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Girls in Yoga Pants Explain the Higher Education Apocalypse
- ambientenv 4y agoApparently, kids aren’t going to college anymore.
- codefreeordie 4y agoIn particular, male kids aren't going to college anymore (one source among many: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethbradley/2022/02/03/men-in-college-another-casualty-of-the-covid-19-pandemic/?sh=433a88c33ce0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethbradley/2022/02/03/men...), so you probably actually can't blame girls in yoga pants (though honestly, having read the article, I have no idea what the bit about the yoga pants is about)
- yetanother4968 4y agoIt’s so the article can have a clickbait title.
- AdrianB1 4y agoWhich makes the situation quite interesting: hypergamy and the wage gap are already in direct contradiction, now it is worse than ever with the bulk of college graduates being women. I am not sure if society is doing a suicidal move or something else.
- ralph84 4y agoTraditionally the surplus males were sent to die in wars. Now that war doesn’t require so many bodies who knows what to do with them.
- AdrianB1 4y agoWe don't have a surplus of men, we have a lack of men: there are not enough highly educated and high earning men for all the women that want a superior men to them (the definition of hypergamy). You cannot find a partner for the 60% women in college, there are just 40% men and dropping.
- lmm 4y agoWomen are paid about 1% more than men for the same job once you control for hours worked (and the difference is attributable to more education).
- thrown_22 4y agoThe West already committed suicide in the 1990s when fertility rates plummeted. There aren't enough women in reproductive age today to keep the age pyramid from getting inverted. We're putting a band aid on it with mass immigration but the same thing is happening everywhere including Africa. Yes, overpopulation is a problem, but an overpopulation of 60+ year olds is even worse. This is like trying to stop a car driving off a cliff by driving into a tree.
- auslegung 4y ago> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
- OJFord 4y agoThe 'Girls in yoga pants' make even less sense in the title than they do in the article, I'd suggest simply 'The higher education apocalypse' (or perhaps 'collapse' is slightly less sensational).
- AdrianB1 4y agoActually it makes a lot of sense, it is subtly explained at the end of the article.
- OJFord 4y agoI said it doesn't much make sense, not that the author didn't explain why they thought they'd do it.
- dixie_land 4y agowhat article?
- auslegung 4y ago> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
- AdrianB1 4y agoGiving the full answer, with the quote, is not good education :)
- tedunangst 4y agoI see fluff, I think "this is fluff", I bounce.
- mikkergp 4y agoActually I read through the whole article and this doesn't really make sense. Most of her article is critical of the institution, then she just throws this in here, like the problem is too many people on their phones, which is rarely her concern before it. Or is she saying the institution requires her to be boring and this is the only one of limited ways she can entertain? I don't get it. I get it in a vacuum, but not in the greater context of the article.
- pram 4y agoThe yoga pant girls are appended to every section like a non-sequitor, literally doesn't make any sense.
- auslegung 4y ago> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
- aliqot 4y agoYou made this same comment 3 times, one for each top level comment. I must ask, what's the strategy and mindset at play here?
- auslegung 4y ago1. It was relevant to each comment 2. I have no reason to believe that a single comment would reach all 3 posters 3. It was exceedingly, exceedingly ironic that roughly 50% of all top level comments (at the time I wrote my comments) didn’t read and/or pay enough attention to the article when said article _explicitly_ added images of girls in yoga pants to get people to read and/or pay attention to the entire article.
- tomcam 4y agoSome of us are strongly in favor of girls in yoga pants. EDIT: Downvote me, ya bastages. What can I say, I'm a straight man who appreciates women willing to objectify themselves modestly
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- silisili 4y agoTrue. But there has been an uptick of stuff here on HN (and maybe in general, but I don't read random blogs much) of articles with dumb, often irrelevant twitter-like reaction gifs splattered throughout. I guess if I had to pick between the two, I'd take the girls in yoga pants.
