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Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how t

• judge2020 5y ago
  > - minor league sports teams Light data for this: freshman admissions, at least within the state of Georgia, commonly have exemptions made for athletes: https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/ https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/
• vmception 5y ago
  The first should be trade schools Just so professors dont have to act oblivious as to why students are there, some still revert to “wdym, you should be here for the pursuit of learning” But there is merit to that, the schools reserved for the upper echelon of society (in terms of most coveted exclusive network and access) have been around for like 300 years, they can weather this several decade long meme of inclusion and the coincidental corporate sector that has people convinced they need degrees to access that (and why expanded audiences want to be included in those school’s admissions to begin with) “Hey current Dean and former US Treasury Secretary and cabinet member, remember that time when the proletariat was trying to go here? Are those dark ages going to be on the evaluation?”
  • jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I also think we could subsidize a few years of on the job training. It can be difficult for trade schools to keep up with industry. A year of trade school for some very general health and safety / common sense / anything they missed in high school, then into the workplace to learn from people actually doing the job.
    • vmception 5y ago
      The apprenticeship model in Germany does both things you mentioned, and to a greater extent. Even for trades we would consider highly skilled labor like office jobs on an executive path. It's pretty unique that the US has the resources for these advances that developed nations have and simply doesn't do them. Part of it is the insular nature of where policy inspiration comes from, it has to be seen as a homegrown original idea, which hampers consensus making because examples of it working elsewhere also aren't accepted.
• prolmopp 5y ago
• slyall 5y ago
  It's interesting to compare this to newspapers which bundled many things together and then got in trouble when people could access them separately.
• readingnews 5y ago
  I have worked at three universities. This is pretty insanely accurate. You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year. Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate students or temporary emergency hires do it since all of our "real" faculty are bringing in research dollars.
  • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    There are schools that don't allow grad students to teach.
    • anonuser123456 5y ago
      That’s a shame, because sometimes graduate students are better teachers than research faculty.
      • Retric 5y ago
        You can also go to a school where professors are employed for their ability to teach. Choosing to go to a research institution seems like such an obviously poor choice it’s strange people get suckered into it. But it’s clear education is a low priority for both students and collages.
        • bachmeier 5y ago
          Not really. Small liberal arts colleges offer the chance to be friends with your professors and small classes. Research universities can offer classes that just aren't going to happen at a SLAC. For example, majors in our department have the option to take graduate courses before they graduate.
          • Retric 5y ago
            Many small to midsized universities with masters programs aren’t research institutions. Higher education is very competitive with a wide range of business models. One of them is to have tight collaboration with industry to have undergrad and masters programs around Mining, Manufacturing, Medicine, etc focused on employability. Some are focused on night classes for government employees who get an automatic pay raise with a higher degree irrespective of what it’s in. Others are focused on continuing education requirements. The high prestige research institutions can be a good fit, but aren’t the only option outside of small liberal arts schools.
• patientplatypus 5y ago
  I disagree. Schools were founded on the principle that the best and brightest minds will teach the new generation (this goes all the way back to Athens). If you separate the researchers into a "research university" and the other students into "trade schools" eventually you'll just make the class divide all that much worse because the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified. If you were a student (or the parent of a student) looking to advance in your field, and you had the choice, would you choose Harvard or say a local community college trade school? It's easy to make massive sweeping sociological choices for the public without considering that you yourself would not make that choice. Obviously, multiply your preferences times every student in the field. If you want to say there's a funding crisis and you want to deal with that funding crisis in some other way, then yes, I agree. Also, I don't personally care for sports. I still think they have a place at a University, just not to the extent that they're funded. If independent undergraduate research projects were awarded (and advertised!) with the same funding as sports teams and sports teams had their funding lowered, I think that might be interesting. Incubator lab competitions in science research projects that would have the results published in journals. Start up accelerators with paid promotions etc etc. How else to organize the budget at universities I don't know how to speculate. It means that with a finite amount of money some resource is getting cut somewhere and someone else is having an increase in endowment which gets super political. I'm also not necessarily sure that cutting liberal arts is a good idea. Many of the people I went to school with (at least one I helped pass advanced maths...) spent the majority of their time drinking and ended up working in investment banks. Forcing them to read a little poetry or sit through a lecture or two on a few sociology courses is maybe a good idea so that when they're out there ruling the (financial) universe they have a bit of awareness of the way the rest live. My thoughts for what they're worth.
