8 ms·

Is Higher Education The Next Bubble?

43 points by ivankirigin 18y ago

hs 18y ago
my friend (a prof) told me that publishers approach her with new textbooks (the 'new' stuff is really just the changing words, numbers and units on problem sets) ... she ends up using older editions so students can buy used i remember that in almost all of my math courses (esp the graduate courses) i wasn't required to buy books (the prof wrote pdf notes and post in on his site) i find that no-bullshit courses tend to less corrupt
jwesley 18y ago
No.
- yters 18y ago
  The fact this got 4 upvotes suggests the article is right.
  - likpok 18y ago
    The fact that s/he got 4 upvotes suggests that few people here think he is right. Or few people here even saw his comment. But it has little bearing on whether he actually is.
    - yters 18y ago
      I'm assuming a) he made the comment b/c he went to college and b) 4 upvotes is a significant amount for this thread. If college taught him to think well, he should be able to give a better reply than "No." If those agreeing with him agree because they also went to college, they should point this out instead of just upvoting him.
      - likpok 18y ago
        Maybe they did somewhere else. His response does not leave much to discuss however (perhaps a better reason for the low number of points).
xenophanes 18y ago
Yes.
kqr2 18y ago
When the Education Bubble Finally Pops: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432743
TomOfTTB 18y ago
He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become. I'll tell you how I became convinced of this. (this is kind of long for a HN post but it's a funny story) I was having a discussion with a room full of college graduates recently. The meeting was about how managers should, when they have to order employees to do something, go in with the mindset of convincing the employees that the decision is wise rather than just dictate it to them. In the discussion I jokingly said something like "Don’t go all Lenin on them". They countered by saying they didn’t understand what I meant. After a short and very confusing discussion I said I didn’t understand how they could equate what I was saying to what was done in Communist Russia. They responded by asking what Russia had to do with anything? At that point it hit me: They were talking about John Lennon. They had no idea who Vladimir Lenin was. The reason this had such an impact on me (aside from the obvious) is this: I’ve long been convinced that universities simply don’t care about practical skills anymore. A Computer Science graduate, for instance, can often graduate without having ever written a line of html, javascript or css. But the one excuse Universities had was that at least they were still teaching culture. This incident dispelled that myth for me and at that point I had lost all faith in the current university system. I still believe in education but I don't believe Universities are providing a good one anymore.
- jerf 18y ago
  "He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become." In my opinion, vast swathes of many college programs are currently completely replaceable by online courses. The only thing preventing this from being acceptable to employers is the college mystique. If the college mystique gets punctured... and I can't think of a faster way than to jack the price up beyond what anybody can afford... and it becomes acceptable to have an online degree, what happens to conventional colleges then? On a pure dollar-for-dollar comparison, the online colleges will kill conventional colleges for value. You might find this hard to believe if you went to college and took some actually non-trivial course, such as in engineering. Leave engineering and the hard sciences, though, and a lot of courses are just mind-bogglingly trivial to pass. As part of a learning content management system I worked on while in school, I once had to debug a junior-level marketing course, so I took some of the pop quizzes from the middle of the course. I got 7/10 and 8/10... and there are people who actually attended the course who didn't do that well. I shouldn't be able to score 8/10 on a pop quiz for a junior level course in an unrelated discipline. There probably wasn't a single 300-level engineering or hard science course I could have done that on. But... not everybody going to college are getting degrees like that. (And, ultimately, quite a lot of even the hard courses could be moved online with little loss...) (I said "vast swathes of many college programs" very carefully. There are yet some programs that aren't very replaceable, and will always have a physical component. Another way for a college to get around this is to make their courses less able to be taken remotely, although as technology marches on it gets harder and harder to imagine what exact form that would take... A lot of people complain about various problems with online courses vs. real courses but I find myself wondering how much of that is truly fundamental, vs. how much of that could be fixed with better technology.) I'm not sure I could agree with "useless", but "poor value" and "easily replaceable with a cheaper but just-as-good-maybe-better substitute" I sure could agree with. If some startup could get past the accreditation hurdle...
tonystubblebine 18y ago
I'm coming to find more and more that the most valuable part of school was athletics. They teach you how to focus ambition into practice for self-improvement. Since you can assume that everything you do professionally is going to require new skills that you need to learn yourself, the improvement skill seems critical. I learned it through sports.
electromagnetic 18y ago
My wife is currently going through college because she needs certification. However when we worked it out she's paying the equivalent of $80 every time she walks into a class, yet for an entire 2 hour class they were taught how to fold a business letter (she didn't attend, we went out the night before because she already knew how pointless the class would be), I made the nice point that the dollar store sells a letter folder. So they paid $80 for something that can easily be done for $1. This isn't to mention that her books can basically be bought only through the college bookstore because they add some tiny unnecessary thing in and double the price. Her Machine Transcription book (like $50 off amazon) came with a foot pedal (we've seen ones with the same basic functions for $20) and she was forced to pay $150 because they didn't say what make the foot pedal was or what software it came with. Higher Education is essentially a scam. At 16 I started working as a reviewer, my editor said that he avoided taking anyone who'd been through college and university because they didn't know how to speak their own voice. The most successful journalism today (where the money is) is a form of Gonzo (IE Hunter S. Thompson), I mean read the main articles in Wired and they're Gonzo. Yet Journalism courses don't teach that and they can't, because there's never going to be a course that can teach you to be unique. I ended up reading many things from magazine and newspaper editors. I can't remember the guys name anymore but he was editor of the Times newspaper, he said whenever an application appeared on his desk, if it included taking Journalism in college or university anywhere except at the bottom of the list he'd throw it straight in the trash. So basically, if you wanted to work for Times Newspaper when he ran it you had a better chance if you was anyone but a journalism graduate! His reasoning was precisely that they don't know how to write news that sells. He said that he'd prefer someone who had good personality in their writing and build them up from there, because all the journalism graduates thought that going through university entitled them to a job and most didn't even send samples of their work in, which IMHO is patently moronic.
