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I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degre

I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people. Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.

DC-3 6y ago
Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?
- dgfitz 6y ago
  “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” - Good Will Hunting
  - keiferski 6y ago
    You know the theme of the movie is actually arguing against that quote, right? The conversation on the bench is the climax of the film; Robin Williams lectures Matt Damon about the limitations of book learning.
    - thehappypm 6y ago
      I wouldn't go so far as to say that the movie is arguing against book learning, just that it's no substitute for real experiences.
      - keiferski 6y ago
        Sure, I’d agree with that.
- Beaver117 6y ago
  We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - flavius29663 6y ago
    I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your own passion and determination. It's the same reason companies have much more innovation in offices compared to remote working. The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
    - shiftpgdn 6y ago
      I went to a crappy state school after community college and met exactly 0 passionate professors along the way. It was an astoundingly miserable experience. None of my classmates have gone on to do anything of note.
      - flavius29663 6y ago
        which is exactly why a good school is better than a bad one: the courses and materials might be the same, but the experience can be totally different. IMO for most of us it's not worth getting into debt to pay any college, unless the college is in top X, or if you need the certification for your profession. Paying 60k a year for a mediocre college is one of the worst decisions you can make. You can achieve just the same amount of knowledge in less time on your own.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I think there's a value in being immersed in a subject, with peers equally passionate about it. You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
- raiyu 6y ago
  If that’s the case you can get it for nearly for free by just buying the books and reading them rather than paying $25,000 a year for that same privilege.
  - minikites 6y ago
    So then why do we have formal education at all?
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      To create workers for the industrial revolution.
      - minikites 6y ago
        Formal education predates the industrial revolution.
        solosoyokaze 6y ago
        Not for the masses.
      - Noos 6y ago
        no, we have formal education because not everyone is an autodidact and may need actual help in evaluating and learning skills. Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not learning physical therapy from coursera, or even something like human resources; some things you need others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide facilities for.
        solosoyokaze 6y ago
        Apprenticeship is the historical way to accomplish this.
        imtringued 6y ago
        No, he is right. Employers demand cookie cutter education and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that if everyone gets their cookie cutter education, earns money and then pays for their kids liberal arts education. We are at a point where everyone gets access to college but not everyone can actually support themselves. This is why the first generation of students has to maximize economic gains above everything else. Once the economy is doing well your kids will be able to pursue their dreams, or you can just go back to college yourself.
- minitoar 6y ago
  I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)
    - minitoar 6y ago
      Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.
        minitoar 6y ago
        Maybe the value of differentiating potential employees is worth it overall.
        Jtsummers 6y ago
        Maybe for the businesses, I'm skeptical that this is a positive for society and the economy overall.
- barrenko 6y ago
  Library works pretty well for that, and has for hundreds of years. *big caveat for hard sciences of course
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. I don't have a lot of experience with other humanities, but history is a verb rather than a noun. You learn history by doing history rather than reading it. I do think that universities are often too conservative about getting students into the archive quickly but a bunch of institutions are rapidly equipping students with archival and analysis skills and sending them to do history. This is very difficult to obtain from a raw library.
- indy 6y ago
  University is the last place for anyone who values education for its own sake
- curiousllama 6y ago
  Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking, etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-colleges). In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    I imagine for many subjects, great benefit comes from the probably millions of dollars worth of equipment you get access to. EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.
- awillen 6y ago
  As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university. Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting. And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4 https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - VLM 6y ago
    Its also a regulation issue. Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job. Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
- jawzz 6y ago
  Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they’re all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or artist who gets discouraged from study because “just do CS so you can make money” or “just go to the library it’s literally the same thing as four years of training under experts in the field and discussion with other smart young people.”
  - minitoar 6y ago
    You are wrong. Not every reply is saying that.
  - DC1350 6y ago
    Almost everyone goes to college to get a job. People who can afford to take risks like trying to become a philosopher don’t come from backgrounds where price is even a consideration. No middle class person dumb enough to believe trying to be a sociologist is a good idea will be smart enough to actually make that happen.
  - awillen 6y ago
    Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc., maybe, but still not great odds. It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
    - brighton36 6y ago
      That probably has more to do with 'greatness' as a product of the publishing system. (Meaning: it's great because it's published in a prestigious medium, not because the content is inherently superior) The next plato will likely be completely uncelebrated in these mediums, and will publish on an uncelebrated website or publisher.
      - smm2000 6y ago
- teeray 6y ago