- OJFord 4y agoUnpopular opinion: there should be fewer people going to university. The educational inflation has been immense, and many jobs simply do not (fundamentally I mean) require so much. That ought to be ok. There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.
- AdrianB1 4y agoIt is not an unpopular opinion, it is against the grain. Education is great for countries, but when it becomes a business it is better for the universities than for the country. For politicians, more education is good on paper, any politician that would say otherwise will be called a Nazi and cancelled. The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.
- parker_mountain 4y ago> there should be fewer people going to university Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way. What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them. Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.
- Retric 4y agoRefining critical thing and awareness of the world only seems necessary due to deficiencies in the public education system. High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a collage degree.
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- jdlshore 4y agoIt's a pretty good article, if you read the whole thing. People seem to be getting hung up on the "girls in yoga pants" non-sequiturs. The author spells it out near the bottom of the article: > Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms... It has consequences... Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it's only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy. In other words, she did it for the clicks. It's either a mildly clever rhetorical device or rage-inducing clickbait, depending on where you fall on the "easily angered" spectrum.
- paxys 4y agoThis entire article is a weird ramble around the central point of "college enrollment has dropped year over year", which, while true, can easily be attributed to students not wanting to pay the same amount of money as before to sit in front of a Zoom screen. Give it a couple of years and the numbers will go back up to normal and this forced "Gen Z doesn't want to go to college" narrative will disappear.
- fundad 4y agoIt's not zoom school anymore unless you know of colleges that are over zoom.
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoThere is also a fast growing collective of students who see how useless an expensive degree can get. They fear the debt that hangs over so many graduates heads. I do not think this trend will correct post-zoom. I think this is the beginning of a long education winter, at least until the education market can prove actual value instead of certified bullshit printed on $100 bills
- paxys 4y agoI have been hearing this same argument for at least two decades now, yet the numbers never back it up. People may think college degrees are useless but they will still get in line (and in debt) to get one. The only ever big dent in enrollment came because of covid, and it is not (yet) a valid victory lap for all these narratives.
- bradleyjg 4y agoThe economy actually needs colleges and universities, for purely practical reasons. They’ve been keeping about 15–20 million young adults out of the job market. They suppress unemployment. If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained. This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people. We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
- gran_colombia 4y agoIt's a joke.
- freetime2 4y agoI didn't read it as a joke. Young adults can be incredibly destructive if left to their own devices. > The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime. [1] https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/60294_Chapter_23.pdf https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/602...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thrown_22 4y agoElite overproduction produces civil wars. Universities are a way to keep people on the elite treadmill long enough to get past their 20s and stop thinking about revolution. The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.
- googlryas 4y agoI assumed this was going to be about the disconnect between male/female enrollment and about how girls might choose yoga pants to help attract a rare mate. Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.
- rory 4y agoSo she didn't actually talk to the women in the pictures about this issue, right? Maybe this is related to a running joke on the blog that doesn't make sense out of context?
- googlryas 4y agoNo, they were labeled as stock photos, and then when you get to the end(which I skipped to) she just says "I had to put girls in yoga pants to keep you reading". I thought, and still think, it was a fairly lame concept to base an article around
- rubberband 4y agoReminds me of a classic: Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics: http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
- club_tropical 4y agoUniversities are a gateway to the party patronage network. The returns for joining, while still positive overall, are diminishing.
- coinbasetwwa 4y agoGod help us if this is the kind of article those in charge of teaching children are writing.
- karaterobot 4y ago> The police are very well funded. Campus police at some universities have armored vehicles now. Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms. Every year, states have cut funding to schools and colleges. Teachers use their own money to buy school supplies. A lot of them can’t even support themselves. States do give less than they used to, but the federal government gives more. The combination of the two is increasing, slowly, after suffering during the Great Recession. Third-party funding has also increased, by the way. This to say that I don't think the reason fewer people are going to college is because there's less money in higher education. Funding is a factor, but the lack of state funding doesn't explain the poor choices schools make with that money.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rdtwo 4y agoThis will likely be a problem for the democratic base eventually. As Hispanics go conservative and less students go to college to be indoctrinated into liberal values the country will shift conservative. Democrats will need to find an alteration source of voters
- nkrisc 4y agoIf young people are going straight into the workforce as Uber drivers or Amazon warehouse workers, I think they’re going to find liberal values even faster.