- timr 18y ago
  So, you pick one example of a bad school, and you conclude that all of "higher education is a scam". Nice. I don't know what kind of college your wife is attending, but it sounds suspiciously like a University-of-Phoenix-ish institution. In 11 years of post-secondary education, I never once took a class on letter-folding.
joe_the_user 18y ago
Hmm, Higher education is indeed one of the few remaining areas of "fat" in today's economy. However, the fat is certainly not in the teaching staff but rather in the "fixed costs" - the "bulding binge" which the article only obliquely refers to. One thing I'd like folks to consider, however. After all the fat is cut, who will buy anything? The housing boom was all fat and got the economy going for six years. But without it, we're in a bit of trouble. Start cutting higher education too and what happens? Does efficiency create demand? Where is the evidence?
Ardit20 18y ago
I will make this comment only because I perceive that it is mostly people who are much older than me and left education a while ago that are commenting. To me personally ( I have not read the article imply replying to the comments) seems that people are generalising excessively and most importantly being very simplistic. Education is a very very very big thing, education almost encompasses life itself and everything that life entails. As such it is not very easy to find the right answer to the question of: how can we best develop the youngsters of today for the skills of tomorrow. For me personally I believe that the only way we can improve our educational system is by listening to the students and their criticisms or compliment for afterall it is them who are going through the day to day experiences of being taught. This approach is not perfect of course, but then hey nor is life. I simply think it is a much better aproach than allowing those who have been in a classroom 30 years ago dictating the order of the day although the posibilities are rather high that they have lost touch with the educational system. That is only one part but then academia is so uterly complex as to take into consideration the hierarchical society that we find ourselves in and maybe conciously or uncoinciously upper the standart for some places while lowering it for others.Maybe against even this taking students view into consideration can counterbalance it.
- pmjordan 18y ago
  I (relatively recently) studied at a UK university (among the top 10 according to league tables: a classic "oxford reject" university) so I'm not sure how transferrable my experiences are to the US education system. The UK's isn't quite as expensive ("only" about 1/5 to 1/6 of median gross income in tuition), but I certainly did notice that the majority of students seemed to be there primarily because their parents wanted them to, and/or because their secondary school teachers had basically tuned them towards university. Not because they were genuinely seeking the cerebral stimulation of their studies. The open days, etc. were also geared towards that attitude: parents, your kid will be safe here and is practically guaranteed a respectable middle class job after graduating; kids, it won't be so bad, look at all the non-studying activites you can do! I'd actually have to include myself into that group: I was basically pressured into studying physics by my parents and my physics teacher. Studying CompSci or EE or whatever never was on the table in the first place, after all that would've been an investment into the stuff that was causing me to go to bed late and doze at school, not for what I was winning prizes at school and beyond. Equally out of the question was not attending university: that's not what upper middle class kids do. Now halfway through my degree, I became self-aware and figured out that it was all crazy and it was all just leading me into the rat race, so I decided to try to make the best of the remaining time, but most students never did - they graduated and applied for jobs at companies that were recruiting at the university or they followed in their parents' footsteps. (FWIW I discovered I loved maths almost as much as programming, so I ended up taking as many mathsy modules as possible - unfortunately the university weren't flexible about this so I mostly did them without getting credit) I have to say I doubt asking the students is going to make much of a difference. You might get better bars and sports facilities at the universities, that's about it.
snowbird122 18y ago
Looking at this from a strictly economic point of view, it is obvious that as the price of higher education continues to outpace inflation, a point must come when is negative expected value to attend college. Knowledge will be your reward. And debt.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
motoko 18y ago
No, because education is an important marker of social class. Where you went to school, for how long, and what you studied defines who you are and where you belong in the social hierarchy in the United States absent aristocratic relations or extreme wealth.
- ramchip 18y ago
  Actually, I think who you know has a lot more weight than what you studied. Just look at the rich and famous who barely finished high school...
  - motoko 18y ago
    Right, which is a proxy for where you went to school and my disclaimer about wealth and aristocratic connections.
rguzman 18y ago
I think the article doesn't really take into account that the student body also affects the return one might get from higher ed. This is argued here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448588 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448588. It is more likely that higher ed is not going to burst like a bubble. Instead, demand for it will scale back down gradually to a point where the return those who get a higher education is worth the price tags. For it to be like a bubble something like a phase-transition in the way a college education is perceived would be necessary. However, it seems more likely that this perception is bound to change slowly and gradually instead.