  This is certainly true, but the harsh reality is that there are “job training” degrees and luxury degrees. If you have all your other financial ducks aligned, I don’t mind if you drive a Mercedes or decide to get a degree you can’t possibly hope to get a job with. Otherwise it’s just financially irresponsible.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  Those people exist, but they are a small fraction of the population. The number of people going to college to increase their future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.
- kop316 6y ago
  I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this actually. Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class). Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two. I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
  - DC1350 6y ago
    The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
    - the_only_law 6y ago
      Another problem is wildly varied quality. I’ve seen course material from some community colleges that made me think “wow, this seems to be a high quality resource” in all sorts of interesting subjects, but most community colleges in places I’ve lived near or been too have limited programs and often low quality ones at that.
    - kop316 6y ago
      I think your comment misses my original intent. If people might value education for its own sake (which is what I was replying to), then I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this. But to address your point: > The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career Since the instructor I had was a well known local musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig, and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I think you would be surprised just what type of networking oppritunities are actually are at a decent community college. Like I said in my comment: > I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two. One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year university. So he went to community college, and a colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was able to pay his way through college with that job) and is one of the best contrbutors to that group.
- wl 6y ago
  I value education for its own sake. So I got my degree from a well regarded university in a lucrative field that I'm good at and enjoy. A roof over my head and money in my bank account, I can study anything I want without worrying about the financial yield. Sometimes that takes the form of free MOOCs. Sometimes that takes the form of paid classes taken through university extension programs. Unlike when I was taking classes for degrees, I'm learning things I want to learn, not things I have to. It's very nice.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    This is the way to go, go to university so you can earn money. Once money is no longer a problem, focus on all your other life goals. That could involve getting the education that you really want and as long as you can afford it that's perfectly acceptable. However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  With the costs required to obtain an education as they are, we are well beyond valuing education simply for the sake of valuing education. If it requires years and years to pay off, then we absolutely must look at it like an investment.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Yes and once your first cash cow investment (STEM degree) has paid for itself you can go on and do any liberal arts degree that you want.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  Because if you want education for its own sake, Google university will get you there much faster and cheaper. Universities are to get that diploma.
- anonuser123456 6y ago
  Yes. And generally no, they don't.
- imtringued 6y ago
  That's entertainment and if you have to get a loan to fund your entertainment then you better plan on finding a way to pay that loan back. There is a reason why this form of entertainment was reserved for the rich, they could afford it. Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.
fossuser 6y ago
There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students. Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”
- awillen 6y ago
  Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
    - 6y ago
offtop5 6y ago
I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not something I can do, at least in an academic environment. That's said my life is much better for having attended college. However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four years is too much. So if you do two years at community college, that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is just tuition. That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these for-profit institutions.
- awillen 6y ago
  I don't actually think you're particularly far off from my point. In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    To be blunt, many of us graduate high school unable to properly read and write . At least 2 years of college is always needed to shore these basic skills up. Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?
lhorie 6y ago
> Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in supply. I think a better alternative is having more schools have tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset in the real world. Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing can pay reasonably well.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  There's always the option of doing a little bit of basic research before spending a significant amount.
Camillo 6y ago
But many of the PhDs minted at first-tier colleges have no career prospects but to teach at second-tier ones, and so forth. You need lots of students down the chain to keep them employed; it's basically a Ponzi scheme. So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Isn't a PhD a research degree? Isn't the goal of that degree to generate useful research? Yes, there are some (meager) employment benefits afterwards but the PhD itself is your academic career.
keiferski 6y ago
Seems to me like further polarization. Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated, while the rest will skip any personal development and just go right into the market. Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
- wiz21c 6y ago
  > the skills necessary for being good citizens this one hundred thousand times.
- econnors 6y ago
  > Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated This is how it is today. The only difference is people are paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not actually learning valuable skills. > Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.” We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like – unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of useless degrees, and increased tuition.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Yet somehow the rest of the developed world manages to offer liberal arts degrees that don’t cost $50,000 a year. The trick is: don’t spend millions on football stadiums, don’t hire hundreds of administrators, and don’t offer student loans that are impossible to default on. It really isn’t that complicated, especially for the single wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
    - CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago
      I work for a consulting company which helps these struggling colleges. It's a difficult discussion to have. When you tell them that they are spending way, way more than they need to on administration, they usually 'ahem' and 'guffaw', especially when the implication is that the people in the room with you are part of the problem.
devwastaken 6y ago
It's not just humanities degrees that are the problem. The problem is the market is not actually in "high demand" like higher education advertises. Graduating CS students across the U.S. are turned down by employers constantly and end up working in a job that doesn't require their degree nor does it use any skills from it. I have multiple friends in this exact situation. We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally fail and be taken over by real market demand education.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  The problem with education was explored by Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education. Education is more about who you admit and less about what you teach.
- worker767424 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on CS graduates getting turned down? I've seen how much trouble companies have hiring, so the only reasons I'm coming up with are these graduates aren't willing to relocate or they studied CS because it pays well, but they're not actually that good at it. Something very underappreciated, and possibly the cause of the classic CS class bimodal distribution, is how many students live the stuff outside of school, so someone academically good at CS ends up competing with someone who has random open source projects, sysadmins a linux server, knows how to set up a network, and has a CS degree.
  - ItsMonkk 6y ago
    They came for the high school drop outs and I did not speak out... High school grads, College Grads, Liberal Arts Grads, Non-STEM Grads, Non-Tech Grads, and now here we are. They came for the average CS graduates and I did not speak out. How far do we have to get up the stack to notice we have a problem? Harvard Medical Grads?
    - worker767424 6y ago
      Not sure if this reference really applies. If you're not good enough to do the job, you're not good enough to do the job. We do seem to be overproducing college grads, but I've heard nothing like that for CS grads.
Balgair 6y ago
Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine. Two things stuck out to me the most: 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment." 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities). The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead. "Abandon every hope, who enter here." https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14ed6e0bcd1c https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...
- yTh0 6y ago
  I can’t tell if things like this are real issues or “but think of the horse and buggy driver!” problems. We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long before we had PhDs. Obsession with normalizing agency to abide fiscal concerns is the real issue here. Let wealth collapse by refusing to buy into the idea we owe deference to those that hold wealth. Teach the classics. Write open source. None of it has to be done for a dollar, or outsized prestige.
  - mcguire 6y ago
mitchdoogle 6y ago
I think people need to stop thinking about higher education in terms of financial yield. Or at least make it a much smaller piece of the metric. If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life that isn't directly related to your occupation?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
austincheney 6y ago
> or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree) I so completely disagree. College/university is for education. If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load of money. As an example lawyers and doctors don’t gain skills in law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced internships for that. CompSci graduates can’t tell the difference because the software industry isn’t mature. In all other professional career paths there is some combination of licenses or certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.
- bilegeek 6y ago
  > If you want skills go to a trade school Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers, carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist, a college degree is required unless you want your resume to go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e. nepotism). The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact that most can't get employment in the first place without a degree, and internships don't pay the bills. In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    > if you want to be an engineer or scientist Get a graduate degree and then a professional license, such as CISSP. Software developers are just skilled technicians like carpenters and plumbers.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer. More what? Licenses? License != skills. A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study per section.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment " I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick). They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand. Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special? A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  >They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows theur production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand. This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
  - dpoochieni 6y ago
    I agree, the unwashed masses do destroy most of everything. Granted Harvard is not what it used to be, same as an MS is not what it used to be, a Phd is not what it used to be. In the past the quality was even higher, more akin to an artisan workshop than whatever mass-anything you could conceive of.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Relatedly I read the top colleges try to get students they know they'll never admit to apply, because the more that apply, the more they can reject and the more selective they become. Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
- tryonenow 6y ago
