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Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not

Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills. The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this. Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.

loquation 4y ago
Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
- supernova87a 4y ago
  You're just confused over who's paying for it. Someone is, I can guarantee you that. And it's not student labor. I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
  - himinlomax 4y ago
    > You're just confused over who's paying for it. He's not.
    - vt85 4y ago
      He is.
      - DoughnutHole 4y ago
        You believe that people in countries that fund college tuition genuinely don't understand that it comes from general taxation?
        himinlomax 4y ago
        Not only that, but the OP mentioned tuition specifically. Tuition is the fee you may have to pay to attend college. If there is no such fee to pay, whether the money comes from donations, taxes, a trust fund, a lottery, intellectual property royalties or what have you, there is indeed no tuition.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Do we have some kind of trophey to give this gentlemen? Like 'stubborn and presumptious of the year'? Its like writing to tell people they are illiterate
        Chris2048 4y ago
        Which Gentleman (or lady?)? supernova87a, himinlomax, or vt85
        supernova87a 4y ago
        My original reply to > loquation > Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else. was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society. Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.
- troupe 4y ago
  While you can go into a huge amount of debt in the US getting a college degree, you can also graduate with little to no debt just using the many programs and scholarship available and being strategic on where you go to college. Yes there are always going to be people paying $80k per year to go somewhere, but you'll also have a lot of people getting there degree while spending very little or (if they are good academically) nothing.
thereisnospork 4y ago
That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/week, plus 20-30 over the summer from every student is a lot of manpower. Albeit very ill trained/inexperienced manpower. That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.
- supernova87a 4y ago
  As you hint at, I think you would quickly find that the university would look like it's run by a bunch of slumlords, with things falling apart, and no one responding when the toilet gets clogged or the wifi goes down.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Why is it that people think it's okay to give 18 year old a machinegun and a granade and to send them to kill, or trust them with a 40 ton vehicle, but they can't be trusted at basic everyday life? Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      I don’t think many people who run universities are the same who think it’s okay to send kids into war. The people making the laws and starting the wars which necessitate giving 18 year olds machine guns are not actually interacting with or involved in the lives and development of those same 18 year olds. Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally? I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.
qznc 4y ago
It reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. The basic is that students are employed by a company and work there half the time. In return the company pays for the studies in the other half.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. Dyson Institute (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering...>) is something similar in England. All students are paid employees of Dyson while working toward their engineering degree.
- col_rad 4y ago
  I did my Bachelor this way. I’d say you learn much more compared to University. And a great way to gain some real work experience. I did a proper University Master afterwards but the experience from the dual system helped me a great deal with my first job in the industry.
- OJFord 4y ago
  That's not 'only used in German-speaking countries', unless you insist on the (translated) naming. It's called 'an apprenticeship' in the UK for example, and similarly elsewhere I assume. Some universities offer them for professional degrees now too - I had a colleague at Arm who was part-time and a student on such a programme. (Two days a week year round apart from a break for exams iirc - quite distinct from the (more common) summer internship format.)
- voqv 4y ago
  A more concrete example of universities with this system are DHBWs in the state of Baden Württemberg: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Cooperative_State_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Coopera...
- lwkl 4y ago
  That‘s not how this works in German speaking countries in Europe. The school is paid for by the tax payer and the company pays the apprentice a salary that should represent the value they create as an apprentice. The company also pays for additional courses organized by their guilds. For programmers and system administrators this might be how to build a pc or a network or how to build some software project. It‘s a great system for companies and apprentices. I think there are even some Swiss companies that try to build similar programs in the US because they have a hard time hiring in the US.
godelski 4y ago
This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if you got one of the better jobs). It might be enough to cover rent and food, but not much else. While we're on the topic, can someone really explain to me what endowments are for? There's many universities that claim hardship but have multi-billion dollar endowments. I mean Harvard (the largest endowment) has over $2m per student. The "business" is clearly profitable without ever accepting a dime from students. I'm just unsure what this money is actually doing.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  Endowments allow colleges to operate like they are a business between the sheets and a non-profit on the streets.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  They absolute most elite colleges lose money on the kids but...like it's a human resources thing, the administration transitions into senior jobs at other, less flash but equally expensive universities for a remarkable salary for how little work it is, and a crazy amount of power over the most politically active, and legally vulnerable because now they're responsible for debts, tried as adults of course, their parents are technically absolved of any responsibility to help them (except when there's a contract to pay for college, which is rare) so paying is totally optional, and poorest age bracket. And they're legal to have sex with, and at their peak of appearance in most respects, and they can't get a decent job without that degree if they're in a bind to get a lawyer. Especially in a bear market like right now, or 2008, youngest adults are fucked the most. I once asked about legal representation against a groundless and provably false rape accusation where the court would say this is a total lie, the scenario was proof sufficient to absolve someone from a murder, meaning court-valid proof all the way. The guy quoted me $25,000, will financial aid help with that I wonder? And he said there's like a delay (when they kind of sniff out if you've got legal firepower if you're rich you obviously do or politically connected), but then once it gets going it's like, it gets going strong and disgusting. But it's the best time of your life!
js8 4y ago
I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough. That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
- bonoboTP 4y ago
  True, being a student should be considered a full-time job. I'm from Europe and we get stipends that depend on grades (and financial situation), and studying is at least somewhat considered a duty and responsibility towards society then, instead of the American attitude where students are service consumers, customers who must be pandered to. You can see where that attitude has led on American campuses.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
elihu 4y ago
I think it could possibly work in a financially neutral way if the school contracted the students (as either skilled or unskilled labor) out to local businesses. There'd be a lot of ethical considerations around how to establish a relationship between the students, the school, and the businesses where everyone is getting a good deal and the students are protected from being exploited (however one defines the term). I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him. I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)
balsam 4y ago
Yeah, it doesnt make sense to make school more like work. Homework is already despised, how can schooljobs be anything more than that? What about making work more like school? Making corporations more like college? Some may prefer that.
headsoup 4y ago
There used to be a system like this that doesn't get mentioned much, I think it was called things like 'apprenticeship,' 'cadetship,' 'technical school' and such. If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.
MisterTea 4y ago
> And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job. Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> Having students work is not a bad thing. My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.
- jseliger 4y ago
  Better advice would be "Spend $7 to read Don't Go To Law School (Unless) and then quit law school." https://jakeseliger.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unless-paul-campos/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unl...
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    One can argue plusses and minuses, but my time at law school was very productive and, despite my winding down my practice for something new, benefits me to this day. Law school is what you make of it.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  This is basically how I see most cases. I did work a part-time job for a few semesters, but it was really easy and I never felt I was sacrificing my education. I dropped it after holding it for a few of my early semesters to free up time to maintain a happy study/free-time balance.
HALtheWise 4y ago
It's certainly true that students can't produce enough value by cooking food and sorting mail to pay for the cost of a modern US college tuition, but there are some specific areas where I do think students can perform high-value "jobs", and which are currently underutilized. - Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard. - Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.
- throwawaygh 4y ago
  > Professors command high salaries I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer. Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading. > but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes 1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster. 2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing. 3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member. There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student. Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy. Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.