  • cercatrova 5y ago
    Your comment was marked dead which I just vouched for, it's disheartening when people will flag posts they disagree with.
  • pca006132 5y ago
    > Schools were founded on the principle that the best and brightest minds will teach the new generation (this goes all the way back to Athens). IMO we don't really need the best and brightest minds to teach undergraduate level classes, most of the contents are not really that cutting edge and can probably be standardized. We want to best minds to teach, but I think they should teach research students rather than large classes. > the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified. Sounds better than lower tier schools attracting teachers who are not interested in teaching at all... The current system mainly considers research output, so schools trying to increase their competitiveness will push the professors to spend more time on research and less time on teaching. Teachers who are very qualified in teaching might not be able to spend much time in teaching at all.
• noobermin 5y ago
  Schools have been doing these things for years and yet half of HN have their degrees and have a start-up or two that have a direct line from connections developed at the unis they got their degrees in. Come on, universities doing morethanonething isn't what changed which caused student debt to explode. I'm not saying these are not problems but there literally is no through-line, it doesn't make sense as an explanation for why student debt has ballooned!
  • bradleyjg 5y ago
    Student debt has exploded because notwithstanding their outrageous tax advantages colleges are demonstrably profit maximizing firms. They induce unlimited demand for ever more credentials though a process of continual devaluation and then charge as much as the market will possibly bear through extremely sophisticated price discrimination. Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the public should pay the ever escalating costs while suggesting nothing to rein in their growth. This suggests that the politicians have been captured in some way.
    • noobermin 5y ago
      Let me explain a line of reasoning that would refute the explanation you provide for the ballooning debt. Universities have not generally changed the way they do things, universities have always been the four things OP listed since forever, even when you likely got your degree (assuming you did, or at the very least most of hacker news did), they were those four things too! Therefore, there is no inherent thing to universities that explains the ballooning debt. Instead, something must have happened between the 90s and now that correlates with the rise of debt. Thus, look for an explanation by looking at the history of policy rather than relying on rationalizations. To that end, a quick google search yields an article that gives a good set of reasons a think-tank that studied the problem found as a set of causes. This is the first result of googling "what caused the student debt crisis": https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-the-student-debt-crisis-so-bad-4-reasons-2021-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-the-student-debt-cris... Now those four items ARE things that have changed between now and then. Generally, the decline state funding of schools means unis now fund themselves by relying on tuition that students do not feel as a cost (at least immediately) because the federal government can give out loans like candy. Again people, please please please don't just conjure up ideas in your head and think you understand the causes in the world that explain how everything works. You would not apply this line of thinking to your own job you are paid for, people have studied these things and generally it is understood why the debt crisis exists, it isn't a mystery!
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  Your first three bullets are all the same thing. “How to think” and knowledge of culture are marketable skills, as is experience with cutting-edge research. I don’t know where you got the idea that learning about “art” is an essential job of college. I wish it were, but it’s not. And I agree that college sports are too big of their own business. Fundamentally you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet. I went to college only 2 decades ago and nothing remotely like my job existed at the time. You can educate people in college though, and that is what is required to keep our society moving forward. (And prevent it from sliding backward.)
  • adverbly 5y ago
    > you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet I've heard this phrase multiple times before... and yet, doctors have been studying bio, lawyers studying laws/cases, and engineers math - for hundreds of years. I don't want someone who did 4 years of philosophy and knows how to think deeply about things performing my heart surgery. The first three bullet points are not the same thing partly because one of those bullet points specifically addresses job training, and one addresses "how to think". You're right that knowing how to think is important, but acting like hard skills don't exist is taking things too far imo.