  >A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle. Unless you recognize that human ability is not equally distributed. In which case colleges need to be exclusionary to maintain prestige. And that prestige is an important signal in a universe where success is dependent on competence. Conversely, when prestige signals are eroded, there are gradual, self-reinforcing downstream effects, wherein all of our institutions - industry, media, government, academia - are gradually populated with cohorts of reduced competence, and society at large becomes less capable of recognizing merit, particularly given that when once clear signals like alma mater are no longer accurate, laypeople are more drawn to the nonsensical belief that all humans are equally capable. And slowly the withering of these institutions, and recognition of/appreciation for competence, lead to a withering of society and, I think, this phenomenon is one of the drivers behind the ongoing collapse of the American Empire, for better or worse. The intent behind lowering standards for entry is amiable but based on a faulty and ultimately dangerous assumption.
fspeech 6y ago
So long as the top tier universities are not expanding enrollments I fail to see what real change would come from more applications. Maybe they will get a bit more diverse. The lower tier schools will get their enrollment so long as the total demand is still there.
GCA10 6y ago
Actually, I'll argue that college educations can pay off in a third way. It's not just brand-name prestige and useful skills. There's a lot to be said for the way that four years of residential education imbues grads with a valuable lifetime network of allies. The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics. It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all. What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.
NikolaNovak 6y ago
>>I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college While I agree with you and approached my university education with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment, open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc. Whether any of these practical or experiential goals are most optimally met, in terms of time/life/money/effort expanded, through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and heated discussion entirely :)
pisteoff 6y ago
> people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it. Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree. I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.
- croissants 6y ago
  It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one. Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities? Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it? [1] https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf
  - pisteoff 6y ago
    > a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one. Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to. More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad. The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.
drak0n1c 6y ago
The market is heavily subsidized, to the tune of the annual $120+ billion in Federally guaranteed grants and loans that the DOE boasts of being provided every year in its public letters. The loaning of such large sums to teenagers who don't yet understand basic financial cost/benefit analysis severely distorts the market. When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow, desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of decades of compounding inflation by subsidy. https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-report.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-repo...
phabora 6y ago
How is this an example of an efficient market when one of the outcomes is to simply get a “name-brand degree”?[1] Ideally it should just be about the other alternative, namely what you learnt. Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity. And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks. [1] Try to justify that without circular logic.
antihero 6y ago
Your second sentence is indicative of the toxic attitude to the world that appears to be rooted in or at least exacerbated by capitalism. Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose that create other extremely important value in the world (the thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc) are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours, or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get scholarships?
cwwc 6y ago
Curious to see how this plays out in law schools — UPenn and UVA have seen 40%+ bumps in applications (guessing it’s even higher at HYS) while schools like Duquesne or Belmont are struggle busing.
treis 6y ago
>I think this is generally a good thing I don't think it's a real trend. You only need to apply to one or two safety schools while you can apply to any number of good/reach schools. Those schools have made the admission process much more random. Used to be that your grades + SATs mostly determined who would accept you. Now it's whatever impressed some random admissions drone and who knows what they really want? So you shoot your shot with 40 reaches and hope one of them likes you. If you're a strong candidate you have to apply to more schools in case you get randomly rejected.
derbOac 6y ago
I guess I feel the opposite -- although I think the system of higher education is fundamentally broken in the US, I see this amplifying problems, not improving them. Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people. I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large. I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.
intended 6y ago
No its not - If you read the article > The Common App’s data does not include community colleges because they typically allow anyone to enroll. But those schools, which often provide low-income students a first step into higher education, also saw steep declines. In the fall of 2020, freshmen enrollment fell by more than 20 percent. The two trends in the article are a 17% increase in applications for the most selective institutions and a 20% drop for community colleges. The Times uses weasel words here >some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019. Meaning only some selective institutions, the Berklely increase in applications was because they waived the standardized test. Knowing application patterns this is bad news - it means that poorer people, especially undergrads have not applied this year. It is unlikely that those same people just turned around and applied to Cornell. I argue that the increase in apps to elite institutions is from people who left the workforce from good jobs. They are making a strategic move to weather the COVID storm and come out on the other side better off.
WalterBright 6y ago
I've been regularly bemused by people graduating with a degree in X, and then bitterly complaining that nobody told them that the pay for X was very low. I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's not bemusing if those people took on debt.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    For someone going to college, there are no excuses for not checking starting salaries with google before making a huge commitment. Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.
    - the_only_law 6y ago
      random, but I recall seeing a graph a while ago of average starting salaries of engineering salaries and chemical was still on top.

