The admin bloat ought to be cut in order to qualify for federal student loans.
I'm always baffled how much tuition was at my public university, yet teacher and TA salaries are so low. It's like everything except academics attached itself to drain money from students
Indeed, much of the recently new administrative office space at my university was dedicated to workers tasked with securing funding. I imagine some combination of grant writing, lobbying, and compliance work?
If the top executives of the university aren't making 10s of millions of dollars, then it can't be a very good university. We should pay them more, much more, as its the only way to improve post-secondary education.
There should only be a single tenured faculty position and every one else is an adjunct or post-doc who gets paid $500 to teach a course. These adjuncts and post-docs have to work very hard for decades for a chance to be considered on the list to replace the tenured prof when they retire. Think the money that can then be directed to the university president and all the acclaim and prestige that high salary will give to institution. This is the only way forward.
It’s amazing how the narrative around college has changed in the last few years. We often talk about government policy changes to do stuff like prevent kids from having to deal with college debt. But its presence in the pubic discourse can push kids to seek alternatives to taking those loans.
Between the high tuition fees, the amount of unnecessary or useless degrees and the wokification of nearly all of the admin body, I can see how people are choosing alternatives.
Yeah, but then the sports fans would cry "Cut everything musical". The band members would argue "Cut everything on stage", and the drama society would return with "Cut all the sports".
FWIW, I don't think that sports should have a large place in tertiary educational institutions. It is the activity that has minimal positive impact on education, and largely negative educational impact on those people who play sports.
While everything else at university leads to some sort of learning, sports leads to the opposite - blind and uncritical tribalistic support of the university team, purely because "That's our side". That sort of thing results in blind and uncritical tribalistic support of politics later in life.
We want fewer "I support $FOO because I'm part of the $GROUP that must support $FOO", not more.
In Europe historically no university has such a large body of sports/teams/etc. You can do without.
But of course there are other factors here, like branding, broadcasting fees and the like that would make it very hard to get rid of now.
Maybe so but in the United States athletics have been a big part of universities for a long time; it is a relatively recent phenomenon that they have been surpassed by professional leagues. I don't think I even agree that there's no benefit to students from having them.
This works for now, but what happens next recession when all those degree requirements return?
This isn't meant as judgemental, but people only employable due to the labour shortage and only accepted into their field due to the labour shortage are also the people who will struggle most come a lack of a labour shortage.
I know someone who has been acting as her boss's replacement since her boss left the company. But the company refuses to promote her into that job because she doesn't have a degree. 20 years of employment with the company, plus demonstrated ability by actively doing the boss's job, doesn't count as much as an old piece of paper.
To emphasize: This company has a degree requirement not just for hiring inexperienced candidates (of unknown quality), but also for promoting experienced employees (of known quality). Stupidest thing I've ever seen.
I found that the first two years of college were basically a repeat of my final year of high school, done to get everyone coming from different high schools around the nation to the same level. There was a semester class on how to use the library, in geography I colored a map of the United States and was tested on state capitals, business class covered supply and demand for those not exposed to the concept previously, the history of the world ended in 1945 because everything after was too controversial to discuss in a state funded school - same as in grade school and high school. Then I ran out of money, so I left, and I never looked back.
Overall college was a waste - more useful for atheists to get married then anything else. In the age of tender and online dating maybe it’s not even good for that.
My advice to people is just leave, get an entry level IT job, start getting experience. You will be working next to people who have six figures of college debt, but unless you tell them they will likely never know. I’m happy to tell them which school I went to if it comes up in conversation, I just omit the part that I left without obtaining a degree.
In the beginning I got turned down for loans occasionally because I didn’t obtain a degree, but no bank has asked my educational background since the 90s.
Of course if you want a non-IT job like practicing law then this may not work because many state bars require a regular college degree in addition to everything else and there is no flexibility.
Same with anything medical that doesn’t involve hair exclusively.
Between the absurd cost and administrative bloat of universities, to the severe decline in the quality of the education at most universities, maybe this will be a wake up call
Ohhh nooooo imagine. Maybe if it was a decent value proposition instead of a way to pay a bunch of non-contributing college admins who's job could be done by GPT-4 people would sign up more, I wonder if there's any way that this could possibly be remedied. /s
Most people cannot. Not only are retention and learning radically different, the vast majority of people do not have the self discipline to go through the same amount of content. If a class isn't something you're immediately interested in and no one's forcing you to go, most people end up abandoning or skipping it. Watching only the fun parts or only the parts that seem to you to be immediately relevant to your current goal is not an education.
I agree with a lot of what you say except when you say "only the parts that seem to you to be immediately relevant to your current goal is not an education"
I think this sort of learning can, for somebody who is motivated, exceed the knowledge gained at a university. College is meant to give you a holistic, comprehensive overview of your major. But you can get that from sheer experience and from continuing to learn from a variety of sources. Books are also great at providing holistic knowledge on topics.
> But you can get that from sheer experience and from continuing to learn from a variety of sources. Books are also...
