics covered.
- cashsterling 6y ago
  Yeah... no dig intended against Caltech or MIT. They definitely push their student a lot harder and more consistently than I was pushed in many of my classes in undergrad. I wanted to go to Caltech or Harvey Mudd College out of HS but didn't have the means. I had the privilege to work at JPL for about 3 years and worked with a lot of folks from Caltech and MIT in that time... all brilliant and wonderful people.

zhdc1 6y ago

Universities are and always have been expensive. This cost was hidden in the US and a lot of Western European countries by extremely generous government support. Now that this is going away, more so in some places than others, it sounds like people are suffering from sticker shock. Is this a fair indictment of the modern university? There are definitely ways to lower the total cost of higher education, but how much I don't know. Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that there's anything ok with 50k-70K annual tuition. However, there is a spending floor that has to be met to fund an "ok" no-thrills research university. Examples: KIT, a very good research university in Germany, spends about 35K EUR per student. I wasn't able to find a source, but I remember reading that the University of Maryland in the states spends about 20-25K USD per student. Fu et al., 2019 quotes about 390K NTD (~13K USD) as the average per student spending in Taiwan.

grecy 6y ago
> Universities are and always have been expensive Why are they any more expensive than High School? In fact, in Australia until the 80s University was free in the same way High School is free. Many people are angry that it still isn't. And of course it's still free in that way in more than a few developed countries.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I am guessing professors salaries and a lot of university infrastructure.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  Free in the sense that the costs were borne by the government and not by the student. I'm totally ok with that. However, now that countries are shifting higher education costs off of their books and people are finding out that universities are, in fact, very expensive to run, it's not fair to blame the university.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  In some cases, supply and demand. In the early 2000s, One of my professors in my MBA program made ~$250,000 USD per year for teaching 3 classes per yer, plus whatever else he did. My understanding is that if you want to attract & retain talent of his caliber, you have to compete with they salary that person can make in the business world, too.

laurentdc 6y ago

I paid zero for my university since EU, but I still kind of feel scammed out of five years of my life. I got a degree only because I was young and family/friends pushed me into it since "that's what everyone does". The networking thing, meh. Maybe if you attend the top 1% of universities that have some barrier of entry for people who're actually talented/determined to achieve a goal and care about what they do. Or expensive private ones with industry connections. Which feels a bit like "easy mode" but whatever :) But in the average public university most students you meet are just coasting through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real life. Professors just don't care and they never have time. Even the job placement events, it's all a bullshit perpetuating machine.

tgv 6y ago
I went to a normal European uni as well, although it did cost money (inflation corrected tuition fees were around €700 or so, and there was a room to rent and food to buy; but many courses used a syllabus written by the teachers and printed by the uni, costing a few € each, only a few required an expensive book). Nothing that should make me feel scammed. The networking thing is real, though. It's not everywhere, but if you join the right student society (Am. fraternity), it definitely exists. I worked a (long) while as a researcher and teacher at university, and networking via student societies only seems to have grown in that period. It never felt to me as useless, as killing time or delaying life. It taught me skills I don't think I could have picked up by myself.
WalterBright 6y ago
> But in the average public university most students you meet are just coasting through it as if it was high school, or as a way to delay real life. Perhaps that's an unintended consequence of it being free, just like high school. If you're paying the bill, it's a lot less likely you'll be coasting through.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  European countries with free public universities also usually have private, paid colleges. In practice, those are where you really coast through.

ars 6y ago

Universities waste way too much money on fancy food, extravagant halls, amazing experiences. It's like an amusement park for adults. Go walk into one and look at all the things that have nothing to do with learning. Go count how many fancy restaurants they have. People go there for the experience, and it costs. They should instead be about learning. Have your experiences later in life, or just independently instead of expecting the university to do it for you.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
But for a certain kind of person the fancy food etc is the learning. It's a social environment for making social and professional connections and (often) a life partner. Sometimes there's some academic work too. In reality there's no such thing as "university." There are different experiences and different goals for different demographics. They all happen in the same environment, but there will always be [double figured number] of social, economic, and political games going on at the same time - sometimes in the same classes - and the demographics involved in each will often be barely aware of each other.