DC-3 6y ago

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

dgfitz 6y ago
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” - Good Will Hunting
- keiferski 6y ago
  You know the theme of the movie is actually arguing against that quote, right? The conversation on the bench is the climax of the film; Robin Williams lectures Matt Damon about the limitations of book learning.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as to say that the movie is arguing against book learning, just that it's no substitute for real experiences.
    - keiferski 6y ago
      Sure, I’d agree with that.
Beaver117 6y ago
We have infinite free/cheap educational resources on the internet. University only exists for the credential now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- flavius29663 6y ago
  I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your own passion and determination. It's the same reason companies have much more innovation in offices compared to remote working. The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    I went to a crappy state school after community college and met exactly 0 passionate professors along the way. It was an astoundingly miserable experience. None of my classmates have gone on to do anything of note.
    - flavius29663 6y ago
      which is exactly why a good school is better than a bad one: the courses and materials might be the same, but the experience can be totally different. IMO for most of us it's not worth getting into debt to pay any college, unless the college is in top X, or if you need the certification for your profession. Paying 60k a year for a mediocre college is one of the worst decisions you can make. You can achieve just the same amount of knowledge in less time on your own.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I think there's a value in being immersed in a subject, with peers equally passionate about it. You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
raiyu 6y ago
If that’s the case you can get it for nearly for free by just buying the books and reading them rather than paying $25,000 a year for that same privilege.
- minikites 6y ago
  So then why do we have formal education at all?
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    To create workers for the industrial revolution.
    - minikites 6y ago
      Formal education predates the industrial revolution.
      - solosoyokaze 6y ago
        Not for the masses.
    - Noos 6y ago
      no, we have formal education because not everyone is an autodidact and may need actual help in evaluating and learning skills. Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not learning physical therapy from coursera, or even something like human resources; some things you need others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide facilities for.
      - solosoyokaze 6y ago
        Apprenticeship is the historical way to accomplish this.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        No, he is right. Employers demand cookie cutter education and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that if everyone gets their cookie cutter education, earns money and then pays for their kids liberal arts education. We are at a point where everyone gets access to college but not everyone can actually support themselves. This is why the first generation of students has to maximize economic gains above everything else. Once the economy is doing well your kids will be able to pursue their dreams, or you can just go back to college yourself.
minitoar 6y ago
I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)
  - minitoar 6y ago
    Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.
      - minitoar 6y ago
        Maybe the value of differentiating potential employees is worth it overall.
        Jtsummers 6y ago
        Maybe for the businesses, I'm skeptical that this is a positive for society and the economy overall.
barrenko 6y ago
Library works pretty well for that, and has for hundreds of years. *big caveat for hard sciences of course
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. I don't have a lot of experience with other humanities, but history is a verb rather than a noun. You learn history by doing history rather than reading it. I do think that universities are often too conservative about getting students into the archive quickly but a bunch of institutions are rapidly equipping students with archival and analysis skills and sending them to do history. This is very difficult to obtain from a raw library.
indy 6y ago
University is the last place for anyone who values education for its own sake
curiousllama 6y ago
Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking, etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-colleges). In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I imagine for many subjects, great benefit comes from the probably millions of dollars worth of equipment you get access to. EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.
awillen 6y ago
As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university. Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting. And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4 https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- VLM 6y ago
  Its also a regulation issue. Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job. Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
jawzz 6y ago
Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they’re all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or artist who gets discouraged from study because “just do CS so you can make money” or “just go to the library it’s literally the same thing as four years of training under experts in the field and discussion with other smart young people.”
- minitoar 6y ago
  You are wrong. Not every reply is saying that.
- DC1350 6y ago
  Almost everyone goes to college to get a job. People who can afford to take risks like trying to become a philosopher don’t come from backgrounds where price is even a consideration. No middle class person dumb enough to believe trying to be a sociologist is a good idea will be smart enough to actually make that happen.
- awillen 6y ago
  Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc., maybe, but still not great odds. It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
  - brighton36 6y ago
    That probably has more to do with 'greatness' as a product of the publishing system. (Meaning: it's great because it's published in a prestigious medium, not because the content is inherently superior) The next plato will likely be completely uncelebrated in these mediums, and will publish on an uncelebrated website or publisher.
    - smm2000 6y ago
teeray 6y ago
This is certainly true, but the harsh reality is that there are “job training” degrees and luxury degrees. If you have all your other financial ducks aligned, I don’t mind if you drive a Mercedes or decide to get a degree you can’t possibly hope to get a job with. Otherwise it’s just financially irresponsible.
jimbokun 6y ago
Those people exist, but they are a small fraction of the population. The number of people going to college to increase their future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.
kop316 6y ago
I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this actually. Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class). Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two. I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
- DC1350 6y ago
  The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    Another problem is wildly varied quality. I’ve seen course material from some community colleges that made me think “wow, this seems to be a high quality resource” in all sorts of interesting subjects, but most community colleges in places I’ve lived near or been too have limited programs and often low quality ones at that.
  - kop316 6y ago
    I think your comment misses my original intent. If people might value education for its own sake (which is what I was replying to), then I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this. But to address your point: > The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career Since the instructor I had was a well known local musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig, and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I think you would be surprised just what type of networking oppritunities are actually are at a decent community college. Like I said in my comment: > I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two. One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year university. So he went to community college, and a colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was able to pay his way through college with that job) and is one of the best contrbutors to that group.
wl 6y ago
I value education for its own sake. So I got my degree from a well regarded university in a lucrative field that I'm good at and enjoy. A roof over my head and money in my bank account, I can study anything I want without worrying about the financial yield. Sometimes that takes the form of free MOOCs. Sometimes that takes the form of paid classes taken through university extension programs. Unlike when I was taking classes for degrees, I'm learning things I want to learn, not things I have to. It's very nice.
- imtringued 6y ago
  This is the way to go, go to university so you can earn money. Once money is no longer a problem, focus on all your other life goals. That could involve getting the education that you really want and as long as you can afford it that's perfectly acceptable. However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
With the costs required to obtain an education as they are, we are well beyond valuing education simply for the sake of valuing education. If it requires years and years to pay off, then we absolutely must look at it like an investment.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yes and once your first cash cow investment (STEM degree) has paid for itself you can go on and do any liberal arts degree that you want.
fallingknife 6y ago
Because if you want education for its own sake, Google university will get you there much faster and cheaper. Universities are to get that diploma.
anonuser123456 6y ago
Yes. And generally no, they don't.
imtringued 6y ago
That's entertainment and if you have to get a loan to fund your entertainment then you better plan on finding a way to pay that loan back. There is a reason why this form of entertainment was reserved for the rich, they could afford it. Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.