Learning is inherently painful. You are encoding boring new information into your brain, and most of it will be useless. From personal experience, 95% of the things you need to learn in CS or mathematics are boring. It is extremely difficult for most people to find motivation to do this. Schools (with grades, etc.) provide a structure to incentivize this.
It hurts me to read this. Because actually learning is inherently fun, or used to be.
Why do kids have fun playing? Because they learn this way.
Playing is learning.
Or it used to, until the philosophy settled in, that playing is meant for wasting time (and you surely can waste time playing as most modern games are made for time killing) and learning has to be intentionally hard.
The most effective way to learn new things for me, is still to play around with them. Whether it is compilers or a new graphical framework. And then systematically move on and read documentation about it.
People can do this alone, but you are right that for most, including myself - a structured class can be very helpful. But it does not have to be a pain. The most I learned was in classes where the tutor understood how to teach in a fun and easy way.
> The most effective way to learn new things for me, is still to play around with them. Whether it is compilers or a new graphical framework.
Compilers and UI APIs are easy to learn. I did it too. Education is the problem of teaching people much harder things.
> It hurts me to read this
Hey man, look, I was a great student and graduated from a good college with a 4.0 GPA with a math and CS degree, and now I've made a lot of money in industry. I am a huge proponent of the U.S. educational system and of the freedom of the individual to become educated.
But there are hard things you have to do in life; unless your name is Erdős, who, btw, was on speed the whole time.
It was relatively easy for me, but learning something real is something that is hard for all humans. The subjective experience of encoding millennia of information into your fleshy brain. Just like working out. The best way to work out is with a coach or buddy. There's a reason humans evolved to be social. Same is true with educational structures.
Play-based learning is a fad designed to satisfy liberal white women. Real, practical results come from overcoming challenge.
"White" is iffy. In my experience in the U.S., thinking about alternative education is a luxury that only some can afford to do. Therefore, it is an issue of affluence.
"Women" was out of line. This is not an issue of gender, not role, and I think it was harmful to reinforce certain traditional roles here.
I lied about my GPA btw, it was around 3.8. Math is hard. And I only went to a mid-tier state school. It was only "good" in that I enjoyed it and learned a lot. It was difficult for me to find a job even in the bull market of 2009-2020. But even though my personal outcome wasn't completely ideal, I still believe in the value of structured education with its grades, sorting, ranking, etc. because, at its best, it drives you to separate the learning from the intrinsic reward (which is necessary to learn the boring things you need to), and to simply be accountable for yourself. I don't think another human (besides Thoreau), or play, can provide that;
these lessons must come from the heartless industrial machine.
Most people can’t even do what you are proposing. They just load up before a test and dump it afterwards because they haven’t created any sustainable system for remembering it past their exam.
>Watching only the fun parts or only the parts that seem to you to be immediately relevant to your current goal is not an education.
The vast majority of tech nerds turned IT professionals self-taught themselves how computers work by being concerned only on what interested them at the time.
I imagine many folks who have watched a lot of videos on, say, economics or history or physics or whatever else hugely overestimate what they understand since they get no expert feedback to test their understanding.
Programmers tend to like self-teaching since it's very easy to get that feedback--write the code and see if it works! But not every subject is that way.
Returning to college, YouTube videos are far higher quality and ability than most lecturers. It's nearly impossible for for a "speech" to beat someone with unlimited retakes/recuts/similar anyways.
The places where professors should beat a YouTuber is being able to use experience from past classes (which they kinda don't seem to, since there's always a video for common misconceptions). And cases where it's impossible to "watch" with classes that need a high level of participation.
Of course something like grades are a good driver to get students to cover every topic, instead of grazing the ones they like. (Again not something impossible to get gamified a different way).
Shame that. Last time I drove past a college in the US it was the day the hat sorts people into fraternities or however that works and there was a great big cardboard sign on the lawn with a poignant message scribbled in sharpie: "Thank you for your daughters"
Quite the facial expressions on parents dropping off their kids and good chunk of life savings at these ivory towers.
92% of students don't interact with fraternities in the U.S., depending on the school [1]. At the school I went to, it was 70%. If you disassociate yourself with the stupid frat/sorority culture, it is absolutely possible to get a lot out of college, both personally and professionally.
Eh, “the couch pulls out but freshmen don’t have to” was definitely a thing hanging off the balconies of sororities at my Uni, and we’re not even much of a party school anymore (comparatively)
>if you don't see things a specific way you might get canceled for life.
Every time I ask for examples people get angry, or if they're mask-off they reply with a very obviously drug-addicted hyper-racist, hyper-sexist, men's rights advocate who is pretending to be a doctor or guru or alpha male and who is, as part of their "cancellation", raking in millions from basement dwelling losers who like being told that they are special and the world is against them and so it's obvious that the cancellation controversy surrounding them is a grift.
If you are a Jew you are killed on site in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians are not allowed to sell their homes to Jews. They target Jewish children and teach their children to hate Jews.
OTOH Israel has 2.5M Palestinians living in peace with equal rights, including voting rights.