- fallingknife 4y agoThe current trend is the opposite. Working class whites and Latinos are moving republican. The upper middle class is moving democrat.
- rfrey 4y agoIt's funny that you consider the biggest threat to "conservatism" is an educated population.
- shigawire 4y agoI'm not sure the educated vote Dems due to their education - they vote Dems because wealthy people vote Dem and college grads are wealthier.
- lapinot 4y agoThis may be true in the US but it's based on a false dichotomy. And i'm even convinced that any kind of factual reality it has in the US is because this false political dichotomy has been put into reality by bipartism. If you actually look precisely what's going on in the general political opinions in the west, you have wealthy people that want liberal economics (near the middle of the traditional division left/right), then you basically have two blocks of more precarious people that either are more socialist (skewed towards young and educated) or reactionary (skewed towards old and less educated). This is still very crude but at least it has 3 dimensions instead of two.
- soared 4y ago> They don’t do much but send out confusing emails all day. They’re so sleep-deprived and addled with caffeine, they can barely think. I do find the article interesting but an editor would be useful since lines like these cast doubt on the rest of the article. Interesting none the less, and oddly I don’t even the yoga pics.
- fallingknife 4y agoAll these students who aren't going to college are still going to high school. Can someone please explain to me why 13 years of education is considered barely sufficient but someone 17 years of education is considered enlightening and "well rounded."
- AdrianB1 4y agoThis is easy: up to and including high school, the education is tailored for the many, with the intention that almost everyone has to make it. It means the standards are lowered to almost the lowest denominator. College has raised standards, the people that get there are above average and move faster and higher. For example you can teach half of the Computer Science courses to half of the high school students directly in high school, but you completely lose the other half. So you move it to college and have everyone happy to have 12 years of mediocre education. It is called equality.
- neilv 4y agoThis piece makes a lot of assertions. Some of them are familiar, but citations or more rigorous argument would be helpful. I suppose that the form of this argument itself could be mimicking the anti-intellectualism that the article decries, much like the acknowledged use of the stock photos to attract&retain attention.
- joeman1000 4y agoWhat the hell has it got to do with yoga pants? I agree university is a complete scam right now though. I’ve never felt more wronged in my life than when I was going through my education at Monash (Australia).
- Mandatum 4y agoWe need to change education, and until we devalue prestigious institutions, this will never change. I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas. 1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc). Once Foundations are done, you split out into either.. A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles. Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations. B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded. Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.
- betwixthewires 4y agoThe yoga pants thing wasn't necessary. You don't have to show me pretty women for me to care. I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.
- lapinot 4y ago> I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. [...] Imho this is naive optimism. Surely things are changing and surely things weren't great, but the direction in which things are changing are not for the better. I'm not familiar with the US but around here affordable publicly-funded university that have generally kind of ok quality are going under just the same. Where do you see any kind of non-commercial learning platform building up? I only see edtech. You're talking about copyright which hints at free software movement and the like: we are loosing ground in that field too (or at best it's stable, but it's still completely niche).
- betwixthewires 4y agoI never said anything about platforms. You're misunderstanding me, I'm not talking about replacement institutions, I don't want to have to pay for a power point course and a printable PDF with my name in block letters on it. I'm glad to see publicly funded institutions go under as well. There should be no gatekeepers to information. The information you need to get the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available. You want to learn how to do residential electricity? Commercial HVAC? Programming, data analysis, and/or statistics? A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started. About the only things you can't do professionally by just following your interests on the internet right now are medicine and law. I expect that to change too.