fossuser 6y ago

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students. Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”

awillen 6y ago
Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
  - 6y ago

offtop5 6y ago

I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not something I can do, at least in an academic environment. That's said my life is much better for having attended college. However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four years is too much. So if you do two years at community college, that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is just tuition. That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these for-profit institutions.

awillen 6y ago
I don't actually think you're particularly far off from my point. In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.
- offtop5 6y ago
  To be blunt, many of us graduate high school unable to properly read and write . At least 2 years of college is always needed to shore these basic skills up. Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for
908B64B197 6y ago
> For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?

lhorie 6y ago

> Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in supply. I think a better alternative is having more schools have tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset in the real world. Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing can pay reasonably well.

908B64B197 6y ago
There's always the option of doing a little bit of basic research before spending a significant amount.

Camillo 6y ago

But many of the PhDs minted at first-tier colleges have no career prospects but to teach at second-tier ones, and so forth. You need lots of students down the chain to keep them employed; it's basically a Ponzi scheme. So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.

imtringued 6y ago
Isn't a PhD a research degree? Isn't the goal of that degree to generate useful research? Yes, there are some (meager) employment benefits afterwards but the PhD itself is your academic career.

keiferski 6y ago

Seems to me like further polarization. Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated, while the rest will skip any personal development and just go right into the market. Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”

wiz21c 6y ago
> the skills necessary for being good citizens this one hundred thousand times.
econnors 6y ago
> Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated This is how it is today. The only difference is people are paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not actually learning valuable skills. > Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.” We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like – unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of useless degrees, and increased tuition.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Yet somehow the rest of the developed world manages to offer liberal arts degrees that don’t cost $50,000 a year. The trick is: don’t spend millions on football stadiums, don’t hire hundreds of administrators, and don’t offer student loans that are impossible to default on. It really isn’t that complicated, especially for the single wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
  - CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago
    I work for a consulting company which helps these struggling colleges. It's a difficult discussion to have. When you tell them that they are spending way, way more than they need to on administration, they usually 'ahem' and 'guffaw', especially when the implication is that the people in the room with you are part of the problem.