43 points by ivankirigin 18y ago

hs 18y ago

my friend (a prof) told me that publishers approach her with new textbooks (the 'new' stuff is really just the changing words, numbers and units on problem sets) ... she ends up using older editions so students can buy used i remember that in almost all of my math courses (esp the graduate courses) i wasn't required to buy books (the prof wrote pdf notes and post in on his site) i find that no-bullshit courses tend to less corrupt

jwesley 18y ago

No.

yters 18y ago
The fact this got 4 upvotes suggests the article is right.
- likpok 18y ago
  The fact that s/he got 4 upvotes suggests that few people here think he is right. Or few people here even saw his comment. But it has little bearing on whether he actually is.
  - yters 18y ago
    I'm assuming a) he made the comment b/c he went to college and b) 4 upvotes is a significant amount for this thread. If college taught him to think well, he should be able to give a better reply than "No." If those agreeing with him agree because they also went to college, they should point this out instead of just upvoting him.
    - likpok 18y ago
      Maybe they did somewhere else. His response does not leave much to discuss however (perhaps a better reason for the low number of points).

xenophanes 18y ago

Yes.

kqr2 18y ago

When the Education Bubble Finally Pops: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432743

TomOfTTB 18y ago

He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become. I'll tell you how I became convinced of this. (this is kind of long for a HN post but it's a funny story) I was having a discussion with a room full of college graduates recently. The meeting was about how managers should, when they have to order employees to do something, go in with the mindset of convincing the employees that the decision is wise rather than just dictate it to them. In the discussion I jokingly said something like "Don’t go all Lenin on them". They countered by saying they didn’t understand what I meant. After a short and very confusing discussion I said I didn’t understand how they could equate what I was saying to what was done in Communist Russia. They responded by asking what Russia had to do with anything? At that point it hit me: They were talking about John Lennon. They had no idea who Vladimir Lenin was. The reason this had such an impact on me (aside from the obvious) is this: I’ve long been convinced that universities simply don’t care about practical skills anymore. A Computer Science graduate, for instance, can often graduate without having ever written a line of html, javascript or css. But the one excuse Universities had was that at least they were still teaching culture. This incident dispelled that myth for me and at that point I had lost all faith in the current university system. I still believe in education but I don't believe Universities are providing a good one anymore.