    • snowwrestler 5y ago
      The vast majority of the education of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals is teaching them how to think. Hard skills are covered of course but it is well understood (and clearly presented) that they are perishable. This is why these professions tend to have a focus on, and in some cases requirement for, continuing education throughout the career.
    • hyperbovine 5y ago
      > I don't want someone who did 4 years of philosophy and knows how to think deeply about things performing my heart surgery a) you’re not getting that, if you know anything about med school admissions and b) why not? This is such a reductivist view of knowledge and talent.
• gen220 5y ago
  This is a great call-out. To put it another way, if the university system was a public company, there would be activist shareholders advocating that the company be split. Each of these entities would perform better without the distractions of the others. One problem with splitting, is that each sub-system has become somewhat parasitic on the other three to a harmful degree, as you hint at. The particular blend depends on the university. For example, NCAA division III teams would not survive without the subsidies of a university. But maybe they shouldn't?
  • rswail 5y ago
    The entire US "college sports" nonsense is completely separable and unnecessary to tertiary education. As is the "4 year college experience" nonsense that has students travelling "away from home for the first time". It's entirely a US-based dysfunctional system. The problem with tertiary education is that it is now considered "necessary" for most employment, so therefore what used to be research institutions are now considered just an extension of secondary education. But at the same time, the research aspect of university, being a repository of knowledge and of learning has been reduced by academic beancounters to literally counting names on papers in journals. Tertiary undergraduate degrees are entirely vocational and should be taught that way. No one expects senior high school teachers to also "publish or perish" or be responsible for bringing grants and income into the high school. If I'm hiring someone in my field (IT) I literally don't care if they have done a post graduate degree. Completing an MSc or PhD or equivalent adds nothing to the characteristics I want in an IT employee. The same applies to pharmacists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, art curators, librarians, accountants, marketers, etc, etc. They are all vocations and require the same sort of training structure that applies to plumbers and electricians and plasterers and roof installers. If someone wants to be a physicist or chemist, or a computer scientist, or a mathematician, or an art historian, or other actual "liberal arts and sciences" role, then that should be an undergraduate degree in "researcher" along with the fundamentals of their chosen art/science field. And to get back to the original point about college sports, if someone wants to be a professional sportsperson, then that is again a vocational degree with a specialization.
• ufmace 5y ago
  FWIW, I think that this factor: > If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was. But then, operating on that assumption, we say, what gives these people the right to be elites? Let's make it more accessible! Send anyone who's smart enough and can afford it to school. We do that. And many of them do go on to get better and higher-paying jobs. To some extent, society creates more jobs for them to do, and to some extent, existing jobs get education inflation, requiring advanced degrees for no real reason. But why stop there? This is biased against the people who can't afford it. Let's create a ton of scholarships and student loan programs to make it more affordable so more people go. This kind of works, and kind of increases the prices even more (due to bad design of the loan system) and increases education inflation some too. We've already made it so attractive, might as well tell all high school students that they're failures if they don't go to college, even if it really isn't for them. Tell 'em that so hard that the blue-collar jobs we do still need start to have trouble getting employees and sometimes actually increase in wage past the point of some degree-requiring jobs. The way the whole financing of the system works makes the whole thing a huge money-pit too, which helps it keep absorbing more functions. It sure feels like the whole system has gone crazy and needs some major reworking. I'm not sure what the new healthier system would look like or how we transition to it, but something needs to happen. Sorry, not everyone can be the elite. We should stop telling people that they're a failure in life if they don't join the elite and stop making them perform signs of elite status, like degrees at high-ranked universities, to get jobs that ultimately aren't all that important.
