6 ms·

There's a simple solution: stop subsidizing useless degrees. If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying Gender Studies or Semioti

by hugh3 15y ago

There's a simple solution: stop subsidizing useless degrees. If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying Gender Studies or Semiotics then good luck to 'em, but make sure they're paying the full cost of their degree, preferably up-front. Underwater basket-weaving is a fine hobby for the idle rich. I they want any aspect of their education subsidized, they should be studying something both useful and hard. Every university degree should include serious mathematical content. What about the students who aren't good at mathematics? They're probably not benefiting from a university education anyway. Let 'em go get the low-level white-collar drudge jobs that they'd wind up in after graduation anyway, and let 'em do it at the age of eighteen and start building up some wealth rather than forcing 'em to wait 'til they're 22 with a net worth in the negative six figures. This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about.

noblethrasher 15y ago
Liberal arts degrees subsidize the hard science and engineering degrees since the per-credit-hour tuition is the same but the guy doing gender studies is way cheaper than the girl using the microbiology lab.
- Bostwick 15y ago
  STEM degrees subsidize the liberal arts degrees by bringing in grants and research money.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    This is generally not true; the overhead charges from grants and research money just about pay for the added cost of the (much) higher faculty salaries, travel, research equipment, and the increasingly onerous grant application and accounting/auditing/reporting processes, but not for undergraduate education. In fact it's usually prohibited to cross-subsidize education with research grants, and funding agencies are surprisingly strict about this, doing things like auditing whether computers bought on a grant are used in teaching a course (not allowed). In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former Computer Science dean: http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/ http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...). The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are actually making money, i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education: http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-really-155771.aspx http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humani...
- nobody3141592 15y ago
  STEM students subsidize liberal arts by creating a world in which somebody whose only skill is art history can live without starving to death or dying of a childhood disease
  - noblethrasher 15y ago
    It will (hopefully) turn out that way but right now you're being a bit selective in your consideration of the STEM contributions.
pjscott 15y ago
On a related note: a good alternative to student loans would be letting students sell a small percentage of their income over the next (say) 20-30 years in exchange for all or part of their college tuition. This would be lower-risk to students than loans, and give investors an incentive to help students get a lucrative education and a decently-paying job. Student loan debts are really a problem.
- guga31bb 15y ago
  Sounds like Australia's system [1]: "This funding is in the form of loans that are not normal debts. They are repaid over time via a supplementary tax, using a sliding scale based on taxable income. As a consequence, loan repayments are only made when the former student has income to support the repayments." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia
  - pjscott 15y ago
    There's a huge difference: the Australian system doesn't allow student loan investors (just the government?) to get more than the inflation-adjusted value of the interest-free loan. A percentage-of-earnings scheme, by not placing such a limit on the amount of money investors can make, would have two interesting effects: 1. Investors would have more incentive to help students succeed financially, since they get a cut of the profits. 2. Students who strike it rich would, in a competitive market, end up subsidizing everybody else. Think startups: the returns on VC's money come disproportionately from a few successes, and this lets them invest in a bunch of companies that probably won't be big hits, to get the few that will get big.
patio11 15y ago
I want to agree with your point, but I strongly suspect that universities are much more capable of price discrimination than the government is, and that close to 100% of subsidies are captured by tuition increases. Put it this way: if Obama waved a magic wand and said "Twelve months from now, anyone majored in engineering gets $100k from the Treasury. No questions asked.", I think you'd see approximately every college in the country debut a tiered pricing structure by next semester.
- patio11 15y ago
  Incidentally, I'm not just being cynical here: most selective universities have official policies where a) they bid for desirable students with grant aid (academically inclined students, desirable minorities, etc) but b) external scholarships decrease grant aid, typically at a 50% ratio. If someone external to the university subsidizes your education, the university acts to capture the subsidy, justified entirely by "Because we can." I paid for a good portion of my college education with external scholarships. Each time I scrounged up another $2,000, the university financial aid department said "Great! We'll decrease your loans by $1,000 and decrease your grant aid by $1,000." (My mother aggressively negotiated with them on this, every time, and got the clawback rescinded "as a one-time exception" something like eight times. I thought this was embarrassing at the time. I plead youth and stupidity on that.)
LisaG 15y ago
That is true at the graduate level. If you pursue a PhD in life science, physical science or computer science your tuition is waived and you (usually) get a stipend. If you want a PhD in liberal arts you have to pay tuition.
- gammarator 15y ago
  Liberal arts PhDs get tuition wavers and stipends from being TAs. That's how universities staff intro writing and language courses.
  - Rariel 15y ago
    Somewhat, but most liberal arts PhDs only get a small stipend from being a TA plus in-state tuition if it's a public University. Maybe what you're thinking about is being funded, that allows you to get your PhD essentially for free. I'm sure that is available for STEM as well?
- telemachos 15y ago
  Are you just saying/guessing this? I have a PhD in Classics, and although I did my graduate work 20 years ago, I'm still in contact with people in that field. The standard is that for a five year program, nearly everyone can expect (1) to be a TA for 1-3 years (and receive pay that way), (2) to receive a writing fellowship (often from your university) for 1-2 years (and thus be able to receive pay while focusing on a dissertation) or (3) to hit the jackpot and receive an external grant for 1-5 years which spares you from some of the teaching duties in (1). In addition to that, everyone (except non-US citizens) has his or her formal tuition waived by some bizarre sleight-of-hand that the university does with itself. Let me stress that since Rariel brings it up below: nobody pays tuition (again, except non-US citizens). People take out loans for extra money (the grants and TA stipends ranged in the 9,000-12,000 dollar range per year in my time, 1992-1997), but nobody pays their tuition. One standard joke was that we were so much better off than the professional students (Business, Med School, Law School) because they did pay tution. I never paid a dime in tuition and finished graduate school with nothing more than mild (< $3,000) credit card debt. I have no reason to believe that this system has changed. Do you have any sources for your claim?
gammarator 15y ago
Who decides what's "useless," and on what timescale? Even within the STEM fields, should studying or researching string theory be subsidized? What about atomic physics? Astronomy? Pure math?
teamonkey 15y ago
As a proud owner of a physics masters degree, I say that this is a load of elitist, prejudiced, confused nonsense. > This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about. I strongly disagree. It's horrible. Mathematics isn't the only 'hard' subject. What is hard to one person may be easy to another. I'm absolutely sure that you haven't even tried Semiotics or Gender Studies, and I'm also sure that the skills needed to study in those fields wouldn't come as naturally to you as mathematics does. Also, just because you don't see the relevance in those fields, it doesn't mean that there is no relevance. Gender Studies, for example, has a place in sociology, psychology, politics. And of course, wealth is not the ultimate objective of everyone. My peers who wanted to persue a scientific career certainly aren't loaded. In fact, those with art degrees made more contacts at university and many have managed to land well paid jobs.
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect. Maybe engineers should be required to take an intense, no-hands-held Gender Studies class, if the other departments are required to take difficult math classes.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect. No, because it's bullshit. Bullshit can be made arbitrarily hard to understand, and it's generally productive to do so if you're an academic trying to justify your own existence.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      That's, unfortunately, a common reply by people who simply dislike some areas, and refuse to believe that not everything they don't understand the purpose of immediately is crap. I even used to be one of those holier-than-thou, "this is pomo obscurantism!" insufferable science undergrads myself. Of course, like most, I hadn't spent any real effort researching the subject before reaching such a "conclusion" (conclusion in quotes because I didn't really investigate the matter, just picking up a few quotes from Chomsky and Sokal or whatever)... I actually still dislike lots of it, especially the secondary literature (which is, I think, full of garbage), but it doesn't take that much reading in the history of philosophy to gain a basic understanding of what problems 20th-century continental philosophy was responding to, or to realize that they weren't all insincere idiots who somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes for 80 years.