jerf 18y ago
"He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become." In my opinion, vast swathes of many college programs are currently completely replaceable by online courses. The only thing preventing this from being acceptable to employers is the college mystique. If the college mystique gets punctured... and I can't think of a faster way than to jack the price up beyond what anybody can afford... and it becomes acceptable to have an online degree, what happens to conventional colleges then? On a pure dollar-for-dollar comparison, the online colleges will kill conventional colleges for value. You might find this hard to believe if you went to college and took some actually non-trivial course, such as in engineering. Leave engineering and the hard sciences, though, and a lot of courses are just mind-bogglingly trivial to pass. As part of a learning content management system I worked on while in school, I once had to debug a junior-level marketing course, so I took some of the pop quizzes from the middle of the course. I got 7/10 and 8/10... and there are people who actually attended the course who didn't do that well. I shouldn't be able to score 8/10 on a pop quiz for a junior level course in an unrelated discipline. There probably wasn't a single 300-level engineering or hard science course I could have done that on. But... not everybody going to college are getting degrees like that. (And, ultimately, quite a lot of even the hard courses could be moved online with little loss...) (I said "vast swathes of many college programs" very carefully. There are yet some programs that aren't very replaceable, and will always have a physical component. Another way for a college to get around this is to make their courses less able to be taken remotely, although as technology marches on it gets harder and harder to imagine what exact form that would take... A lot of people complain about various problems with online courses vs. real courses but I find myself wondering how much of that is truly fundamental, vs. how much of that could be fixed with better technology.) I'm not sure I could agree with "useless", but "poor value" and "easily replaceable with a cheaper but just-as-good-maybe-better substitute" I sure could agree with. If some startup could get past the accreditation hurdle...

tonystubblebine 18y ago

I'm coming to find more and more that the most valuable part of school was athletics. They teach you how to focus ambition into practice for self-improvement. Since you can assume that everything you do professionally is going to require new skills that you need to learn yourself, the improvement skill seems critical. I learned it through sports.

electromagnetic 18y ago

My wife is currently going through college because she needs certification. However when we worked it out she's paying the equivalent of $80 every time she walks into a class, yet for an entire 2 hour class they were taught how to fold a business letter (she didn't attend, we went out the night before because she already knew how pointless the class would be), I made the nice point that the dollar store sells a letter folder. So they paid $80 for something that can easily be done for $1. This isn't to mention that her books can basically be bought only through the college bookstore because they add some tiny unnecessary thing in and double the price. Her Machine Transcription book (like $50 off amazon) came with a foot pedal (we've seen ones with the same basic functions for $20) and she was forced to pay $150 because they didn't say what make the foot pedal was or what software it came with. Higher Education is essentially a scam. At 16 I started working as a reviewer, my editor said that he avoided taking anyone who'd been through college and university because they didn't know how to speak their own voice. The most successful journalism today (where the money is) is a form of Gonzo (IE Hunter S. Thompson), I mean read the main articles in Wired and they're Gonzo. Yet Journalism courses don't teach that and they can't, because there's never going to be a course that can teach you to be unique. I ended up reading many things from magazine and newspaper editors. I can't remember the guys name anymore but he was editor of the Times newspaper, he said whenever an application appeared on his desk, if it included taking Journalism in college or university anywhere except at the bottom of the list he'd throw it straight in the trash. So basically, if you wanted to work for Times Newspaper when he ran it you had a better chance if you was anyone but a journalism graduate! His reasoning was precisely that they don't know how to write news that sells. He said that he'd prefer someone who had good personality in their writing and build them up from there, because all the journalism graduates thought that going through university entitled them to a job and most didn't even send samples of their work in, which IMHO is patently moronic.

timr 18y ago
So, you pick one example of a bad school, and you conclude that all of "higher education is a scam". Nice. I don't know what kind of college your wife is attending, but it sounds suspiciously like a University-of-Phoenix-ish institution. In 11 years of post-secondary education, I never once took a class on letter-folding.

joe_the_user 18y ago

Hmm, Higher education is indeed one of the few remaining areas of "fat" in today's economy. However, the fat is certainly not in the teaching staff but rather in the "fixed costs" - the "bulding binge" which the article only obliquely refers to. One thing I'd like folks to consider, however. After all the fat is cut, who will buy anything? The housing boom was all fat and got the economy going for six years. But without it, we're in a bit of trouble. Start cutting higher education too and what happens? Does efficiency create demand? Where is the evidence?