  • jerojero 5y ago
    Do you think access to education is a human right? I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is made to benefit, empower and sustain elites. Becoming part of the elite is a very good way of sustaining your family and the future family of your family for generations to come. Look at the downward versus upward mobility! To pretend like there is a social class that just isn't for everyone is extremely offensive; everyone should have the same chance. Not everyone can be the best, but everyone who wants to should have a fair shot at it and universities and education as a whole is the best way we have to pave the way. In Europe, in most countries, universities are accessible to all and they do have some excellent institutions. But not only that, children of all social classes go to the same schools (yes you do have mega elites but I'm talking here about the vast majority of the population) on the other hand compare that to america where children go to school that depends on their location and where you have an incredible disparity between where the poor and where the rich live. How could you say "not everyone can be part of the elite" when being part of the elite is already largely determined on the area you were born in! I think the US education system needs a complete reform and so much has to change, but really, if youre a politician and you are part of the elite what incentive do you have to make things harder for you and your class? Your kid is going to a top high school then its going to go to a top university. And their kids will do the same if you keep things the way they are.
• wefarrell 5y ago
  I'd add another role to that: Offsetting racial inequities in the lower education system.
  • avs733 5y ago
    More generally offsetting failures in the lower education system. (Not saying we suceed but we try almost because we don’t have a choice)
• User23 5y ago
  > If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. Wrong.
  • phdelightful 5y ago
    Since you don’t offer much to work with, I assume you mean: “I disgree. People at the cutting edge should be educating others both to help them make their ideas accessible and connect them with the future of their discipline.” I encourage you to add more than a single word to the conversation.
    • User23 5y ago
      Why? You just showed how much that single word conveyed. For which I thank you. Being overly specific is rarely productive. I was writing for people such as you. As for the rest? Well anyone who can’t make such a trivial inference obviously has nothing interesting to say about didactic methods.
      • howenterprisey 5y ago
        Because you contributed so little to the conversation that anyone could trivially fill in your response.
• beloch 5y ago
  One thing I was told as a grad student that I've never forgotten is, "Nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students". At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human typewriter to medical prescription from a meth-addicted doctor. I tried to grade everything fairly and provide feedback about mistakes so students could learn. My fellow TA's complained to the department that we were well over the hours we were supposed to be spending by a factor of at least 3. We were told to do less. Just to be clear, I wasn't worried about how much I was being paid. The problem was that I had my own research and coursework to do. We simply needed more TA's in that course due to the way lab assignments were designed. The prof teaching the course was apologetic and furnished me with the above quote. This is teaching at a research focused university in a nutshell. There is no shortage of people who want to do a good job teaching, but the system is designed to force them to spend their time on other things. Why is an institution of higher learning so hostile to those who want to put an honest effort into teaching? Just as nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students, no research focused university ranks well if they aren't churning out a lot of papers. Teaching competes with that priority. If we want better educational outcomes for students, we need to do a better job of aligning the incentives governing universities with that goal.
  • netizen-936824 5y ago
    I don't think Nobel prizes and happy students are mutually exclusive
    • generativenoise 5y ago
      I don't read it at mutually exclusive, more that pleasing students is not going to advance your research. So more of a witty, be mindful about what you are trying to achieve, what the preconditions actually are and direct effort appropriately.
      • jxramos 5y ago
• mareko 5y ago
  On the cutting edge research point, one of the reasons universities are structured this way is because students want to learn from leading researchers in their respective fields. This ensures that the education they are paying for is not out of date. I agree that this isn't that important for the first year or two as an undergrad but it can be pretty great later on in your education.
• LeroyRaz 5y ago
  If you have a physist who is at the leading edge of their field you very much do want them teaching. How do you think you get the next generation of great physists? It is similar to how when growing crops, like wheat, you should take the best of your harvest and use it for seed. Historically that is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things to teach farmers. + Many of the greats have loved teaching and benefited from the process. E.g. Richard Feynman, etc...
  • socksset 5y ago
    Yea because there is such correlation between being an expert in a field and being a great teacher. Come on. Most professors are not Feynman. This is exactly the problem if anything.
  • chii 5y ago
    Those greats might not be best at teaching newbies. They are better off spending time teaching their protege, and doing research. Teaching undergraduates is easily accomplished by another not working on research imho.