tkgally 6y ago

The coronavirus crisis and the enforced shift to online teaching might very well lead to major changes in higher education. At the university where I work in Japan, we began teaching all of our classes online a month and a half ago using Zoom. I don't know anyone, teacher or student, who thought that they would prefer online classes, but now that we have been doing it for a while it's clear there are advantages. Perhaps most significant is the fact that teachers and students do not need to live near campus. The students in my undergraduate classes are scattered throughout Japan, and my graduate seminar includes students in Thailand and Indonesia who were unable to enter Japan when travel was shut down in early April. Some of our teachers are also stuck outside the country and are conducting their classes from overseas. Overall, classes seem to be going surprisingly smoothly, and students are able to participate equally in class discussions regardless of their location. What the author of this post presented as a cost-comparison exercise—get a group of people who want to study the same thing and hire a teacher—is much more feasible when the students and teacher do not have to be in the same geographic area. It will be interesting to see how such possibilities change higher education in the years ahead.

_nalply 6y ago

Labor has changed and is still changing. It's getting more and more difficult to get a job that pays. Meritocracy? Meh. It's bullshit being peddled to shut us up. It's just connections and luck. Even the able ones have to be in the right place at the right time and need to jump through a million hoops. It feels like a never-ending captcha session. Bullshit at universities is backpressure from the labor market. Backed up bullshit spills over to education at all levels. Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of the end of the labor era. And now that we can see this laid bare clearer and clearer: What can parents do today for their children? Education doesn't have the primary goal to procure a job. This was never really the thing. And even at this education is failing more and more. So what needs to be done for children and young adults? What is the goal of education? As a father I have been thinking about this for years. I don't have an answer for the material needs of the generation of my descendants. However I know that people need a meaning of life especially if they are poor. I am trying to teach my children to look out for their own meaning of life and to work hard to attain it by themselves. I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the people when there's not enough labor for everybody. And then? What can they do if they don't have a job? That's what I am trying to find out with my children growing up. Humanities are important to create meaning. However one thing is sure: If I detect bullshit permeating an university I am not going to suggest an expensive course to my children!

tsimionescu 6y ago
> I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the people when there's not enough labor for everybody. There is a very clear answer to this, it's just that people who are not labour are trying very hard to avoid giving it. We should all be working far less for the same money we are getting today. As the productivity of work increases, hours worked should be going down, without affecting wages. Right now, the benefits of increased productivity are all going into profits, that is, into the hands of the very few. We have been here before, and our great-grandfathers and great-grand-grandmothers have fought for reducing the wrok week many times before, successfully. We will probably soon have to fight this fight again.
- _nalply 6y ago

dorkwood 6y ago

My bachelor's degree was basically a scam. It was from a well-known university in Australia, too. Teachers who barely knew anything about what they were teaching, outdated course material, the lowest bar imaginable to get a passing grade. At a guess, I'd say that 99% of the graduates would not have had the skills to be employed in their chosen field upon completing the degree. I only stuck it out through the whole thing because I was a dumb kid who didn't know any better. Now I'll be paying off the debt for the rest of my life.

to1y 6y ago
Are you non-citizen? Would you mind sharing the degree and the amount?
isubasinghe 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what university did you go to?
- slantaclaus 6y ago
  Let me guess for him: James Cook University perhaps?
- dorkwood 6y ago
  The University of Newcastle.

symplee 6y ago

Does anyone have an actual cost breakdown of every expense that goes into running a university? It would be great to see this for any major private college, and/or a public university. In most of these comment sections I see speculation about why universities are so expensive. But have never seen the hard data to back it up. Is it really the luxury dorms? The bloated administration? etc... Anyone have the real numbers? And how has the budget breakdown changed over time?

PeterStuer 6y ago

In the EU I paid 250 Euro per year, so 1.000 Euro total for my graduate degree. The US system is insane. Why do you tolerate such obvious racketeering?

flowerbeater 6y ago
Just curious, do you think what you paid is the actual cost to provide you that education?
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  No. Tuition fees is just one of 5 money streams that the university relies on. Te others being Research grants, Service provisioning (contract research mostly), subsidies and Assets & Investments.

withinboredom 6y ago

I transferred from a mid-west university to an east coast university in the US. When I got there and was scheduling I couldn't take any of the advanced classes I was supposed to for my major, why? I'd never taken College Algebra, despite taking three semesters of Calculus, Computer Science. At this new school, College Algebra was a requirement that could not be skipped. I wasted an entire semester taking electives and Algebra. I was pretty pissed.