by hugh3 15y ago

noblethrasher 15y ago

Liberal arts degrees subsidize the hard science and engineering degrees since the per-credit-hour tuition is the same but the guy doing gender studies is way cheaper than the girl using the microbiology lab.

Bostwick 15y ago
STEM degrees subsidize the liberal arts degrees by bringing in grants and research money.
- _delirium 15y ago
  This is generally not true; the overhead charges from grants and research money just about pay for the added cost of the (much) higher faculty salaries, travel, research equipment, and the increasingly onerous grant application and accounting/auditing/reporting processes, but not for undergraduate education. In fact it's usually prohibited to cross-subsidize education with research grants, and funding agencies are surprisingly strict about this, doing things like auditing whether computers bought on a grant are used in teaching a course (not allowed). In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former Computer Science dean: http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/ http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...). The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are actually making money, i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education: http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-really-155771.aspx http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humani...
nobody3141592 15y ago
STEM students subsidize liberal arts by creating a world in which somebody whose only skill is art history can live without starving to death or dying of a childhood disease
- noblethrasher 15y ago
  It will (hopefully) turn out that way but right now you're being a bit selective in your consideration of the STEM contributions.

pjscott 15y ago

On a related note: a good alternative to student loans would be letting students sell a small percentage of their income over the next (say) 20-30 years in exchange for all or part of their college tuition. This would be lower-risk to students than loans, and give investors an incentive to help students get a lucrative education and a decently-paying job. Student loan debts are really a problem.

guga31bb 15y ago
Sounds like Australia's system [1]: "This funding is in the form of loans that are not normal debts. They are repaid over time via a supplementary tax, using a sliding scale based on taxable income. As a consequence, loan repayments are only made when the former student has income to support the repayments." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia
- pjscott 15y ago
  There's a huge difference: the Australian system doesn't allow student loan investors (just the government?) to get more than the inflation-adjusted value of the interest-free loan. A percentage-of-earnings scheme, by not placing such a limit on the amount of money investors can make, would have two interesting effects: 1. Investors would have more incentive to help students succeed financially, since they get a cut of the profits. 2. Students who strike it rich would, in a competitive market, end up subsidizing everybody else. Think startups: the returns on VC's money come disproportionately from a few successes, and this lets them invest in a bunch of companies that probably won't be big hits, to get the few that will get big.