Ardit20 18y ago

I will make this comment only because I perceive that it is mostly people who are much older than me and left education a while ago that are commenting. To me personally ( I have not read the article imply replying to the comments) seems that people are generalising excessively and most importantly being very simplistic. Education is a very very very big thing, education almost encompasses life itself and everything that life entails. As such it is not very easy to find the right answer to the question of: how can we best develop the youngsters of today for the skills of tomorrow. For me personally I believe that the only way we can improve our educational system is by listening to the students and their criticisms or compliment for afterall it is them who are going through the day to day experiences of being taught. This approach is not perfect of course, but then hey nor is life. I simply think it is a much better aproach than allowing those who have been in a classroom 30 years ago dictating the order of the day although the posibilities are rather high that they have lost touch with the educational system. That is only one part but then academia is so uterly complex as to take into consideration the hierarchical society that we find ourselves in and maybe conciously or uncoinciously upper the standart for some places while lowering it for others.Maybe against even this taking students view into consideration can counterbalance it.

pmjordan 18y ago
I (relatively recently) studied at a UK university (among the top 10 according to league tables: a classic "oxford reject" university) so I'm not sure how transferrable my experiences are to the US education system. The UK's isn't quite as expensive ("only" about 1/5 to 1/6 of median gross income in tuition), but I certainly did notice that the majority of students seemed to be there primarily because their parents wanted them to, and/or because their secondary school teachers had basically tuned them towards university. Not because they were genuinely seeking the cerebral stimulation of their studies. The open days, etc. were also geared towards that attitude: parents, your kid will be safe here and is practically guaranteed a respectable middle class job after graduating; kids, it won't be so bad, look at all the non-studying activites you can do! I'd actually have to include myself into that group: I was basically pressured into studying physics by my parents and my physics teacher. Studying CompSci or EE or whatever never was on the table in the first place, after all that would've been an investment into the stuff that was causing me to go to bed late and doze at school, not for what I was winning prizes at school and beyond. Equally out of the question was not attending university: that's not what upper middle class kids do. Now halfway through my degree, I became self-aware and figured out that it was all crazy and it was all just leading me into the rat race, so I decided to try to make the best of the remaining time, but most students never did - they graduated and applied for jobs at companies that were recruiting at the university or they followed in their parents' footsteps. (FWIW I discovered I loved maths almost as much as programming, so I ended up taking as many mathsy modules as possible - unfortunately the university weren't flexible about this so I mostly did them without getting credit) I have to say I doubt asking the students is going to make much of a difference. You might get better bars and sports facilities at the universities, that's about it.

snowbird122 18y ago

Looking at this from a strictly economic point of view, it is obvious that as the price of higher education continues to outpace inflation, a point must come when is negative expected value to attend college. Knowledge will be your reward. And debt.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

motoko 18y ago

No, because education is an important marker of social class. Where you went to school, for how long, and what you studied defines who you are and where you belong in the social hierarchy in the United States absent aristocratic relations or extreme wealth.

ramchip 18y ago
Actually, I think who you know has a lot more weight than what you studied. Just look at the rich and famous who barely finished high school...
- motoko 18y ago
  Right, which is a proxy for where you went to school and my disclaimer about wealth and aristocratic connections.

rguzman 18y ago

I think the article doesn't really take into account that the student body also affects the return one might get from higher ed. This is argued here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448588 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448588. It is more likely that higher ed is not going to burst like a bubble. Instead, demand for it will scale back down gradually to a point where the return those who get a higher education is worth the price tags. For it to be like a bubble something like a phase-transition in the way a college education is perceived would be necessary. However, it seems more likely that this perception is bound to change slowly and gradually instead.