devwastaken 6y ago

It's not just humanities degrees that are the problem. The problem is the market is not actually in "high demand" like higher education advertises. Graduating CS students across the U.S. are turned down by employers constantly and end up working in a job that doesn't require their degree nor does it use any skills from it. I have multiple friends in this exact situation. We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally fail and be taken over by real market demand education.

jackcosgrove 6y ago
The problem with education was explored by Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education. Education is more about who you admit and less about what you teach.
worker767424 6y ago
Could you elaborate on CS graduates getting turned down? I've seen how much trouble companies have hiring, so the only reasons I'm coming up with are these graduates aren't willing to relocate or they studied CS because it pays well, but they're not actually that good at it. Something very underappreciated, and possibly the cause of the classic CS class bimodal distribution, is how many students live the stuff outside of school, so someone academically good at CS ends up competing with someone who has random open source projects, sysadmins a linux server, knows how to set up a network, and has a CS degree.
- ItsMonkk 6y ago
  They came for the high school drop outs and I did not speak out... High school grads, College Grads, Liberal Arts Grads, Non-STEM Grads, Non-Tech Grads, and now here we are. They came for the average CS graduates and I did not speak out. How far do we have to get up the stack to notice we have a problem? Harvard Medical Grads?
  - worker767424 6y ago
    Not sure if this reference really applies. If you're not good enough to do the job, you're not good enough to do the job. We do seem to be overproducing college grads, but I've heard nothing like that for CS grads.

Balgair 6y ago

Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine. Two things stuck out to me the most: 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment." 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities). The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead. "Abandon every hope, who enter here." https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14ed6e0bcd1c https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...

yTh0 6y ago
I can’t tell if things like this are real issues or “but think of the horse and buggy driver!” problems. We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long before we had PhDs. Obsession with normalizing agency to abide fiscal concerns is the real issue here. Let wealth collapse by refusing to buy into the idea we owe deference to those that hold wealth. Teach the classics. Write open source. None of it has to be done for a dollar, or outsized prestige.
- mcguire 6y ago

mitchdoogle 6y ago

I think people need to stop thinking about higher education in terms of financial yield. Or at least make it a much smaller piece of the metric. If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life that isn't directly related to your occupation?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

austincheney 6y ago

> or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree) I so completely disagree. College/university is for education. If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load of money. As an example lawyers and doctors don’t gain skills in law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced internships for that. CompSci graduates can’t tell the difference because the software industry isn’t mature. In all other professional career paths there is some combination of licenses or certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.

bilegeek 6y ago
> If you want skills go to a trade school Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers, carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist, a college degree is required unless you want your resume to go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e. nepotism). The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact that most can't get employment in the first place without a degree, and internships don't pay the bills. In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > if you want to be an engineer or scientist Get a graduate degree and then a professional license, such as CISSP. Software developers are just skilled technicians like carpenters and plumbers.
mywittyname 6y ago
> It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer. More what? Licenses? License != skills. A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study per section.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

"from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment " I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick). They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand. Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special? A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.

alasdair_ 6y ago
>They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows theur production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand. This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
- dpoochieni 6y ago
  I agree, the unwashed masses do destroy most of everything. Granted Harvard is not what it used to be, same as an MS is not what it used to be, a Phd is not what it used to be. In the past the quality was even higher, more akin to an artisan workshop than whatever mass-anything you could conceive of.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Relatedly I read the top colleges try to get students they know they'll never admit to apply, because the more that apply, the more they can reject and the more selective they become. Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
tryonenow 6y ago
>A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle. Unless you recognize that human ability is not equally distributed. In which case colleges need to be exclusionary to maintain prestige. And that prestige is an important signal in a universe where success is dependent on competence. Conversely, when prestige signals are eroded, there are gradual, self-reinforcing downstream effects, wherein all of our institutions - industry, media, government, academia - are gradually populated with cohorts of reduced competence, and society at large becomes less capable of recognizing merit, particularly given that when once clear signals like alma mater are no longer accurate, laypeople are more drawn to the nonsensical belief that all humans are equally capable. And slowly the withering of these institutions, and recognition of/appreciation for competence, lead to a withering of society and, I think, this phenomenon is one of the drivers behind the ongoing collapse of the American Empire, for better or worse. The intent behind lowering standards for entry is amiable but based on a faulty and ultimately dangerous assumption.