  • pca006132 5y ago
    Some great researchers don't teach very well, and some great teachers can't do great research. Even if some of the great researchers can teach very well, you have to consider the opportunity cost of that. This is what specialization is for...
    • lesam 5y ago
      They shouldn’t be teaching undergrads. They should be teaching a few grad students.
• bnralt 5y ago
  It's also important to note that higher education is responsible both for education, and for handing out credentials. Tying these two together real screws over the student. Imagine if driving schools were the only ones who administered driving tests, and they required you to take two years of expensive classes, including numerous classes that had nothing to do with driving. Most people would take them simply because they had to, even if they saw little value in them. If you split these two - say, had a national assessment and credentialing program that didn't require a college education - I bet most students would find much cheaper, better, and quicker ways to learn than college.
• pyuser583 5y ago
  I went to a small college that actively avoided the “standard model.” They focused on providing high equality undergraduate education. No sports, research requirements, etc. They found they could easily recruit junior faculty, but as the faculty got experience, they “cashed out” for a better position. The “standard model” is hard to deviate from. Some schools do it, but it requires a large endowment, and there’s a gravitational pull towards sports teams and research grants.
• wyldfire 5y ago
  > Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. Collegiate athletics emerged as lucrative entertainment, over decades. It's not as if they established sports teams originally in order to make money or to become training ground for pro teams. And good luck getting them to forfeit this willingly. A minor league could show up to compete, but would it offer athletes an opportunity for a rite of passage too? And could it offer a hedge for the athletes who don't graduate to higher pro leagues? IMO baseball is probably a good place to look for answers because it has both a minor pro league and NCAA "student-athletes". Ice hockey, too, IIRC.
  • quartesixte 5y ago
    And if anything, the colleges were the original sports leagues. The Ivy League was a sports league. Football was a sport done by daring-do young men at Yale and Harvard. The professionalization of sports is a short history. And college sports becoming the huge media sensation it is today also a recent phenomenon. Also, Baseball being the outlier to Football/Basketball when it comes to collegiate leagues probably comes from its very early professionalization relative to the latter two.
    • Kon-Peki 5y ago
      The minor league farm system in baseball was pioneered by Branch Rickey when he was with the Cardinals, and further expanded when he moved to the Dodgers. Everyone else hated it, and MLB tried to stop him multiple times. But eventually the Yankees adopted it too and then there was no stopping it. Could a single team in other sports go against all the rest in modern times? I highly doubt it. PS - Rickey was passionate about collegiate sports and the role they played on campuses.
  • parineum 5y ago
    > Ice hockey, too, IIRC. This is partially true. Most Americans still go the NCAA route the typical Canadian route being the CHL, for 16-20 year olds. Europeans follow a model similar to European soccer leagues. The CHL offers a year of college scholarship for each year played in the league. I think it's only for the national schools, I'm not exactly sure.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  There was an article on HN a few weeks ago talking about the slowing pace of “innovation” in the modern world, the lack of an Einstein or a Bohr or a Feynman. I have no evidence of this and maybe the entire notion is unfounded in the first place but I think this framing: - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture is part of the problem. When you go back and look at many of science and philosophy’s “greatest,” they were almost always deeply curious and inquisitive people and interested in many things, not just what they are known for now. They read other “greats” and were well-balanced intellectually. I think a problem now is we are producing unbalanced minds, the equivalent of a bodybuilder who skips leg day, every day. Perhaps there is some something to be said about encouraging a diversity of thought, people who read poetry as you say. It is likely no coincidence that genuine genius is extremely divergent and radical in thought, likely not someone who learns physics and only physics with no other interests.
  • erosenbe0 5y ago
    Unfounded. There are billions more literate people than in Einstein's day.
    • _aavaa_ 5y ago
      To their point, it doesn’t matter how many literate people there are if there aren’t more Einsteins.