patio11 15y ago

I want to agree with your point, but I strongly suspect that universities are much more capable of price discrimination than the government is, and that close to 100% of subsidies are captured by tuition increases. Put it this way: if Obama waved a magic wand and said "Twelve months from now, anyone majored in engineering gets $100k from the Treasury. No questions asked.", I think you'd see approximately every college in the country debut a tiered pricing structure by next semester.

patio11 15y ago
Incidentally, I'm not just being cynical here: most selective universities have official policies where a) they bid for desirable students with grant aid (academically inclined students, desirable minorities, etc) but b) external scholarships decrease grant aid, typically at a 50% ratio. If someone external to the university subsidizes your education, the university acts to capture the subsidy, justified entirely by "Because we can." I paid for a good portion of my college education with external scholarships. Each time I scrounged up another $2,000, the university financial aid department said "Great! We'll decrease your loans by $1,000 and decrease your grant aid by $1,000." (My mother aggressively negotiated with them on this, every time, and got the clawback rescinded "as a one-time exception" something like eight times. I thought this was embarrassing at the time. I plead youth and stupidity on that.)

LisaG 15y ago

That is true at the graduate level. If you pursue a PhD in life science, physical science or computer science your tuition is waived and you (usually) get a stipend. If you want a PhD in liberal arts you have to pay tuition.

gammarator 15y ago
Liberal arts PhDs get tuition wavers and stipends from being TAs. That's how universities staff intro writing and language courses.
- Rariel 15y ago
  Somewhat, but most liberal arts PhDs only get a small stipend from being a TA plus in-state tuition if it's a public University. Maybe what you're thinking about is being funded, that allows you to get your PhD essentially for free. I'm sure that is available for STEM as well?
telemachos 15y ago
Are you just saying/guessing this? I have a PhD in Classics, and although I did my graduate work 20 years ago, I'm still in contact with people in that field. The standard is that for a five year program, nearly everyone can expect (1) to be a TA for 1-3 years (and receive pay that way), (2) to receive a writing fellowship (often from your university) for 1-2 years (and thus be able to receive pay while focusing on a dissertation) or (3) to hit the jackpot and receive an external grant for 1-5 years which spares you from some of the teaching duties in (1). In addition to that, everyone (except non-US citizens) has his or her formal tuition waived by some bizarre sleight-of-hand that the university does with itself. Let me stress that since Rariel brings it up below: nobody pays tuition (again, except non-US citizens). People take out loans for extra money (the grants and TA stipends ranged in the 9,000-12,000 dollar range per year in my time, 1992-1997), but nobody pays their tuition. One standard joke was that we were so much better off than the professional students (Business, Med School, Law School) because they did pay tution. I never paid a dime in tuition and finished graduate school with nothing more than mild (< $3,000) credit card debt. I have no reason to believe that this system has changed. Do you have any sources for your claim?

gammarator 15y ago

Who decides what's "useless," and on what timescale? Even within the STEM fields, should studying or researching string theory be subsidized? What about atomic physics? Astronomy? Pure math?

teamonkey 15y ago

As a proud owner of a physics masters degree, I say that this is a load of elitist, prejudiced, confused nonsense. > This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about. I strongly disagree. It's horrible. Mathematics isn't the only 'hard' subject. What is hard to one person may be easy to another. I'm absolutely sure that you haven't even tried Semiotics or Gender Studies, and I'm also sure that the skills needed to study in those fields wouldn't come as naturally to you as mathematics does. Also, just because you don't see the relevance in those fields, it doesn't mean that there is no relevance. Gender Studies, for example, has a place in sociology, psychology, politics. And of course, wealth is not the ultimate objective of everyone. My peers who wanted to persue a scientific career certainly aren't loaded. In fact, those with art degrees made more contacts at university and many have managed to land well paid jobs.

michaelchisari 15y ago
Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect. Maybe engineers should be required to take an intense, no-hands-held Gender Studies class, if the other departments are required to take difficult math classes.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect. No, because it's bullshit. Bullshit can be made arbitrarily hard to understand, and it's generally productive to do so if you're an academic trying to justify your own existence.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    That's, unfortunately, a common reply by people who simply dislike some areas, and refuse to believe that not everything they don't understand the purpose of immediately is crap. I even used to be one of those holier-than-thou, "this is pomo obscurantism!" insufferable science undergrads myself. Of course, like most, I hadn't spent any real effort researching the subject before reaching such a "conclusion" (conclusion in quotes because I didn't really investigate the matter, just picking up a few quotes from Chomsky and Sokal or whatever)... I actually still dislike lots of it, especially the secondary literature (which is, I think, full of garbage), but it doesn't take that much reading in the history of philosophy to gain a basic understanding of what problems 20th-century continental philosophy was responding to, or to realize that they weren't all insincere idiots who somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes for 80 years.