fspeech 6y ago

So long as the top tier universities are not expanding enrollments I fail to see what real change would come from more applications. Maybe they will get a bit more diverse. The lower tier schools will get their enrollment so long as the total demand is still there.

GCA10 6y ago

Actually, I'll argue that college educations can pay off in a third way. It's not just brand-name prestige and useful skills. There's a lot to be said for the way that four years of residential education imbues grads with a valuable lifetime network of allies. The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics. It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all. What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.

NikolaNovak 6y ago

>>I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college While I agree with you and approached my university education with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment, open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc. Whether any of these practical or experiential goals are most optimally met, in terms of time/life/money/effort expanded, through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and heated discussion entirely :)

pisteoff 6y ago

> people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it. Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree. I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.

croissants 6y ago
It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one. Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities? Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it? [1] https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf
- pisteoff 6y ago
  > a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one. Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to. More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad. The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.

drak0n1c 6y ago

The market is heavily subsidized, to the tune of the annual $120+ billion in Federally guaranteed grants and loans that the DOE boasts of being provided every year in its public letters. The loaning of such large sums to teenagers who don't yet understand basic financial cost/benefit analysis severely distorts the market. When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow, desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of decades of compounding inflation by subsidy. https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-report.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-repo...

phabora 6y ago

How is this an example of an efficient market when one of the outcomes is to simply get a “name-brand degree”?[1] Ideally it should just be about the other alternative, namely what you learnt. Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity. And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks. [1] Try to justify that without circular logic.

antihero 6y ago

Your second sentence is indicative of the toxic attitude to the world that appears to be rooted in or at least exacerbated by capitalism. Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose that create other extremely important value in the world (the thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc) are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours, or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get scholarships?

cwwc 6y ago

Curious to see how this plays out in law schools — UPenn and UVA have seen 40%+ bumps in applications (guessing it’s even higher at HYS) while schools like Duquesne or Belmont are struggle busing.

treis 6y ago

>I think this is generally a good thing I don't think it's a real trend. You only need to apply to one or two safety schools while you can apply to any number of good/reach schools. Those schools have made the admission process much more random. Used to be that your grades + SATs mostly determined who would accept you. Now it's whatever impressed some random admissions drone and who knows what they really want? So you shoot your shot with 40 reaches and hope one of them likes you. If you're a strong candidate you have to apply to more schools in case you get randomly rejected.

derbOac 6y ago

I guess I feel the opposite -- although I think the system of higher education is fundamentally broken in the US, I see this amplifying problems, not improving them. Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people. I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large. I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.

intended 6y ago

No its not - If you read the article > The Common App’s data does not include community colleges because they typically allow anyone to enroll. But those schools, which often provide low-income students a first step into higher education, also saw steep declines. In the fall of 2020, freshmen enrollment fell by more than 20 percent. The two trends in the article are a 17% increase in applications for the most selective institutions and a 20% drop for community colleges. The Times uses weasel words here >some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019. Meaning only some selective institutions, the Berklely increase in applications was because they waived the standardized test. Knowing application patterns this is bad news - it means that poorer people, especially undergrads have not applied this year. It is unlikely that those same people just turned around and applied to Cornell. I argue that the increase in apps to elite institutions is from people who left the workforce from good jobs. They are making a strategic move to weather the COVID storm and come out on the other side better off.

WalterBright 6y ago

I've been regularly bemused by people graduating with a degree in X, and then bitterly complaining that nobody told them that the pay for X was very low. I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".

imtringued 6y ago
It's not bemusing if those people took on debt.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  For someone going to college, there are no excuses for not checking starting salaries with google before making a huge commitment. Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    random, but I recall seeing a graph a while ago of average starting salaries of engineering salaries and chemical was still on top.