loquation 4y ago

Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.

supernova87a 4y ago
You're just confused over who's paying for it. Someone is, I can guarantee you that. And it's not student labor. I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
- himinlomax 4y ago
  > You're just confused over who's paying for it. He's not.
  - vt85 4y ago
    He is.
    - DoughnutHole 4y ago
      You believe that people in countries that fund college tuition genuinely don't understand that it comes from general taxation?
      - himinlomax 4y ago
        Not only that, but the OP mentioned tuition specifically. Tuition is the fee you may have to pay to attend college. If there is no such fee to pay, whether the money comes from donations, taxes, a trust fund, a lottery, intellectual property royalties or what have you, there is indeed no tuition.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Do we have some kind of trophey to give this gentlemen? Like 'stubborn and presumptious of the year'? Its like writing to tell people they are illiterate
      - Chris2048 4y ago
        Which Gentleman (or lady?)? supernova87a, himinlomax, or vt85
        supernova87a 4y ago
        My original reply to > loquation > Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else. was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society. Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.
troupe 4y ago
While you can go into a huge amount of debt in the US getting a college degree, you can also graduate with little to no debt just using the many programs and scholarship available and being strategic on where you go to college. Yes there are always going to be people paying $80k per year to go somewhere, but you'll also have a lot of people getting there degree while spending very little or (if they are good academically) nothing.

thereisnospork 4y ago

That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/week, plus 20-30 over the summer from every student is a lot of manpower. Albeit very ill trained/inexperienced manpower. That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.

supernova87a 4y ago
As you hint at, I think you would quickly find that the university would look like it's run by a bunch of slumlords, with things falling apart, and no one responding when the toilet gets clogged or the wifi goes down.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Why is it that people think it's okay to give 18 year old a machinegun and a granade and to send them to kill, or trust them with a 40 ton vehicle, but they can't be trusted at basic everyday life? Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    I don’t think many people who run universities are the same who think it’s okay to send kids into war. The people making the laws and starting the wars which necessitate giving 18 year olds machine guns are not actually interacting with or involved in the lives and development of those same 18 year olds. Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally? I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.

qznc 4y ago

It reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. The basic is that students are employed by a company and work there half the time. In return the company pays for the studies in the other half.

