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> State and federal direct funding of unis Is a big part of government putting its thumb on the scale. The only way to have truly free competition in universit
by pdonis 4y ago
> State and federal direct funding of unis
Is a big part of government putting its thumb on the scale. The only way to have truly free competition in university education is for universities to have to fund themselves entirely from payments for services rendered. Tuition is such a payment. But most State and federal direct funding is not.
> Students not being able to afford direct costs led to the government creation of the credit money regime
In other words, the government switched the way it was putting its thumb on the scale.
> Schools still have to compete for students, and tangible non-academic features always win the day.
Why? In a true competitive environment, I can't see why this would be the case, since the reason the students are there is academics, so competition would be expected to be on the basis of academics.
- whall6 4y agoPersonally I’d choose the school with mediocre academics but is well known when I enter the job market over the school that has great academics that nobody has heard of.
- pdonis 4y agoWhich schools are these that have great academics but nobody has ever heard of them? (I'll agree that there are schools with mediocre academics that are well known.)
- neltnerb 4y agoWell, of course no one knows... (kidding) I can think of a few that I had never heard of in high school and people outside my field wouldn't know of but which do phenomenal work. One actually wonders how their students even know to look for them. In any case, I would say the Colorado School of Mines is a prime example. I am a materials scientist and first really ran into them while doing some work with NREL which happened to be near their campus. Perhaps it is a side effect of being undergrad only. Or perhaps a side effect of being populated with students who, at like 18 years old, knew they wanted to enter this extremely specific field.
- quartesixte 4y agoEmory Riddle for aerospace engineering being another one of them. But the relatively mainstream obscurity of these institutions is heavily offset by the weight they hold in their field and the near guarnatee job security it offers in niche fields...which might result in you making quite the pretty penny.
- cafard 4y agoAccording to https://www.mines.edu/about/by-the-numbers/ https://www.mines.edu/about/by-the-numbers/, Colorado School of Mines has "1,658 graduate students (master’s and doctoral)". I don't doubt that they have a strong focus on teaching.
- neltnerb 4y agoOh, sorry, you're right. I've been corrected about that before, by coincidence the extremely impressive materials scientists I interacted with happened to be undergrads. They were just doing grad level research as part of the curriculum. Maybe it's just an effect of being in a very niche area so that no one would notice them unless they were passionate about it already.