- w10-1 4y agoLet me try to take the bait in all its seriousness, for potential YC companies. This article creates heat and smoke but not much illumination - motivation without direction. Irony here is both the epitaph and murderer of citizen education and culture being lamented. Rome the Republic gave rise to consummate ironists, and the correspondingly detached professional classes allowed Imperial Rome to flourish. Must we follow? Yes, tech bears some responsibility (and credit) both for the means of production and the incentive influences on consumers, workers, and investors. But the question is, what would make a difference? Stock options have been mostly successful at getting people to work together, as have reputation privileges on forums like this. But those might just be noise in the signal of vast profits or continuous attention highs. No incentives really distinguish good from bad: profit and reputation work just as well for the black market and poorly-managed companies. In response companies try to adopt an ethos of operational efficiency or mission-orientation, but ethos devolves to signaling and tribalism. My experience is that the only countervailing force is the formative lifeboat experience: when young having to work intensely together on things that matter, often losing some people as a result. This happened writ large in WWI and WWII, as soldiers came back guilt-ridden and dedicated to humbly building society (* ok relatively speaking), but it also happens in the small in college, just helping each other figure out what to do and how to learn what you need (with the sadness of watching some of your friends get lost). Somehow having worked together and suffered and lost makes you less inclined to take advantage of others, even when you can. (fwiw I believe there's a recent article on the sense of guilt being a distinguishing attribute of a leader.) Political apathy, the great resignation, opting out of college (or lacking grit or work ethic or ...), people are detaching from systems they find toxic (some would say challenging): competition with foreign engineers or immigrant workers, cultural assimilation, political discussion of any sort, etc. If human relations are disciplined by exit (when consensual) or voice (when exit is not an option), high utilization rates of both mechanisms indicate that relations aren't good, largely because of forces introduced by tech. No one would recommend a real lifeboat experience if you can avoid it, and they're not a scalable response in any case. However, I think they help, and I think college can deliver that, if it's 2-4 year residential, in-person, small-classes with a strong element of student self-governance culminating in the selection of a career as a life's work. The curriculum should expand attention spans, critical thinking, diversity of friend groups, and (above all) a sense of responsibility for the effects of your own actions on yourself and others, and the sense of agency and ownership, where you realize you can make a difference. Obviously, college should not support or reward cheating, cramming for exams, collecting credentials, social isolation, marketable skills trumping professional judgment, privilege networks, decomposed learning, etc. Tech's influence on education should not be to scale horizontally but vertically. If the article is right that education is contracting demographically and burdened with bureaucracy, it has the two characteristics that make it ripe for tech disruption -- not by scaling single classes to world audiences, but by making small intensive environments economically feasible and enriching. For heaven's sake, the next generation has to be grounded enough to manage climate collapse, authoritarianism, and technology-driven disruption. It's the least we can do for them!
- prirun 4y agoThe rich and powerful who run our country don't want an educated society. A society of critical thinkers is harder to control. Better to have sheep who are easy to herd. So if they managed to screw an entire generation with high debt because "of course college is required for a good life in the US", great! If the next generation can't afford it and has to take lower-paying jobs, great! And now we got abortion nixed, so there will be more desperate kids having kids. Great - they'll take any job we offer at the lowest rate possible! The US doesn't want a good education system.
- beej71 4y agoI wouldn't trade my years and years of college for anything. Got a BS and MS back-to-back. My part time internship paid my college and living expenses. Not all my profs were great, but I had the space to explore on my own. What's not to like? Sure, I came out of that $2,000 in debt, but I paid that off from my new gig in one payment the second it was about to start accruing interest. I'd argue that the keystone to the downfall of higher education is the cost, full stop. Other problems? Yes, of course. But fix the cost, and these problems lose most of their effect.
- tpoacher 4y agoEducation is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. -- B. F. Skinner
- rafi25 4y agoThe writer focus on financial dropping reasons, and neglect the collages part: the cancelation colture, the one sided propaganda, the education system where facts are replaced with narratives. Why would anyone pay for neo communism? At least in Russia it was free.