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>California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos. So peanuts. The public universities bu
by noosphr 5mo ago
>California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos.
So peanuts.
The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion.
This isn't even a rounding error.
- vermilingua 5mo ago[flagged]
- AceJohnny2 5mo agoMoney is fungible. Budgets are not.
- dvt 5mo agoThe idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down. It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free. [1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png
- irishcoffee 5mo agoAmusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. You pay for the rubber stamp.
- aleph_minus_one 5mo ago> Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online. There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment. Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others. Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that: - What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself. - Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.
- charcircuit 5mo ago>Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment. Why do you need equipment to learn something? You can learn the information outside of a lab. >Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others. Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoThe information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoAnother example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.
- mystraline 5mo ago> These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. There is a single person responsible for this. His name is Reagan.
- noosphr 5mo agoIt's been 40 years, surely someone could have done something to fix it if they wanted to.
- jltsiren 5mo agoIn real terms, tuition fees in public universities peaked in the early 2010s. They have not kept up with inflation since then. That explains a large part of the fiscal disaster.
- dvt 5mo agoCan you source this? My cursory research shows the opposite[1]. Imo, the fiscal disaster is in part due to enrollment declining (which, ironically enough, mainly affects low-income households). [1] https://myelearningworld.com/cost-of-college-vs-inflation/ https://myelearningworld.com/cost-of-college-vs-inflation/
- jltsiren 5mo agoHere is one example: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year Declining enrollment affects universities very unevenly. University of California is still under pressure to increase enrollment, which is mostly constrained by physical capacity. The housing situation is particularly bad on some campuses.
- qsxfthnkp2322 5mo ago16.9M would have helped pay for quite a bit of student aid.
- throwawaypath 5mo agoDefinitely. That amount could pay for 20 students to attend classes for a week!
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo agoThey could buy, like, seven books from the bookstore!
- pesus 5mo agoI get the joke, but CSUs are fairly inexpensive as far as universities go. Tuition at SJSU is about $9500 per school year for California residents. That's a year of education for almost 1700 students. It may not seem like a much money to some, but it certainly covers a lot.
- noosphr 5mo agoWhy not ask about the mismanagement of the other 60 billion?
- ryan_n 5mo agoIs all of the other 60 billion mismanaged?
- vermilingua 5mo agoBelieve it or not, that other $60b isn’t one chunk of money, but other similar chunks of ~$20m that’s probably being spent in similarly idiotic ways. If this were an article about those, yes I probably would.
- throwawaytea 5mo agoThe money spent goes to people, that give it to other people. They didn't just burn it.
- vermilingua 5mo ago“People” in this case being Altman and co.
- dang 5mo ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mystraline 5mo ago> spent $16.9 million on A.I. Sooooo... A few days of claude code "thinking", for a few hundred people?
- hparadiz 5mo agoI use it in the field and my usage isn't even $1000 yet. I think I might be just now getting there after 6 months.