Yet the whole world watches and is outraged that Israel defends its citizens.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I hate to break it to you, but thirty and sixty years ago, colleges were as full of lib as they are today, it's just that most of the radical causes they were getting behind have since had the benefit of the decades it takes to make it into the mainstream. (Or, like communism, have quietly been forgotten about.)
> I hate to break it to you, but thirty and sixty years ago, colleges were as full of lib as they are today, it's just that most of the radical causes they were getting behind have since had the benefit of the decades it takes to make it into the mainstream.
Sure, but it was the student body expressing their support (and not stomping on alternative viewpoints. It also wasn't the college administration and faculty stomping on alternative viewpoints back then.
> They were full of liberals, but now they're full of leftists.
That’s not really true though. There’s a huge gap between old-school Marxism and contemporary progressivism. Classical Marxism foregrounds class; most of contemporary progressivism foregrounds race, gender and sexuality, and class issues are moved to the background.
African-American Marxist Adolph L. Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at UPenn), criticises “wokeness” as a capitalist scheme to distract and divide the working class-he’s definitely a “leftist”, but I don’t think he’d agree that many of the people you are complaining about really are “leftists” at all.
The point is if one person is a “Leftist” for whom class is most important and the other is a “Leftist” for whom it takes a back seat to race/gender/sexuality/etc - then the one word (“Leftist”) is being used to mean two different things.
What do queer theory, intersectional feminism and critical race theory have in common with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc? I don’t think they have much in common at all. Calling both the former and the latter “leftists” just makes the word meaningless
Whether you're talking about how much money, or what genes, or what genitals someone has, or what genitals someone thinks they have, you're still overtly concerned with what someone is and how that can be used to discriminate.
So no, I don't see any difference of substance. The terminology changes, but the substance remains the same.
Not to mention, the left also still talks about class. Remember the "We are the 99%!" craze?
You evaded my argument and tried to reframe it into a "But the other side!" conversation, which is worse than worthless because you have refused to engage in discourse.
If you won't (or more likely can't) refute my argument, it stands to reason my position is vindicated: There is no difference of substance between the left talking about class and the left talking about race and sexuality.
To put it another way, you are failing to convince me to your ideas.
You proposed a definition of “Left”. I pointed out your definition doesn’t work because taken literally it incorporates things which nobody in their right mind would call “Left”. I am engaging in discourse-I don’t feel like you are.
The "We are the 99%!" crowd were decidedly left, but that is beside the point.
I said I see no difference of substance between class, race, and sexuality insofar as politics is concerned, it's all identity politics all the way down. You have provided nothing to suggest otherwise.
> The "We are the 99%!" crowd were decidedly left, but that is beside the point.
That was more than 10 years ago though. A lot has changed in the decade+ since. 2023 “progressivism” differs in many ways from its 2011 incarnation, to the point that you have to ask if it is still the same thing, or has evolved (or been hijacked) into something else
> I said I see no difference of substance between class, race, and sexuality insofar as politics is concerned, it's all identity politics all the way down.
“Identity politics” isn’t exclusive to “the Left” however-nationalism is a form of “identity politics” too, and while there are “left” versions of it, the majority of it is usually considered “right”. White nationalism,
Christian nationalism, Kahanism, Islamism, Nazism, “men’s rights activists”, “incels”, etc - all are examples of “right-wing identity politics”. So, defining “left” in terms of “identity politics” doesn’t work
You keep talking about lefts and rights, while I'm saying I don't see any difference of substance between class, race, and sexuality insofar as it regards to politics.
At best you're misunderstanding, at worst you're disingenuous, and either way you aren't carrying your half of the conversation.
I’m talking about “left” because how to define that term is the topic of conversation. And I don’t see how could can define “left” without defining “right” - the two terms have always existed as a pair.
We've banned this account again since you haven't stopped posting flamewar comments.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
no crisis - this is the American people recognising that the ROI of higher education is no longer there; in fact, with generative artificial intelligence poised to wipe out the white collar knowledge work college graduates had previously aspired towards, not going to college is unequivocally the smartest thing kids can do
I remember from some video on youtube that colleges in US used to be cheaper because government gave a lot of money to subsidise education. It stopped when government figured out that it was essentially paying to create citizens with progressive ideas and critical thought. There may be a lot of things wrong with colleges but they are essential and should be saved.
>” It stopped when government figured out that it was essentially paying to create citizens with progressive ideas and critical thought.”
I have no idea what that video is basing this on. The government continues to substantially subsidize college education through guaranteed loans, Pell grants, tax breaks, and research grants. And, colleges/universities had a reputation for “progressive ideas” since the 1960’s and it’s not like the powers that be have just recently caught on and tried to shut that down. Depending on who you ask, they’re more progressive and ideologically biased than ever.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” -- 1970, Roger Freeman, a Hoover Institution economist and a key educational adviser to Nixon
State governments have massively dropped their support for colleges. And the federal govt’s support has barely kept up with rising inflation, never mind the inflated rise in college costs.
In fact, one of the only major changes the federal govt has made in the last couple of decades is to make college loans something you cannot get rid of in a bankruptcy.
I'm always baffled how much tuition was at my public university, yet teacher and TA salaries are so low. It's like everything except academics attached itself to drain money from students