      • alxndr 5y ago
        That sounds like they are expecting a predictable relationship between literacy rates and once-in-a-lifetime geniuses being born…
  • lesam 5y ago
    I think the problem with innovation is more the incentive structure. There are too many people trying to p-hack stuff that just doesn’t work well and spin it to get the next grant, and not enough people actually breaking new ground.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  > If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Well, part of the value of an institution like Harvard is that it connects those two groups of people. Wickliffe IV gets to meet Noah or Kumar or Xiao who got 1600s on their SAT and recommends them to his dad for positions at his investment bank.
• bell-cot 5y ago
  Sadly, I think you're overlooking the extremely feudal nature of higher education - especially at the "leading" institutions - and how strongly many people want to be associated with the modern equivalent of the pomp, pageantry, and glory of the Sun King's court in the beautiful Palace of Versailles. No matter how expensive that is... Of course, the ever-growing expense of all the pomp and palaces will eventually bankrupt the whole system - just as the expense of the French King's court at Versailles eventually lead to the French Revolution.
• vishnugupta 5y ago
  > teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs From Indian perspective I see this part broken big time as well. It takes 4 years to graduate with an engineering degree where as the core content could very well be taught well under 2 years. The first year is common across all streams; so one is taught workshop/welding, workings of ICE and what not. 3rd semester the specialisation topics are gingerly introduced with heavy emphasis on adjacent courses (e.g., CS students are taught analogue electronics). Heavy duty math is taught for 4 semesters (PDE, Laplace transforms and what not). Only from 5th semester do the stream-specific topics start in full earnest. Then there are some fluffy courses which don't make any sense if one doesn't have experience working in as a s/w engineer; OOPs, Software Engineering. What's worse, the syllabus has only been slightly tweaked for last 50 years or so. I say this as a software engineer professional of 15+ years; I've had to use less than 15% of what I learnt in those 4 years. It's such a waste of precious time. Engineering education needs to radically change in India. Something similar to trade-school in Germany? Part time theory, part time working/interning under professionals? Even that shouldn't be more 2.5 years IMO.
  • mindentropy 5y ago
    I disagree with you. I found the common engineering subjects to be of lot of interest especially workshop. Being a polyglot it has helped me immensely in many things be it with work or outside of work. For eg: Being in embedded product development, I have to wear multiple hats from Software, firmware, PCB design, mechanical enclosures etc and I get to use my skills when I sit with all these teams.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. You forgot the most important one for companies: use college or the preference for "ivy league" institutions which is on its own a neutral requirement as a proxy to weed out "undesirables" without violating the ADA and other laws: people with mental health issues and many physical disabilities don't stand a chance for the top grades, as do people from poor financial background. It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able. Anyone else is left for the bottom jobs of society.
  • wubbert 5y ago
    >It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able. What world are you living? Colleges and "Corporate culture" these days are all about opposing "whiteness."
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      On paper, yes. Everyone loves their diversity programs. In reality?! Just look at the C and VP level of most large companies. Old white men galore [1] [2], and lower management and the drones aren't much better. And by the time a woman takes the helm, the company has often been run into the ground so hard that the board can't find another man willing to risk his reputation. To make it worse, during the 'rona female representation at C-level actually fell [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_500_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_... [2] https://cooleypubco.com/2021/06/09/board-diversity-fortune-500/ https://cooleypubco.com/2021/06/09/board-diversity-fortune-5... [3] https://www.channelpartnerinsight.com/news/4045218/fewer-women-leading-fortune-500-tech-companies-ago-global-report https://www.channelpartnerinsight.com/news/4045218/fewer-wom...
      • p10_user 5y ago
        How about Mary Barra at GM? Do you consider her a rare exception?
• hef19898 5y ago
  If you exclude the sports teams, which to a non-US observer seem to have enough funding to pay millions for their coaches, basically free (as in no tuition fees for most studies) universities in Germany do. Just saying...