notaphilosopher 6y ago

I went bankrupt around 2016 and am homeless (vehicle dwelling), yet have ~$9000 USD in student loan debt that wasn't dischargeable or forgivable. I spent over $40k on a degree I cannot use as I am now considered disabled (SSDI). Navient is still after me and checks my credit every few months looking to pounce. I bet they'll reach into my online-only bank account and take the little money that I need to eat, buy gas, medications, and pay copays. It took me over 7 years and a lawyer to get SSDI ($1300), and it can be taken away every 2 years. If you're poor or disabled in America, you're automatically a criminal trying to steal and so austerity crumbs are justified.. and delay, hoping you'll just give up or die. For 9 years, I lived on $199/month for food and $149 in cash. There is no out for me because 99.99999% of Americans are either too comfortable, learned helpless cowards, and/or too ignorant to understand how bad we have it and how much we're being screwed. There will be no rebellion even though a calm but determined march of 5 million people to the seats of power could overwhelm any resistance and remove the corruption. The key problem is endurance by separating church and wealth and mass-media and state for the future. Without fixing corruption driven by the elites above the system, nothing can change.. and not preventing them from stealing power some other way again is only a temporary, pyrrhic victory. Work stoppages are reactionary temper-tantrums seeking a few more crumbs from the master. Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are all pointless virtue-signaling onanisms. Why pick rapist 1 or rapist 2.. presently, voting is accenting sheepishly to an inverted totalitarian, pluto-kleptocratic empire, not republican psephocracy. Be like George Carlin and not so.. maybe let's (assuming you're American) dent the universe and fix this bitch.

TuringNYC 6y ago
Firstly, i'm sorry to hear about your situation. I have met so many people with similar stories about struggles when I lived in the city. I am curious though -- why aren't more people more angry given how desperately so many people have their backs against a en economic wall? Do you think the Protests, petitions, awareness campaigns are just appeasement campaigns to make people think they have a choice? How is it people do not see through it eventually? (side note: i've been voting in the US for 21yrs and have only once found a candidate i truly felt inspired to vote for (Bernie))
vxNsr 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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jerome-jh 6y ago

With the low interest rates, everything that requires a loan sees over-inflation. I think this is what is happening with university tuition.

akater 6y ago

There's a fairly well-known 2018 book on why education (higher and lower) is the way it is now: Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money”

econcon 6y ago

People often forget that one of the biggest value of having degree is the optics that comes with it. Basically if a person has spent time getting a degree this shows a important value - risk averseness. Another value it shows is - being subservient. You are allowing some professor or institution to have significant control over you well past age 18 as an adult. Risk averseness shows that you'll not be duping the company or stealing their secrets and starting a new company as a competitor and you prefer having a stable salary than mega payoff by selling the tech of the company where you work. And being subservient means, you'll listen to all the BS magement wants and also you'll not question the authority or go against them.

wurst_case 6y ago
When I'm hiring, these are no the qualities I'm looking for.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

Modern Universities do not teach how to spot equal-but-opposite thoughts, concepts, arguments, and ideas. In other words, they teach students what to think, not how to think... Upon graduation, the new graduate (in addition to their college loans and degree!) has, by virtue of their education, been given a virtual "grab bag" of many small, relative, convenient truths which only relate to special circumstances and corner cases, which all have intelligent and impressive sounding lingo/jargon/buzzwords/"$2 names" attached to them, such that the graduate may then, later on in life, pick and choose from this "grab bag" and selectively apply those small relative truths to any problem (and sound very intelligent in the process!) that they or someone else may be having... ...All while missing the big picture, and/or conveniently ignoring one or more other larger, more important truths that may be present as well. (Error of Omission). When I hear minor truths, by a so-called "Academic", selectively applied to a problem or problems, I think to myself, with respect to what the speaker/writer said: "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it." (With my apologies to the Principal in Billy Madison!) Yes, it is actually possible to dumb things down while appearing smart, and the way this is done is through selective (minor) truth observation, AKA "Error Of Omission". Otherwise known as missing the big picture, putting too much attention on minutiae, making mountains out of molehills, presenting the weaker argument as the stronger, etc., etc. It happens in academic papers, it happens in the news media... "Grab Bags" of small, relative truths, but small relative truths with impressive sounding languaging around them... And yet, there are a lot of good academic papers, and education (the right education!) is valuable from many other perspectives...