TMWNN 4y ago
>This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. Dyson Institute (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering...>) is something similar in England. All students are paid employees of Dyson while working toward their engineering degree.
col_rad 4y ago
I did my Bachelor this way. I’d say you learn much more compared to University. And a great way to gain some real work experience. I did a proper University Master afterwards but the experience from the dual system helped me a great deal with my first job in the industry.
OJFord 4y ago
That's not 'only used in German-speaking countries', unless you insist on the (translated) naming. It's called 'an apprenticeship' in the UK for example, and similarly elsewhere I assume. Some universities offer them for professional degrees now too - I had a colleague at Arm who was part-time and a student on such a programme. (Two days a week year round apart from a break for exams iirc - quite distinct from the (more common) summer internship format.)
voqv 4y ago
A more concrete example of universities with this system are DHBWs in the state of Baden Württemberg: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Cooperative_State_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Coopera...
lwkl 4y ago
That‘s not how this works in German speaking countries in Europe. The school is paid for by the tax payer and the company pays the apprentice a salary that should represent the value they create as an apprentice. The company also pays for additional courses organized by their guilds. For programmers and system administrators this might be how to build a pc or a network or how to build some software project. It‘s a great system for companies and apprentices. I think there are even some Swiss companies that try to build similar programs in the US because they have a hard time hiring in the US.

godelski 4y ago

This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if you got one of the better jobs). It might be enough to cover rent and food, but not much else. While we're on the topic, can someone really explain to me what endowments are for? There's many universities that claim hardship but have multi-billion dollar endowments. I mean Harvard (the largest endowment) has over $2m per student. The "business" is clearly profitable without ever accepting a dime from students. I'm just unsure what this money is actually doing.

jeffwask 4y ago
Endowments allow colleges to operate like they are a business between the sheets and a non-profit on the streets.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
They absolute most elite colleges lose money on the kids but...like it's a human resources thing, the administration transitions into senior jobs at other, less flash but equally expensive universities for a remarkable salary for how little work it is, and a crazy amount of power over the most politically active, and legally vulnerable because now they're responsible for debts, tried as adults of course, their parents are technically absolved of any responsibility to help them (except when there's a contract to pay for college, which is rare) so paying is totally optional, and poorest age bracket. And they're legal to have sex with, and at their peak of appearance in most respects, and they can't get a decent job without that degree if they're in a bind to get a lawyer. Especially in a bear market like right now, or 2008, youngest adults are fucked the most. I once asked about legal representation against a groundless and provably false rape accusation where the court would say this is a total lie, the scenario was proof sufficient to absolve someone from a murder, meaning court-valid proof all the way. The guy quoted me $25,000, will financial aid help with that I wonder? And he said there's like a delay (when they kind of sniff out if you've got legal firepower if you're rich you obviously do or politically connected), but then once it gets going it's like, it gets going strong and disgusting. But it's the best time of your life!

js8 4y ago

I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough. That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.

bonoboTP 4y ago
True, being a student should be considered a full-time job. I'm from Europe and we get stipends that depend on grades (and financial situation), and studying is at least somewhat considered a duty and responsibility towards society then, instead of the American attitude where students are service consumers, customers who must be pandered to. You can see where that attitude has led on American campuses.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

elihu 4y ago

I think it could possibly work in a financially neutral way if the school contracted the students (as either skilled or unskilled labor) out to local businesses. There'd be a lot of ethical considerations around how to establish a relationship between the students, the school, and the businesses where everyone is getting a good deal and the students are protected from being exploited (however one defines the term). I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him. I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)

balsam 4y ago

Yeah, it doesnt make sense to make school more like work. Homework is already despised, how can schooljobs be anything more than that? What about making work more like school? Making corporations more like college? Some may prefer that.

headsoup 4y ago

There used to be a system like this that doesn't get mentioned much, I think it was called things like 'apprenticeship,' 'cadetship,' 'technical school' and such. If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.

MisterTea 4y ago

> And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job. Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.

sandworm101 4y ago

>> Having students work is not a bad thing. My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.

jseliger 4y ago
Better advice would be "Spend $7 to read Don't Go To Law School (Unless) and then quit law school." https://jakeseliger.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unless-paul-campos/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unl...
- sandworm101 4y ago
  One can argue plusses and minuses, but my time at law school was very productive and, despite my winding down my practice for something new, benefits me to this day. Law school is what you make of it.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
This is basically how I see most cases. I did work a part-time job for a few semesters, but it was really easy and I never felt I was sacrificing my education. I dropped it after holding it for a few of my early semesters to free up time to maintain a happy study/free-time balance.

HALtheWise 4y ago

It's certainly true that students can't produce enough value by cooking food and sorting mail to pay for the cost of a modern US college tuition, but there are some specific areas where I do think students can perform high-value "jobs", and which are currently underutilized. - Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard. - Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.

throwawaygh 4y ago
> Professors command high salaries I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer. Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading. > but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes 1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster. 2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing. 3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member. There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student. Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy. Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.