• illusivesaint 5y ago
  Stop worrying about the drinking aspect of school. Socializing/networking is one of the golden nuggets of academia, the orgs and clubs really do improve the quality of life and experience of everything else. Just because you're not into it doesn't make it detrimental. Otherwise, the ecosystem is decent, it's all about profit and marketing in the age where you can be self taught and many are complacent of having trades because bachelor's don't really offer much in terms of salary for some. Intl. students still strive a d see the merit in education/academia's quality but: 1. Raise the wages of professors/teachers 2. Give the athletes salaries 3. Reduce the inflation of job market qualifications *4. Make higher Ed. Free (in NA+) If they don't solve these things, then yeah you might see lower admission rates + quality of students' work.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  > If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. That depends. Fundamental research is a tiny field and prodigies should perhaps stay there. But otherwise you want the best of the best to educate the next generation as a general rule. Their task is vastly more complex as to convey the plain material. That teachers have such a low regard is indicative of a highly anti-intellectual position, which of course makes the job fairly unattractive for anyone talented. To supply researchers with resources that their work is not inhibited is often a logistically trivial problem, especially in modern times. So research and education can and should remain intertwined for the most part. Progress is about the pipeline too.
• ummwhat 5y ago
  College is just one of the three pervasive pillars thoroughly entrenched by systems of law, culture, and physically built infrastructure. The other two are cars and suburban home ownership. They all have sustainability problems. Car commutes lead to neighborhoods that aren't dense enough to support the economy needed to sustain them and they're a de facto 30k ticket just to participate in society. Suburban homes are somehow supposed to be both an investment and affordable to everyone. We all know that no matter how many times there's a housing bubble, people never learn. The cultural propaganda aspect is huge. "What's good for GM is good for America." "The American dream." The GI Bill started the trend of government subsidized college, and now there's all manner of grants. If you buy into the suburban home Ponzi, you are literally subsidized thought the mortgage interest deduction. Roads take more than gas taxes cover, yet rail is only acceptable if it's profitable. It's all fever dream of Utopia that made sense to post war boomers with good intentions but now the execution spirals out of control. Maybe a car or a degree or a suburban home is right for some people, but as a one size fits all solution that is indoctrinated since birth and in some cases part of peoples identity, it becomes absurd. College will continue because we will remain irrational about these 3 things much longer than you can remain solvent.
• specialist 5y ago
  My local university is also a real estate mogul and hedge fund.
• cutenewt 5y ago
  This is a great take. If there's one domino that should fall first, it's the student-athlete one. It's the easiest one to break away (relative to everything else) and should be the cleanest too.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Research pays for itself with grants. That's not a conflict Sports teams in theory pay for themselves with revenue. That's a matter of accounting and debate, but in theory it's just recreation. It's not really a conflict. Marketable skills vs "how to think" is basically the domain of knowledge you study. Want more skills? pick that major. These can all coexist in the same institution and have for 100s? 1000s? of years. The issue is the financing, facilities bloat, marketing on the basis of non-academics, inabiility to properly measure academic value, class paranoia, and the rise of the vampire administration class has blown out the cost of a high-reputation degree by a factor of 10. Universities used to do its core activities/competencies with much less opulent housing, unnecessary buildings, basic auditoriums and rooms, basic labs. I'll put aside research here since grants will fund the facilities they need to do the research. Sports teams should theoretically self-fund their own facilities. The issue is the bloated cost vs the value of the degree. What the country needs is high-reputation high-value degrees from very modest/focused institutions. Like military-style boot camps (in terms of austerity, not authoritarianism) where you are focused on the mission of gaining knowledge and not about living in a cool dorm room, watching a good football team, drinking to oblivion. Those are ancillary, they can be there, but they can't be the focus. That comes down to the institution mission, and selecting students in the right way. Colleges used to be based on the quality of the people that come out of the institution. Now they are too broadly graded on non-academic and non-performance.
• nullc 5y ago
  - Babysitting young adults who are not yet equip to make it in the world
• Callusing 5y ago
  This is a great little insight, well put, and in fact you are understating the scope of the problem. The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means. Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels) Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.